Unknown Armies

So I know this a bit off topic but this thread needs a bump and you guys will probably be able to help.
I need some hooks for my Demon: the Descent game and /wodg/ is too packed with Magefags shitposting and people complaining about V5, and UA has that bizarre Urban Fantasy feel nailed down. Any and all UA plothooks featuring mechanical stuff or computers is needed and welcome.

The proper version isn't out yet, but the archive has the 3e beta in it. Grab book 2 and read a bit about GNOMON. It's essentially a computer that has become infused with magical energy and it gives power to those who follow its unusual demands. I'm not sure how well that would fit in Demon, but if it's the God Machine version, you could paint something like it as an aspiring competitor for the title of "most powerful thing with arbitrary goals" without much change except in game mechanics.

>The new community content thing is out
>You have to make your own PDFs, if you don't know how to do that you're shit outta luck
>People pricing single Adept schools at $2
>Nothing from the old Tynes site will be or can be ported over unless the creators still have the original text files and update them for 3e
>Uploading anything is a confusing mess, just like the D&D 5e community content site
>All art has to be poorly photoshopped stock images just like in the new core books

I honestly can't say I didn't see this coming but still, fucking why? This shit looks so bad.

That all sounds retarded. Why would you do something like that?

Like I get the idea behind it, UA always kind of sustained itself on really good community created content so letting them do that for 3e and also giving them an opportunity to make a little money off of it should be great, but so far the execution has been horrible. I was planning on making everything I would have published pay what you want but at this point it seems like I'd be better off making my own blog for this shit and posting a paypal link.

The cherry on top of this is the art restrictions. The biggest issue I have with 3e by far is the art direction, the photos in the first three books look so fucking bad it makes me not want to read the them at all. I've still barely gotten through Book 2 because I keep stopping and staring at a picture of some dopey looking actor that takes up half the page and wondering who the dipshit that okayed it was. Like Atlas is a pretty successful game studio that got over $100,000 in the UA Kickstarter and they still managed to make exclusively photo art look like shit and now they expect their community content to look good? At this point I'd rather pay them the combined cost of everything that will ever get made on that thing to have them bring back the old Tynes site than use what they have now.

I really thin 3e was a pretty huge let down in terms of everything except crunch. A lot of the fluff and atmosphere just felt off. I mean, the setting had to be updated with the times, I guess, but the update really removed the grit and strangeness that was par for the course with 2e.

Yeah I agree. Even in terms of crunch, every time I've ran a game character creation has been really confusing for pretty much everyone. My current plan is to try to back-port all of the interesting Adepts and Avatars and use any fluff that sticks out and just keep playing 2e. I can't imagine anyone picking up a 3e book and having their interest grabbed the same way that 2e did with me.

I remember back in the older UA threads when 3e was still all speculation we were coming up with way better stuff than what ended up in the books.

What a shame. I think the biggest loss was all the old blog stuff; I used to spend hours combing through those posts for shits and giggles. Even the worst ones were still unique and somewhat useable.

>the setting had to be updated with the times
I think the biggest problem is that, rather than updating the setting they've just straight up reset most of it. The main thing that had me hyped for 3e was that we might see a timeline progression of what's been going on since 2e, that the old continuity would be a foundation that 3e would build on like what Delta Green is currently doing. Instead of getting to see what the old factions and power players have been up to we just got a handwaved explanation that most of them are now either dead or underpowered and there's a whole bunch of new guys that aren't as interesting or thought out.

Yeah that's what I was talking about earlier with their new community content thing. They're just letting hundreds of pieces of community created stuff go down the drain because it doesn't fit the new UA model and giving us a new site that nowhere near as many people will use because creating stuff is now a huge pain in the ass. On the old website I could just copy and paste straight from whatever word processor I was using and have something other people could read and use within five minutes, now I have to format a pdf and dig though shitty stock photos to find something that might fit before I can put it up for review.

I don't care about making a few bucks off of a scenario I wrote, I just want people to see my shit.

Forgot to mention, the new community site isn't even easy to find. I had to dig around DrivethruRPG for like ten minutes before I gave up and just went to the link I got from an old Kickstarter email. Who the fuck thought any of this was a good idea?

Honestly, I barely used the power players when I ran 2e. The cosmology is what got me interested, and that's still there. I might do a modified version of the history for running 3e, but the important parts are GNOMON (because there's a lot that can be done with that concept) and 3/3/03.

I can fully agree about the art being mediocre I'd call it bad, but after Ironclaw it's a lot harder to bring myself to hate an RPG's art and the community publishing site being trash, but those aren't as big as the mechanics and fluff, so I'd call 3e two-thirds of a great game.

You know the Strength of Samson ritual you do with Bruce Lee tapes? Do that, but with a Jackie Chan tape, and instead of the blood or the bumblebee suit, you need horse piss.

Helps with mad tulpas and nightmares.

Blogs and forums still exist and there is a lot of pdf conversion/formatting software around. They want other people to use shitty stock art because they're trying to keep continuity of aesthetic among the work, which is smart in making a brand. Wrong stylistic horse to back, though.

If you don't want to make scratch off of it, skip their distribution channel entirely. Write stuff up in a pastebin and link it when UA threads come around.

UA3 character creation would be a lot easier if the crew creation and the solo chargen weren't in different fucking books. Someone needs to get smacked for that.

After a few sessions with the gamma, I just had people choose an identity for mind/body/soul, then asked if they were open, hard, or whacked for their shock gauges. All that mentor/senpai shit I said player to your left gets one and player to your right gets another.

I think GNOMON is the best new addition and I'm not even that thrilled about it as a concept. It's cool, but it feels more like something that would be in Shadowrun than UA.

>Write stuff up in a pastebin and link it when UA threads come around
That's the plan. Hopefully we can throw together some sort of content archive here for people who don't want to deal with the Statosphere bullshit.

You know, with 3rd edition such a disappointment and having the potential to turn off new people from the concepts behind Unknown Armies maybe we should make our own retroclone of Unknown Armies, but with any form of copy-written material replaced with our own things.

I think it's fine in UA. One of the things on people's mind is government surveillance and big data, and there should be something tapping into that fear. The problem there is that having the FBI proper having a bead on the Occult Underground raises a lot of questions, so you need a symbolic representation of an impersonal datamining operation: a server that has awoken mentally and magickally, datamining purely for the sake of having more information to do nothing with. There's a few minor adjustments I'd make, but it's overall a neat concept.

Well, the big problem I see is the history of the setting between 2e and 3e, so having a free PDF that gives another possible way the setting can evolve plus modified fluff for the power players would be my suggestion. Call it something like "The Truth of the Whisper War" or something. Hell, sell it on that half-assed community portal once it's good enough.

Then again, I'm mostly saying that because I had a group that actually figured out and enjoyed the way chargen worked RAW. Apparently I'm the only one.

>The proper version isn't out yet,
What planet do you live on?

To be desu, UA means different things to different people and the concepts were always pretty "high concept".

You have to realize that whatever wacky conspiracy/urban fantasy itch a potential new UA3 player has can be covered with Night Vale, the new Twin Peaks, the SCP Foundation, and good old fashioned Internet trawling. The 1e and 2e stuff was cool, but adapting it to 3e isn't very hard and 3e itself shifted more generic system in order to allow people to play the old shit in a new engine.

They got your money (or you pirated it), they sold the 2e books people liked off of nostalgia (or you pirated them/already own them) and the major selling point to randoms (Adepts) has a roll-your-own system front and center in the first book.

>The system kinda sucks
For sure? Always thought the insanity system was way better than CoC or Vampire

I meant that as "noone has uploaded a copy of the 3e full release to the trove." I should get more sleep.

This guy looks like a bizarro mirror of the guy who's been talking about how d% systems are bad because they never use the granularity you would get from it compared to a d20. Some people just have weird fixations about dice.

Those are not high bars to clear, but the shock gauges being your social minigame targets, your Sanity HP and your defaults for two opposing stats, as well as having a second strike system for actually going crazy is kind of a kludge.

It also makes weird situations like getting spooked by a jump scare making my character not as good at running. Or Unnatural checks in a game about weird magic shit. Big dick Magickal identities don't actually protect a character from their own weird shit, so failing notches doing their weird shit makes them not want to do the weird shit which defines their character.

"Big dick Magickal identities don't actually protect a character from their own weird shit"

What? Having an identity protect against something is something you can pick. Also, I can't recall anything in the rules that requires a sanity check against your own magic.

To be fair, there are some edge cases where it could happen (seeing someone killed by magick is a rank 3-5 Unnatural check, and an adept could manage that). The real question is, why does an adept have so few hardened notches in Unnatural that they'd be making that check?

Of the other things he mentions, the Ability defaults are a bit strange, but I'll accept them being a bit strange for having your Shock gauges actually influence your capabilities. Everything else is stuff I enjoy, but everyone can have their own wrong opinion.

Getting whammied is 3-5, killing/seeing inexplicable magick death is 5-7.

Wahmmies are 4-6. I will say I was wrong on seeing an inexplicable death since I wasn't looking, but I still don't think an adept having 5 hardened notches in Unnatural (and really, if you caused it, it would be more of a 5 than a 7) is asking too much.

>Mark Zukerburg is the Godwalker and hes planning something Huge,

I think I know what it might be. He's taking over physical reality using virtual reality.

Yeah, it's not like UA is a huge media property like D&D. How much did they expect to make by "monetizing the player base", all of 50 cents?

Bad idea.

Well according to the KS figures, the content creator gets half of whatever the listed price is and so far I've been incentivized to spend exactly zero dollars on whatever has been published by now so 50 cents might be generous.

Dumping some classic stories and rumors to counter all the 3e disappointment in this thread.

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I forgot a lot of these are single posts taken from several different threads so if anybody wants to stitch them all together after the dump is over for the sake of saving space be my guest.

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Looking to put into words the philosophical paradox behind Astromancy, a modernized form of one of the most ancient of all magical systems (sorta like Herpemancy from Break Today). It's like, I can understand it on a cognitive level, but I just can't phrase it well for some reason. You're trying to do magic by gazing at the stars, looking into the mysteries of the heavens, but ultimately there is no real mystery and you aren't really influencing anything. The stars aren't under your control and their courses are absolutely predetermined. You're mystifying what by all means could be done by a calculator.

You know what I mean?

(For reference, I plan for Astromantic minor charges to be from gazing up a heavenly body you've never before, significant charge by discovering a wholly new one, and major charge by physically traveling to another one, complete with rumors about astronaut adepts charging up from the moon. Astromancy will involve a lot of divination but also deal with the majesty and mystery of heaven and the stars)

What's going to be the taboo on that?

yeah, it's awful. really disappointing

Don't really know. I want it to be something along the lines of "your fate is at the whims of powers beyond you", like maybe there's a random night each month where you lose all your charges and it changes from month to month so you can never be sure. However this would go against the symbolic paradox that Astronmancy is about attributing mystical qualities to predictions which could be perfectly well made using scientific means.

Well, you got your paradox then: Astromancy is essentially the School of trying to reveal information by willfully BLINDING yourself to what's obviously right before your eyes. Your forcing a layer of arcane mystery onto the movements of stars even though anyone with a calculator and a few charts, much less a telescope, could tell you there's no mystery at all and you aren't divining anything. You have to ignore facts to reveal them.

What are your favorite Adept Schools (any edition) and why?

I think I've posted a version of this here before but since Statosphere sucks shit I'm just gonna save all of my UA content for threads here. Gonna work on punching up some stuff I had on the old site as well.

This is the latest version of a scenario/campaign starter I've been working on. I've still got a bit of a to do list for it (fleshing out the Mak Attaxers, reorganizing a few things, whipping up some suitable premade PCs, possibly making a 3e version for starters) but I'm mostly just looking for some feedback since I feel like I've been the only one looking at it for too long.

Iconomancy, it really lets you know what UA style magic is all about.

I'm trying to come up with an adept school based around wrestling, WWE style, what would be the paradox, taboos, charging method and spells of such a school?

i was thinking the paradox could be that wrestling is fake but must be treated as real since kayfabe is really the most interesting thing about it, but i think i can do better.

I suppose I'm kind of missing the point of UA, because for the most part all of my favorite Schools are the least... "creative". One way or another, they all feel like something that could've fit perfectly well in a more traditional occult themed game, compared to some of the really unique stuff like Videomancy or Plutophagy. I think my very favotie is Personamancy, followed closely by Kleptomancy, Cryptomancy, Herpemancy and Vestimancy (from 3rd edition).

I could also go for Iconomancy, I suppose.

Don't worry, user. You're not uncreative, you're just a munchkin.

Kleptomancy always felt under-utilized. There's almost no mention of them in any sourcebooks, which is a real shame. Would've wanted to see an example of how they should feel before letting anyone monkey around with them.

>Be shitpostomancer
>need to get a UA thread to the bump limit for a significant charge

life is suffering, guess ill go troll a DnD thread for minor charges.

Gotta get someone to do a psychic surgery on you. It never helps with cancer, but it can help with Tuplas.

What functionality would a Coincidence Engine have?

>namedropping
>1st grade symbism for avatars
>corporations have supplanted nations
you liked Jared Leto's Joker don't you ?

I think most people agree that Kleptomancers were a bit of a bad idea conceptually because used as written they're pretty much "PCmancers". Their theme is weak, their symbolic paradox is uninspiring, and their powers don't really have a common theme besides being "things that the average PC would need". They just don't feel like a part of Unknown Armies all that much.

It's presented as being more situational than that, but I do agree that at least a significant part (if not most) of the time this ends up being the case. The fact of the matter is that while Unknown Armies characters are technically free to pursue any "occupation", so to speak, *in practice* most adventures are definitely going to involve them doing something illegal, and the Kleptomancer's whole magickal arsenal revolves specifically around that. It's not like with Dipsomancers or Entropomancers or Epideromancers where their powers are simply *strongly conductive* towards illegal activity, it's that they're literally intended for it. You don't have to creatively think "how can I employ my powers over alcohol/luck/my own body towards accomplishing [illegal activity]", you just pick them from the list. "Okay, we need to gather information about the target - covered. Need to infiltrate the area - covered. Locks - broken. Security system - disabled. Guards - duped. Information - gotten. Target - neutralized. Time to teleport out of here."

You might as well make a School whose Random Magick domain is "bypassing challenges".

And what's most insulting about this is that since you charge up by stealing shit and your taboo ISN'T stealing shit, most of the time you're going to be charging up and never breaking taboo pretty much as a consequence of just PLAYING THE GAME. You aren't an Unknown Armies Adept - you're a D&D wizard.

I think that, when handled correctly (which is difficult, but theoretically possible and should be aspired to) Unknown Armies shines exactly in the face of this kind of characters. It's not about whether or not you're overpowered, it's "okay, fine, you're overpowered. Now what?".

I think the best example of this was the Bad Man, from Postmodern Magick. Rumor has it (huh) that he was invented in response to criticism of the core book saying that the Merchant Archetype was too strong (since in time you could trade in stats, skills, lives and powers until your abilities transcended any other character in the game). So the devs were like "yup, pretty much", and added a GMC called the Bad Man who is precisely that: a powerful Merchant Avatar who traded in power until he became an unstoppable, immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing monster. He's now a part of the setting. Enjoy dealing with him.

A Kleptomancer can get anywhere, out of anywhere, and with anything, both literally and figuratively? That means people like that exist in the world. It also means YOU are that kind of person. What does that do to your personality?

So, obviously werewolves in Unknown Armies are weird and unusual and unexpected the way that Unknown Armies monsters always are. However, they also make pretty lousy monsters in practice, not the least because, RAW, barring some kind of omniscience it's literally impossible to even REALIZE THEY EXIST, as their transformation is always completely retroactive.

How would you do werewolves in Unknown Armies that could nevertheless be used like actual werewolves in a horror story?

So, there was a post with bleeding eyes mentioning UA 3rd edition being a thing that exists.

Tell me more?

People were talking about it earlier in the thread. It's generally pretty disappointing.