Unknown Armies General

I'm really on the fence about UA3. On one hand the new rules are nice and some of the new magick schools and archetypes are cool and there is a good amount of advice on how to actually run the game that was lacking in 2e, but the art direction is fucking horrible and a lot of the new fluff doesn't seem as interesting as what was in the older editions. Also no fiction that gives a sense of a larger "plot" to the setting besides the stuff about the girl in Cincinnati and all of the new rumors in the third book aren't very good.

I still think that if I were trying to get new players into UA I'd use 2e.

>no sense of a larger plot

so did you miss the entire thing about the Comte and The Freak entering the House of Renunciation and how they're warring for the future of existence

or the schism among the Naked Goddess cult for that matter

also GNOMON is more interesting than anything in 2e

>art direction
I love the new edition, but I'm 100% with you on that. I get what they were trying to do, but it fell flat compared to 2e's nice, more classic-looking style. That even goes for the cover, it's got nice details and all, but the old cover's got atmosphere 3e doesn't match. But hey, I like Ironclaw, which should tell you how much art direction affects my opinions of things.

The thing about the Comte is my least favorite part of 3e, and I think about it with the fury of at least 3 suns. I've justified it to myself by having it be that this happens every cycle, where one person replaces the Comte and then, once the old one dies, they ascend to replace them and complete the cycle. So the old Comte did this before, to someone who did this before, to [...]. The experience and knowledge comes after their dip in the Statosphere between the end and the beginning.

GNOMON is cool, though.

Yeah, that's all stuff that's detailed in the setting info sections of the book, I'm talking about the fiction that was scattered around throughout the old books, all the stuff with Renata and Dermott that ended up coming back in To Go, the story about the TNI team that got told over the course of Lawyers Guns and Money and the Mak Attax book, the Witness stories from the 2e book. They've released three books so far and only one of them has anything like that.

And GNOMON is fine but it feels more like something that would show up in Delta Green.

>I get what they were trying to do, but it fell flat compared to 2e's nice, more classic-looking style.
Yeah, like the art in 2e wasn't great but it at least made it look like UA was a gritty game where weird shit happens. Most of the stuff in 3e makes it look like UA is a game about people in bad costumes standing around.

2e art looked like it was illustrating characters in UA, 3e art looks like it's illustrating people who play UA.

There's talk of a ritual called "Raise the White Dragon". See, medieval literature is filled with imagery of dragons swooping down from the heavens in fire and brimestone to terrorize and spread carnage, isn't it? Well, what has a broad wingspread and makes illiterate farmers run screaming from the hills in faraway lands when it shows up roaring from the sky? That's right: a USAF MQ-1 Predator drone.

As far as rituals go, this one's got pretty mild requirements. The only problem is that the main ingredient, that is to say, the drone itself, is a tad bit hard to get. The US Air Force isn't particularly keen on lending its flying death machines to random weirdoes as is, and while there've reportedly been some attempts to steal one from the Yemenites in the chaos of the recent civil war most agree the ritual only works with an American one.
Once you've gotten your drone - how exactly shall be left as an exercise for the reader's imagination - the steps are fairly simple. Make ink by mixing ashes, crude oil and human tears. You only need about a spoonful of tears but the ashes must have been collected from the still smoldering ruins of a building that was at least at one point used as a dwelling. Now, using a quill made from a falcon's feather (species is irrelevant), use the ink to inscribe the 105th Shura (Al-Fil) of the Quran, in Arabic, on the body of the drone 100 times. This must be done in one go, without eating or drinking, and for a full month before starting you must not have eaten anything that wouldn't pass by a Halal inspector.

(cont.)

Drain all the gasoline out of the tank. Sell to someone, it doesn't matter. Replace it with goat's blood. Now you're all set and ready, although if you really want to go through with it there's technically a final, optional step you could try: pry open the bomb bay, and fill it with the waste of American society. What you use exactly doesn't matter but it has to be unmistakably American, so of course junk food is said to work best. Something like a combination of aerosol cheese cans, Shake Shack burger wrappers and Coke bottles should do the trick.
Fall asleep while chanting the Shura. If you've done everything right, you will find that your sleeping consciousness has possessed the drone, which now flies on goat's blood (thankfully, as efficiently as it does on fuel) under your control, surrounded by a funky halo of ghostly white flame which someone's bound to mistake for a UFO. This is a Rank-5 Self check and a Rank-5 Unnatural check right there, but whether or not you succeed you do get yourself a shiny new Drone Possession skill at 15%, which you can increase normally if you're thinking of making a habit of drone bombing your enemies.
(cont.)

A little Predator trivia for you laypeople: the MQ-1 Predator drone has a cruising speed of 130-165 km/h and a maximum speed of 217 km/h. It can fly for 1,100 km on a full tank and has a service ceiling of 7,620 meters. In other words, it's basically faster, higher up and can travel further than most anything any of your saner enemies might be running away from it in. It's got a camera on it with nightvision, thermal vision, all the good stuff you can now use to spy on the poor bastards. It doesn't have any countermeasures and a single missile will drop it, but hey, what are the odds they've got something like that in their pockets, eh?
If voyeurism alone isn't your thing, here's the real icing on the cake: all that garbage you put in the bomb bay? Well, the moment your monster took off, it transformed into a pair of AGM-114 Hellfire smart missiles. 8 km operational range, 450 m/s of laser guided, bunker busting death. Fire with your Done Possession skill. You hit anything, it's vaporized. Half the block around it probably is, the building it was in definitely is. Don't even bother rolling for damage. Holy shit, what are you doing with your life? Roll a Rank-7 Violence check, you maniac.
Enjoy being hunted down by the Armed Forces.

>implying Delta Green and Unknown Armies don't orbit each other as a binary system constantly warring between the importance and insignificance of humanity

The Fate was described as running NYC's "occult underground" for a reason.

Cry some more, Ahmed.

...

I like the idea of off the books G-men dealing with The Fate's more isolated "occult underground" more than the idea of official G-men getting involved in UA's more global Occult Underground.

Page 11 for the sig. Last bump I'm giving.

So what's different about the 3rd edition?

Hello fellow wizards

I'm an epideromancer and i was thinking whether it's possible with maybe a major or significant charge or two fuse several human bodies together to one big one and create a servile flesh golem? I need one because of reasons.

Would i need a thanatomancer/mechanomancer to help me with the 'breathe life' part or would i straight up need a demon from heck?

The actual systems changed hugely and they updated the fluff and magic schools to match current trends. Personally I like the first bit, not so much the second.

Everyone has 10 basic abilities which are tied to the Madness Meters (now called Shock Gauges) and move up or down based on a sliding scale of how hardened you are to a particular trauma (for example the Violence meter has both Connect and Struggle on it, the more hardened notches you have the better you are at biting people's ears off but the worse you are at being charming).

Every character has identities which can substitute for abilities and a bunch of other options (you get to pick 3 for each). Things like being an adept or an avatar are included under this umbrella. There are also mechanics for measuring relationships between people (and using them to put folks in bad positions) as well as defining a group objective and creating characters as a collaborative exercise (this was intentioned to get around the 'what the hell am I supposed to do with this/why would this group of weirdos work together?' thing. It's optional, I'm not using it in the game I'm running atm). One thing I'm a big fan of is the Coercion mechanics for threatening people's gauges.

The timeline has moved on a bit, a lot of the old players in the OU are either gone or in completely different positions and new ones have popped up like mushrooms after a storm. There's been a tonal shift too: the OU seems less grungy and the adept schools have less grit which is a shame, that said some of the new stuff is cool (like GNOMON and the Jesus Christ Advisory Board, a forum for would-be messiahs/cult leaders). Personally it doesn't bother me too much as material is easy to retrofit from previous editions.

You'll probably have better luck if you use components that are still alive.

I'd probably go with
Significant for merging, but they must all be alive to begin with and it won't be servile so much as insane mass of people.
Major for what you want, because a major is reality warping crazy shit.

Maybe mix it up with some other adept magic, maybe even some sort of ultra-rare low magic crazy ritual, if they are corpses you are putting together to get the life going.

Alright, if we assume the people are still alive at the time of creation, how would i merge the consciousness into a single, handy and servile mind that doesn't want to die at any given time of day?

Use something that already has that mindset, like a dog, as the brain. The trick will be getting it not to freak out long enough so that you can train it to use the new body. A gradual transition should do the trick.

Haven't read up on the new edition but what you have said sounds like they grabbed most of the neat shit from A Dirty World and Better Angels and added on Unknown Armies, which I like the sound of.

Intriguing, but how do you suggest i gradually transfer a dog's brain into a hulking abomination?

My first guess would be somehow keep it sedated at all times, then later use my skills in blood magic to purge the vessel of it's debilitating addiction to horse tranquilizers.

More or less. You can see the DNA of a bunch of Stolze's other work in there if you squint.

That's disproportionately powerful for a significant ritual and IIRC there are no major rituals.

The biggest risk is that the mind will crack or rebel and then you'll have a bunch of wasted materials - or worse - a marauding abomination on your hands. I would suggest a transition of gradually interchanged parts with time given between each switch for recuperation and acclimation, like the Ship of Theseus over a period of months or even years.

To keep time costs low I'd also suggest you have several ongoing instances being built in parallel in case of breakage. There's no telling what breeds or training programs would be the most successful (or catastrophic).

Man of Theseus sounds good, but what about the man part? The people being used as building blocks should be alive as well, and i don't know any plutomancers who could convince them to sell their bodies bit by bit for my project. My first idea would probably go to a hospital to find a supply of comatose/braindead people to use as flesh banks.

Then again perhaps with some precision tampering i could make my own braindead people to use as building material.

People parts are hard to come by these days. If you can roll your own the only issue is the composition and fidelity of the finished product, you don't want and misrouted blood vessels or cross-wired nerve endings.

Well it seems that i have to start reading a lot about medicine and anatomy if i ever wish to build a giant human out of human legos. Thanks!

Wait, would it be possible to build a giant artificial womb without the woman part, keep it alive through the power of arcane science and birth out a giant person naturally?

Even with only a rudimentary nervous system that sounds like a prime demon vessel to me. I wouldn't trust it and the investment for keeping it clean would be extortionate. That said if you can work up the juice it's your race to lose.

How are you doing for eyeballs and limbs personally? All this isn't going to be cheap.

Still have them all intact, although i did have a plan to go buy some chemicals to peel skin off if needed, maybe chug some poison.

I'd give it to an appropriate adept (fulminaturge, maybe?) who was willing to blow a major charge and go to all that trouble.

Any ideas for a cool new adept school? I'm not feeling the motumancers and such. 2e had better adept ideas.

Someone on the Atlas website gave ideas for an otaku school based around waifuing an imaginary character. You'd gain charges by denying real world pleasures and/or engaging in ritual masturbation/worship and taboo would be something like getting a real girlfriend. Magic is based on forcing reality to behave like an anime, as well as the concept of perfection (or, rather, its antithesis - flaws) The central paradox is that obsession with the perfection with a 2D waifu is with the unattainable as perfect. An otaku like this has no greater dream than to bring their waifu to life but if she were to become a real person they'd be inevitably disappointed with her not being all they've made her up to be.

Thinking about it now, maybe branching off from the same idea: a School founded by otaku adepts who hold romantic anime, as a genre, to be some kind of symbolically purified form of an archetypal mystery play. Its gods and heroes are the Oneesan, the Senpai, the Yamato Nadeshiko, etc. They can charge up by acting out roles in their day to day lives (i.e. living their lives as if they were romantic anime characters, or for significant charges, convincing other people to do so) and can similarly spend them to force reality to behave in a certain way.

Been waiting for this, any of you guys get the deluxe edition with the slipcase/gm screen? Wondering if I should just preorder the main books separately or spend a couple more sheckles on the deluxe one.

Also, I am sad I will probably never play this game, but damn if I don't love the setting and Stolze.

Oh god. Waifuturges.

In fairness, once you get yourself in the right mindset for UA and start looking for the mystical symbolism in everything, waifuism is a REALLY interesting phenomenon. You know how they used to call once upon a time the dude who has entire shelves filled with imagery of the same imaginary figure to whom they are singlemindedly devoted and oftentimes erotically entangled (attracted to yet feeling unworthy of acknowledging their lust for), arguing in the literal forums for her superiority, producing additional images if they have the artistic skill and inventing stories about their interaction with her?

The high priest. Waifufags are the idolators and iconists of the internet age.

>Some creepy dude from Milwaukee drugs and kidnaps underage girls from the street. They are found, dazed but unharmed, in various abandoned buildings. The only connecting thread is that they were all dressed up in the same frilly, revealing faux-Japanese school uniform and wore the same pink wig.

Gain charges by reminding others that their waifu is trash. Taboo if you ever betray your waifu for another. Invoke anime tropes. Waifu magic.

The problem with that charging method is that it kinda requires that adepts of this type exist so that adepts of this type can exist. Unless you can damn the waifu of "normal" otakus without magic powers, but in that case you probably need stricter guidelines about how devoted someone needs to be to their waifu for this to do the trick. Otherwise they could gain 300 minor charges a day just by shitposting on /b/.

My recommendation based on is that charges revolve around physical expressions of devotion to one's goddess/icon/waifu. This taps into the symbolic power and paradox in the center of the school, since adepts think of their waifuing as a form of pure love yet ultimately focus only on its shallowest aspects by definition.

For a minor charge, you need to acquire paraphernalia of your waifu of a kind you don't yet have (a new poster, a new figurine, a new limited edition DVD, a daikimakura, etc.). For a significant charge, you need to produce something yourself, like a doujin or a fanfic. You probably have to dump either a certain amount of money or a certain amount of time into it to "count", so you can't just doodle her on napkins for charges (not that a proper waifumancer would ever think to debase his goddess this way).

For a major charge, I'd say you need to somehow get the original creator of the waifu to make a work explicitly and specifically dedicated to you. Signing a volume isn't enough - but if you can get the production company to include the fan song you wrote into a new episode of the series, that's a major charge.

>you need to acquire paraphernalia of your waifu of a kind you don't yet have
What if they don't make paraphernalia of your waifu anymore? Are you SOL for minor charges?

Formula spell: Your Waifu's a Shit (2 minor charges)

While niche, this curse can produce surprisingly potent results when used cleverly and/or in the right circumstances. It subtly influences people's perceptions with a very, very specific goal: turning them off their loved ones. It emphasizes tiny flaws, turns minor or even previously endearing habits obnoxious and annoying, and causes romantic and sexual doubts to gnaw at the back of the victim's mind. Was their wife always so plain compared to all of their coworkers? Is this boring woman really the one they're considering marrying? What were they thinking when they started going out with a guy who has nothing in common with them? For a week, any roll to have a positive interaction with their romantic partner suffers a 10% penalty, with matched failures inevitably resulting in an explosive argument or otherwise disheartening conflict. At the 3.5 day mark, they also need to roll a Self-3 check - if they really loved someone, those kinds of sudden doubt can hurt.

If they have no loved one, the curse has no effect.

Then they need to start hunting down whatever's on the market like the obsessive otaku shut-ins they are. It's perfectly in theme.

>of a kind you don't yet have
So what happens if you have all the types because they made like four because it was a series that was never popular?

Formula spell: Knock Off (1 minor charge)

This is like a very minor version of the Plutomancy spell "Devaluation". It works by finding out and exaggerating the flaws in a physical object, making it worse. It won't cause anything to crumble to dust unless it was an absolutely horrid condition before, but it can make a gun behave like it hasn't been cleaned a long while, a car engine develop some issues, a windowpane brittle or a wooden beam begin developing rot.

Formula spell: Jade Colored Glasses (? minor charges)

When your every living moment is spent in devotion to an unattainable standard of perfection, your every living experience is one of unbearable wrongness. Waifumancers are, self acknowledgedly or not, the masters of flaw, and this spell helps by magickally highlighting them to them. It can reveal the worst personality trait of a person, the most vulnerable part of their bodies, or the weakest point in a physical construct. Rumors run of a significant spell that can also find the flaws in plans, arguments or ideas, but nobody's been able to confirm it being cast (or they're keeping it very secret).

Use the stuff other people made for their own significant charges. Who knows what they'll sell them to you for?

What do drawings people have made of their waifu count as for minor charges? Obviously making them is a significant charge, but can you get minor charges for having 8 GB of pictures of Reiko Michaelson?

Minor charges only. They're paraphernalia. For the sake of limiting powergaming, maybe say they only work if the creator was a waifumancer and/or if you've paid some serious cost for them. At least a 100$ or so (maybe you can even charge off of paying some DA artist for a particularly fetishistic commission). You must prove your willingness to sacrifice for your waifu.

It should probably be Taboo to lose any of your waifu paraphernalia.

The school probably has a pretty high Ω unless there's some implicit conflict between adepts that muddies the water.

That might even work its way into the taboo or central paradox: your magic depends on the overwhelming belief that what others worship is vile heresy. The veracity of your own beliefs are only as great as your ability to tear down those of others - a secondary taboo based on any interaction with practitioners outside your 'fanbase' maybe?

This sounds like "The Library at Mount Char", which I thoroughly recommend to this thread.

Their Blast is subtle, but cannot work on anyone who's completely healthy. Instead, it emphasizes the flaws in someone's body. If they have a small cut, it opens wide. If they have a minor cold, it explodes into an instant fever. If they were shot in the chest, the bullet burrows even deeper, etc.

Running a game of unknown armies 2e and need help. The players are members of Interpol, a French detective and an ex Mossad agent, and the game will start out in Marseille. I am planning on having them deal with the shipment of hard drugs from Mexican drug cartels into Europe, by sending them through terrorist controlled areas in Africa and human trafficking. Any ideas on how to make it more supernatural? I am planning on starting the campaign with a refugee ship landing near Marseille and several people on board carrying drugs and being detained, refusing to speak out of fear. Thinking of including so sort of nyarlathotep figure, based only on the poem, being behind it. Any other ideas? Pls help

As it happens, remote Blasts are often used as an assassination weapon among rival waifumancers (i.e. the vast majority), generally hidden inside fake web addresses with relevant porn or packages supposedly containing limited edition figurines. Given that the average waifumancer is a disgusting mess of medical issues just waiting to become manifest (from a life of docile seclusion and a diet of almost nothing but junk food), the Blast can very often cause them heart attacks and strokes. Not always lethal ones, but that depends on the adept.

Drugs of course calls to mind drug magic. Spell dope being 'purified' into sacraments for higher consciousness or the dope is magicked to keep the locals docile (well, docile-r). Perhaps it's not the dope itself that's magickal, but there's compulsions laid across the dope? The act of smuggling being used by an adept to charge up possibly?

Keeping with the theme of "find the symbolism in postmodern practices", how about a School of Magick that draws power from [feelings of] persecution? It could have anything from transblack translesbian transwomen whining about Trump to /pol/fags blaming their every failing on "Jewish feminists" (naturally, it'd be rife with internal conflict since nobody can agree on who exactly is persecuting whom).

Charging would be focused less on one's actual condition or even treatment and more on how it's broadcast to the world. Whining on the internet for minor charges, getting hundreds of people to read your complaints (like on a blog or something?) for siginificants, maybe performing a symbolic act of "martyrdom" on national television for a major one? Like getting people to broadcast you being savagely beaten by the evil, evil enemies of your cause or getting elected mayor of a major metropolitan area on a platform that's explicitly "throw off the shackles of [group of likely imaginary persecutors]"?

Suggestions:
- Take the big scary crime orgs involved in the drug trade to start with ...then leave them the fuck alone. They're fine being mundane monsters that will skin you and eat your family. Be inventive and creepy. Sure. Sprinkle in some odd superstitious/religious behaviour. Absolutely. Use them as a backdrop of obscene nastiness and cruelty to the smaller players in the game.

- Their boss is a real bureaucrat, the kind of officious, nasal asshole who delights in tripping them up on every detail. Underneath this facade she's a rogue Sleeper hellbent on digging into what's going on while the real Interpol middle-manager is chilling in a leaky chest freezer back in their apartment. Add in Sleepers who have been tasked with checking up on her to make things messy.

- A narquis has hidden something special in one of the shipments and will do anything to retrieve their cargo. They're only tangentially associated with the drug traffickers but will lie and connive against and with whoever they need to for what they're after - a magickally boosted hallucinogen which produces it's effects by mere proximity, the ultimate contact high (and opportunity to fuck with your players 'you're behaving erratically, pee in this cup').

- Demon/s. Not only is drug-addiction in something this single-minded already terrifying, but it's trying to expand its consciousness so it can possess more than one person at a time.

How'd you involve the Rosewell greys in all this? My hunches would be either a kind of Revenant or the servitors of a Room of Renunciation (perhaps one that supposedly turns skeptics into "believers" but more often than not just sad loonies). The only problem with that is that the scary thing about the House of Renunciation is that on some very fundamental level its Agents are also all human. Making them "aliens", even aliens born from the mass consciousness, takes something away from the impact.

Messiah mages (or whiners, as their detractors call them) are all about the tension between being a triumphant figure getting their shit completely done in. Their triumph comes from the empathy of an audience, while they have to suffer persecution, physical or otherwise. So a charge requires empathy (in the form of comments, tweets, likes) but you have to post content or broadcast it somehow, unless of course you did it in public. Presumably, in this day and age, whether it's in person or online you'd still be netting your minor charges, but in both cases the veracity of the persecution is less important than the reaction it evokes. The larger the controversy/emotional reaction, the more powerful/numerous the charge. Martyrmancers consequently have high Ω, unless their taboo is super restrictive.

Prior tenants. The Invisible Clergy was a little sloppy mopping up everyone from the last universe. Don't worry the Comte will sort them out shortly (...or not, if you're playing 3e).

How about losing all their charges if they ever suffer a hardship that goes unobserved? Like, maybe not "having a bad thought" or something (though they undoubtedly tweet about those fifty times a day), but if they ever suffer a blow, stab, or gunshot without immediately spending a turn taking a picture and uploading it, they're not providing their suffering a proper exposure. Same goes if they ever get cheated out of money, have their belongings stolen, or even seriously humiliated. Someone pushed you in line for the counter? You must immediately begin blogging about the disgusting white man/nigger/feminazi bitch! McDonald's boy forgot to return your change? You must make a scene and start throwing shit around and screaming. THE WORLD MUST KNOW how badly they have it!

This is pretty neat.

>Be sneaking into the apartment of a rival adept to steal some of their junk for a Tilt or something
>trip over their cat
>make noise, you can hear their footsteps as they rise from their computers in the next room and come over to check
>all your companions immediately scramble
>you instead remain lying there on the floor, tears in eyes, taking a selfie and tweeting about how the patriarchy subverted an innocent cat to trip you just because you're a transcactus

As a bonus, this makes them horrendously vulnerable to magical attacks/hexes/curses of almost every kind since if they're hit with one they're basically forced to break taboo and keep quiet or the Sleepers will off them.

That works. Also, they must never be caught/portrayed in a superior position without casting it as persecution or victory against the Oppressor. Doesn't matter if it's really flimsy, it just has to be able to be cast as such.

I don't know what Christian Chandler's archetype is but he's probably going to ascend pretty soon, and the heavens shall tremble.

These guys need a Significant formula spell that temporarily (an hour?) turns someone into a member of their supposedly persecuted group. A white person black, a man into a woman, a straight gay, etc. Probably racks up Unnatural and Self checks like hell.

If your persecuted group ever becomes a respected and celebrated part of society, does the martyrmancer move on to another group or do they just wither and die?

I like the idea of keeping the drugs mundane in order to contrast some of the weirder stuff, I think I will make it some sort of new super drug, highly addictive but with subtle affects, although it is being discovered as it is on the market for longer that taking it for to long will have similar effects to krokodile.
I also like the idea of their manager being a sleeper and trying to incite a feeling of isolation and paranoia. I also want to try and emphasise a feeling of decay. The port being past its prime, burned out hobos in the projects. Someone yelling at the French officer to get out while in Arabic, while they are doing their investigation.

What else should I include. Marseille has quite a large African quarter so I was thinking of including a gang boss setting himself up as a True King there, while the Russian and Italian mafia fight for control for distribution rights.

I want to try and create the feeling of something truly insidious approaching and slowly corrupting the city. Emphasis the differences between the wealthier southern neighbourhoods and the poorer northern ones.
Any more ideas?

Could go either way, I think. Given that they're more concerned with how people SEE them than how they actually FEEL, it could be that being a "member of a persecuted group" is far more central to their worldview than any actual group identity.

THAT SAID, I'd be wary of going with this idea without some philosophical examination since frankly this strikes me as the attitude of an Avatar, not an Adept. You do not become an Adept without being passionately, obsessively concerned with something. It needs to color everything you see, do, and think. Simply making it look that way isn't enough.

Urban decay is always a good theme to go with and hardcore drug addicts do shit that defies explanation all the time.

- What's the platform of the True King hopeful? What is he selling his would-be subjects on to cement his influence, is it purely temporal or is there a philosophical/religious element?

- Someone who has gotten by with the trappings of being magickal suddenly has to deal with some actual magickal issues. Lots of superstitious trappings and gnomic, but meaningless, pronouncements but really they're in over their head and can't admit it. Maybe they're the religious/magical cornerstone of a particular sub-culture?

- Different Narqui idea: An adept distilled his own consciousness into a batch of drugs. Sure he's dead now but whenever someone partakes he lives through them while the high lasts. Provides plenty of opportunity for random people to accost the PCs and carry on whatever conversation the last stumbling addict was trying to impress upon them, they just have to figure out how and why. Tie it in to something else that's going on as a complicating factor.

- Rosicrucians, because it's Europe.

Excellent ideas. I like the dead Mage living through drugs, would fit in quite nicely, thank you you have given me plenty to work with.

One more thing, could you perhaps give me some more general advice on running unknown armies, pc's are street level btw, new to the setting, and this will be my first time running the game. I have some experience with Mage the awakening, war hammer fantasy role play and don't rest your head. So got any tips in that regard?

Give NPCs quirks. Not the usual rpg traits, but weird little personal things: the egregiously friendly slimeball lawyer with a painful weakness for horseracing, the guy with no legs who sells information along with his paintings on a street corner (always different styles and subjects), or the dockworker who is obsessed with numerology and has an apartment full of chinese lamps. Anyone worth talking to in UA is obsessed with something.

Make things personal to the characters. Take a look at whatever they've given you on background and their passions and obsession and really hone in on things you can bring up in play and give them each individual attention - UA is one of those games that thrives on oddball psychodrama.

I'd highly recommend looking at things like The Illuminatus Trilogy, Foucault's Pendulum, or even The Club Dumas (or the film version The Ninth Gate) for chunks of inspiration if you get the chance.

This pic doesn't even have the shrimp-pill. Get enlightned my dude

It's really just an off-branch of Tulpas when you think about it.

Could be a new type of Avatar? People with a victim complex has pretty much always been a thing but it's a phenomenon that has gained huge traction now that the internet has made it easier for people to get stuck in echo chambers, hell people make careers off of feeling persecuted and/or legitimizing other people's feelings of persecution. When you have that many people fitting the stereotype of "victim" (heavy on the quotation marks) the Statosphere is gonna take notice.

Mystic Hermaphrodite, obviously. I wouldn't be surprised if he/she's been The Freak this whole time.

I think the Mystic Hermaphrodite is about more than crossdressing.

Any news on the poor sod?

I have Phobomancy completed and Chronophagy partially completed. If this thread is still around after I see Life in 20 minutes, I will post them.

Lookin' forward to it. Bump of life until then. Also, because it's fun to bump a thread from 88/8/8.

Here you go gents, movie was terrible, but I hope my school isn't:

Phobomancy
aka
Boogeymen, Scarecrows, Fear-Junkies

You know that at the end of the day, every action is governed by the same force, Fear. You know that nobody does anything because they want to, they do it because if they don't, something bad is bound to happen. You know that what you are scared of reveals what you think is worth protecting. Your fears are what define your personality, overcome them at your own peril.

Fear is in many ways the primary motivator of not only humanity, but perhaps all life. Fear of dying, fear of hunger, fear of loneliness and abandonment. These are emotions so powerful that even the most base of beasts seems to understand them clearly, so potent are they that once they reach a certain point, they can literally overpower the most secure of minds and make them flee, freeze or even simply just die. Unique to humans perhaps is the nature of fear as a force of attraction; from ghost stories, slasher flicks and serial killer admirers, to those who chase terror by jumping off of buildings, out of near-orbital aircraft or diving into underwater cave systems, fear can easily become a drug, a rush unto itself. While Panic can be a killing thing, a force of unequaled destruction amongst Humans, it can also be a liberating force, a reaction to true desparation that finally frees Men and Women from the shackles of their circumstances.

Many people understand that fear is something that is meant to be listened to, the little, insistent voice that must be acknowledged so that we don't destroy ourselves, but for Phobomancers their fears and anxieties become the fertile ground through which they cultivate their terrifying skills. Whether the heady experience of pulse-pounding Dread,

the subtle pleasures of Paranoia or the perky taste of Shame and Anxiety, the Fear-Junkies want to inflict the whole range of Enyo, Eris and Deimos' delight upon any that they can. This isn't necessarily out of spite or malice (though their victims may disagree with that, as would some of the Boogeymen) but rather that many Scarecrows see themselves as harsh teachers and guides in life, showing through magick if necessary that any fear can be defeated, but none ever conquered.

The central paradox of Phobomancy is simple, Fear is an atavistic emotion, one that is strong enough that it can affect nearly any undertaking that someone may turn their mind to; Boogeymen must master a thing that can never be tamed, laughing in the face of the force that they claim to respect and edify. Phobomancers may feel fear, but they can never show it.

Phobomancy Blast Style: A Fear-Junkie's Blast is a horrific assault of mental images, sensations and hallucinations within a moment's time. There is no real damage done (though the victim certainly believes that there is) through the blast, but what the Mind believes the Body makes real all the same and the psychic wounds only disappear after the target has gotten a full, eight hours night's rest, which can be a tricky prospect when one has had fear-mojo pumped directly into their mind. In spite of the ethereal nature of the damage, it can still kill you, though any clinical examination will likely come up with the standard go to of Heart Attack.

Generate a Minor Charge: Intentionally cause someone (including yourself) to suffer a stress check in any gauge. It doesn't matter whether or not a Hardened or Failed notch is gained, they simply have to suffer the check itself. The Charge is given upon the test itself, rather than the result.

Generate a Significant Charge: Make someone do something they don't want to (this can include yourself, luckily, you just have to hit your own Self gauge) do through a tangible, hostile method like threats, intimidation or just plain creep-factor. The Charge is given upon the target engaging in the action.

Generate a Major Charge: Drive someone insane, meaning that they have failed every single notch on one of their gauge checks, enough to have developed some permanent form of madness. It doesn't matter whether or not the Phobomancer is responsible for the failed notches that came before the final one, only that they're responsible for pushing them the rest of the way over the edge.

Taboo: Phobomancers can break Taboo in one of two ways, the first is if they are witnessed by another acting upon their Fear stimulus, the second is if they fail to accept a direct challenge that questions their courage. Most Boogeymen strike others as unshakeable or unperturbed by even the worst sights imaginable, but often this is simply calllousness through hardened notches that they've intentionally exposed themselves through charge gathering.

Random Magick Domain: Phobomancy deals with the things that terrify, unease or otherwise make people feel out of sorts, conversely it also can bolster, embolden or make them near-immune to those same things. Phobomancy has almost no directly physical uses, but the mental effects that it can impart can range from subtle to gross.

Starting Charges: Newly made Phobomancers start with 5 Minor Charges.

Charging Tips: Scaring people around the office, school or work is a great way to gain reasonable amounts of minor charges per week, but it will certainly attract odd looks, trips to the Principal's Office and HR complaints. Significant charges are somewhat random in how they're gathered, though it is certainly easier to rely on failed stress checks if the level of the check is higher. An easier way to charge, if psychologically damaging in the long-term, is to cause stress checks in yourself through engaging in purposefully risky behaviors, especially those that are directly related to your Fear stimulus. A dedicated Fear-Junkie can probably reap 8-10 minor charges a week just by being a weirdo and taking stupid risks, while gaining more than 3-5 significant charges per month would require a great deal of effort.

Phobomancy Minor Formula Spells:

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?
Cost: 1-10 Minor Charges
Effect: For the next ten minutes (or round, if your target is in combat) the target of this spell suffers chills, paranoia and a sense of deep unease about their situation, no matter what it currently is. In game terms they take a -10% shift on initiative, rolls to notice fine details and to resist intimidation, this penalty can be increased by another 10% or by another ten minutes (or round) for each additional minor charge that the Scarecrow spends, to a maximum of -50% and fifty minutes (or five rounds).

I'm Under The Bed!
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: After casting this spell, for the next hour anyone who tries to actively search for you if you're making an attempt to hide takes a -10% shift on their rolls. In addition, if you stick to places traditionally associated with nightmares or monsters, such as Closets, Basements, Dark Woods, etc, you become invisible to everyone but pre-adolescents or dogs.

I Wouldn't Do That If I Were You
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: Choose a target and a particular course of action (this must be clearly delineated,
"running away from me" isn't specific enough, but "flee using my 1999 LeSabre" would be) the next time that the target attempts that action they must make a Rank-5 Self check due to the extreme fear of carrying out that idea. If they still manage to perform that action, it suffers a -10% shift due to their anxiety.

We Know
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: Study someone for at least ten minutes time, this can be as simple as staring at them from across a room, reading their mail, or even Internet-stalking them. After your observation make a Mind roll, if it is successful, you discover a secret that your target would rather keep hidden. This can be something general such as, "I hope my Tad doesn't discover my infidelity" to something more complex such as, "Beatrice from Accounting can never find out that I've been stealing from the Pension Fund". Unfortunately the Scarecrow can't specifically name which secret they'd like to find out, but it's generally a more vital secret the better the Mind roll. We Know cannot be cast on the same target more than once per week.

Fears Laid Bare
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: When you live your metaphysical life at the mercy of other's fears, you'll quickly gain the ability to simply sniff them out like a hound. After casting this spell, the Phobomancer chooses a target within view and makes a Soul roll versus the target's Soul. If successful, the Fear-Junkie gains knowledge of their target's Fear Stimulus. The Adept gains the knowledge in the form of a small sensory input, such as the sound of circus music for Clowns, or the smell of burning wood for Fire, it's up to them to interpret it.

Fear Is The Mind-Killer
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: The Fear-Junkie can steel themselves or others against a specific type of fear for a time, it's not that they forget or rationalize their actions, it's just that they don't make the connection necessary to damage one's sanity. Choose a stress gauge (excluding Unnatural) and roll 2d10. The number that shows on the Tens die is the level of stress check that the target becomes immune to, the singles die is the number of minutes that the target becomes immune to that stress gauge, For example, if Frankie the Phobomancer rolls a 78 to amp his buddy Jimmy up to attack some loser Mak Attaxers, Jimmy would become immune to any Violence checks of 7 and under, and the spell would last for 8 minutes, making his attempt to shoot up a busy restaurant rather easy on the ol' Violence gauge. At the end of the spell's duration, the target must make a stress check on the Unnatural gauge equal to the level of stress that they became immune to during the spell's effect.

Gives Me The Creeps
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: You may make someone (including yourself) or something into a source of fear for others for an hour's time. By focusing on the target for a moment, it begins to take on a subtly threatening aspect that makes any one in their presence feel uneasy until they leave. Concentrating, or otherwise performing complex tasks is difficult while in the presence of a Creepy thing or person, giving -5% shift to most Mind skills and any Speed or Body skills requiring deliberative thought ( "Assemble Ikea Furniture" would be affected, whilst "Break Yer' Face" would not) which increases by another -5% for every five minutes spent still in the Creepy thing's proximity, to a maximum of -20% if an object, or -10% if it is a person or animal. The GM is encouraged to give positive shifts for People, Animals or Things that are already legitimately Creepy. It's easy to amp up what's already there after all...

The Ol' Toss And Turn
Cost: 6 Minor Charges
Effect: Touch the target of this spell. The next time that they sleep they will suffer horrific nightmares, persisting in their mind even after they wake and they'll almost certainly be exhausted the next day. This causes a -10% shift to all rolls involving Speed and Mind for the next sixteen hours, until the target gets some rest or uses a great deal of stimulants.

Phobomancy Significant Formula Spells:

Who's Behind You?
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: With this spell you can convince someone for a short time (fifteen minutes) that someone with malevolent intent is following them closely, just out of their view. This is intensely unsettling and can trigger Violence, Helplessness or Unnatural checks depending on the subject's circumstance and state of mind. If used on a target in combat, Who's Behind You entitles the Boogeyman to a free Sucker Attack (UA pg 55) without having to use an action first.

Let's Split-Up Gang!
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: There is strength and safety in numbers and that's something that simply will not do for most Phobomancers, especially if they need to deal with some meddlesome kids. After casting the spell, the Fear-Junkie can target a group of people, no larger than the tens place on their Phobomancy skill. Make a Soul roll, and if successful the Adept inflicts the crowd with the desire to be alone; this is a compulsion that can be resisted only by suffering a rank-10 Self Check, and even if resisted that does not mean that their fellows will be at all happy to see them coming back their way, perhaps necessitating Isolation checks in the searcher, and Self checks to the person hiding.

Scare You To Death
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: This is the Phobomancy Blast Style, as noted above it does psychic damage that harms the target in their own mind by projecting terrifying images and hallucinations, triggering a massive physiological reaction through fear response. The damage is passing in nature however, and the Target need only to get a full night's rest to heal completely. Normally this spell only deals Minor Blast damage, unless you know their Fear Stimulus, in which case it deals Significant Blast damage. Regardless of the amount of damage dealt, the target is paralyzed for next the round as their body is rocked by the horror that is being beamed directly into their skull.

Witch House
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: This spell is Gives Me The Creeps scarier homebody of a big brother. You cast this spell by walking around a location, it can be as large as a multi-storied house, a duplex would be fine, but an entire apartment complex, school, or large mansion would be out of the question; it doesn't have to be the entire location in a straight line, but you must travel over the majority of the perimiter. After making your way around the location, it becomes a conduit for the Unnatural for the next night (or current if it is already night). In game terms the Adept gains access to a pool of Unnatural Phenomenon, 3 Significant and 6 Minor that they're allowed to spend over the course of the night in the Bewitched location at their discretion. In addition to the pool, any being within the locale besides the Adept who cast the spell take a -10% shift to any skills requiring deliberative thought or fine manipulation, as the Bewitched location causes unease on a primal level. Animals will refuse to go near a Witch House and will attack or flee if forced inside.

>I'm Under The Bed!
I love that secondary effect. It's one of those little things that helps reinforce the theme and taps into the symbolism. I might go through some adept spells and add clauses like those, customized for each adept.

A Witch house only lasts a single night and in addtion, if the Location being Bewitched has a reputation or strong rumor of being haunted (say, enough for a Cliomancer to gather a charge from a murder having been committed there...or if a someone had convinced enough people that it was such a site) the cost of the spell drops to only 2 Charges.

Don't Fear The Reaper
Cost: 5 Significant Charges
Effect: Horror, no matter the type, is a thing that can impress itself upon people so deeply that it can define their lives from that point on. Fear-Junkies can destroy these deep-seated fears and anxieties, stripping the trauma associated with the event away from the subject's mind, like plucking a worm out of an apple. The target (including the adept, if they cast it on themselves) of this spell still remembers the event in question, it just ceases to have any deleterious effect; in game terms the target rolls their Mind, needing to roll under the Adept's Phobomancy skill. If successful the subject may erase a hardened or failed notch in the gauge of their choice.

Phobomancy Major Effects: Create a permanently haunted location, Make someone's fear manifest in reality, Cause a city-wide panic lasting weeks. Cause yourself or another to become permanently immune to fear.

What You Hear: The Phobomancer

Night lights were invented to make people afraid of the dark, after all, who was afraid of the dark before electricity was invented? Their introduction sparked a massive uptick in the amount of charges Fear-Junkies were able to harvest. The constant sliding scale of horror movie ratings is a battle between a pair of Phobomancer Film Directors known as the Blood Brothers and an unknown, but extremely powerful Avatar of The Mother who sits on the MPAA board.