Following up on Zomnocon, the 9/11 Jam and last year's Halloween event, the Unknown Armies SWAP MEAT Jam wrapped a couple weeks ago. Participants had 333 to 1,296.3 words to write about at least one of the following prompts.
- Man vs Technology, Nature vs Civilization, Grief and Loss
- Genre: Folk Horror (1800s to Modern Day), Urban Horror, Corporate Horror
- Inspiration: The Witches Sabbath by Francis Goya, The Dust Bowl, Faustian Bargains
- What you hear about Occult Underground during Halloween
We got six entries this time. The Unknown Armies fan community is not large and has been demoralized in recent months by Atlas Games inadvertently shuttering the Statosphere community content program. But what are you gonna do?
I like the ritual because it doesn't require charges or exotic ingredients, only patience. The real cost is wearing a giant animal mask that deals damage if you remove it before its time. I don't love percentage buffs as the primary use of an item (I think Unknown Armies 3e substantially overweights the value of percentage modifiers) but a boost to all stats is enough to be worth the squeeze. The face merging is a nice detail that brings to mind After the Festival, one of Mieville's best and a highlight of the Moments of an Explosion collection.
The crow identity is the strongest of the three. It's evocative and fun. I like the other two but I don't think flip/flops in narrow circumstances are quite good enough to make them worth taking. Burning relationship points to gain mechanical success is a great start (it's the best designed mechanic in Delta Green) but is there a more compelling mechanical effect we can give in exchange? Maybe Overworked people can auto-pass stress hits to certain meters in exchange for burning relationship points.
It's
exactly what it says in the title. A flash drive that installs GNOMON.
It reminds me of finding flash drives and other media lying around in
high school and plugging them in to see what was on it. In retrospect I'm
surprised we didn't take down the whole network. One of the most
effective means for spreading malware is to just leave infected media
lying around and count on whoever found it being curious.
This one's mine, but every part of this is stolen from somewhere. The broad plot is an obvious riff on a couple stories from Laird Barron's latest collection Not a Speck of Light. The title is the trailer theme from Life Eater, a game about a 21st century druid who kidnaps and disembowels people to stop God from destroying the world. The term Endocatopter is from A Column of Ashes, a story printed in the Gene Wolfe fancomic Book of Fuligin. The hive of lights is Ellison's Invisible Man.
I like this character because she's a more interesting version of typical Unknown Armies demon summoning. People want secret knowledge, she wants to pursue her goal of killing people descended from some guy nobody remembers or cares about. It's like the Xenomorph from Alien. It has no way of traveling through space and would go extinct if left alone. But humanity's endless greed prompts people to deliberately transport the bugs throughout the galaxy, ensuring the infestation will never be defeated.
I dig this one. The ghost fences are a nice Tim Powers style setpiece but with a different tone. The fairy guy reminds me of The Corpse and all the other fairy stories in Hellboy, which are some of my absolute favorites. "The Fey are dying out" is a classic for a reason. I also get a little Scritch Scratch, the Call of Cthulhu Free RPG Day adventure about totally mundane characters vs a low level supernatural threat in a small English town.
A fun supernatural creature followed by a pair of example characters. I dislike anything that revolves around random unnatural phenomena but the series of specific examples directly addresses my main problem. The lack of a full stat block for Jack is the only real issue. The What You Hear section focuses on the players manipulating him, he needs passions and stress trackers for that.
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