Unknown armies in Europe

I find truely adore the unknown armies system and setting but it seems that it focuses mostly on America. I was wondering what the occult underground might look like in Europe as it seems to me that even most sources of inspiration, e.g. Lovecraft, Gaiman etc also seem to set the majority of their works in America.

So what advice would you have for running a unknown armies campaign in Europe and unknown armies rumours general.

Those who get lost in the catacombs beneath Paris, should they manage to reach the surface again may find themselves elsewhere.

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(Cool thread OP, but Veeky Forums never seems to talk about UA at all)

It was the british who were one of the first practicioners of what we know as modern magick. It was taught to them by the fae, (beings which we would now call daemons) who taught them to manipulate leylines of power, and pull magick out of the human subconscious. The humans returned this favour by turning on them, cladding those lines in cold-iron, and locking the fae inside. These ironclad leylines form the basis of the british rail network. And as they rust and decline, the angry fae get closer and cloaer to escaping and taking revenge on the descendants of those who imprisoned them.

Many an avatar of the executioner has died in pursuit of a fragment of one of the french guillotines. A cult of Thanatomancers hold most of the truely powered ones, and they aren't keen on sharing.

The most closely monitored country for use of magick in the world is Germany, and not for the reason you'd think.

Beware the Swiss Plutomancers. They are powerful and petty.

The current godwalker of the Warrior is looking for the pieces of Simo Haya's legendary rifle, as part of his bid for ascension.

All roads really do lead to Rome, if you know the right ritual.

There's a woman who lives in trafalgar square who'll tell you everything you didn't know about yourself if you give her an old farthing and a loaf of bread.

Big Ben has a soul.

There was a german version of the 2nd edition rules with a really interesting looking "wizard of oz" adventure in the german undergound made for it.

The outcome of national elections in Europe is determined by soccer. Not even a rumor, ask anyone familiar with the statistics.

Latin is a language of power and the many derivations of it spoken all over Europe have different effects. It is said that the power of the Latin language was stolen by the Romans from the Greek, and from the Barbarians.

People should have a closer eye on who gets to conduct which rituals at CERN.
youtube.com/watch?v=FxpCi_dachM

Has anyone actually alive even read the magic chapters of TTIP? What about CETA?

Brexit was a major power move, although I'm not sure by whom. And I'm not sure the Brits know either.

...

Anybody seen the 3e Gamma playtest?
I'm not sure how I feel about Identities. They're kinda neat, on one hand, but on the other having only 4 of them feels kinda limiting.

See, yes.
Read? Not yet.

Some say Brexit wasn't about Brexit, it was instead a battle between the secret forces of NO in their eternal battle against the evermortal beings who form the band YES, who are the people really in control of the EU.

Others point to the tautologists of Albion, who bring non-things into being by re-reciting that those things are themselves.
Having a sitting Prime Minister repeatedly chant that "brexit is brexit" cannot be coincidence, but what does "The Brexit" bring or plan?

Meanwhile, the Sleepers in Portugal are keeping things quiet, their vast tunnels beneath CERN are quickly filling with the sand that keep the ancient vaults of basque from being uncovered, bouyed by the helium of indepedence as it is becoming.

Reminds me of a show I watched set in the UK, I believe it was called "Nevermore". When I hear about the occult underground, that's what springs to mind for me. All of these mystical things like hobo kings, sewer monsters, and guys dressed up in pigeon feathers and all that.

>All of these mystical things like hobo kings, sewer monsters, and guys dressed up in pigeon feathers and all that.
That's basically what UA is about
Granted, sewer monsters are more likely to actually be demons or lycanthropes than anything like a slime monster

The sewer monsters in Neverwhere tended to be extra large sized animals - the Great Bull of London, the Beast of New York (a giant albino alligator) etc...

Neverwhere. Script by Neil Gaiman, he later turned it into a novel.

A lot of the spooky stuff in UA is best explained as "Demons" or "Revenants"
UA's setting is very humanocentric; there is some non-human shit out there, but it's a lot more rare. A myth as common as sewer monsters would probably be either a particular sort of Revenant, or maybe a Diametric from the 3e Playtest.

Magic in Europe is much more aristocratic, the traditions followed tend to be old and the methods of recruitment tend to be elite.

You could probably have a group of Cryptomancers trying to revive the whole 'mystery cult' thing

>A lot of the spooky stuff in UA is best explained as "Demons" or "Revenants"
>UA's setting is very humanocentric

This is a contradiction.

Lupus est homo homini in Unknown Armies. It may look like a creature, but it's really a person who went so far down the rabbit hole that they gave up their humanity. But that which took the over is not external but borne out of the greed and fears of people running amok with imagination.

"Demons" in UA are probably just figments of the human imagination, and revenants are humans.

For reference, Diametrics are Avatars who stepped off the path of their Archetype, and didn't handle the fall very well. As a result, they become Diametrically opposed to what they used to be, embracing the taboos of their archetype and basically just being insane, but their madness is also contagious, so if you hang out with a Diametric of the Unsung Champion long enough, the two of you will eventually start arguing over who gets credit for the sun rising every morning.

So you explained UA with UA lingo? - That's helpful... to someone.

There's only one actual human, everything else-- the other humans, the universe, demons, magic-- is just in his imagination. Also, aglets.

Uh, no
Demons in UA are ghosts who are obsessed with trying to return to the world of the living
Revenants are ghosts who don't give a shit about returning, and get stuck in patterns of behavior

Revenants are a more common explanation for spooky shit than Demons, because they tend to just possess people and/or fuck with people from inside their minds.
Revenants on the other hand can be just about anything.

>he believed their lies!

Top kek, so called "demons" are actually advanced humans from the future, projecting themselves into our timeline via technomagic. Involving aglets.

(You)

Nice try Memeomancer, but I'm shitposting from behind 9 protection spells. No chrage for you!

Aren't we all just memomancers?

There is a lineage of martial arts that slowly spreads through music festivals and holiday destinations. So far, the only known component of the Six Beats is breakdancing.

It is said that the adept who attends the right combination of music festivals over a two or seven year period will gain fabulous powers, up to but not including a full comprehension of the malign influence of aglets on contemporary music.

I'm curious, what are some experiences Veeky Forums has had with the Comte de Saint-Germain?
How has he fucked you over? How has he helped you?
How have you helped him?

What is your deal with Aglets?
I'm taking the bait

Their true purpose is sinister.

I like them, and I've found similar systems to work very well with the "Identity" system (Barbarians of Lemuria is an example that, coincidentally enough, also uses for identities, or "Professions" in its parlance),

I think their (relative) "free-forminess" is a huge aid when it comes to concept-first character building. Like, If I want my character to be a tweaker in 2nd Ed, I'd think up a few skills that a tweaker would have and start him with them. I'd pick things like "Squirrely Reflexes", "Friends in Low Places," or "I Can Get You What You Need".

But in 3rd Ed? Fuck it, I write down "Tweaker", and anything tweaker-related is me now. You want to be a self-hating Catholic insomniac cop? Here's how you do it:

>Identity: Self-hating Catholic
>Identity: Insomniac
>Identity: Cop

It's fantastically user-friendly, and there's just enough mechanical crunch attached (in the form of "Features", provided in a relatively brief, friendly list) to make them feel solid. "Cop", for instance, might substitute for Pursuit, is probably going to provide firearm attacks (untrained folks can only spray and pray), and might allow you to coerce a gauge ("Helplessness, maybe, if you're a red-tape kind of guy, or "Violence" if you're more of a thug). Give the same treatment to the other two and you're well on your way towards a finished character.

I think it's important to keep in mind that Magick is a wild-card when it comes to creepy-crawlies. Not *everything* has to be a human spirit, there's bound to be plenty of fucked up freaks of nature that were either made with no (or at least extremely indirect) human intervention or as an unexpected, long-forgotten byproduct of some unrelated aim--not to mention the entirely non-human entities actually made by Adepts *on purpose*. The 3rd Ed Gamma mentions golems made "with whatever an Adept has lying around the house" (in that particular example it was comic books and colostomy relief bags). It would be entirely in-setting to have a slime monster lurking in the sewers of a small Scottish town.

Hell, if you want to jam just about anything into UA and have it be entirely compatible with canon, just say "an Adept probably did it" and leave it at that. Or even better, just leave it entirely unexplained (there's an entity called "Claws" in the Gamma that is completely capable of fucking a person's day up and is given no origin or explanation at all). If there's one thing that UA encourages a GM to do, it's to get fucking weird. Feeling constrained by a setting so purpose-designed to be a grab-bag of ridiculous spooky shit seems counterproductive.

I'm not sure what Insomniac could substitute for, desu
The best I could think of is Knowledge, justified by being the kind of insomniac that stays up all night reading wikipedia articles or watching shows on the Discovery channel while they try to get to sleep.

But yeah, that's one of the things I like about it, the free-forminess
One of my few gripes with it is, unless you specifically take a skill as a feature, its value is going to fluctuate over the course of a game, and if you wanna have, say a Self-Hating Catholic(Subs for Connect, Therapeutic, Resists for Unnatural), Insomniac(Subs for Knowledge?, Resists for Isolation?, Maybe Evaluates Unnatural?), Cop(As you said), who gets visions that they believe to be from God(Supernatural ability with Vague Information), then my ability to handle myself in a brawl(Struggle) is gonna be all over the place, based on how many notches I've got in Violence; you could swap Cop to sub for Violence, instead, but then your Pursuit is going to fluctuate, and any other Feature has more or less the same problem


Granted, that's a minor gripe, because having so many Identities to flesh out a character gives you a lot of wiggle room.

He's an agletomancer

But user
UA 2e:
>>Elvis
>He's dead.
UA 3e Gamma, Book 3:
>>Elvis
>Still dead. Really.

I get what you're saying, but I see it as more of a feature than a bug. It gives the stress gauges a concrete, mechanical (and in some cases--like your example--deeply mechanically important) way to change a character during the course of a campaign.

It does mean that there are always going to be significant portions of your character that you have a very small amount of control over ("Oh, the GM threw a dozen Violence stress checks at us and I don't have an ability that subs for Connect, looks like I can't talk to people any more"), but it at least includes the safety net of "If you *really* don't want to lose something, roll it into an identity." I think that's fair enough.

That would be surprisingly strong against anyone but hobos.

Anyone tries to come at you, they find their shoe laces tied up, they getting surprisingly strong shoe whips attacking their legs, they get aglets burrowing into their foot skins and tear them apart from the foot up. Plus shoes can be walking around on their aglets, and you get a shoe store full of sneakers trying to kick your ass you probably ain't gonna leave their alive.

And how do you *kill* shoe laces with a gun?

The problem there is it's ridiculously easy to country
Just wear sandals, loafers, slip-ons, or any other kind of shoe that doesn't have laces. Alternatively, cut your aglets off before you go in.

You'd want Foucault's Pendulum, The Master and Margarita, The Name of the Rose, Calvino's Invisible Cities, Neverwhere and Subway (the French movie).

>to country
To counter*
Dunno how I made that mistake

Does anyone know if the Sexual Rebis (the former Mystic Hermaphrodite) is going to have rules in 3e?

Seconding Master and Margarita as a fucking masterpiece.

Probably. Worst case scenario, the rules don't change that much between editions, you could probably just use the 2e rules for the Archetype.

I know Veeky Forums has itchy trigger fingers about anything they could possibly brand """SJW""" but I love UA for being a very queer game.

Same

I didn't even get around to reading Cryptomancy's fluff until earlier today, and I actually like them more knowing that the whole thing started as half-gay sex cult, half-magic god cult

The trouble is you don't even need shoes with aglets, just the laces.

So you pull a gun on some agletmancer, and suddenly what seems like spaghetii starts pouring out of his pockets, writhing and twitching as it spills onto the floor.

But it's not spaghetti, its laces, before you know it a band of laces has leapt at your gun, and bound the trigger from being pulled, is constricting around your gun hand, squeezing your flesh.

And the agletmancer laughs, and your bones break beneath the unstoppalbe force of shoe laces.

>fragment of the French guillotines
>keen on sharing

Oh user, you SLAY me.

Bad puns aside, these are pretty great, especially the rail road lines.

How would an Agletomancer even gain Charges?

Honestly? I'd think an Agletomancer would actually be more of a rumormancer than anything else.

I don't know, but I know for damn sure that his taboo would be using laces for their intended purpose. You can spot an Agleturge right-out because he's the only motherfucker who goes hiking in flip-flops.

Or maybe we could take this further. Maybe Algeturgy isn't about shoes or the lacing thereof at all, it instead concerns itself with little-known and generally worthless trivia--of which the name of the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces is merely exemplary.

Triviamancy, then
Sounds good

It's the movement of small, easily overlooked things to a disproportionate effect.

Minor charging: cause a life threatening situation to unfold by the placement of a single small item. Items used in Agleturgy can be no bigger than an adepts fist and can generally be easily held and concealed within the palm of their hand.

Sig charge: cause the death of multiple people from the placement of a small object.

Major charge: cause a major national disaster via the placement of a single small object (example: the person who placed a warning meter in the control center of chernobyl so high up a wall operators had to get a ladder to ever read it)

(At least, that's what a villain's school would look like, could also go with one of those weird trainer collectors, with rarer shoes producing greater charges, or a variant on cryptomancy focused on small, seemingly useless trivia being interwoven into vast conspiracies)

How do you guys feel about the 3/3/03 Event, and Old Mother Apocalypse?

Personally, I'm not a fan. I like the Comte, and the Freak is just...exactly the type of thing that will scare a lot of people away from the game, honestly. Old Mother Apocalypse feels like they arbitrarily decided 'well, since the Ritual of Light made things not-terrible, I guess we gotta kill the Comte so things can be a bit more grimdark'

I like that it isn't fully explained, in the overarching plot of the game I'm putting together the 3/3/03 event was the end of the last incarnation of the universe with the stratosphere finally being filled - the fact that it is remembered at all is an incongruity but every other prior memory subsequent to it is just a case of Last Thursdayism.

If anything to me it feels like an effort to reassure people that UA still has that edge. Adepts schools are a lot easier on players with only Agrimancy and GNOMON being overtly about sacrifice (in the agrimancers case, LITERAL sacrifice), and magic in general is easier on you.

There's nothing like saying "don't worry we can still be 90s" by putting an ominous apocalyptic being that may come for us all at any moment.

I hope there are conversion rules for the old adept types in 3rd ed

Most of the archetypes stayed the same.

There are, don't worry.

But I'm a worrymancer!

Anyone made any interesting adept classes? Anyone got an ready for 3rd edition?

I'm considering trying to make a "Musomancer" or "Audiomancer", or something like that
Music-based magic