Unknown Armies: The Colonel's Table, a burgerpunk game about the magickal revolution. Blood magic. Scary monsters. Brainwashed cultists. Mad bombers. The snap of the deep fryer as a bubble of hot fat leaps out to kiss your face just below the eye. You aren't insane. You aren't stuck in a dead end job that will eventually kill you. You're workin' for the Colonel.
The Colonel's Table was an eleven session open table game of Unknown Armies 3e. I used the Colonel's Secret Coterie faction from the upcoming Special Orders book of the same name. This series of Statosphere books (beginning with the Scottish Rite and continuing with the soon-to-be-released Court of the Burger Queen) is a modern day update of the Break Today splat, my favorite Unknown Armies splatbook. I chose it because it's my favorite and because the premise was easy to explain. The players are domestic terrorists who work at a fast food restaurant. Nothing else needs to be explained. No adepts, no Invisible Clergy, no Whisper War.
PLAY REPORTS
DEVELOPMENT
WHAT DID WE LEARN?
The simplified character creation rules worked great. The players chose a starter identity (all mundane, no provides firearms attacks, struggle, medical or therapeutic) at 60%, distributed hardened notches, filled in their faileds and were off to the races. If I did it again I'd just make each identity come with a starting set of hardeneds and faileds rather than telling the players the rules for filling them in manually. Explaining notch distribution was a great opportunity to teach the game's themes and mechanics but at the end of the day it was a decision the players were asked to make before they understood the implications. I told them to pick based on their character's life history but at that point their character was an index card with a name and a list of of-course-I-cans.
Filling in passions during play was also good. I allowed the players to lock in an empty passion any time they disastrously failed something they really wanted to succeed at. My policy now is that if you want to reroll with a passion you have to operationalize that by doing something socially inappropriate or crazy looking. It can't just be an internal mental state. This is Unknown Armies, where madness and social ostracism are the price of power. The main downside was the same as in vanilla, non open-table UA3. When you let the players hem and haw over their character sheet trying to find a thematically fitting escape from their misfortune, it seriously blows out the amount of time needed to resolve any tense situation. This can be a lot of fun if the whole group gets to participate, like the moments at Pathfinder Society where everyone sifts through their paperwork looking for the one situational boon from a past session that will save them. Done multiple times in a single combat turn it can drag.
(Running it straight out of the book, you only get the rerolls from your Passions when you fight your Rage or flee your Fear or uphold your Nobility. But each passion can also give you a once-per-session flip flop, and that flip flop is possible "if the passion is relevant to success." I use the simpler "reroll if you act crazy in accordance with your passion" rather than explain to new players that each one has two different uses that can be invoked under different circumstances and refresh at different rates per-session. This is how everyone I know does it, because it's simpler and easier to remember and it fits the theme of power growing with madness. But it does lead to more fussing over passions when they can potentially be used infinite times in broader circumstances. It also explains why Unknown Armies 3 puts so much emphasis on tiny percentage modifiers that end up being useless or forgotten in actual play. Run according to the book the players have less access to die manipulation and will fail rolls more often.)
McMahon
Players adding elements to the board after their first session went well. Everyone's contributions were very restrained. Not knowing the setting like the back of their hand and wanting to be respectful while playing in someone else's sandbox, they all chose mundane characters or locations. But mundane doesn't mean boring. My favorite was the nightcore health inspector, but I also liked the Soundcloud rapper who was cruelly hacked to pieces the same session he was introduced as a named NPC.
I initially planned to use the milestone and objective system as a guide
for what the players should do each session. It didn't end up being
necessary. After even a single session of play returning players already
had things they wanted to pursue further. I made sure to have a
prebaked adventure in my back pocket in case nobody had a lead they
liked. This was the most blowback-heavy Unknown Armies 3 game I've ever
run. Blowback is often sidelined because the board is overloaded and if
you include the counterblows to all the players' actions you'll never
have time for anything else. At the Colonel's Table the Cadre went on
the offensive to take other factions out of the game precisely because
they were being harassed to the point that they couldn't work.
Special Order distribution quickly took a back seat after the first session, which the players spent handing out chicken at the restaurant and managing the fallout. This is a constant going back to the original Break Today splatbook, which suggests a bunch of campaign frames where the players travel far and wide across the American continent or to other countries rather than sitting in the restaurant handing out food. The players ate lots of Special Orders and handed them out to NPCs outside the store. I created my own system for random genning effects. D10 types of supernatural effect, D10 themes of the Coterie, and another D10 for the Court. The NPC Courtiers could have made more use of their Special Orders since part of their advantage over the other factions is the massive centralized distribution system.
That'll do it for Unknown Armies 3e. Until I have another idea I like, it's going back on the shelf. Look forward to the next Special Orders book, coming eventually.
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