Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: Grand Supreme

The Entropomancers of Level Die get a letter.

To the sorcerers of Level Die

A challenge:

Come to Caesars Atlantic City and I will kill you.

I have a spectacular Roman cage cup dating approximately 100 years before the fall of the Republic. Its value is incalculable. Since I only charge using vessels I make myself, you are welcome to it. Come to the Toga Bar. I will be waiting there to take your skulls. If you survive the goblet is yours.

-Three Bear

It’s an obvious trap. That’s what makes it fun.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: The Greggs and the Graveyard

The Fourwentways Bronze Age Cemetery, off the A11 interchange outside Cambridge. Past the roundabout where the trucks park, behind the Travelodge. A small interpretive sign explains the significance: four thousand years ago, primitive Britons inhumed their dead beneath a complex of burial mounds that once stood on this spot. Today, the site is naught but a fenced off patch of grass and a few sickly trees, littered with rubbish from the nearby combination Burger Greggs.

It’s the middle of autumn and the middle of the night. The moon’s the color of bone but you wouldn’t know it through the clouds. Everything is wet.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: Black Coffee

 
1980. Skyrocketing coffee prices induce East Germany to send engineers and help the Vietnamese establish first rate coffee plantations. In exchange the GDR will receive half of Vietnam’s coffee harvest for the next twenty years.

Coffee is to Teutons like tea is to the English. Its absence is apocalyptic. It’ll take years for the Vietnamese coffee operation to bear fruit. The way things are going, there won’t be an East Germany by then. 

In the Hands of Osiris - Masterpost

Ferenc Eisenhut

 

An Unknown Armies 3e double feature set during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.

 

Unknown Armies Playtest - The Lone and Level Sands

Elihu Vedder

1799. Following an outbreak of bubonic plague at Jaffa and a failed siege of Acre, French forces retreated from the Holy Land, endlessly harassed by Mamluks as they marched through the desert on their way back to Egypt.

Four frogs woke up in the shade of a huge pair of legs, all that remained of an ancient statue swallowed by the desert. 

• Dr D'Hubert, Savant
• Eugen, Grognard from Tolosa
• Jacques, Grognard from Bordeaux
• Louis, Grognard from Paris

They were alive and in pain from the pustules on their lymph nodes. They felt dry and desiccated and they were surrounded by blue-tinted corpses. The Armee D'Orient was nowhere in sight, tracks long erased by blowing sand. The Doctor realized that they all had the bubonic plague and had just survived an opium overdose. The Little Corporal had tried to euthanize them.

Unknown Armies Playtest - The Rose and the Nightingale

Lecomte du Nouy

 

1798. General Napoleon Bonaparte led the Armée d'Orient into Egypt against the Mamluks, a military aristocracy of former Ottoman slave-soldiers. In the Nile Delta, the French stormed the castle of a Mamluk Bey. Artillery smashed holes in the walls. Fusiliers stormed the battlements. The defenders surrendered or fled. The Bey and his wife stepped into his secret escape tunnel. The castle was hit by French artillery and the happy couple were immediately killed by a piece of falling masonry, leaving five Eunuchs in command of the harem and his palace.

• Agha the Gardener 
• Baybar the Physician
• Faisal the Librarian
• Hassan the Guard
• Malik the Bath Attendant
  

They debated what to do about the impending French assault on the harem. They were split between their desires to escape, protect the Bey's concubines,  loot the place, or do some combination of the three. The palace was surrounded and even if they could get out, they'd be penniless, friendless and without protection in a land being invaded by foreigners. They needed a plan.

 

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: INSTANT LOSS

 

The z-list joshi puro promotion INSTANT LOSS Puroresu. As low as you can go in Japanese women’s professional wrestling and still be above ground. A place to see stuff the bigger promotions can’t get away with anymore. Cheap gimmicks, sleaze and disastrous fuckups. A place a woman works if she’s desperate to break into the business, or has no other options.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: The Full Boot

The Sleepers were bad people who got what they deserved in the ‘03 war, but even their detractors admit they performed an important pest control function. If they were still around, a place like The Full Boot wouldn’t last a week.

THE FULL BOOT

The Full Boot is a bar in an old Ancient Order of the Hibernians temple. The one the Know Nothings bombed in 1851, killing a dozen Irishman and leaving shrapnel scars on the interior walls still visible to this day. The name is a pun on the novelty glass boots they serve beer in, and their signature performance completely flaying the skin off a victim’s foot and lower leg.

The stairs lead down into the bar area, which is poorly lit during business hours. Low tables, cigarettes in defiance of the indoor smoking ban. Bar counter against one wall, where the soft light makes the things in the bottles swim. There’s something wrong with the barman. Other side of the room is the stage. They used it to give speeches, maybe a hundred years ago. Now the old wood is bloodstained, no matter how many tarps they lay down and how hard they scrub.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: Clown Death March

We were in Davidson (?), Illinois staying at a cheap no tell motel where staff got stuffed 8-10 to a room while Joe stayed in the tour bus with his boys. We had just gotten back from almost 24 hours at the local mall doing magic shows on the hour and showing off tigers in collapsible cages in-between. It was snowing like a motherfucker and I was perched on the balcony/second story walkway in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette when I saw the clowns.

The clowns were just ex-cons in their 50s-60s who wore clown makeup and were the hype men during the days at wherever we were stopped. They'd draw people out of the hustle and bustle of the mall towards the sad tiger shanty town we'd built in the middle of the mall (it was almost always malls or parking lots).

One big rule Joe Exotic had was NO ALCOHOL. I figure this stemmed from his brother dying via drunk driver. These old clowns had a helluva time with bottleache though, so whenever we'd get settled they would go straight for a liquor store or gas station. Since Joe was cozy in his tour bus, they wouldn't get caught. They didn't get out of costume or even wipe off the facepaint. They just threw on jackets and started walking. A line of 5 or 6 clowns in the snow, wandering towards the nearest bottle of KD. About an hour later I'm back on the balcony smoking and see these guys coming back. They're trudging through the snow, facepaint sloughing off, wearing clown clothes. Each one was carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag. They were walking single file. It is one of the most surreal things I've ever seen. Like some kind of horror movie death march. If I was artistically inclined I'd have already painted that strange tableau on black velvet and hung it in my living room.

Untrustable, February 2nd, 2020