Deserted Island experiment - Unknown Armies

I just listened to the THACO podcast, and they did something interesting. They talked about which game they would take with them to an deserted island. Old hat, yes, but with a new twist. They stipulated that you got the core book(s) for free, and could only take three supplements. Which do you pick?

I'm going to amuse myself by listing some of my games, and my picks. First out is Unknown Armies.

Why Unknown Armies? Well, first off it's so damn well written. The second edition is one of the few game books I read from cover to cover just on the strength of its prose. The content is good as well, but the prose is excellent. UA is a game where violence matters, where magic is ugly and hurtful. It's a game about the urban modernity, and its backside. It's just like the highfalutin 1st edition Mage, except it's not written by hippies with no grasp of rpg rules.

1. 1. Lawyers, Guns and Money - This is because Alex Able's organization is a good start for your street level investigators to get a lead into the Underground. You can boss the characters around and give them missions to do crazy stuff until they develop their own agendas. It's a good book for getting the players to join something bigger than themselved.
2. Hush Hush -  Everyone needs someone to hate, right? The Sleepers are great for showing up at weird places, silencing witnesses and if you have them show up and clean the mess the characters have put themselves into, you've got a serious trip going with doubts, debts and murder. 
3. Weep - Look at that cover. Seriously, look at that cover! Go do an image search and I'll be here when you come back. See? If there's anything more twisted and disturbing than that little girl and her staring eyes, then I don't know what is. This is a scenario collection, and you might wonder why you'd take that to the Island. But, not only are they long and meaty, the book just ooze that feeling of urban decay and desperation, physical and mental, that so defines Unknown Armies.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to say so. Next game, Call of Cthulhu!

How to not write a game

Last night I had some time to browse a game I have borrowed from a friend, Dresden Files the rpg. This is a game that have been talked about a lot, and most of it very positive. I did find some points of it so grating I had to put the book down. What do you do then? Gripe online!

In Dresden Files, the pages a very "designed". In my view, overly so. For example, some parts of the pages are designed to look like someone took a highlighter pen to some words and sentences. Personally I have never been able to use highlighter pens. For me they are of no use. I don't read like that. Sometimes I have read books bought second hand, and underlining or highlighting drives me up the wall. If anything, I take notes on a separate paper, never in the book I read! Having a thing like that in a printed book, by design, drives me nuts. It makes my eyes stop at intervals which are not natural to my way of reading. Quite jarring.

The other design element is sticky notes. Yes, they have small "sticky notes", with faux hand writing in the sidebars of the text! To me it just makes the text on the page drown in the clutter of notes. Adding insult to injury, the few times I stopped reading and glanced at those notes, almost all of them contained snarky remarks of a very annoying nature. I mean, if you add something to the text, add least make sure it adds information!

Since it's very easy to complain, I'm also going to say how I think it should be done.

The best game book I ever read is the 2nd ed. rules book for Unknown Armies. What's so good about it? It's clear and understandable. There are no witty quotes or snarky sidebars, just a clearly presented text with illustrations not interfering with the text. The text is different from the majority of gaming prose, though. It is not detached. Instead it is personal, and with a very clear author voice. For some that is a killer, and for those I direct you to SPI's DragonQuest, which is as formal as it gets.

But, I'd like to emphasize that in Unknown Armies, the voice never hinders the important function of the text, to get the information across on how to play the game. You can read one sentence after the other and the information flows naturally. The combination of all these factors are sadly quite rare, and one reason why I have sought out Greg Stolze's writing since.

When horror hits home - an experiment with Unknown Armies

So we have just finished a session of Unknown Armies, and it really left the players feeling confused, and a bit freaked out I think. Was that good or bad? I'm going to think out loud about some of that.

First impressions from behind the screen is of satisfaction. I finally got to run a game that reads great, it's the best written RPG bar none, and even though I had to flip through the book a lot, it worked out ok.

We played one of the scenarios in the back of the 2nd ed rules, called Bill in Three Persons. This is a scenario full of weirdness, and also some really twisted NPCs and lot of opportunities to trying to cope in a world full of hard knocks. I thought it had lot of potential, and it had the excellent qualities of working fine with characters (and players!) that know nothing of the setting and don't know each other beforehand.

Once again, my players surprised me by not interacting with the NPCs. I guess I should have learned by now that these players wont actually approach and talk to everyone they meet, like I do when I play. When I asked them after the session, one of the actually said it was a weird scenario, where they was whisked from place to place and didn't have much people to talk to. How does that jive with their efforts to avoid interacting with the NPCs in the game? Maybe they were too freaked out by them? Let me take an example, with spoilers for the scenario, so be forewarned.

The scenario is in three parts, and is about how to three times encounter the person Bill Toge, and maybe put him on a different path in life than the one the PC encounter in the starting scene. Bill is not a very nice person, or at least a person who has been roughened up by life quite a bit. In our session the first part ended with Bill shooting one PC in the chest before being shot to death by a police sniper. I guess that established him as dangerous, and so dangerous that the players stayed out of his way in the rest of the session! That kind of puts a damper on the NPC interaction opportunities when he in the main NPC in every scene.

Mood wise I think the game worked perfectly, though. After the first 10 minutes everyone was already feeling freaked out and everyone could see their world trying to burst its seams. It was very David Lynch, so to speak. I loved it, and I those who commented said they loved it as well. That brings me to another point. How does it compare to Call of Cthulhu we played the session before that?

CoC ended with everyone mad or going mad in the alien city of Carcosa after seeing some alien monsters grabbing them and flying through space. In UA on the other hand, they had seen low life crooks getting shot, child molesters being harassed and drugged cultist being taken out by police. And getting shot. I think it all felt a bit more real.

It will be very interesting to compare when I finally run a modern CoC scenario, if it hits closer to home that way. I know that the idea of alien non euclidean angles and books about arcane non human knowledge doesn't sound horrifying to many modern people, as my players. Modern horrors, and modern non-Lovecraftian ones, feel more real.

After this run, I think it's time for something of a different genre. Horror wear out, and post apocalyptic gaming beckons, or Old West, or science fiction, or something else. But, I will run more Unknown Armies in the future, now I know for sure!

How did it work? Combining the Cthulhu game rules

So, now I have run to sessions of my Trail of Cthulhu infused Call of Cthulhu hack. How did it go?

To begin with, I think more sessions are needed to really expose the dark corners of the system. But, I think I some impressions would be fun to share.

How about the most talked about feature of ToC? Well, I have said before that I think having a scenario stall because somebody missed their Spot Hidden roll is just shoddy game mastering. Having rules that hinder that just feels like the wrong way to fix the problem. That being said, I always liked the way how Unknown Armies handled skill percentages. In that game you are really good with a skill of 50%. That doesn't mean that you fail every second time you try to do what you do to earn your living. If you have 50%, you can earn your living, without rolling! That way of handling skills is a way to fuse ToC with the regular BRP system. You don't roll your Spot Hidden to notice that clue, and fail. If you are a guy who needs to be perceptive to make a living, you just spot things. That's what that 50% means. It turned out quite well in real play. You roll your dice anyway and if you succeed I give some extra info or colour. I think that worked fine.

The part of ToC that I personally feel is most interesting is the Drive, Pillars of Sanity and Sources of Stability. I implemented the Drive and the Pillars. The former I actually turned to once, just checking if it was time for a soft driver. The player in fact used the Drive to justify the roleplay, and the Driver thus worked, without actually turning into a game mechanic. Would that roleplay have happened without the Drive? Maybe, but the signpost and guide for roleplay was there. I think that worked fine.

After the scenario I realized that I had totally failed to ask for SAN rolls at quite a few opportunities when it would have been applicable. Thus, the concept of the Pillars needs further play testing.

I will probably make a follow up post on this topic after some more sessions of play. Sadly, it seems like the great game killer season is upon us, and now people will be travelling to be with friends and family. Probably we will have to wait until January until the next session.

Never split the group! Maybe you should...

I have had the fortune to be invited to a Unknown Armies game. The gamemaster is one of my dear readers, and he have done some quite cool things with the set-up for the game I wanted to talk about.

As everyone who have wondered about ecology in the dungeon, or "naturalism", knows there are a few things you just can't explain or have make sense without some major thinking ahead. Personally I lean far enough into the gonzo side of things, but if you want it all to make sense, one thing to watch out for it why the party adventure together.

In Call of Cthulhu there is one attempt to create a narrative structure, Delta Green. It's quite successfull. In our UA game we have The Band.

The band is called Unpeace, and was the greatest of them all. Well, it was riding the wave of death metal, mixing in some symphonic influences and a healthy dose of showmanship. After releasing one album the band was dissolved, but it's legacy and memory is very much alive. Now there will be a documentary, and a lot of memories are being brought to the surface. Naturally the player characters are the members of this band.

So, what's so cool about this?

Well. One thing I find interesting is how our game master have handled the fact that all PCs have a gigantic ego and loves to be in the spotlight all the time. Considering that, I think the solution is both neat and obvious when you think of it. We all met at a bar to talk to the film crew, and when the bar fight erupted and somebody's wife calls them to pick up the kids, we went in our different directions.

We split the party. It just made sense.

Now, to just idle and do nothing is the main cause for boredom when splitting the party, so naturally you have to keep the individual segments short and too the point. There is another trick in the bag, though. Since we have all played a few of those new fangled forge style games, we are quite confortable with the idea of shared narrative. This is used to good effect.

When my character, high on cocaine, runs into an alley after having hit somebody with his car, he finds somebody. The GM just said to me it was, I think, someone whom I had been missing lately. I could have said it was one of the other PCs, and suddenly the player sitting by my side would have been in that scene. Naturally, the other players could chip in their suggestions as well. I thought that was cool. While nothing really revolutionary, it was a good example of how the ideas of kibitzing and shared narrative can help make the split party less of a problem.

Let's think more of how the narrative structure helped the game along.

We all knew, from the first short conversations with some NPCs that we had arranged to start filming tomorrow. Thus we had a structure to the game, and could goof off until we were bored and it was tomorrow.

That also made it easy to split the party, running off doing wild things, since we could all participate to some extent.

I have often muttered about how the holy grail of sandboxing demands pro-active players. In this case we all knew that we had a Story, the film. If we wanted something to happen, we could just do something related to the film, like fight about whether we should play some songs, if we should film individually or as a group. I foresee lots of opportunities when the GM as the crew asks us about filming a scene about when "Frank fell off the stage". Guess if the possibilities of shared narrative are going to be utilized then!

To have an organization that gives you missions is one good way to keep the party together. Having some shared history like the Band creates natural conflicts, and some natural allies. Having the film being done is a good way to drag the PCs together again if we split up. Having the ability to chip in helps everyone to be involved. I think this set-up is great.

Can this be done in your vanilla D&D style fantasy game? Well, there's always the DragonQuest solution, with the Guild of Adventurers and their contract [sic!] spelled out in the rules!

A new game in town

A while ago I decided I was fed up my the gaming drought, and decided to follow the advice of Jim Raggi. He had an article in on issue of Fight On! about how to find players, and I did like he said and printed up a flyer and spread it around. Not any bloody response at all in the fourth biggest city in the country, with a university and lot of people coming and going. It just didn't work.

I would like to think that Swedes are insular and scared of letting anyone talk to them. It's almost as if you have to be drunk, or mentally unstable to address another human being in this place. Can you tell I'm a bit disappointed? Yeah, and maybe a bit bitter and unfair as well. Sometimes I wish I was back in North America, though.

Heck, I could probably fail there too.

...or we should all move to Finland.

Anyway. I did attend a character generation session last night, though!

Blogging seem to have brought me into contact with some really cool people in a way the flyers did not, and yesterday night we fixed up some characters for Unknown Armies. I have no idea where this will lead to, but I have a character named Frank, and he is stupid and into "darkness" and have some obsessions and social misadjustments. Simply put, he is a nutjob. I think that makes him a perfect PC in Unknown Armies. I'm really looking forward to this game!

One thing struck me about our PC gen session. We talked a lot about how we imagined our PC to be looking or sounding like this or that celebrity. Maybe this is the way to go when you are left with a game devoid of randomness? Pick an arena to be famous in. Say, pick an actor or a musician. Then think of some distinctive feature, like Sean Connery's way of speaking with his teeth clenched. Bring that look and feel into your game and try to stat it out.

It wouldn't surprise me a bit you you couldn't get a deck of cards and scrawl the names of actors/singers/writers/whatever on it and go from there at random. 

Unknown Armies - UK?

As anyone who have had come into contact with Unknown Armies probably know, it's known to be a very American game. Not only is the Occult Undergound as described in the game mostly focused on what's happening in the USA, it's also grounded in Americana and the mythological landscape of North America.

I have seen a few attempts to broaden the scope of UA, mostly by including magical traditions from the Old World, and emphasizing things the like influence of the roman catholic church. None of these attempts have really felt convincing to me. Even though we have another relationship to time in this part of the world, nobody is that obsessive about having a cultural heritage that goes back for a thousand years. That's just how it is. It feels forced in a game text.

Lately I have been reading a novel that made me think of UA again. My wife mentioned before Christmas that she'd love to get Kraken, by China Mieville, and since the cover text made me curious I bought it. Having read most of it I think it is a very interesting take on modern magic. Things have mythical resonance and meaning in that book in a same kind of way like the obsessiveness of postmodern magic does in UA. Pop culture is not only an American thing, but some things like Londonmancers are an interesting twist. There are even the magical incarnations of memory, and time, in the Angels mentioned in the book.

Maybe it can be argued that what makes UA what it is, and not just Mage minus the new age and powered by BRP, is Americana. Still, I think Kraken could be a very cool basis for an Unknown Armies game in e.g. The United Kingdom. Take a peek at it if you dig UA. It is far from the best book by Mieville, but it's definitely worth mining for ideas.

More houseruling Call of Cthulhu

Listening to the Innsmouth House Players roll up characters for Shadows by Gaslight (a YSDC patron only recording, hint! hint!), I spotted another candidate for CoC house rules.

Even though I have been looking through the editions I own, I haven't found any trace of the rule they used, that you can't start with a skill higher than 80% or two at 75%. I am grabbing those numbers from memory, so they might be slightly off. I like that idea, since it leaves some room for growth even for the "experts".

Related to that, I am personally not that fond of the idea of gaining 1d10 percentiles when increasing a skill. Way back it used to be 1d6 and I think I prefer that. Like in Traveller, "real world" characters should start competent and then grow slowly. It just makes more sense.

Finally, in Unknown Armies all characters have one thing called the "trigger event", which is what made that character aware of the Unnatural. Tied into the Drive, I think it would make excellent sense for CoC PCs to define such a thing. I noted that the Keeper of Arcane Lore for Shadows by Gaslight, Helen Maclean, used such an idea to provide some initial Cthulhu Mythos skill to the Investigators. Me like.

Now I not only have to collect these and other ideas in a document, I really should get a group together to play CoC!