Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 0

I played a superb twelve session campaign of Unknown Armies featuring ¥0, a Japanese successor conspiracy to Mak Attax from David Tormsen's upcoming Special Orders splatbook. I really enjoyed the game, and after the playtest game wrapped I felt comfortable enough with the game to run it myself, featuring my own fan organization: The Brethren of the Curb, food truck pirates with their own vision of the magickal revolution.

 

Unknown Armies 3E begins with "corkboarding", a world creation exercise where the group chooses an objective for the campaign, based on the premise set by the GM and whatever the players are interested in doing. Then the players and GM go around the table and take turns developing their characters and adding plot elements and connections to a relationship map, which then forms the basis of the action in future sessions.

We finished corkboarding in a single four hour session We had one new player (to UA, not to RPGs) and several experienced players. Everyone had spend the week running up to the game discussing their plans in the discord, and they all arrived with basic concepts for their characters, food truck, and objective, which definitely sped things up. Most of the players were also contributors to the Special Orders book, and had been marinating in the setting for several months, so they had a good feel for what the tone and setting of the game should be like.

THE TRUCK

The group pretty quickly zeroed in on the idea of a Kaifeng/Ashkenazi fusion truck. They came up with a rotating list of dumplings to serve:

• Hoshin Duck Bao
• Brisket Bao
• Spicy Chicken Bao
• Chive Bao
• Soup Bao
• Pastrami Bao with mustard sauce
• The Scorcher

They decided to call the truck BAO DOWN, PEASANTS, which according to Tormsen can be rendered pictographically in Chinese as 包下农民. They also decided that since the cuisine they were shooting for barely used milk anyway, they could shoot for a Kosher certification and just not have dairy products anywhere in the vehicle.

THE CHARACTERS

In the players' own words:

• DBD aka Deebeedee aka David ben David aka Daoud bin Daoud. Born in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank to a secular Zionist family, DBD was so ostracized and bullied by his peers he ended up hanging out with the local Palestinians who beat him up much less because they liked having him as gangly Jewish mascot. Ended up abandoning his post during his IDF service and traveling the world to find himself until he ate a spicy burger in Goa that caused a religious experience in the bathroom and made him the world's first Capsaicinurge. Having run out of his grandparents’ money, he has joined the Brethren to build up experience so he can return to Israel, avoid a prison sentence for desertion, and create peace.
• Rachel — WASP redhead with a ponytail, grew up in the house of a Boston Brahmin clan that fell into disrepair, early 20s. Part Unspeakable Servant, lived in and around New England her whole life. Wants to acquire the resources to fix American society, permanently. Wears an eyepatch over the glass eye that resulted from making her first Unspeakable Servant.
• Reba - Hong Kong Kaifeng/American Ashkenazi, nonbinary, age 35. Culinary school dropout and former Mak. They grew up in Hong Kong, but are now unable to return there after the Whisper Wars ran them out of the underground and participating in the recent protests saw them labeled as an American provocateur by the PRC. Sincerely believes that magick is a source of beauty and wonder that is neither good nor evil on its own, and that it should be spread and brought into the light to make the world a more interesting and open place.
• Tal Safdie they/them - Lebanese American, crustpunk, merman hair with a bushy beard (well, for a teen), 19. Estranged from their parents. Disillusioned by the lack of direction and goals of their fellow crust punks, so glommed onto the first group of people that seemed motivated, ideological, and vaguely lefty. Trigger Event: A female crust punk detritomancer tried to feed Tal to the pile. This probably accelerated my leaving crust punk culture

After a short discussion, the players elected Reba the captain. 

THE OBJECTIVE

The Brethren of the Curb are opposed to the tyranny of several other Mak Attax splinter conspiracies, chiefly the Court of the Burger Queen and the Colonel's Secret Coterie, both of whom have a history of forcibly annexing or destroying anyone who gets in their path. The players were interested in this type of inter-faction intrigue, but wanted a motivation that was positive and constructive in nature, rather than laser focused on destroying someone else.

 

After some deliberation, they found a mission statement that encapsulated what they were interested in:

MAKE SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS THE NEW TORTUGA

 

They further broke the objective down into several milestones - concrete goals they'll work towards over the course of the game.

1. Make unspeakable servants to keep the peace (Intense)
2. Figure out who burned down the KFC (Petty)
3. Guarantee the local Mak's independence (Intense)
4. Change local fast food ordinance (Intense)
5. Build solidarity among local food trucks (Petty)
6. Keep cataphracts out (Intense)
7. Create a local occult pirate council (Petty)

 

THE CORKBOARD

Rather than give a blow by blow, I'll just describe the final result. Here's a screencap of the finished board (the software doesn't have an option for a high resolution export).

Esoteric Enterprises - Dungeon Entrances

Meant to write this one up a year ago, forgot about it until now.

Dungeon entrances for Esoteric Enterprises. The core rules text gives various entrances. Sewer tunnel, crypt, housing project, nightclub, etc. Besides these locations, there's very little flavor or gameplay given to the surface city. More types of entrance means more flavor for the surface city.

Photo by JJ Harrison

GALLERY

Not a full on Occult Gallery, but a surface structure that could have a painting or two linked to one. It also has a hidden staircase or hatch that leads into the underworld.

They charge a fixed fee per use of the dungeon entrance. Say $50 per person, or $40 per head for a group of four or more people. This is framed as a "suggested donation" but they aren't unlocking the door unless you pay. This one-time fee includes entry and exit, they aren't going to toll you twice. If you enter somewhere else and exit through the gallery they don't charge you.

MAFIA CONTROLLED BUSINESS

A bar, bathhouse, restaurant, or other legitimate front. The backroom or basement has the stairs down to the dungeon, watched over by armed wise guys.

Entry into the undercity is free (for anyone not known to be a police informer or enemy of the family). Anyone exiting to the surface through this entrance is taxed 10% of the value of the loot recovered. Safe from exit campers, at least.

Obviously the guards on the stairs are gun toting Mobsters, with a Lieutenant somewhere on the premises in case they need backup.

MUSEUM

A museum in an old building. It's closed at night, patrolled by security guards. There's a closed wing in the back, under renovation or used for storage. In that room is a staircase going down to the underworld below.

If the stairs go down to a dungeon node populated by a faction, the room is guarded by a couple NPCs or creatures from that faction.

NECROPOLIS

The dungeon entrance is in an old mausoleum. The necropolis is guarded by a militia drawn from the wealthy families whose ancestors are entombed there. They assume anyone entering at night is here to pillage graves. They politely escort trespassers out on the first offense, and shoot on subsequent violations.

The militia are Thugs with rifles, pistols and shotguns, plus a couple leaders who use the Mobster stat block.

If too many gunfights break out in the Necropolis, the police kick the militia out and establish a permanent presence there, making it even harder to enter and exit.

 

NIGHTCLUB
The top level is a normal nightclub. The bottom has underworld creatures and doorways leading into the dungeon. Entry and exit are free, but the tables are occupied by a random faction every time the players visit, which can result in awkwardness or violence.

WAREHOUSE

Or other abandoned building in a violent or abandoned part of town. No faction controls it, but there's always a random encounter when you enter or exit. It's highly likely that intelligent humans camping the exit are waiting for adventurers to emerge so they can rob them.

Drinks Post - Runoff

For all the recipes that were either too simple or not good enough to make it into the main drinks post series.

Dutch Russian

This is a stock photo from Wikipedia.

Availability: Tricky. I had to go to a megastore to find genever, and they only had one kind.

This is a White Russian with genever instead of vodka. It tastes like a malted milkshake. Delicious, but nothing to run home about.

Manor of the Giant Arminius at A Weekend With Good Friends 2021

Another Jackson Elias Server Virtual Convention, another run of the Manor of the Giant Arminius using the latest revision of Begone, FOE, my personal D20 dungeon crawler.

 

 

By Arthur Rackham

 

We had four players.

• Gideon the Rogue
• Elbekh the Cleric
• Douglas the Fighter/Mechanical Engineer
• Aric the Magic User

The players left their mule and cart in the forest and marched up the wedge shaped hill, on which the Manor of the Giant Arminius was sat. The hill was 100 feet high, and the manor stood a preposterous 100 feet higher. The area was patrolled by rebels, but by staying off the path and keeping to the brush, they were able to avoid being spotted - even with most of the trees chopped down. They noticed corpses of soldiers hanging from a couple of the giant statues on the way up, the ones the rebels hadn't toppled.

The group stopped before they got too close to the structure, and sent Gideon the Rogue to scout ahead.

Manor of the Giant Arminius - Music Post

I've been diverted from work on new dungeons (Oops, All Hags! and The Salt Pan) by Tormsen's superb upcoming UA3 splat Special Orders. But I did a rerun of The Manor of the Giant Arminius the other day for the latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias virtual convention, and came up with this updated music list.

There's some overlap with the Fallin' Down music posts, because I recycled a lot of the same ideas for that.

 

mellonbread's Favorite Drinks to Make at Home - Part 2

Building on the wild success of the first drinks post, let's have another!

APEROL SOUR

Availability: Easy. Aperol isn't hard to find, though I don't actually like it for anything besides this drink.

I doubt I invented this drink, but I can't find any mention of it anywhere else. I find the Aperol Spritz is too sweet for my taste. This recipe tames the sweetness and lets the rest of the flavors express themselves better.

• 2 oz Aperol
• 4 oz Prosecco (can use a drier sparkling wine if you want the drink to be even less sweet)
• Juice of one lemon
• Carbonated water

Shake the Aperol and lemon juice with ice, strain into glass with ice, add prosecco and top with carbonated water to taste. Garnish with lemon wheel and cocktail cherry of choice.

Consider also: just a splash of absinthe or Pernod to turn it into a Death in the Aperol Sour.

mellonbread's Favorite Drinks to Make at Home - Part 1

Mixing drinks is not difficult. Getting all the ingredients and utensils together can be an expensive chore. But once you have them, making the drinks is rarely more difficult than squeezing, stirring, shaking and pouring.

 

These are my favorite drinks - mostly small variations on established recipes. I'm going to list how I make them, which isn't always going to be the proper recipe. Sometimes I substitute things. I'll list the overall level of availability so you can gauge how difficult it might be for you to find the ingredients.

ACID SPIT 

Availability: Easy. If your grocery store has liquor you can pick up everything you need in one trip.

 

This is the first real cocktail I ever made, a simple gin and tonic variation. It's sweet, sour, boozy, and you can customize as you drink it until it's exactly the way you like it.

• 2 oz of a gin with a strong flavor. Delicate, artisinal gins will get lost against the background. Something cheap or mid shelf is ideal.
• Juice of half a lemon
• Juice of half a lime
• Cracked ice
• Tonic water to taste (I use Fever Tree. I know the pros prefer Q, but I find the sweetness of the tree offsets the harshness of the gin and sourness of the citrus perfectly)

Combine in a glass and take a sip. If it's too sweet, add more citrus. If it's too sour, add more tonic. If you can't taste the gin, add more gin. 

Unknown Armies NPC - Yoshida

An Unknown Armies NPC, based on my character from David Tormsen's playtest game for ¥0, a Japanese Mak Attax successor conspiracy from his upcoming Special Orders sourcebook.

Portable version here.

In uniform.

Yoshida (just Yoshida) is a cleaner from a long line of cleaners. From the Tokyo Subway all the way back to the Koreans speared to death in the ruins of the Great Kanto Quake, Yoshida’s family has bagged the bodies and mopped up the blood, piss and liquified fat. Today, he cleans up after people who kill themselves using trains. Japan averages one a day, so he travels a lot.

You might have guessed that Yoshida is one of the burakumin, the village people. Yes, he also wears a hard hat at work, and has been known to hang out at the YMCA. His brother Yoshioka went into the trash business with a local chivalrous organization. One of the outfits that settles their disputes with grenades. That isn’t Yoshida’s scene.

Yoshida was cleaning up after a jumper when her hand followed him home. Climbed into his pocket and hid. He didn’t find it until he was back at Rose’s, the tachinomi outside the Nagoya station. Crawled up onto the counter and tried to climb into his little bowl of pickled things. Everyone else freaked out. Only he could see the person attached to it. She seemed sad.

Yoshida takes care of dead people. He sorts their bones and scoops their skulls into plastic bags. It doesn’t get more intimate than that, so he wasn’t surprised when they started to talk back to him. The head lost in the storm drain, yelling at him to pull it out. The salaryman wedged under the bogey, who forgot to let his cat out before he stepped off the platform.

¥0 was the logical next step for Yoshida. He can’t serve food - nobody would willingly eat anything his hands had touched. But he can clean up a crime scene, speak to dead people, and go unnoticed where a cabal of twitchy mages would make a scene. He pledged himself to the memory of Betty Kimura because he wanted to help people. Maybe if things weren’t so fucked up, he wouldn’t meet so many of them on the other side.

Unknown Armies NPC - Joel

Another character from LISA the Pointless, this time adapted for Unknown Armies. Portable version here.

By Edvinas Kandrotas

Joel is a fulminaturge with a Major Charge burning a hole in his pocket. He’s got a custom pistol and a single custom .476 caliber bullet, both of which he forged with his own hands from materials scavenged out of the trash. He doesn’t know what he’s going to spend it on, just that it needs to be something… big.

Joel could make good money with a square job as a machinist, or spend his Major Charge on something that would make him a powerful underworld figure. Truth is, he’s addicted to life as a vagabond. Rolling into town, getting stuck in the nightlife, making friends and enemies, then moving on to his next adventure. The unspent magick potential flowing through him makes him a magnet for weird shit.

Joel has never personally killed anyone, but has helped his friends do so. He has never fired a shot in anger, and a couple times he has paid the price for not doing so.

Fallin' Down Music Part 3

The Fallin' Down game has fallen down. According to Conscience, the players have hit a wall on level 5/6, with the Mind Flayers now controlling the entire floor, blocking access to the rest of the dungeon. 

Old, semi-related artwork by me

The most powerful characters died in a full-floor brawl with the squids, taking all their earned experience with them and leaving the survivors underleveled, with few opportunities to advance to the power level they need to get through (Conscience is using the 5E system, but with treasure as XP).

(One of the dead characters was basically the Robilar of the group, pulling in vast amounts of loot on solo adventures in timeslots where the rest of the group couldn't make it. It's cool to see a 5E game replicate the first D&D campaign ever run)

The remaining players are looking for a way forward that lets them skip the Illithids entirely, or somehow even the odds of success in combat.

I expected this to happen on Floor 2, with the hundreds of ghouls blocking the players and ripping them to shreds. Instead, the opposite happened. Floor 2 (and to a lesser extent Floor 3) has been a continued source of XP for the group, as they unlock hidden rooms filled with additional monsters and treasure.

Conscience suggested the following tracks

I introduced a new track for the illithid encounter, since Lakebed Temple didn't feel right - it has kind of become the ghost theme at this point (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6Jv53y1Dw)

You might also mention this as a track I've been using as theme for the sphinx: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzi7RAUnLBI)
It's funny though, I started out using this for her: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKLfvt6CZCY)

zomner (author of the floor below the Illithid meatgrinder, which the players haven't reached yet) suggested the following

For the elf village (https://youtu.be/wjmkpUJljQI)
For the mill gnome (https://youtu.be/zq6KnILABy4) 

For trolls or other creepy magic (https://youtu.be/l8O9BNTl004)

Fallin' Down - Music - Submitter's Choice

After writing up the music post for Fallin' Down, I put a call out to the submitters of each floor, to see if they had music tracks in mind for their dungeon levels. I also asked Conscience what he'd been using so far.

A rune wizard amends signage in the Stone Town, courtesy of one of Conscience's players

I received the following replies:

Conscience (Dungeon Master)
General Combat Relaxed: Drumbeat of the Dunmer (https://youtu.be/Yookfajt3lg)

General Combat Intense: Stormclouds on the Horizom (https://youtu.be/QdKgNP0ygMw)

Stone Town Day: Journey's End (https://youtu.be/cph3BSQq1e0)

Stone Town Journey/Event: Wind Guide You (https://youtu.be/qBBwdOGDIKk)

Stone Town Dark: Masser (https://youtu.be/Va9GQkjrnII)

Broken Venus: Mirkwood Theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZMk7ZCOyw)

Ghouls Exploration: Flat of the Blade Instrumental (https://youtu.be/WfIP4DWGG28)

Ghouls at Work: Pray for Rain Instrumental (https://youtu.be/XdaJi0tdAwI)

Ghouls Attack: Babel Instrumental (https://youtu.be/rNWXDiqw-cc)

tophat (Floor 3)
"I'd put Machinarium's The Prison down for specifically visiting The Blood Pool"

Fallin' Down - Music

Friend of the blog Conscience is running Fallin' Down for his open table. He hasn't written a full play report or review yet, but he's been posting updates to the disky and it sounds amazing.

Screenshot from his roll20 of the abandoned inn in the Stone Town

So I decided to score all the Fallin' Down floors. Similar to what I did with Esoteric Enterprises. Here's the music I'd use for each area:

• Surface
• Exploration: By the Wall
• Combat: I'll Live Forever (Cormac Rex Version)
• Inn: Tiger King (Game Version)
• Inn After Players Repair It: Dream Serene
• Inn Fully Upgraded and Occupied: Vandereer

• Floor 1
• Exploration: Abyss
• Combat: Hailton

• Floor 2
• Exploration: Shifting Sands
• Combat: Machine in the Walls

• Floor 3
• Exploration: Drowning
• Combat: Innocence Mangled

• Floor 4
• Exploration: Elevator
• Combat: Party Hardy
• The Shop: Marble Forest

• Floor 5/6:
• Exploration: Lakebed Temple
• Combat: THE WOODS

• Floor 7
• Exploration: Muddy Waters
• Combat: Bellicose Ballet

• Floor 8
• Exploration Duergar: Warehouse
• Combat Duergar: Freemove
• Exploration Trolls: Rave On Waiting Entrance
• Combat Trolls: Forever Turbo Heat Dance
• Dragon Combat: Fancy Meat Computer

• Floor 9
• Exploration: Hallowed Ground
• Combat: Sewers of Dross

Clean Living - a Resident Evil Adventure

Resident Evil! It's not my favorite series - in fact the only one I've ever played is 4. The setting is kind of bloated with too many prequels and spinoffs and retcons that create a ridiculous Metal Gear style pileup of conspiracies.

But I saw a thread on the traditional games board that captured my imagination: what would it be like living in a world where anyone with a grudge could turn over a rock and find thirty new bio-organic weapons. And it reminded me of one of my favorite settings of all time: the B.P.R.D.

By Guy Davis, the best of the B.P.R.D. artists

So I wrote up a rules hack for Delta Green, along with an adventure and some pregens to play with it. You can read them here.

Here's a play report of how the playtest went.

THE UNITED STATES IN 2021

Since President Adams’ assassination in 2013, the United States has been in a permanent state of emergency - a police state in an endless struggle against yearly bioterror attacks. Wild mutants breeding in the woods for decades, filtering out into population centers. Cults and militias brewing new strains of viruses bought on the black market. Zombies staggering into crowded malls. Secret military tribunals. Bodies in sealed bags, tipped into an autoclave.

That’s been the new normal for almost a decade. And it’s not all bad. The biological revolution that unleashed neverending horror on the world also opened a treasure trove of medical and pharmaceutical discoveries. When’s the last time you heard of someone dying of heart disease, or cancer? So people live around the shortages and empty shelves, the long lines, the endless checkpoints manned by guards in full MOPP gear, pointing flamethrowers and rocket launchers at families in sedans. You shop for groceries, pick up the kids from school, spray your groceries down with bleach, and hope to God the thing on the back of your hand is just a rash.

THE DIVISION OF SECURITY OPERATIONS
Empowered by the 2001 PROTECT America Federal Bioterrorism Commission Act, refreshed every year by Congress during the usual appropriation cycle, the Division of Security Operations is the cabinet level agency which assumed the duties of both the FBC and the National Counterterrorism Center. Unlike its predecessors, the DSO has broad authority to assemble Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a permanent basis, in effect skimming personnel from other law enforcement, military and intelligence three letter agencies.

BRIEFING
Yesterday, local police in Lubbock, Texas making a routine traffic stop found a hermetically sealed container filled with plagas spores. Thankfully the driver was apprehended without incident, and the container secured without releasing its contents.

We’ve got people checking out the trucking operation, and the source of the package. We need you to investigate the destination. According to the shipping records, the box hiding the spores was destined for a community in Central Washington called Squiddler’s Patch, up in the Okanogan National Forest. We’re sending you in undercover to sniff out the operation, with the option to go loud and neutralize any threat that can’t wait for a followup team.