The Unknown Armies Open Table?

 

I've cooled off on open table games over the last decade or so. Pacing is really important, maybe the most important part of running a game, and ensuring every game ends at a "good stopping place" where you can swap players/characters in and out is a pain. Playing with a consistent cohort who don't need everything explained to them repeatedly (not just rules explanations but repeated recaps of who they are, who the NPCs are, what's going on in the game world) is way better.

 

On the other hand, I thought about running a UA3 open table long before I got sick of running this style of game. Weekly open table games get better attendance at the RPG club than oneshots demoing new systems, which struggle to scrape together even a couple players.

CHARGEN 

The hardest part is character creation. Unknown Armies has a way to create characters without going through full meal corkboarding. It requires the players to sit down with the book and chew through a big list of character build options grounded in solid understanding of the mechanics. Not an option for a drop-in game.

  

Pregens are great for one-off adventures. You can give a player a half-finished pregen and let them customize it, like I did with His Majesty The Worm. You can give them a pregen on their first session and let them read the corebook and come with a finished character next time, which is how I played Pathfinder Society 1e. On the other hand the ability of players to hook their characters into the game world with their own authorial contributions is UA3's killer app. Much more than the stress trackers and skills and coercion system. Unknown Armies pregens are very labor intensive to generate and I don't know that I can keep up a constant stream. 

 

 

FAST PLAY CHARGEN

IDENTITY

Start with a single prebaked identity. 60%, three features, three of-course-I-cans. Give the players a big list of these on cards and let them choose one.

 

STRESS TRACKERS 

The players can assign a few points. None to the Unnatural meter. Maybe their starting Identity gives them a few notches.

 

PASSIONS

Fill in during play. 

 

OBSESSION

None, yet. You're normal.

 

RELATIONSHIPS

None yet. You don't know these people.

 

 

THE FIRST SESSION

I see two paths forward here.

 

OPTION 1: REGULAR PEOPLE

Unknown Armies 3e places a lot of emphasis on picking your character's "trigger event", the moment where they learned about the supernatural world. I never liked this because it's one more thing that people get stuck on, but we can make it work for us.

 

Take the half-finished characters and come up with a paper thin reason for them to be stuck in a situation together. Either an investigation where they learn about the supernatural, or a situation they have to escape/fight their way out of.

• The Full Boot
• Drown With Me
• The Greggs and the Graveyard
• Where The Hell Is Adrian Lebarge?
• False Retreat
• Bartholomew Gates
• The Test Firing
• My Heart Is A Haunted House

Whatever you pick this method has the advantage of not requiring any setting explanation. Like Bill In Three Persons for the older editions, you're thrust into a situation you have to survive. The downsides are twofold

1. The surviving characters may not end the encounter with a reason to continue supernatural adventures together.
2. This method does not let new half-finished characters join a party of experienced checkers. 

OPTION 2: FACTION PLAY

Take the unfinished characters and send them on a mission for a prebaked faction. The Colonel's Secret Cadre is the one I had in mind when I first thought about this project. Give them a quick brainwashing and send them on an introductory mission. 

 

This method lets finished characters play with new characters from prior adventures. It gives the characters a reason to continue adventuring. If you pick a faction with an interesting premise it lets you skip any setting explanation and just say you're domestic terrorists who work at KFC. Obvious downside is you've got to read everyone in on the fictional organization and you risk the whole thing turning into Delta Green with the players doing missions handed to them by an NPC. 

 

 

 

THE COMPLETED CHARACTER

If the players want to continue playing then they add a second identity after the first session. This can be a supernatural identity or a mundane one. The default rating is 60% but they can transfer points from their starting identity to the new one, like if they pick an Avatar and want to start at 71% instead of 60%. Since you've got both your identities now (technically you can have as many as you want and spread your 120 points how you please, but let's keep it simple) you can choose which one you want to be your obsession identity.

This is the big weak point in the process. It requires the players to choose from a vast list of character build options. The magick schools are complicated enough but choosing features for a mundane identity is even more of a sticking point. You don't get to grab a ready made product that sounds evocative and fun. You've got to choose three options that represent what you want to do, which means you have to understand all the skills, the stress offense and defense systems, unique features...

 

Maybe I'm setting my expectations too low. I ran a Delta Green open table for half a decade and the expectation there was you create your character beforehand (using the quick start rules or, I suspect, a pirated copy of the corebook) and do any necessary maintenance in between sessions. I think there's a huge difference between running this kind of thing on Discord versus running it in-person with a Discord tacked on to the Meetup group. And even in that Delta Green group we sometimes got people who showed up without a character ready despite our instructions, assuming they'd get to make one during the session.

(The archetypal in-person character creation session, where the group passes around one copy of the book and everyone has to wait for the people ahead of them in line to finish their paperwork, is terrible. It's insane that anyone still does it this way.)

 

So we have two options again.

 

OPTION 1: HOMEWORK

Players who want to keep playing with a completed character in sessions after the first must acquire the necessary rulebooks and handle their paperwork between sessions. They can choose a caster school or assemble a mundane identity and arrive at the table next session ready to play.  If they don't do this they don't get to advance their character. They can come back next session but they'll still be obsession-less and stuck with a single, mundane identity. 

 

Players who want to use stuff from outside the 5 canonical UA3 books can do so subject to my approval, with the understanding that I might revoke or modify these permissions down the line if it turns out to be completely broken. 

 

OPTION 2: PRINTED PAGES

I bring a printed page or sheaf of pages for all the different magick schools the players can choose from, along with more index cards with mundane identities. I already have a few of these from the pregen cabals I wrote over the last couple years.

 

The huge advantage of this method is the players have everything they need right there at the table. Nobody forgets their homework and arrives unprepared because there is no homework. The disadvantages are twofold

1. The players are still choosing from a prebaked list of options chosen by me, rather than making the character their own.
2. I have to create a bunch of these packets, which not only require me to copy and paste all the text from the rulebook but edit it down to the necessary reference information without all Stolze's bloviating.

ADEPT WHISPERING 

For any combination of options (faction play, normal people, printed pages, homework between sessions) you might want some explanation for how the characters go from everyday slobs to magick users (if they pick a casting identity) or pick up a second mundane identity. Characters who come back for a second bite at the apple are, by definition, checkers. People who delve deeper into the world of supernatural mystery and acquire Unnatural knowledge in between the trigger event and the first session as a completed character. 

 

As for the faction play angle, I have always loved shovelheads. Raw recruits or conscripts elevated to the lowest level of magic power for use as cannon fodder in an underground war. Just give the Cadre an item that shoots people full of random magick and you're good to go.

 

 

CORKBOARDING 

The reason I gave earlier for putting up with all this paperwork is to give the players a small amount of ownership in the shared world. How do we do that?

 

When you return for your second session, you get the option to add an element to the game world. A character, location, supernatural creature, magick item... You don't have to add it right away, you can hold it in reserve until you have an idea you like. You can assign a Relationship to it, or not. I think mechanically defined Relationships in Unknown Armies 3 are useless and I've never seen them used for anything in half a decade of play, but maybe this will be the time.

 

I think this will directly address one of my main problems with the default corkboarding system. Brand new players are asked to make authorial contributions before they have any experience with the world and setting. After a single session they'll hopefully have a better idea of what fits and what they want. In normal Unknown Armies I try to first introduce board elements to the game in sessions where the players who contributed them are present. Here I won't have that option. Once it's in the game world, it's in there for anyone to encounter.

 

How do we populate the starting playspace with world elements, milestones and objectives? I could assemble a cohort of trusted players to build the world using the standard UA3 corkboarding system (along with their own cohort of starting characters) or I could make it myself. If I make it myself I've got a wealth of content to choose from, both stuff I've posted on this blog and from upcoming Special Orders books which we're still hard at work on. If I let the players choose then the objective needs to be something we can easily deal new players into on subsequent sessions.

 

 

GAMEPLAY 

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

The milestones give the players a list of missions to choose from on a session by session basis. Blowback will add additional missions to the list. The big problem with this type of game is information management. Players will pay attention while they're at the table and might take personal notes but will probably not share them or read them or use them to populate a centralized document between sessions. I write play reports to let the players know that I'm paying attention and their choices mattered, and to remind myself of details like NPC names that I'll later forget. But it's not realistic to expect new players will read a bunch of posts about stuff strangers did. 

 

A physical conspiracy corkboard that I bring to games and keep updated with ongoing developments might help. So will a helper NPC who can get them up to speed on what they need to know for the current session. The faction play option is looking more attractive the more I think about this but I don't want it to be a Handler giving them orders. Having a core group of regulars (which inevitably happens due to scheduling and geography) will orient new players. 

 

IN-GAME TIME

How much time should pass between sessions? 

 

I've run a couple weekly Esoteric Enterprises games (Coal City and M&P) where one week passed in-game every session. 

 

It didn't work in Coal City because there was too much happening in the city in any given session. The players picked one job to work on, then everything they didn't choose to interact with raced ahead outside their field of vision. NPC plots and city events were formulated, carried out or stopped without them ever interacting with the involved parties. It created the impression of a living world, but one that was impossible to meaningfully explore in four hour spurts. When the players realized what was happening they bit and held onto one plot thread because it was the only way to keep it from unraveling once it left their field of vision.

 

It worked in Maintenance and Preservation because a foundational assumption was the players had day jobs that they worked in-between sessions. There was no incongruity when they finished a night of adventuring and then sat on their hands for a week while urgent plot developments happened beyond their ability to influence. They put in their eight hour shift in the dungeon and then worked on less dangerous assignments. The players were responsible for what happened on the job and everything else was just some shit on the news. In case they still wanted to dig deeper I gave everyone a Delta Green style home scene at the end of every session.

 

In Mythic Bastionland, the players get to decide how much time passes after each session. They can pick up where they left off (and they usually do) or they can advance the clock weeks, months or years. Advancing the clock can heal ability score damage and give the players downtime activities that expand in scope depending on how much time you spend. The DM dices for any unresolved conflicts to see how they shake out in the interim. I like this system a lot but if we have a rotating cast of players who gets to decide how much time passes? The cohort ending the session, or the one who show up for the next game?

 

UA3 is a game where NPC blowback matters a lot. It's core to the DM advice given in book two. The NPCs have their own plans and they react to the actions of the players. I'm hesitant to offscreen too much of this because the consequences range from being arrested to lethal violence and I don't want to just tell someone it happened to their character while they weren't playing. Everyone I've run or played with has to some degree elided NPC blowback for pacing reasons (UA3 corkboards always end up overloaded) and trying to fit everything in a three hour session without spilling over could exacerbate that.

 

 

DOWNTIME AND CHARGING 

Should Adepts be able to charge in between sessions? I need to address this no matter how much time passe in-world. Some schools can rack up multiple sigs a day without lifting a finger if left to their own devices. Others take serious risks to gain even a minor charge. I vaguely recall UA2 had a system for calculating how many charges a given school could pick up over a given period of time while they weren't going on supernatural adventures. But the more you let Adepts charge offscreen the more you upset the balance between them and the other caster types. I don't care about every school being balanced against every other school but there's a basic design precept that Avatars are always-on, Adepts have to work for magick power. To a certain extent I think passive charge gaining schools (Fulminaturgy, Ustrinaturgy...) already violate this.

 

The passage of time is also what lets the players recover HP, like in Delta Green and every other game. If Adepts can gain charges during downtime then I should give other character types home scenes where they work to minimize fallout from their actions, gather information, manage their stress meters or gain identity points.

 

Healing, charging and other mechanics necessitate establishing how much time passes between sessions. It's not something that can be brushed off like I did with my old Delta Green game. Everything points to a shorter timeline being better.

 

 

RECAP AND DECISION TIME

If I go forward with this, I'm thinking 

• Start with partial characters (make a bunch of starter identities to pick from)
• Pick a faction for everyone to work with (the Colonel's Secret Coterie is ideal)
• Go with homework-free character completion and print out a bunch of spell schools/additional identities.
• Allow players who want to read the books to do so and finish their character behind the scenes, but don't expect this to be the default.
• Prepopulate the starting corkboard with objectives and milestones
• Players who come back for a second session with a finished character can add an element to the board.
• One day of game time passes per session. The whole thing takes place over a few weeks at most.
• No charging offscreen.

The next step is to create the starting corkboard, the starting identities, the completed character pages/packets and the pitch document. This should be a minimum viable product so I can gauge interest before putting in a lot of work.