Urban Unease

These people are willing to share their power and knowledge with you, but for a cost. You cover their rent for the month.

Remember, rent is the first of the month, or a task for the community. This means you might have to undertake TWO side-quests for a month.

Sounds only in bedroom probably means that parties actually orgies. Cos you know. Magickal symbolism.

>There are almost no children living in the building. Sure, they show up, but few of them ever go into a room to sleep, and it seems like no family there ever really has children.
>Either they're expecting forever and ever, they move somewhere else to give birth, or the child seems to have grown up over the course of a single night. The parents don't seem to have aged a day.
>There is one man whose room is regularly home to children. If you see a child in the building, chances are that they'll run up to the man who lives on the floor with no number.
>For all you can find out, he's childless and has never had a child, being a kind but nervous balding man in his fifties with a penchant for coffee with a splash of rum, cheap cigarillos and tweed suits.
>His apartment is filled with drawings of children - not children's drawings, clean and skilled drawings of children, each one of them unique.
>If you stay with him on Father's Day past midnight, he'll get drunk and talk about "the forbiddance" and the metaphysics of souls for hours, nothing of which is truly clear.
>And once in a while, if you drink with him enough, you'll hear the pattering of tiny feet outside his door, he'll stand to his feet and open the door, but nothing but a putrid smell comes in. He seems to like it this way, though.

Man in Fancy Suit shows up every three months, and has a birthmark of the lobby damask on him.
Father's Day Father gets visited by an apparition of his on on Father's Day.
Father's Day is in June, the sixth month of the year, and a multiple of three.
Father's Day Father is the father of the boy who became the Man in the Fancy Suit...

Old shaman give you piece of cactus and order to chew it. After few hours of terrible aftertaste and night of horrible hallucination he said you are not the chosen one. Few redhair witches misteriously smile when you left shamans room. You hear outburst of laughter when ou go around corner. Later you find QR-code message in the lobby. Its a link to a video where youre drugged and all witches and wizards filming you on their phones. You scream amd cry. They laugh.

Hallucinations comes back as dreams as long as you live. Each time you remember them they seem more and more beatifull. At one point you realise it was heaven all along, but you were to blind and to stupid to realise this in time. It becomes psychological scar, you want see more of heaven but you cant. Shaman died. You had one chance and you failed.

Huh. I had no idea.

That just makes the name better to be honest

>there is a mummified human hand living in your cupboard, it is prone to wander around your apartment and mess accidentally things up if you leave the door unlocked
>it is surprisingly good at filling out tax forms though and will automatically do so if placed near one

>Then again this more often than not just you putting the supernatural were it doesn't belong (as is the case with more phenomena in the complex than you would think).
>The complex, being kind of a shithole, isn't the place a family would would settle down or spring from.
>That's not to say that their isn't children, in fact Greg and Linda, the Werewolves down in 5C have a pretty sizable litter, and so do the Molemen in the walls and several members of the Cult of the Washingroom

There's no canon, don't pretend anything is canonical.

There's a hard and a soft canon if you want my opinion.

>Hard Canon: the oriental feel of The Apartment, the shops (Icky's Chophouse and The Bodega) the landlady, the dead girl across the hall, The Man in The Fancy Suit, the courtyard/s, the labyrinthine basement, and the generally helpful attitude of the tenants and The Apartment.

>Soft Canon: The interior of The Apartment (and the exterior to some extent, what with all the roofs and the multitudinous entrances and exits of The Aprtment) defies any logical ordering, layout, or number of floors; this allows there to be more tenants than you'd ever think there would be room for.

My opinion is probably shit though just have fun and make up interesting and cozy spooky things.

Judging from the lack of a railing and the way the light falls, it looks more like an indoor lobby with full-sized windows.

Which makes sense: why would anyone want an open-air lobby in a bad neighborhood full of air pollution and noise?

>Many of the residents seemingly come from the future, decked in far out gear and slinging some wild street talk
>Some of those jacks jab about their biz, runnin'. Good work, but sometimes you gotta rub elbows with collars and wage slaves, but hey, a check's a check, chummer.
>These punks like to knuckle up the Wizards, and anybody else that likes to crash their joints and whine about their beats

>oddly, the crime, noise and pollution tend not to be an issue, at least those from outside.
>this also infuriates local paranormal investigators, who are constantly thwarted by the nature of the Building from learning anything about the nature of the Building.

Locations (mine semi head canon)
The Building or Apartments.
Main source of weirdness in the neighborhood. Seemingly shitty, yet homely and comfy. Some saying have a soul in it.

The Condo.
A high-rise of highly successful businesses and apartments. Reeks of class, big money and hard earned success. Yet it's cold, efficient and sucking away your very own soul from you. Modern "art" and clean, minimalistic looks of apartments and offices doesn't help either. In fact, it make you worn out even faster. You must wear a suit all the time. But don't worry, you'll get used to it. Everyone does.

Co-op.
It used to be a heart of the Community. Now it's dead and on it's rotting corpse rising a new life, like maggots and other scavengers. There is nothing left in this ruins but a misery.

Housing Projects.
They are shitty as Apartments and soulless as Condo, but doesn't have a money and power they have. They already killed Co-op, and they are waiting for a sign of weakness to strike down another victim and devour it. They are numerous and faceless as their tenants.

>One day as you are walking home, some thugs start following you
>You try to ignore them, but they keep taiing you
>Seeing the apartment doors nearing, you run for it
>They follow you inside
>You run down the hall and take a left
>They also run down the hall, turn left, and look confused.
>They don't see the hall you took, just a wall
>They try to turn back, but see only another wall
>Panicking, they bang on the walls, until one wall turns into an open door that leads to an alleyway
>In Ukraine

Dead Girl isn't across the hall, she's next door. She couldn't be the girl next door otherwise.

Why is she locked up? I thought she was supposed to be nice
Is there something out of her control about her that makes her dangerous

Nice does not equal not dangerous, m8.

>Is there something out of her control about her that makes her dangerous
Probably, since she's supposed to readily admit that people are right to keep her door locked.

Proabably.

Everyone is adamant that the Girl should never be let out. Including, usually, herself.

I think I remember something in the first thread about how if you look through the peephole, the room looks torn up, like something violent occurred.

The Apartment cares for its tenants

>Down by the boiler, there's a man you see, who avoids getting wet or steamed so carefully.
>He possess such status, self-respect and ease, that you only can conclude that he is the ruler of the Queens navy
>Your thoughts also turn to rhymes when you're near him

>The complex is no stranger to...exceptional tennants, the cyperpunks and wizard population being a notable example due to their frequent skirmishes out in the parking lot, often broken up by the intervention, and rifle, of the Vet

>However there has been a recent uptake in Fishmen and Neanderthals after a rise of oil spills in the Atlantic and climate change thawing out the cavemen in Siberia

...

>posters, bills, and adverts
That's a point. We could have some fun with those.

I'd imagine that the building slowly absorbs things not put up by the tenants and they turn into mulch for the courtyard's plants

>One of your neighbors is a time-traveler.
>A time-traveler that's VERY BAD at disguising the fact that he's a time-traveler.

>His cover is blown the worst when both the Neanderthals, the Wizards, AND the future punks recognize him

>The garbage disposal is just a fleshy maw with rows and rows of teeth
>Turning it on makes it scream in pain

>the thing under your bed forgot a decimal point in an online order and now there's forty-five hundred pounds of crushed macadamia nuts in your apartment
>the quiet, mousy kid down the hall is also a troll, specifically a huldra.
>there's a pale, red eyed girl living in various paintings and photos around the Building, and she'd be very appreciative if you would help with her degree by putting textbooks near one and turning pages now and then.
>the previous tenant left a very old 'first aid kit' in the apartment. It consists of a needle and thick, black waxed suture thread. The kit can close any wound painlessly, reattach limbs or graft on different limbs and organs. The sutures remain forever.
>a few of the Vets have a cook out once a month, and each prepares some sort of meal from The War. Favorite meals, things they wished they could eat, 'food' that kept them from starving, things like that. You're always welcome to attend, just bring a few beers because they always forget somehow.

>Your neighbor jack sure is a swell guy
>His name's not actually jack, and you're not really sure if he's your neighbor
>You actually can't remember anything about him, not even his face or whether he's actually a he
>It seems to start fading from your mind whenever you're not directly looking at him
>But somehow you're sure that he's a swell guy and always there when you need him
>What were you thinking about again?

What IS 'the only war that matters' in this urban unrest cosmology? What did the Vets fight, and why?

The last war of course. Which one depends on certain vet I guess.

I see The Doctor has finally taken up residence in The Apartment
I don't know what the fucks going on here though

You still fight their war on the first of every month
You fight it once every three months when you see a Suit
It was every war, the Vets are congregate memories and ideals of countless soldiers over the centuries
Super Hitler

I thought there was only one Vet? A sort of "Unknown Soldier" type deal.

There has been some posts that suggest that the Building is the battleground for a war, which is why rent is the first of the month. During that day, those that pay with the day are fighting in the war. As you become more accustomed to the urban unease, you may begin to remember.

How do I come out of each battle relatively unscathed and rather rested, you ask? There's a bunch of wizards, druids, shamans, elementalists, exorcists, priests, cultists, arcanists, ghosts, golems, mad scientists, living paintings, transmogrified criminal animals, a Schroeder's cat-as-a-girl, and an apartment building with a will of its own and the means to bend reality. I don't gotta 'splain nothin'.

There is no canon
First there was old man Kowallski, who got messed up in the War
Then there were various vets talking about 'the War' but with no details and what they said tended to be impossible
Then there was a sort of aggregate action hero Vet

>There is a Vet on the second floor, not to be confused with the former soldier (?) on the fifth floor
>No this lady is actually an animal (?) veterinarian. She can bring ole Fido back from the dead in a most Monkey Paw esque manner
>In a bind she'll work on human/oids, but be prepared to help her out with some grusome task or other sometime dowm the line

>On the 12th floor there's a legal aide office, rented out by a very good lawyer, Roger Chapman3000, a KenkoCorp. AutoDroid(tm)
>He'll offer free legal advice, consultations, remediation, and legal counsel in exchange for stray dogs.
>There are no dogs in his office

I think this was the old, old thread

and that's just the old thread

personally I like this pic better but well "arguing about the shape of the shapeless"

Well of course there are no dogs, he finds them all loving homes

Sometimes they die during the wait but that's okay because everything has a purpose

That's no guarantee.

Anyone save those posts from a couple years back with the user who worked in the US Capitol building and encountered a homeless veteran living in the underground tunnels? The "did we win the war" posts?

> worked in the US Capitol building and encountered a homeless veteran living in the underground tunnels?

What in the fuck? I need to know more.

I know what you're talking about

>The Vets are the ones who have been in the Building and fought in the war for long enough to remember what happened.
>The Only War That Matters is secretly a war fought at the end of time and space against something that has nothing to do with what's going on here on Earth, but will destroy all of existence if it ever wins
>The war can't ever be decisively won, only fought
>If we don't keep fighting, we'll lose for sure

>>there's a pale, red eyed girl living in various paintings and photos around the Building, and she'd be very appreciative if you would help with her degree by putting textbooks near one and turning pages now and then.
I really like this

The Suits are technically on your side in this war, but their methods are terrifyingly different from those chosen by the Building.

Perhaps you can get permission from the landlady to paint a diorama around a whole room somewhere for her. Just remember, there are certain standards to make art 'inhabitable'

The Building's entire initial purpose was to be a recruiter for this war. It takes care of its tenants because any harm coming on experienced recruits while away from this vast cosmological battlefield would be counterproductive to the purpose of fighting The Only War That Matters.

It still does that recruiting thing, but ultimately, it's trying to settle into its role as a home for the weird here on Earth. The Suits want it back in the game full-time.

>Strangely enough, the outside seen from the stairwell windows changes according to which floor you're on
>From the eighth floor the outside world is always covered in snow and hidden by a heavy blizzard
>The fifth floor is a european castle-town from what seems to be a clock tower vantage point of view
>The tenth floor is always pitch black. You'd look closer but something tells you it's best not to
>The windows are always rusted shut, no matter how hard you push they never budge even a millimeter
>The apartment doesn't have windows on the stairwell, though, at least not when viewd from the outside

>sometimes a strange half-naked man wanders around the building, he's about seven feet tall, incredibly hairy and speaks with a weird accent that sounds like a mixture of Greek and Canadian.
>If you've got a problem he'll always offer to help sort it out if you go with him the next time he goes on a 'hunting trip'.
>Few take him up on his offer, fewer still come back from these trips

Putting said diorama in the courtyard would be amazing. I really like painting girl. Dead Girl is still true waifu.

Have you ever read Cold Days by Jim Butcher? There's a scene that depicts the war against the Outsiders by the Fae and their agents, and this gives me that vibe.

I have, actually, but I didn't get the vibe until you post just now. You're absolutely right, it sounds like Dresden Files.

Not that that's a bad thing.

Maybe also paint a cube or cylinder, so it can be moved about easily and she has a 360° view around. I think painting girl works best as daughteru

There's a guy that does the windows once a month

Posting to save the thread for myself.

>Every 4th of July the Apartment's residents have a barbecue/cookout. You have no idea what half this stuff is but it's delicious.Never any fireworks, though. Come to think of it, you haven't heard a firework go off since you started living here.

Next time remember to carry over the thread description. (If the last few threads have abandoned it then go to one of the 3rd party Veeky Forums archiving sites to look up the old ones to inform how you make a new one)

There, now you know.

Fuck off with this, the apartment complex is an apartment complex. Albeit one that is home to several nexuses of bullshit and disobeys all known and uknown laws of physics and magic.

Take this 2deep4u deepest lore somewhere else

Agree, I don't want this turning into anything other than an apartment complex that happens to house a lot of unnerving but strangely comfy phenomena.

No offense intended to anyone who wants galactic war recruiters, but it feels like a huge tangent compared to what most of the thread is talking about.

I gues its better to have mystery about what building, Men and other thing actually is. Your pc are regular humans and they dont actually have to go deep down into the Truth to fight BBEG to save fucking universe. Lets it just be strange thing you encounter at home The Game, you dont have to turn this into Mage The Apartament.

Kinda agree, kinda don't. The Only War shouldn't be the focus of the plot, so it being a recruiter AND battleground is kinda too much. This being one of many places where the battle is raged, just because it is a nexus of weird. That feels better. The story doesn't revolve around it, it is just one of the aspects of the place. The players can pursue this plotline if they wish, or they can follow completely different stories. Each of these stories interlace to form a complete tapestry of the Urban Unease setting.

That should be a uniting theme in the narratives: Don't try to win. Don't try to understand it. This is not the focus, this is not the deepest truth, it is just one of a billion paths you can follow into your ultimate goal: Finding where you belong.

> Mage the Apartment

Ok I chuckled.

Fair enough. It struck me as a good justification for all the weird shit. If there's one thing that I keep catching wiff of here, it's kind of a Fallen London, Sunless Sea vibe. There's weird shit going on and deeper truths to find, even if a lot of it is fairly normal day-to-day stuff in this locale. It's weird to the people just coming in, it gets comfy as time goes on but even when that happens, there's always gotta be something worse going on beneath the surface that some players or groups might take an interest in.

Playing it up as JUST Comfy But Unnerving strikes me as a disservice to where the concept could go, but it's cool either way. I'm just brainstorming, that's all we're doing. Spitballing to see what sticks, no problems.

You, sir, can bite me.

Anyways, new plot hooks.

>There's a hole in your wall that wasn't there this morning. Looking inside, you can see a mirror. And you're fairly sure there's something moving in the background, behind your reflection.

>Your homepage on your computer keeps getting redirected to some weird website about conspiracy theories. You reset it to the usual site, but every time you open another tab, it takes you back to that conspiracy site. There's a lot of pages on urban exploration there, including some addresses in your neighborhood. The Building is not among them.

>Someone keeps jacking your coffee and replacing it with hot chocolate. You like hot chocolate, but seriously, what the fuck. You put it in the cabinet, then close the cabinet. Then there's hot chocolate where there was coffee. The brand isn't in any language you recognize. It tastes good, but you really want your fucking coffee.

Could this also be the girl in the mirror and the Midnight Webcam? She sometimes just gets her jollies by creeping on you.

You don't need coffee grounds in your apartment because the only coffee maker in the building is the one in the lobby. It cannibalizes any other coffee machine brought in and gains new features. Gonna use instant coffee? Son, that's cute, have some hot chocolate. You're too young to drink with the big boys.

But seriously, that coffee maker has to be nigh on its own Starbucks setup by now.

>Everyone pops the balloons and throw them away because they're a massive mess

>People accidentally only throw out the balloons that contain the memory of what the balloons do.

...

I think that popped is okay, no matter what you do with them after. The memory is "free" of the balloon by then.

Still, a weird opportunity to tamper with your own mind, if you realize in time. Would it still be you if you got rid of all you wished to forget?

Like the Men in the Suits the Only War That Matters should be kept to a side-story. One regular "Vet" with a couple buddy's he brings round every so often.

If you need some kind of solid facts. The war has been fought to a standstill. Both sides drew back, so now the vet is trapped in limbo. Knowing that eventually he'll be called back to the front once conflict begins again.

Also adding Painting Girl to the overall roster of known characters. I would say keep her secondary, like the pregnant lady/couple

Wow! The fifth floor seems to have a higher concentration of weird! I'm building a doc collecting all this (marking conflicts, but keeping both).

The fifth floor has five entries, plus the Werewolves and the Vet live there. Oddly, we have an entry for the Six-and-a-Halfth Floor, but not the sixth or seventh, minus some tenants. We know those floors are there, and are easily accessible, but nothing seems to happen on 6 or 7.

Getting onto those floors requires exceptional luck and an uncommon set of coincidences

The elevator goes there, and so do the stairs... unless.

Here's a link to the doc. I have commenting enabled for now.
docs.google.com/document/d/1Y5cGnqK3HpGKC3QGGthS2kciUqCKb3QQbvu0lcvLOcM/

...

>the attic is accessable from the third roof, full of things lost or forgotten and watched over by tibetan batfolk
>Medusa wears a mask and leads a survivor support group once a week
>some walls have spots slightly larger than a door, made of old cinderblock and with plaques that read "This spot looks breakable..."

>if you just walk up stairs, you eventually get to the roof with the pigeon coop. If you walk the stairs to the 11th floor, then take five steps back down and walk the rest of the way up, you end on a roof without the coop, with ash falling from the sky and and burning ruins all around the building.
>The BBQ pit on that roof always cooks meat to perfection, and it's kind of beautiful if you don't mind the ash. Just don't put anything that's not made of meat into the BBQ pit.

I almost want to imagine that the red-eyed girl in the paintings was created, in Pygmalion-fashion, by an elderly former tenant who was a painter that paid his rent in various pieces of art that still hang around the building. His apartment, which became the girl's apartment after he passed away, has a floor to ceiling mural covering every wall, allowing the painted girl to present the illusion of being able to interact with the world around her. As previously mentioned, she can also jump to any of her creator's paintings where they hang around the building, and is trying to earn a degree in art history.

>Playing it up as JUST Comfy But Unnerving strikes me as a disservice
Making it anything more would be a disservice.

There is no canon. Stop trying to make one

>There's always Wifi in the complex, problem is you can get to sites that seem to not be terrestrial in nature

Does it not strike you that you're the one trying to make a canon out of it being low-key simply for it to be "cool and mysterious"?
There is no canon.
When there is no canon, there should be no one telling people what they're allowed to put in and what not, because that's canon.
The building is a huge fount of possibilities, and everything or nothing in these threads could be true. In fact, that's the main fundament of this idea - that there's only a structure to things for long enough to confound you, and that multiple things can be true or present at once even if they should be mutually exclusive.
You're the one acting like you just got elected for IRC admin. People dump what they want here, and other people take what they want. Your mini-modding only squelches good ideas and keeps people dependent on power-mongering namefags to decide what the project and its rules should be.

Pretty nice history there.
I was thinking an architectural degree myself, Painting Girl being enamored with the concept of 3D spaces and structures. Maybe she's smart and driven enough for a double major.

Though being limited to her fathers works would make adding new paintings for her quite dificult.

Nonsense, you just need to ask around, perhaps that tattoo artist with the clockwork hands and glass eyes?

The dead girl might know more, or perhaps you can ask one of the dogs? the displacement, however temporary, of souls is something they would know

Maybe that's why she's learning art history. To broaden her horizons and thus allow herself to manifest in a wider variety of paintings and forms of art.

>It wasn't just her father's skill as an artist that brought her to life, but the magical painter's toolkit he possessed.

>This magical toolkit was stolen on the night that the man died, perhaps by his killer, and has been missing ever since.

>It becomes the PCs' job to discover the truth about what happened and track down those magical painter's tools.

>Curiously, in their search the PCs begin to discover sad, anguished, graffiti around the building that appears strangely alive...

>There are some halls that seemingly have no gravity
>There are some with a little too much gravity that seems to effect anything not on your immediate person
>Sometimes the center of gravity isn't always...down

>if you just walk up stairs, you eventually get to the roof with the pigeon coop. If you walk the stairs to the 11th floor, then take five steps back down and walk the rest of the way up, you end on a roof without the coop, with ash falling from the sky and and burning ruins all around the building.

Well shit, looks like the move silent hill version

There's a door on floor seven with no handle or peephole. Tenants have been trying to pull the door open for years to see what's inside, but even the strongest men can't get the door to budge.

It's actually a push door.

Why would people try to pull a door with no handle? The natural thing to do in that situation is push it.

We tried to call for a dentist several times but for some reason the line always goes dead halfway through the call.

Must be something wrong in his phone, since he asks the caller to repeat himself a lot.
> I'm sorry, you want me to take a look at what?
> I'm sorry, how many teeth?
> Why are you calling me again?

I guess the problem's getting worse. I tried to call him just now twice and the line went dead right at the beginning. I barely managed to say the address.