The Unknown Armies 2026 All Hallows Jam wrapped at the end of October. Let's see how we did.
The best way to add monsters to Unknown Armies is to just add them and not explain it. But that doesn't leave room for character build options, so a Vampire adept school is the obvious next step. It's a weak spell school more in line with the Book 1 Adepts than the more powerful examples in Books 4 and 5. But that's a good thing. The Vampire wears you down at a distance and only strikes when you're at your weakest. A sample NPC would complete this spell school.
BLIND OR CRIPPLED, SHARP OR DULL (mellonbread)
The way to deploy the Punishing Rangers is a life sim where they freak out while trying to do normal stuff and eventually get to cut loose in a horrifying moment of catharsis at the end. But I already wrote one of those, and it was a campaign starter kit that spanned dozens of pages. It was the best thing I ever ran for Unknown Armies but I can't just do the same thing again and expect it to hit as hard. Better to rip the bandaid off and skip straight to the superhero battle.
I Wear No Mask (Dragoleaf)
This one is like the old Sterile Begetting ritual that the Sleepers used to manufacture corpses. Disgusting and absurdly cheap and easy for the power it provides. But that's a good thing. Once knowledge of the ritual spreads it really gets out of control and whole social movements spring up. Good on Jacket or the Biker or whoever it was that figured the whole thing out. Killing Sleepers is a public service.
TRIA CLAVA AND THE STIGMATA SACRA (Mechristopheles)
One of the only things I liked about Thin Black Line was the Jesuitical excuses the Order came up with for employing artifacts and spells. They happily used magick items to murder people as long as there was a thin skin of religious theming draped over them. This is like that.
ARCHETYPE: THE STALKER (Mechristopheles)
The theme and powers are alright and I like the sample Godwalker but my favorite part is the Assembly Roll. Unknown Armies gets stale when everything uses the same languages of flip flops, rerolls, shifts, and my least favorite of all: hunches. I completely agree that the Dark Stalker was silly but the Stalker is not much less so. Lucky for you, interesting abilities are more important than thematic gloss.
This adventure in dire need of an executive summary that tells you what's actually happening. The description at the beginning gives the starting positions of a handful of the involved parties but the overall fit is not obvious. There's a terrorist conspiracy to set off a nuke and end the world by wiping out the statosphere but as we go through the document things get less clear rather than more.
There's a thirty man squad of rebellious demons, a nine man squad of demons under Colonel Selke... Is the Colonel a human or a demon? Are the rest of the eighty nine guys at the base possessed? The thirty guys with automatic rifles are untrained in using them, does that mean they can't actually deal damage per the rules for shooting without the Provides Firearm Attacks identity? What about the other guys? The central command is stocked with firearms equipped soldiers who want to detonate the bomb and the angel only has a vague protection identity to stop her being blown away. Regardless of whether the players are meant to take control of the named NPCs or enter the compound with their own characters, the whole thing could end quickly if either Tango or the Colonel simply shoot Venus and descend into the basement to annihilate the world.
While I adore the characters and the novel and largely unexplained (laudatory) additions to the Unknown Armies cosmology, I can't imagine how you would actually play this.
EVIL BASEMENT DEATH TRAP (Traskomancer)
These are some great* pregens, it would be nice if there was a scenario to play with them. Stocking a dungeon with traps, psychedelic drug effects and encounters with the killer is the most labor intensive part of the scenario and is left entirely to the user.
*The brain damaged quarterback has an effective Struggle of 30 percent. In the playtest game he literally could not tackle people to save his life despite doing it for a living.
That'll do it for this Halloween. Thank you to everyone who submitted.
No comments:
Post a Comment