Unknown Armies: What's Beyond the Stratosphere??

We all know that in the end, it's all about the clergy invisible. Avatars had it figured out all along, and Adepts are the guns they bring along the way. Adepts are a Global thing, while Avatars are the end-all, be-all of humanity's future. Can't go against the grain if you want change the world, after all.

Only, that doesn't make sense. At all. You ever hear of Otherspaces? Masterless Unspeakable Servants? The Cruel Ones? They don't make sense. Humans DON'T KNOW where those minds come from. The Stratosphere isn't behind those. There's something out there that the Clergy's trying to cover up. Something they don't want us to know.

When you dig past the 'ultimate truth', what's REALLY out there?

And can I use it for my Adept cabal's Cosmic goals?

A feeling of loneliness and despair, when you realize that we dont owe our shames and most inhuman to none but ourselves.

Old universes. Every time it gets reset, chunks of the last incarnation get left behind. That's how rituals work, right? Leftovers and gaps in the universal construction. It turns out we are lazy gods. Mostly they collapse in on themselves without the rest of the universe to lean on for support and disappear (or encyst themselves in the universes' fabric so deeply as it makes no difference). A fraction of them form spontaneous Otherspaces, and a fraction of those have a strong enough raison d'etre to be actively dangerous. Seeking something from us. Maybe a way to sustain themselves forever or even lay claim to some of this sweet corporeal real estate.

Like the House of Renunciation.

Space

This

I'm gonna be running To Go for my group soon, does anybody have any experience with it?

Nope, but it reads like it'd work best with some sort of lead in rather than a cold open. What're you using to frame it with?

Probably gonna run Fly Me To Heaven first to give a low key introduction to the chakra symbolism. The PCs in To Go won't be the same ones from Fly Me To Heaven though so I'm still debating on whether or not to do another session before starting To Go to draw them into LA or just start To Go with something along the lines of "you all came to LA because you heard something big was about to go down."

All of the players are more or less unfamiliar with UA but I was gonna give them the option to play whatever they want or be part of the same faction if they feel like reading up on them.

Also debating on whether or not it's worth converting To Go to 3e rules now that the actual pdfs are out.

I need some help, Veeky Forums
One of the players in my game(3e) is an Epideromancer.
The objective right now is to capture the guy who murdered his step-dad, which is primarily being done by the other 2 PCs, who are mundane detectives. He knows his step-dad is dead, he knows the detectives are the ones investigating his murder, but despite him doing a pretty decent job at playing the character, he isn't actually trying to help them solve the murder(they brought him in to ask some questions, and he answered them, then immediately went home)

So, right now, I'm thinking of giving him either something to pull him towards the detectives so they can all start working together, or else a distraction for him to mess with while the detectives are doing their job, so the player doesn't get bored.

Right now, my ideas are
-The detectives had a run-in with a vrai-Sleeper woman, who tried to snag a phone they have with a video of the step-dad's murder, which is grade A weirdness(A dude possessed by a demon argued with him, then snapped his fingers and made him explode into naught but blood). She got away, but not before they got ahold of her phone(a burner) and the 2 numbers saved on it(the vrai hotline, and another Sleeper named Ken). I'm considering saying, since both of the detectives are currently away from the station, where they left the phone with the video on it(in evidence), saying it's gone when they get back, and having the Epideromancer get a knock at his door, only to find a phone outside with the video on it and a note telling him to do something
Alternatively
-He's still kind of panicked over a trip through an Otherspace him and another PC(who's missed both sessions we've had) decided they had while we were doing the corkboard. I'm considering having him get a package in the mail, with something inside that'll push him to try and return to the Otherspace. I dunno how, though, really.

Give him something to bite on to that's specific to his character. The first idea is pretty good if you've got a rationale as to why it would end up at his doorstep, even something screwy like Otherspace interference would work if you want to merge the ideas together. Depends on the nature of the Otherspace.

If that fails, then fuck with him directly. Maybe if whoever it was is unsatisfied with what they got from his step-dad, then they come looking for him.

I'm kinda thinking of just hand-waving it as "The Human Eternal", but I'm not entirely sure if that works as well with the Eternal as it would have with the Comte.
I could probably reason out some Otherspace shenanigans to get the phone to his door, though, since all that got defined about it was "a labyrinth of hallways and a dread presence throughout the whole place", and the door in being opened in a burning strip club.

The demon who killed his step-dad has a hit-list, and an Urge to 'bathe in the blood of his enemies'. Given the step-relation, there's no reason for him to go after him for 'the blood of my enemies'.
Although I might have one of the other people on the list stop by the Epideromancer's trailer, to give condolences about his step-dad, only for the demon to show up and splatter 'em in front of him.

Re: The Otherspace. If there's a reason it (or something in it) would want him to return you can use that as the impetus to have it delivered to him. Have something extra recorded on the phone specifically for him in the meantime, maybe? If you do go that route you'd need to establish some sort of connection in case the players look into it (Where's the missing PC? Have they been trapped in the Otherspace for what seems like years with only limited access to the real world? That'd piss me off).

Re: The Demon. The cavalcade of condolences has some fun possibilities. One or two of the visitors could have an inkling what's going on and be unpleasantly persistent in asking questions to prompt him to keep digging after they're spattered (plus more murders around the PC can be used to draw the detectives in closer).

The missing PC is, presumably, just not around the rest of the group while all the shit is happening. We already decided for sure that he escaped with the Epideromancer, but the player's missed all the sessions we've had, and if he misses another I'm probably just gonna write him off since we're getting a new player within the next week or two anyways.
I actually had plans to have him return ~eventually~ and run into the source of the 'dread presence', an unnatural entity who loves company and does what he can to keep people from leaving

That's actually a really good idea. I hadn't yet thought of a concrete way to tie the guy whose possessed to the demon possessing him yet, aside from having one of the detectives find the ritual he used when he checked out the dude's apartment, but since the ritual is disguised as establishing something like a telepathic link, I figured I'd probably say it actually summons the demon you're thinking of, or the nearest related demon if the person you're thinking of hasn't become a demon yet/otherwise can't be summoned. I already established(vaguely, since my players don't know shit about demons) that the demon was a co-worker of the step-dad who he liked to fuck with, so it wouldn't be too far fetched for one of his other co-workers to be familiar with the underground and have been the intended target of the telepathic link.
Granted, it's not like that matters since odds of the players learning that much are slim, but it's nice to have a concrete explanation handy just in case.

I've been a seeing a lot of posts in UA threads recently describing sessions where the PCs are largely separated from each other. Are these all coming from the same guy or is running UA games in that way a common thing?

I used something like this, pockets of reality still exist from previous universes. And some groups in this universe have exit plans for when the invisible clergy is full.

Scientology knows something about all this.

There are some rules in 2nd edition that make party cohesion kind of difficult, especially if you've got 2e style adepts, so I'd say it's not entirely uncommon to separate PCs past street level.

I dunno.

The new 3rd edition method of character generation, making characters as a cabal with a common purpose is supposed to address this. That said UA encourages pretty idiosyncratic characters, so division's still in the cards unless you play against it.

There's a school of thought (from 2e) that Otherspaces represented an end game for Adepts (getting so far in that you bud off a little mini-verse full of your own craziness) as a parallel to Ascension for Avatars. Anyone and their mum's can do it now, but there's nothing stopping a GM from saying that particularly developed Adepts don't cause the phenomenon naturally.

pretty much, the scientologists created an otherspace they claimed was a spaceship (inside a modified 747) that they planned on escaping in and then returning to the new universe and becoming a major power within it.

Years ago, I ran a campaign with the premise that some people had done that in the last incarnation of the universe and that it turned out to be a shit idea.

Damn what went wrong, because I plan on involving some of that.

I once created a magick school bsed on minimalism and sensory deprivation. The end goal was to perceive the world as a binary input like "exist/no exist"