[OSSR]Unknown Armies

[silva]

You know what reminds me most of Unknown Armies these days ?

Regular Show.

[Ancient History]

Book Two: Part One:
The World of Our Desires

Raveonettes - Black Wave

FrankT:

At 120 pages, this book is longer than any other book in the book. It's longer than both of the other non-Game Master books in the book combined. It's also five chapters long, but half of the page count is in chapter 10. So when we're doing chapters 7, 8, and 9 in part 1, and chapters 10 and 11 in part 2. That's actually still weighted pretty heavily to the second part, but it's what we can do. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 are only 32 pages between them, but it makes more sense to do them in order than to hop around to make the page counts even.

When people tell you how cool Unknown Armies is, the chances are almost zero that they are talking about any part of the book other than Book Two. This is where the meat is, the part where the “magick” system and the unique take on urban fantasy is. If it wasn't for this book in the book, I doubt anyone would have ever noticed this game. Which of course makes the authors' decision to make these chapters double secret all the more puzzling.

AncientH:

Welcome to the Occult Underground

This is the basic takeaway from this book, and you have to contrast it against the first sentence in the first book. The idea that this book is secret is that you, the player, are uninitiated, just discovering that there is an occult underground. Then you step over the line, and become a part of it. It's the kind of threshold crossing you don't see quite as much in RPGs, mostly because players are more interested in playing a given concept than playing someone that becomes that concept; it's a little like "Okay, write up a mortal character, we're going to roleplay your embrace." in Vampire.

Or such is the high-level idea; at the actual play-level you're still going to be a PC and have to munchkin the hell out of yourself to be an effective character.

Chapter Seven: Global Overview

AncientH:

A bit part of the magic system - maybe the whole of it - is that belief shapes reality. It's a fundamental concept that underlies a lot of late-80s/90s RPGs, based on contemporary occult philosophy. Shadowrun does it a bit, Mage wallows in it. The difference is that Unknown Armies is at heart a Call of Cthulhu hack, and so the strength of belief necessary is closer to obsession or fanaticism than anything healthy. In the UA-verse, it's impossible to be well-balanced and a magician. If you want the cheat codes to the universe, you're going to have to be insane. Pick your flavor.

FrankT:

After the Thelema inspired introduction about becoming the thing you believe, we get right back to the ghastly and illegible “witness reports” where we get three little vignettes of white text on dark gray pictures. These explain more than you'd think about why I have friends who love Unknown Armies and why I don't. Focusing in just on the first one, there's a private detective who does weird cases, and a woman comes in complaining that her baby has been erased from history, and so the detective determines that the woman needs to protect herself from memory wipes by wearing anachronistic clothes and hanging spirals around while the detective goes to Gettysburg to fight Confederate ghosts to keep them from reincarnating Andrew Jackson into her son. Got that? That right there is everything that's cool about Unknown Armies as a setting and everything that is absolutely fucked about Unknown Armies as a game.



When the different magicians are worshiping cardboard boxes and manipulating the symbols of toast on billboards in order to channel breakfast magic and whatever the fuck, there is nothing rational to connect any effect to its underlying cause. All events happen in a reference frame that is so tangential to normality and also to all the other reference frames that events take place in that no one who isn't writing the events can guess the logic that ties one to the next. When you hear “missing child, records erased” your first thought isn't going to be “Confederate ghosts.” Indeed, you aren't going to make the logical jump to ghostly Virginians if you are given ten guesses. The other two fiction pieces are about prime number street addresses and Time Cube. Those wouldn't be your first, second, or twenty-second guesses either.

Basically the authors present a setting of Dadaist Surrealism. And that can make some damn fine flash fiction and even short stories. I genuinely like surrealism. I enjoyed Mr. Nobody, a Belgian movie about an old man using the end of the universe to sift through the infinite possibilities of time to find the perfect timeline where he can be a hobo who sleeps with his stepsister. But the fundamental problem with surrealism in a mystery RPG is that when you ask the other players to guess what you're thinking they fucking can't. Surrealism succeeds because the audience doesn't know what's going to happen next and likely doesn't understand what happened last. This can be great to read or watch, but it's very fraught to participate in. To make surrealism participatory, you really need the solutions to the mysteries to be freeform because the clues to the mysteries will definitionally not make any fucking sense. The players aren't going to guess your solar cult as a fried egg on toast analogy, which means you have to be flexible enough to go with the flow of whatever the fuck the players want to investigate. This game fundamentally doesn't do that. It tries to organize itself as a traditional RPG where the MC has written the backstory and then doles out clues until the players figure out what's going on. Which in this case they will never do, because nothing makes any sense and the players aren't supposed to read the part of the book that tells you what's really going on anyway.


If you want to do surrealism as a cooperative storytelling exercise, you have to surrender agency to the other people at the table to take the story in any of these directions.

AncientH:

When you talk about magic, there's a couple fundamentals to get out of the way. Cosmology is one; even in games which refuse to answer the 'big questions' (which is most of them), one of the fundamentals of being a magician is talking to invisible people and getting an answer back. Unknown Armies fills this niche by talking about the Afterlife, with a capital A. There are demons, whom you can talk with, and they talk about the Cruel Ones (who might be angels, or maybe not), and something called the Veil, and...y'know, actually they don't end up saying a lot about much of anything. There are demons, you can talk to them, end of story.

FrankT:

It is difficult to explain how pretentious Unknown Armies actually is. I think the perfect encapsulation is the fact that it describes demons as being “the supernatural equivalent of ebola virii: you have to know what you're doing to handle them, and even then you can die horribly.” Not just that this is the kind of overwrought analogy a pretentious douche would write, but that “virii” is not a fucking word. First of all, “Ebola virus” is capitalized and singular, but the plural of “virus” is “viruses.” Always has been. There is no Latin plural of “virus” because the knowledge that disease was caused by distinct strains of microscopic organisms came over a thousand years after the last native Latin speaker died. In actual Latin it's a collective fucking noun like “water” that takes verbs in the god damned singular. To even use the word “virii” at all you have to find out that “virus” has a
Latin root and then misapply Latin pluralization rules onto an English word. Every single person who uses the word “virii” unironically is an asshole who thinks they are way smarter than they actually are.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're like “Frank, you don't get upset at all when people use the word 'mooses' and only get slightly annoyed when people call octopuses '1440 degrees,' why the massive hate boner for 'virii'?” And that's kind of fair. The thing is that while you get a pass for simple ignorance (such as not knowing that the plural of “ox” is “oxen”), it takes a little bit of work to get to “virii.” Not a lot of work, because if you did any serious research on the subject you'd know that using the word “virii” is incorrect and makes you sound like an asshole. It's like in gradeschool when some snot nosed brat “corrects” you to say that the capital of Nevada is Las Vegas. They really put effort into “correcting” something that was right into something that was wrong.

AncientH:

Magick is wht they call, well, DIY reality-warping. Like Mage, the idea is that way back in the beginning when there weren't so many people and fucking your sister was a legitimate survival tactic, magick was pretty easy and innate. Then you had all this civilization happen and consensus reality started coming in and eventually the magick all goes away, or more properly goes underground. Until somehow finding expression in the 1990s in America as some Baby Boomer's internal timeclock started ticking to zero.

It is, even by indie game standards, a pretty short and barebones history that raises more questions than it answers. There is no great conspiracy of mages, there are no individuals or groups mentioned by name. You wonder why they bothered to fucking talk about the history at all.

FrankT:

The history of Magick is pretentious pishposh. This is where the oMage DNA flaps around most strongly: the age of magic was in the past when everyone could rewrite reality spontaneously and shit was awesome and then bastards destroyed it all with writing and religion and now people don't know how to make reality floob anymore. Basically the same shite that oMage was shoveling, only this time it's not an organized technocracy but merely a long and steady decline of coolness which is the fault of civilization and philosophers. It's all very vague and kind of dumb, but I'm pretty sure the flurry of activity and death alluded to in the late nineties is the authors referencing shit that happened in First Edition Unknown Armies.

Magic itself is basically Chaos Magick, which is like supernatural hipsterism from the seventies. Stolze and Tynes were born in 1970 and 1971 respectively, so I'm guessing that this stuff seemed cool and edgy when discovered it when they were in their early teens. But of course, when these guys stumbled upon tomes of ancient magic, those books were younger than they were.

But this whole Chaos magick thing really puts an underline on how this whole thing probably shouldn't have been a role playing game. The whole concept of behaving irrationally in order to create magickal effects makes for a good story. But it does not make for a good cooperative story if the framework is supposed to be that the players are trying to investigate and deduce the motives and actions of non-player characters the gamemaster has made up. Because when magic creates effects illogically based on criteria that are specifically personal, arbitrary, and insane, then you can't fucking deduce anything. Deduction requires a logical framework, and the magick is specifically illogical. Quick: the house number is 94, that adds up to 13, which is a prime, and both the numbers are squares, now your task is to guess whether that's important or not in an illogical framework that the gamemaster made up. You might as well flip a fucking coin, because it's literally unsolvable as stated.

AncientH:

Frank maybe does a slight disservice; most Chaos Magick isn't about fishmalking it up and then you find a hundred dollar bill anything. It's mostly about manipulating existing symbols, even or especially those that are fictional, to achieve magical results. This was most famous in people that would "channel" deities of the Cthulhu Mythos, or Grant Morrison worshipping John Lennon because he'd assumed all the traits of a god.

The whole idea was that if your belief was strong enough, your will would trump reality, and that by tapping into strong symbols of mass media you could achieve some powerful effects. The whole thing where John Dee tried to talk to angels was just him attempting magick through his cultural syntax; in the modern day, John Constantine snorts the powdered bones of St. Nicholas and taps into the vast psychic energy surrounding the idea of Santa Claus.

No, seriously, that's a thing that happened.

FrankT:

Unknown Armies posits not only an occult underground, but also an occult mainstream. These are people who believe that there is magic and want in, but don't actually have any of it. This is rather too much hepcat lingo to be honest, as the whole point of the “mainstream” as a thing for the “underground” to despise is that it's popular and well supported with money. But sure, we're just going to unapologetically use counterculture words and motifs whether or not they make any sense in context. Honestly, this book in the book handles it pretty well. They rather realistically and maturely point out that as a person who knows actual magic you can stroll up to the wannabes, flash some magic, and get them to become your student. Or your cult follower. Or your one night stand. This sort of frank assessment that having magic means that you can get groupies and exploit them for sex is probably the first part of the book that really dates this book as having been written after 1982. I will give them props for this: their description and assessment of non-magical hopefuls is much more mature and plausible than Vampire: the Masquerade ever had.

Of course they lose most of these points by not really explaining why there's a masquerade or how there even could be one considering that magicians don't have any structure and apparently people are just starting cults and shit all the time. There's a thing about the “Sleeping Tiger” of mundane society and how society has a lot of people to put into a torch wielding mob if it wants one. But while the fear of an angry populace is sufficient reason for a masquerade to exist, there's no line drawn between that fact and the proposition that there actually is one. No society means no laws, not even meta-laws or laws that would be a really good idea.

AncientH:

The Big Two options in Unknown Armies are Adepts and Avatars. Adepts tap into an obsession that they can warp reality around, creating little rituals around their clinical OCD that actually work; Avatars tap into archetypes, the big conceptual movers and shakers of the global human subsconscious, one part Carl Jung to two parts Tarot card major arcana. On the minor scale of things you have people with magickal artifacts, and people that conduct magical rituals. All of these can cross over, so you could have a Dispomancer/True Warrior who knows a handful of runic rituals and carries a sledge hammer he says is Mjolnir. Or you can just choose one.

In the underground, you've got the lone operators (dukes), and the groups (cabals), and the self-appointed watchmen (Sleepers). The actual name-dropping of major groups is squeezed into a single page in a massive infoburst, so you know that there are things called the New Inquisition and Max Attack, the Sect of the Naked Goddess, and the Ordo Corpulentis, but that's about it. Most of the rest of the chapter is about subdivisions and sub-sub divisions of the occult underground, none of whom are quite as cool or interesting as Papa Midnite from the Constantine movie.


That's right, my sister sucks cocks in hell...and I get all the bedroom gossip, bitches.

Chapter Eight: Global Campaign


Why are you putting so many pieces in Congo? It doesn't even protect South Africa if Red has Ethiopia.

FrankT:

Chapter eight begins by telling us the name of the party/coterie/pack/whatever in this game. It is called a “Cabal.” That's fine, but I think it's really important that you shouldn't reveal the gimmicky name you have for the player characters on page 90 of your book. Perhaps more importantly, you shouldn't have been using the word “group” for 63 pages before that point. If people don't use specialist nomenclature, it doesn't exist. Words only have meaning to convey information between people. So whether or not the characters use the word, you have to make damn sure the players use the word or that won't be the word. They'll end up calling the player characters “the group,” or “the party,” or “the Scoobies,” or something. You have failed at branding if you don't alert all the players that the label exists to be used.

This is where the authors attempt to face up to their responsibility to provide direction for Cabals. I don't think they succeeded. Where the street level “groups” are Scooby gangs who work together and solve mysteries... the next level “cabals” are... not. It's not entirely clear what the point of your cabal would be, and there certainly isn't a default. One of the examples is a group of people who secretly worship a mid-nineties porn star. That's a fascinating group, I suppose, but it's not at all clear what adventures you would go on if that was the concept for your party. There's even a “goals” section, but I have no idea how “serve the naked goddess” corresponds to well, anything.


Fascinating. What are we supposed to do?

AncientH:

The apparent idea of the global campaign is that your cabal is in the pay of or a branch of one of the larger occult conspiracies.


Who keeps the metric system down?/We do!

Which, when you boil it down, has a lot to do with freemasonry - occultists borrowed a lot from freemasonry, including the whole thing about having different chapters all over the place which were their own thing but also paid up to some Grand Lodge somewhere else. Congratulations, you are the local branch office of Wolfram & Hart, and you really don't want to be called back to the home office.

FrankT:

While the chapter is called “Global Campaign” there is actually nothing global about it. It's just a label for campaigns where characters know some magic at the start of the game. It's five pages about naming your No Homer's Club and... that's it. That's the whole chapter. You might want to be part of the secret cabal of sorcerers infiltrating McDonalds... and? Then what? This chapter has nothing. The fact that McDonalds is the biggest fast food chain in the world is as “global” as this chapter gets, and the suggested groups are so weird that it would need a lot more information on each one to make them something you might actually be able to play. Instead it just flits to the next group like an eight year old with ADHD telling you about his urban fantasy setting.

AncientH:

You can also, they suggest, create your own cabal from scratch. You can even be a group of mundanes!

You learn the basics, have a hideous experience in a graveyard, they give you a trenchcoat and steal your razor. Like an assembly line, really.

Stolze and Tines know enough that you as a cabal need goals, and suggest a few, but the whole framework and setting is so thin at this point that really it's just a blank slate against which the gamemaster can paint anything. Maybe your group decides to eliminate the chupacabre population in New Mexico, to keep them from spreading and thus saving the rest of the world from those hideous monsters...even as they get more clever in adapting how they prey. Maybe a duke raped your dog and you've sworn vengeance against the entire occult underground in honor of dear, departed Muffins. One of the actual examples they give is that Herman Meville's Moby Dick is an occult text which hides a route to ultimate arcane power in the allegorical journey abord a whaler with a bunch of dudes and more homoerotic subtext than you can shake a phallic symbol at, and all your cabal has to do is follow it...I'm not sure how that works, but I guess it means volunteering on a Japanese whaler and going from there.

Chapter Nine: Magick

FrankT:

This chapter is 15 pages long and most of the descriptions of what magic is or how it works in this setting are not in this chapter. Even the “three laws of magick” are in the next chapter. I don't know why. Such as anything is explained, it's mostly early twentieth century occultism based on the law of similarity and the law of contagion. But they don't call it that for reasons. I don't know if the reasons are that they are trying to be too cool for school or because they aren't actually terribly well read on the subject they are talking about. It kind of comes out the same either way.

AncientH:

Instead of going for numbers or dots to grade magical power, they sort everything into minor, significant, and major. There are also three styles of magick: adepts, avatars, and ritual magick - they left out artifacts, but fuck 'em.

FrankT:

There are three kinds of magic and the rules for determining whether you have access to any of it or how to use them are in later chapters. Nevertheless, this chapter jumps right into describing some rituals and presenting their alternate costs if you were a holder of one of the other types of magic. So you get four pages of spells that tell you how many “charges” things cost before we get a description of what a “charge” is or who gets them or how they are acquired. Also there is a ritual to protect yourself from “the revenants known as Snowfallen” which is I'm pretty sure the first time they have been mentioned in this book. The game's whole “we aren't going to tell you things” attitude really comes and bites it in the ass whenever they do grudgingly agree to give out mechanics or tell you how anything is supposed to work. Because there's never any fucking context for anything.

Lots of things are divided into Minor, Significant, and Major. That's the levels of magic, the levels of magic charges, and of course it's the type of skill checks called for in the game. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have your own themed words for high, medium, and low for your game, but it creates the apparently false impression that the check to use major magick is a major check and the check to use minor magick is a minor check, and that is seemingly not actually true.

AncientH:

Rituals are, more or less, sort of like all the annoying parts of a D&D spell: the material, verbal, and somatic components. On the other hand, if you just put everything in the recipe together and spend the charges, the ritual works. If your skill check works. This is extremely bad, because you're making a Soul check at a -30 shift for a minor ritual. So if you've maxed out soul (100!), you've got a straight 70% chance of any minor ritual going off; if you've got a typical soul (54), you're looking at less than a 1-in-25 chance.

On the other hand, anybody can do rituals. Even a mundane. Avatars actually have a slightly easier time than adepts, which we'll get to later.

For some reason they really really don't want you to do rituals. They try to explain this in unhappy terms:

Finding a ritual is like finding a slice of pizza in the gutter. Are you hungry enough to eat it? It might be okay, after all.

This feels like another leftover from CoC to me; lots of gamemasters would fuck player characters over by finding out that the spell they found in the grimoire doesn't do quite what was advertised, if it even worked at all, and there was no way to tell until you tried it out. Then again, magic in CoC was very punitive.

FrankT:

Actually written up rituals are bizarrely extreme in their specificity. There's one where you cause someone to get covered in animals, another one where you dress up like Samson from the Old Testament and go crazy in exchange for very tiny amounts of bonuses to your kung fu for a single fight. To the extent that these things actually have rules they tend to be kind of terrible: the aforementioned combat bonuses are literally +10 to Struggle in exchange for a failure notch on the insanity meter that'll take months of therapy to resolve. And that's a significant ritual! When things don't have rules, they are often pretty powerful. The aforementioned small animal smothering thing is simply “often fatal.”

But this isn't an effects based system. There's no way you can extrapolate from these things to make new rituals, and there are only 8 listed significant rituals in the Ritual Magick section (there are more under Authentic Thaumaturgy... we'll get there). Major rituals don't even get rules, just some teasers about how they probably exist. Basically what I'm saying is that for a game where people are supposed to be Big Mac Magicians and dark lords of new traditions and shit, the spell book is way too fucking short. You could see every single sub-adept spell in the game used in a single adventure – which really puts the kibosh on the idea of onion layers of ineffability that this game tries to wrap itself in.

AncientH:

Some of these are fairly traditional hermetic magic stuff, such as lead-to-gold (it works, just not very well) and a male-magician only spell for creating a homunculus by masturbating into a flask (what, no horse womb? Savages!)

The one time I ran a UA campaign, I let players steal left, right, and center from Vampire thaumaturgy rituals and Call of Cthulhu spells to fill out their sheets, because as terrible as rituals are they're at least a useful and (relatively) dependable thing.

Significant rituals don't require skill checks, but they do require significant charges, which mostly restricts them to adepts, since most non-adepts can't generate a significant charge.

FrankT:

Thaumaturgy is based entirely on rituals.

This is why it is in a separate section from “Ritual Magick.”

This is very much like a school of magick

This is why it's in a separate chapter from the schools of magick.

You know what? Fuck this book. It's an organizational hate crime.

AncientH:

You're not wrong. Okay, so after the pizza-in-the-gutter rituals...



...is "Authentic Thaumaturgy," which is a Mind-based skill. What this means is that you belong to the Ordo Tempo Orientalis (OTO) or a Santeria cult or something and have some proper training in how to do Real Magick(TM). It's basically your garden-variety occultist rather than anything unique to this book like being an avatar or adept. Now, you can be an Authentic Thaumaturgist and then become an Adept, but you can't be an adept and then learn thaumaturgy...because of reasons.



Thaumaturgists get to memorize rituals by spending XP instead of carrying around a bunch of scrolls and shit, because this was 2002 and ipods were really just getting going; nowadays I'm pretty sure I could carry most of the occult lore of Western Civilization on my iPad 2.

Proxy rituals, as Frank noted, are a subset of rituals using some of the magical laws that Sir George Frazer came up with in The Golden Bough studying folk myth and folk magic - basic voodoo doll shit; Law of Similarity (like affects like) and Law of Contagion (two things once connected are always connected). It's the basic bullshit still behind homeopathy today, and the basic juice behind magical links in Shadowrun.

Proxy rituals give you a "Proxy of (Target)" skill based on how close the proxy is to the target. The actual rules involved are needlessly complex and confusing.

Tilt rituals are based on the law of similarity, and they're basically luck rituals. The idea is that you do something that improves your rolls, or that jinxes your enemy's rolls, or ward a location against tilting...you get the idea. It doesn't require any charges, but you need at least a Soul of 60.

My basic take on tilting is that it's sort of meant for, y'know, the coolers that casinos bring in when a particular table is running "hot" and they're losing money. And I could totally see an interesting game where you've got an occult subtext to poker.


Oh wait, Tim Powers wrote that novel.

FrankT:

Most of what you can do with Thaumaturgy is extremely metagame. You can fiddle with charges (which I remind you, are not actually described until next chapter), you can fuck with die rolls, and you can spend experience points to not have to carry a book around to use your ritual magicks.


Shadowrun's magic book used to be subtitled “The Manual of Practical Thaumaturgy.” That's not directly relevant, but reading through eight pages of rants about “Thaumaturgy” made me miss that book.

Also there are some rituals listed in this section of the chapter that are not in the “Ritual Magick” chapter, and I have no idea why.

AncientH:

We do a lot of bitching about the complexity of the rules and the weirdness of the game and the thinness of the setting, but I think some of the examples I've given so far highlight one of the benefits of the game: weird and idiosyncratic and thing as it is, you can create a lot of interesting character concepts based on the different stuff available. I said before that this isn't Dr. Strange: the RPG - it's not even really Hellblazer: the RPG - but it does have some interesting bits. I mean, let's look at these potential character concepts:

Mundane (Scooby-type, stumbling into the occult)
Artifact-user ("This gun kills demons.")
Ritualist ("I found something that works!")
Thaumturgist ("There is no chaos, only Zuul.")
Tilter ("This car is death-proof.")
Adept
Avatar

...and that's not including the various combinations. You can be a Thaumaturgist/Adept/Avatar with tilt and proxy rituals and magical artifacts. That is a thing you can be. Multiple sources of power. If you start out trying to be that, you'll probably suck hard at it, but it's an option for the perspective archmages out there. It's the possibilities that make this game interesting, more than the existing material.

FrankT:

Next we'll do the final two chapters of the book in the book. That's 88 pages, so we'll necessarily have to speed through it a bit.

[jadagul]

It is difficult to explain how pretentious Unknown Armies actually is. I think the perfect encapsulation is the fact that it describes demons as being “the supernatural equivalent of ebola virii: you have to know what you're doing to handle them, and even then you can die horribly.” Not just that this is the kind of overwrought analogy a pretentious douche would write, but that “virii” is not a fucking word. First of all, “Ebola virus” is capitalized and singular, but the plural of “virus” is “viruses.” Always has been. There is no Latin plural of “virus” because the knowledge that disease was caused by distinct strains of microscopic organisms came over a thousand years after the last native Latin speaker died. In actual Latin it's a collective fucking noun like “water” that takes verbs in the god damned singular. To even use the word “virii” at all you have to find out that “virus” has a
Latin root and then misapply Latin pluralization rules onto an English word. Every single person who uses the word “virii” unironically is an asshole who thinks they are way smarter than they actually are.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're like “Frank, you don't get upset at all when people use the word 'mooses' and only get slightly annoyed when people call octopuses '1440 degrees,' why the massive hate boner for 'virii'?” And that's kind of fair. The thing is that while you get a pass for simple ignorance (such as not knowing that the plural of “ox” is “oxen”), it takes a little bit of work to get to “virii.” Not a lot of work, because if you did any serious research on the subject you'd know that using the word “virii” is incorrect and makes you sound like an asshole. It's like in gradeschool when some snot nosed brat “corrects” you to say that the capital of Nevada is Las Vegas. They really put effort into “correcting” something that was right into something that was wrong.

Not that this matters, but this is all an aside anyway. But even if there were an attested Latin plural of "virus" it would almost certainly be either "viri" or "vira" and not "virii". The word breaks most of the usual rules for Latin nouns but there's no way the plural could be "virii".

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Not that this matters, but this is all an aside anyway. But even if there were an attested Latin plural of "virus" it would almost certainly be either "viri" or "vira" and not "virii". The word breaks most of the usual rules for Latin nouns but there's no way the plural could be "virii".

I looked it up in my Church Latin dictionary (I'm Catholic) and the Church (which is basically the only user of living latin these days) treats it as you said, a 2nd/masculine declension word. So its vir/viri. Virii could happen if the original word was virius, with the stem being viri- not vir. Vira would only happen if it was 2nd neuter, meaning the original word would be virum in the nominative. There is, however, a third option that you missed. If it was a 3rd declension than it could be virus/vires. But that's splitting hairs.

There is no Latin plural of “virus” because the knowledge that disease was caused by distinct strains of microscopic organisms came over a thousand years after the last native Latin speaker died.

Sorry to be nitpicky about this, but since you are making kind of a big deal about it I kinda need to point it out. Virus does indeed have a latin root, its from v(elongated i)rus, meaning poison or an ooze. The direct use of the latin word in english dates back about to the 1600's and the idea of virus being tiny things that kill people is basically just an added definition that became the standard meaning of the word in English and in Latin. So yes, virus has a plural in both English and Latin and its been used for a damn long time. Viruses is one of those modern constructions that happens to foreign words as they become more integrated into the normal language.

As for bacteria and viruses/viri in general, cell theory itself is actually pretty ancient. Socrates basically killed it in Ancient Greece when his theory of essences (fire, water, air, ether) rose to dominance, but there were philosophers at the time who, though they couldn't prove it, believed in basic cell theory. Hippocrates himself was a firm believer in natural causes of disease and sickness, though he still was in part a humorist by nature. Microorganisms themselves were discovered in the 1670's, by a Dutchman (Antonie van Leeuwenhoek) who could barely see them, which is in part why it took over a hundred years for his research to come back to prominence. That discovery would have been written in Latin, like all scientific journals of the time. So yeah, its not a wrong statement per se, but there is a lot of nuance to this issue and its kind of a cool subject anyway.

[jadagul]

Not that this matters, but this is all an aside anyway. But even if there were an attested Latin plural of "virus" it would almost certainly be either "viri" or "vira" and not "virii". The word breaks most of the usual rules for Latin nouns but there's no way the plural could be "virii".

I looked it up in my Church Latin dictionary (I'm Catholic) and the Church (which is basically the only user of living latin these days) treats it as you said, a 2nd/masculine declension word. So its vir/viri. Virii could happen if the original word was virius, with the stem being viri- not vir. Vira would only happen if it was 2nd neuter, meaning the original word would be virum in the nominative. There is, however, a third option that you missed. If it was a 3rd declension than it could be virus/vires. But that's splitting hairs. Virus does have a latin root, but its from v(elongated i)rus, meaning poison or an ooze.

The dictionary I use has it listed as virus/viri/n. I think there are attested uses of "virus" in the accusative with the form "virus," which is why it's listed like that. Anyone who cares about more detail on this can check out here for instance, but the short version is that that word is weird and it's not entirely clear how the Romans thought of it. Either way, there's no obvious or attested Latin plural, so you can't use it even if you want to.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

The dictionary I use has it listed as virus/viri/n. I think there are attested uses of "virus" in the accusative with the form "virus," which is why it's listed like that. Anyone who cares about more detail on this can check out here for instance, but the short version is that that word is weird and it's not entirely clear how the Romans thought of it. Either way, there's no obvious or attested Latin plural, so you can't use it even if you want to.

Interesting, both the Perseus project dictionary and the ecclesiarchal dictionary (which is better for "modern words" latin, in part because they are the only folks who need to evolve the language to deal with modern objects) give the plural as viri and according the the ecclisiarchal dictionary there is some (but very rare) precedent for its use "the assassin knew the use of many different poisons". The problem is of course that these uses are in the post 1000 AD context and not really Latin as we know it, but latin as a universal translation language. Its an interesting problem dealing with the language, but the post is right (and I was wrong) that in the Roman context, virus does not have a plural and occupies a different grammatical context. Cool!

[silva]

Just a quick aside:

In a rare bout of self awareness, this chapter ends with an essay about how characters have very low chances of succeeding at tasks. There's some lame justification about this is because the chances listed are for your chance of success under stressful conditions, but really it's because we're looking at a BRP hack. Characters having tragicomic failure rates at even the most basic tasks has been a staple of RuneQuest and RuneQuest derived games since the late seventies. Percentile die roll-under systems have an easy enough time calculating what your chance of success is (it's already in percents for fuck's sake), but have a horrible time describing actual competence. The entire range of potential character ability is defined in terms of how often you fail at standard tasks. It's stuck in comedy of failure mode, because characters fail a ridiculous amount of the time.

My experience with Runequest do not corroborates this. First, the initial skill ratings dont start as low as you make it to be (I had characters with skills in the 75 or so), and most importantly, the skill ratings measure your competency in stressful situations, not standard ones as you put it.

[erik]

Just a quick aside:

There's some lame justification about this is because the chances listed are for your chance of success under stressful conditions, but really it's because we're looking at a BRP hack.

most importantly, the skill ratings measure your competency in stressful situations, not standard ones as you put it.

God. Just... God.

[silva]

... The entire range of potential character ability is defined in terms of how often you fail at standard tasks. It's stuck in comedy of failure mode, because characters fail a ridiculous amount of the time.

Yeah.. god.

[Whipstitch]

Man, this fucking guy.

Silva, your brain is tweaking out over the word "standard." Don't do that. It's dumb. See, the practical application of some skills really only happens during stressful situations, so setting the bar such that people fail all the fucking time whenever things get modestly difficult is tantamount to saying that you cannot have competent characters in a variety of different fields. Those fields, ironically enough, are exactly the kinds of things that people want to do in RPG games, like operating a vehicle in rough weather or get away from a slasher. It amounts to a game of Mother May I: Either the MC thinks it's easy enough that you don't have to roll or he asks for a roll and you fail.

[silva]

See, the practical application of some skills really only happens during stressful situations, so setting the bar such that people fail all the fucking time whenever things get modestly difficult..

Thats the problem - I havent seen this happens in my Runequest games. Perhaps this is a feat of Unknown Armies instead of the whole BRP family as Frank seems to indicate ? Or perhaps the latest edition of Runequest tweaked this somehow ?

[Username17]

First: silva is a twatshitter. I think that's pretty clear to everyone at this point.
Second: A seventy five percent chance to succeed at specialist tasks is actually fucking awful. The fucking Three Stooges don't fail one quarter of the time. That's too high a failure rate for slapstick comedy.
Third: BRP games do not normally give you skill ratings of 75%. They just fucking don't. If you look at the examples, starting characters don't get anything over 55%. Hell, in Unknown Armies, 55% is literally the starting character ceiling.
Fourth: Old School Runequest is online [pdf]. You can go read it if you want. Skills start at 5. Not seventy five, fucking five. The actual single digit number. And they are rolled on a d100. With good stats they might get a 5 or even 10% bonus. Yeehaw!

-Username17

[silva]

A seventy five percent chance to succeed at specialist stressful tasks is actually fucking awful

But thats similar for starting characters of most games out there no ? It would be interesting to see what are the odds for similar starting characters skills in other games. Do you have this data for Shadowrun, D&D 3/4, Vampire, etc ?

BRP games do not normally give you skill ratings of 75%. They just fucking don't. If you look at the examples, starting characters don't get anything over 55%. Hell, in Unknown Armies, 55% is literally the starting character ceiling.

Old School Runequest is online [pdf]. You can go read it if you want. Skills start at 5. Not seventy five, fucking five. The actual single digit number. And they are rolled on a d100. With good stats they might get a 5 or even 10% bonus. Yeehaw!

The versions of Runequest I remember most are 3rd and the latest one (6th), and both are different from what you put above. In Runequest 6th, for eg, your starting skill is informed by the sum of two relevant stats (so the average will be around 22%), and then you distribute more pts in 3 more steps (Culture, Career, Starting Age). And while most skills will range between 30 and 50, its normal to see ones going to the 70s or even 80s.

[RadiantPhoenix]

In D&D3e, if you approximate every encounter as a single save-or-die on each party member, every character has a 90% chance of passing any save, every encounter gives XP as level=APL, and resurrection costs a level, the characters will eventually reach level 1 from any level.

[silva]

But approximating encounters is not a good comparison, since Runequest encounters are also a series of skill checks instead of just one. I was referring to something envolving a single skill check like climbing a wall (under stress) or spotting a trap (also, under stress).

[Ancient History]

Book Two: Part Two:
The World of Our Desires



Our musical accompaniment today will be The Wizard. We could have linked the Daffy Duck version, but we did not.

FrankT:

These two chapters are more than a quarter of the book. They are more than half of the book that anyone gives a fuck about. When one of your friends rants at you about how cool Unknown Armies is, he's almost certainly talking about something in this section. Which makes their decision to tell new players to not read it all the more puzzling. To the extent that Unknown Armies has hooks, these are them. You'd think they'd want to lead with their best foot, but apparently they don't.


Long Chapter is Long.

Honestly, it gives the whole thing a sort of mystery cult feel. Someone who is going to gamemaster is supposed to read the whole book, and that's where “the good stuff” is. The rest of the players are just supposed to read the part that contains some dude's half-assed Call of Cthulhu house rules. The disparity of information probably helps to make the one guy who has read the book feel even cooler about everything, but honestly I've never heard of anyone having a successful long campaign of this game, and the disparity of information probably helps make the other players feel even more shat on.

AncientH:

There was this guy who was crazy: speaking in other voices crazy, bad trouble crazy. Yet he kept it together enough to have a girlfriend, and one day when his facade of sanity crumbled and she asked him the obvious question: "Have you thought about getting professional help?" He said the first fearful thing that came into his crazymaking head: "But what if I come out a happy, well-rounded person?"

Welcome to the world of the adept.

Part of the appeal of Unknown Armies is that it eschews a lot of the conventions of RPGs up to that point. Wizards aren't generic. There are references to existing magical traditions, sure, but the setting isn't based on it, nor does it bring forward a lot of new gods and shit to memorize. Boil away the thin veneer of dukes and cabals and shit and what Unknown Armies sells you is an attitude and a handful of ideas, and in the rather staid atmosphere of most RPGs, that'll carry you a long, long way.

Chapter Ten: Adepts

AncientH:

The whole world is waiting for you and they don't even know it.

The thing about any sort of underground is that it tends to be a relatively small, intimate thing - the people in it might hate each other, but they also know each other, and the occult underground of Unknown Armies is small enough that the player characters should have impact just by being there...a trenchcoat brigade standing alone against the forces of night. In practice, well, maybe not. But it's the first idea they sell you on.



Adepts are, arguably, the big push in the book. The idea is that you have a school of whatever-mancy, it's an obsession with something that has so twisted your worldview that reality itself breaks down and starts conforming to some of your batshit insanity. Which is really a sweet place to be, because you get to turn your mental illness into a path to power. Unknown Armies doesn't give a reason for this, it gives you a couple-three theories and a few magickal laws ("Law of Symbolic Tension," "Law of Transaction," and "Law of Obedience") - which boils down to:

1) Magick doesn't make sense.
2) Magick has a price.
3) You only get one school of magick.



#1 is the hardest for everybody to come to grips with, because it's the "1 + 1 = purple" problem. It's someone finding cosmic enlightenment in the patterns of a doily or making a pact with Satan by listening to heavy metal records backwards and having a conversation with the voices there. More specifically, every school of magic is supposed to have an inherent paradox built into it - like the pornomancer that can't have meaningful sex. It's a weird idea to get your head around, and there's never a why to it, and the supplements with new schools never quite huffed the same gas fumes, if you catch my drifts.

#2 and #3 are, by contrast, pretty easy to understand. Magic requires sacrifice (soul, sanity, charges, hell even Visa cards), and you're a munchkinny fuck if you want to have more than one adept school.

FrankT:

This game has 12 magical traditions and this chapter spends 47 pages explaining them. The other 12 pages of the chapter are given over to magic rules. You'd think that magic rules would have gone in the previous chapter, and when you come across crap like “The Laws of Magick” then that thought narrows to simple certainty. Organizationally, it simply would have been better if the Adepts chapter had been basically just a page on how to read the entries of the magical traditions and then the magical traditions, with all the general magic rules in the god damn chapter that supposedly has the fucking general magic rules in it.



Despite the gonzo deliveries, magic in this setting is pretty much Crowleyist will working and/or early eighties Chaos Magick.

The actual Laws of Magick themselves are basically simple game mechanics drawn up with fancy looking rants. You aren't allowed to pick multiple magic paths because game balance, and you aren't allowed to cast bigger spells than you can afford because game balance. But this is conveyed in tortuous prose as “The Law of Obedience” and “The Law of Transaction.”

AncientH:

Nominally these "laws" only apply to adepts, so I can sort of see why they included them here...sortof.

Anyway, where thaumaturges get rituals, adepts get spells. Spells are functionally almost identical to Sphere magic in the Mage games, except instead of having spheres you just describe the effect, Mister Cavern picks a charge cost and any shift for your roll, and then you roll to see if you can cast it. Spells came in three flavors: blast, formula (similar to Mage rotes or rituals), and random (improvised spells). Improvised spells are basically Rule Zero written several times in large letters: Mister Cavern decides what you can do and what it costs, no argument.

FrankT:

Much is made over “blasts,” which are the default magickal attack. And by much being made, I mean that the rules go on for quite some time and I don't know how they work. Magic blast attacks use their own bizarre dice mechanic where you can take penalties to your skill to roll extra dice and then pick and choose which die you want to be the tens place. This is annoying on several levels. Firstly, because it's simply a solvable problem how many dice you want to buy, and then that's the number of dice you roll every time you use your blast. The designers have to know this, because they gave a little chart for effective skill ratings with obsession skills earlier in the book, but they don't provide a helpful little chart here – the players are just supposed to play accountants and dragons for a while before the game starts. A 40 with 2 dice is “effectively” a 63, a 30 with 3 dice is “effectively” a 66, and so on. It's painful combinatorials, but it's not actually hard and there's no part of it that is dynamic or interesting during the game.

But it's no less irritating in that this is page 114 and they are telling you that you might need five or six dice. The beginning of the book said you needed two dice. Five or six is more than two, and I think it is plain dirty pool to contradict the “what you need to play” in an aside when the book is one third over.


Once you've math hammered the combinatorials, you can figure out what you're actually supposed to roll when you use your blast attacks.

But as we get into the actual traditions, it becomes clear that I really don't know how this fucking system is supposed to work. The money mages have their blast being themed as forcing enemies to hurt themselves, with examples of shooting themselves or putting their face through a TV. Does that do normal blast damage or does it do damage based on the self harm it motivates? Does it take place on the adept's turn or the target's? Does it use up the target's next action? I don't fucking know. These rules don't fucking say. It's all secrets and poetry and basic things like “how much time does this take?” aren't handled well if they are referenced at all.

AncientH:

Now, you can actually become an adept during play; there's a section on self-taught adepts and mentored adepts. It basically requires you to fail several sanity tests until you become permanently nuts in the "Self" sanity track; you gain a pittance of Magick skill and a school. Congratulations, here's your meds. After breaking you down to the point where magic seems plausible, you or your mentor then build you back up to the point of a near-functioning human being, get issued your tinfoil hat, and are shoved out into the world.


Contrary to this image, there are expressly no organizations among "schools." There isn't an invisible college of pornomancers where you go to learn pornomancy or anything, and people of the same school expressly don't get along with each other because minor differences in understanding of their schools turn into huge sectarian conflicts.

Magick is always an Obsession skill for adepts (it replaces your old Obsession skill), so you get "cherries" - little bonuses (when they're positive) that can affect you.

FrankT:

The actual mechanics for using magick (with a K) are generally that you make a skill check. Each magical tradition has its own skill, and each person is allowed exactly one magical tradition. Also, you're allowed one
obsession skill, but your magical skill is literally required to be your obsession skill. So while the different magical traditions are all wildly different in some ways, all the characters are pretty much exactly the same. You have a “goodness” skill that determines how good you are at pretty much everything, and you max out that skill because you're not a fucking idiot. So while one player will have “videomancy” written on their sheet and another player will have “entropomancy” written on their sheet, these two skills are used in pretty much exactly the same way and are statistically likely to be literally exactly the same number.


Unknown Armies introduces complication for complication's sake rather often.

Note that also since the skill lists are fucking secret to new players and there is absolutely no way in fucking hell that you were ever going to guess that “Epideromancy” was a skill that you should write on your character sheet, that new players are going to necessarily start with a big zero in whatever magical skill they ever unlock. So they are never ever going to ever amount to anything magically. Meaning that the whole promise of Scoobies uncovering magical secrets and joining the occult underground that was made back in Book One is a fucking lie.

AncientH:

Keep in mind that you have limited points in the beginning, and thaumaturgy, adept Magick, and avatar Magick all require their own skillz. So if you do want to be a big-time wizard, you're trying to max out three skills, minimum, just to not suck too badly.

FrankT:

There are twelve magic paths, and each one gets about four pages. Not necessarily exactly four pages, some get more or less. Cliomancy gets five and Entropomancy only 3. But four is what you get most of the time. This is both too much and too little. It's a massive infodump. The twelve magical traditions are basically a seventh of the entire book and constitute more pagespace than the actual rules of the game that new players are allowed to read. But you really don't get that much meat on any of these guys. Each type of Adept gets six minor spells and seven significant spells. And while that's each almost as big as the whole spell list in the Magick chapter, it's still smaller. Each Adept type only has 13 spells, it only takes up so much page space because the prose is... not spare. It takes six fucking paragraphs to explain the spell that impoverishes someone by making them lose twice as much money every day until they have no dollars in their bank account.



This underlies the primary contradiction of this book. Unknown Armies sells itself on flavor, but it doesn't ever tell you enough about anything to go anywhere with it. It's fun to read about Plutomancy, but there isn't really enough Plutomantic magic to tell cooperative stories about it. You'd definitely have to make up new spells if you wanted to really have an RPG. The rules for making your own spells really come down to “fucking make something up,” the guidelines just aren't there in a usefully usable form.

AncientH:

I'm not convinced there was one person writing all of the adept school entries. Each one is so fucking different, I'm pretty sure that Tines and Stolze split the difference, and maybe drunk-wrestled for a couple. Nominally what you're supposed to look at and care about from a game-system perspective are the "Stats" for the school - a listing of what you need to do to generate a minor, significant, and major charge; a taboo; an idea of what their random magic covers; how many starting charges they get; and some "tips" which are a rough guidelines for how to get charges/how many charges the MC should award the studious PC.

But that's only a fraction of the total entry for each school. There are specific concerns for each school, blast style, a bunch of formula spells, and a rumor section that's maybe supposed to be an adventure hook but more often than not is weird magick wanck.

FrankT:

The schools of magic are nothing like balanced. They aren't even a little bit balanced if you look at them in a bad light. There are clear winners and losers. The basic effects of spellcasting is thirteen completely arbitrary
spells for each school, most of which are terrible wastes of time but some of which are very powerful. Also, each type of Adept has a writeup for the blast, although as mentioned earlier in some cases the description of the blast sounds like it has different rules than the normal ones, but that's never explicitly stated. Personamancers don't get a blast at all. The basic currencies of spellcasting are various levels of “charges,” and each tradition of magic does different shit to get their charges. The shit you have to do varies wildly in difficulty and repeatability. It's not just that specifically some groups can use Thaumaturgy to power up charges and others can't because go fuck yourself – it's that some require you to work for hours and others let pick up multiple charges in minutes. If a plutomancer works the cash register at a Safeway or Frys, he basically gets a charge every time he rings up a customer, while the aforementioned Personamancer gets one charge for every hour she spends in full stage makeup delivering monologues in a funny voice. As a pornomancer you need to perform a ritual sex act based on a mid-nineties porn series to get a single charge.



The different types of characters also get different amounts of starting charges at the beginning of the game. But based on how easy or difficult it is to get new charges, this doesn't even pretend to make any fucking difference.

AncientH:

We're not going to get to every school, so I'll just hit some quick rundowns:

Bibliomancers are book lovers who get off of collecting and owning books, but not necessarily reading them - just the physical ownership of the book, the quality and rarity and the edition. Most bibliomancers specialized in a specific type of book, like Bibles or Oprah's Book Club editions or comics or something, and their magical power is literally tied to how many books they physically own - and they can never loan or sell them, unless it's to get a better book. Minor and significant charges just require money (at about $100 per minor charge) and diligent searching; acquiring a major charge requires getting a unique book like the Necronomicon or the gold discs of Mormon or something.

Cliomancers are the masters of Trivial Pursuit; their magic specializes in "general knowledge" that "everybody knows," and they get charges off of visiting famous landmarks that are widely known by many people. They don't have a blast, and while you can harvest minor or significant charges just by doing a walking tour of Washington D.C. or London, to harvest a major charge you need to be the first cliomancer to visit some famous place in ten years. On the flip side, your charges only last a month and fade away if not used.

Cliomancy also has some bullshit about immortal Atlanteans that makes me angry.

Dipsomancers are alcoholics, for whom blood alcohol level equals power. To do magick, they have to be totally smashed, and will spend a minimum of three hours per day on the toilet, lose friends and family, have trouble hanging onto a job, and probably die of cirrhosis of the liver. Minor charges come from taking a drink and getting tipsy; significant charges come from drinking from a historically potent or significant vessel; major charges come from drinking a unique liquor of some kind. If you sober up, you lose all your charges.

Dipsomancers are one of the most-remembered schools in the game, one of the famous ones. It lets you get magical power by turning your enemy's skull into a chalice and drinking whisky out of their brain pan, and their greatest formula spells let you literally bottle up a demon or ghost and drain their knowledge and power sip by sip.

FrankT:

Every type of magician has an annoying taboo – a thing that if they do they lose all their magic and have to start over from zero. Since some characters can generate dozens or hundreds of charges in a day and others can't, this may or may not make any difference. The taboos are in many cases totally fucked: pornomancers aren't allowed to have non-ritual sex, thus making their presumed character concept unworkable. Other taboos are totally gamable – the plutomancer loses his unspent charges if he spends more than $1000 on a single bill, but there's nothing preventing him from setting up installment plans to pay for his mansion in weekly or even daily payments and never even fucking notice that he has nominal limits on spending.



Each one is supposed to be an ironic paradox, but it's not so much ironic as stupid in most cases. I don't want to play a Narco-Alchemist who isn't allowed to take LSD. And yet, I actually don't give a single fuck if my skin mage is required to cut her own hair.

AncientH:

Entropomancers get their power by playing Russian roulette and win. They gain charges by surrendering themselves to chance, be it gambling with money (minor), serious injury or death (significant), or the lives of you and everyone nearby (major). In exchange, you get coincidence magic: always a cop when you need one, desperate for a shag and the hottie at the bar is on the rebound from a nasty divorce, bank error in your favor, etc.


Chev Chelios: Legendary Entropmancer

Epideromancers are cutters. They gain power by hurting themselves. The more they bleed, the more juice they get. Major charges require some Odin-level shit like plucking out an eye or cutting off a hand. On the other hand, if you let anyone else modify your body - tattoos, dentistry, haircut, proctology exam - you lose all your charges. Also, you can't use magick to heal your epideromancy cuts. You can use your magick to alter flesh though. Not quite Vicissitude style, but close!

I never liked those nipples anyway.

Mechanomancers use clockwork to work miracles. The paradox is that it used to be bleeding edge, and now it's a relic. This was before steampunk or etsy was a thing. Mechanomancers get charges from working on their gears (minor), giving up a minor memory from their past or acquiring a significant historical object (significant), and to give up a major memory or get a complete, working, historically significant piece of machinery (major). But they can't incorporate any tech into their clockworks from after about 1800, and you can only build magic into your hand-built mechanical machines.

Which means yes, you could potentially get a little factory going of mechanomancers each doing their clockwork bit, if you could get them in a room together without killing each other, and yes they're going to be on eBay like the bibliomancers putting money against fantastic watches and Swiss cuckoo clocks and shit. But if they put some gears on your iphone, they lose all their mojo.

FrankT:

The twelve magical traditions are bizarrely aggressively specific. Yet at the same time they are too sketchily described to really do anything with. Pornomancers aren't sex magicians in general, they are the followers of a specific sex cult based on re-enacting the works of a specific divinely ascended mid-nineties porn star. Honestly, it's difficult for me to imagine caring about the Naked Goddess. She gets mentioned a lot, but she doesn't get described at all. So I don't care. If sex magic has to follow the script of a specific series of porn films, shouldn't we at least get told what kind of porn they were? It was the mid-nineties, so
I assume she had big hair and a trimmed but unshaved pubic region, but was she pretending to be a lonely housewife? A naughty school girl? A saucy flight attendant? Are these movies straight sex? Group sex? Softcore only? BDSM? 2G1C? What? Are pornomancers required or prevented from taking it in the butt? We don't fucking know the answer to any of this shit.



By making pornomancy into a specific filmography based on a specific fictional actress, players of pornomancers are then required to use the specific costumes and sexual assortments of that specific actress. But that information doesn't fucking exist. And while you could say that leaving the sex recipes unwritten is an insurance policy against players being forced to have their characters perform sex acts they aren't comfortable with, that's actually bullshit. First of all, one of the things you're supposed to do is discover sex acts of the Naked Goddess back when she was a mortal and then perform them – that's how you do the big hoodoo magic. Which means that the actual dynamic is that the MC pops sex acts on you in the middle of the game and then your character has to do them. That has the huge potential to be creepy as hell, especially when you discover that the gamemaster is a looner or rape fetishist or some fucking thing. Secondly, one of the suggested global campaigns is for everyone to be a pornomancer, which requires each person at the table to have the same list of allowed sex acts. Again, that's pretty much a recipe to push peoples' boundaries into unhappy territory. Just because you're OK with another player having their character go ass to mouth doesn't mean you're OK with having your character doing that.

It's just puzzling. People like sex magick. Sex magick is fun. It's sexy. It has sex in the name. But then this book had to go make it all weird. It's almost a complete list of things to not do if you want to have sex magick in your game. Don't bring sex acts into the game without other people being comfortable with them. Don't force your fetishes on the other players. Don't restrict other players from having their fetishes. Just don't do that kind of crap. This book does it all. This is the worst sex magick writeup I've ever seen, FATAL included. Because at least in FATAL it's supposed to be an overlong dead baby joke and being offensive and stupid is kind of the point. Here, you're supposed to play it serious and then have it sprung on you in the middle of the damn game that you're supposed to re-enact the time your idol was molested by her uncle or something and then everything dissolves into uncomfortable acrimony.

AncientH:

Narco-Alchemists read Cannabis Alchemy a bit too strongly. Narco-Alchemists are a lot like dipsomancers in that they're addict-magicians; where the dispomancers need to be shitfaced, the narco-alchemists require serious brainbending drugs. They get fucked up to perfect their spirits. "Minor narquis" draw the line at that - they're users who get magical charges off of doing hard drugs; "significant narquis" actually brew their own drugs. It's the difference between being a meth addict, and being a meth addict who owns his own meth lab...and who gains permanent superpowers from the supermeth he brews.

There are a few drawbacks: no way to generate a major charge, no blasts, and the "works" that significant narquis generate in the hopes of creating a significant charge are still really gonzo "I'm off my tits" drugs. Significant narquis lose all charges and powers if they ever use street drugs instead of their own home-brewed magic crack.

Personamancers put on a mask, pretending to be something or someone they're not. At first because it was easier, or it was expected of them, but then because they found out that it gave them magic. All they had to do was never really be themselves. They gain charges by acting in front of an audience (minor), pretending to be somebody else for a day (significant), or fooling an audience of ten million people or more (major). Their magick affects identity, which is subtle but scary: they could take a dispomancer and make them no longer be an alcoholic. No blast. Lose charges if you show any of your Passions in front of someone else.

Plutomancers gain magic by gaining money. The paradox is that if they spend money, they lose magic. So these are the millionaires that lie about their age to get a discount ticket at the theater, or hoarders with ten million dollars in gold coins under their bed but eat ramen like college students and steal condiments from fast food places. To gain charges, you need someone to give you money as a lump sum: $100 (minor), $1000 (significant), $100 million (major). Stealing doesn't count, but getting a reward or fencing the loot would. Spending more than $1000 as a lump sum and you lose all your charges. Plutomancy is good for getting what you want; it can be used to call physical items towards you.

Frank's covered Pornomancers in sufficient detail, I think.

Urbanomancers are city magicians; they love the city, but the city doesn't give a shit about them. Minor charges come from studying the city, significant charges come from interfering with the city significantly, major charges come from permanently altering the city somehow. Urbanomancers lose charges if they ever touch the dirt on which a city is built, and their magick fails outside the city limits.

Basically, this is one part megapolisomancy and one part Jack Hawksmoor.


Tokyo is just a giant battlesuit we haven't learned how to use yet.

Videomancers get power from the TV, connecting with millions of people through the shared medium of television...however, you do this by being slave to the TV, unable to interact with people in any way. Oh, wait, the internet. Shut the fuck up! Anyway, videomancers charge up by watching their favorite programs and lose charges when they miss them (wait, what about TiVo? Shut the FUCK up, I said.) Minor charges come from reruns, significant charges from watching new episodes (nightly news count as new episodes), major charges come from starring in an episode of your favorite program. Reruns count for missed charges, so Nick At Night probably screwed a lot of Videomancers over; no word on streaming TV.

The chapter ends with some miscellaneous rules on creating new formula spells and customizing old schools of magick.

Things they don't really address are "What the fuck do you do as an adept, aside from generate and spend charges?" or "How the fuck are adepts supposed to work together in cabals?"

Chapter Eleven: Avatars


No.


Not exactly...



There we go.

FrankT:

Avatar magick is when you re-enact the life and times of a Jungian archetype so hard that you get magical powers. You may ask how exactly this is different from the pornomancers that I was ranting about last chapter who spend their times re-enacting the stuff that The Goddess did in order to get magical powers. And um... hmmm... it's kind of not. But Avatar Magick is in the Avatars chapter and the Adepts who basically do that are in the Adepts chapter. Because fuck you, that's why.

AncientH:

Pornomancers are supposed to have some inherent paradox to their shit - they have sex to gain power, but not for pleasure; Plutocrats earn money to gain power, but not to spend it; Bibliomancers get books to own the books, not to read them, etc. The thing about the avatars is that you follow the archetypes (or one of their major incarnations, like Captain Kirk as the Pilgrim); ideally you move from mimicking someone else to becoming the incarnation of it, from quoting badasses to being a badass.

FrankT:

There are fourteen Avatar examples in this chapter. That's more than the twelve adept paths, but it all squeezes into 30 pages because each Avatar archetype only gets a single page and there is a lot of art. Some of the archetypes seem properly, well, archetypical. Like “The Fool” or “The Warrior.” Others are shit like “The Flying Woman” and “The Mystic Hermaphrodite” that probably should have been left on the cutting room floor to make room for more iconic icons.


Only a few of the archetypes presented are as iconic as this.

AncientH:

Avatars have an Avatar skill, and the percentile in the Avatar skill determines what shit you can do, which are called channels. You don't fuck around with charges, but you have adept-style taboos and a bunch of suggested filler material for playing your avatar. Channels come in skill levels of 1-50%, 51-70%, 71-90%, and 91+%. Which means that at the low level, Avatars can do jack shit and have very little chance of even accomplishing that, and at (theoretical) high levels they can do some very impressive shit and are almost guaranteed to succeed. If you minmax at game start, you're in the middle tier, with a slightly better than 50% chance to do some moderate effect.

FrankT:

You can start as an Avatar, or you can try to acquire Avatarhood during play. Getting it during play takes 15 weeks and gives you an Avatar skill of 11 which you can then raise normally with experience. So that just isn't going to fucking happen and it's kind of insulting for the book to even pretend to give you this as an option.

Fundamentally the authors don't seem to understand how fucked people are if they try to buy up skills from zero during play. Over and over again the game gives you the option of buying into new powers by purchasing new skills from a cold start. And this just doesn't work at all. I don't even understand how this could be a second edition.

AncientH:

While adepts get random magic and specific formulaic effects, Avatar channels tend to be much more broad and ill-defined. For example, at 71-90% a Demagogue can start influencing belief systems in mass consciousness - she decides Hemingway was homosexual, then suddenly grad students around the world start writing term papers on it, as if the same idea had occurred to all of them concurrently.

...which is rife for abuse, if you're a certain type of player. I'd try to come up with an idea where all the other Demagogues got the idea to get people to send me money, and then fuck off and go live like a king in Patagonia before you could say "No backsies!" Of course, this is one of those powers which only guarantee an effect, not an outcome. So the idea might be out there, but if it's too silly then no-one will act on it...or maybe a little old lady in Fuckitall, Idaho will mail you her life savings and die in poverty. Depends on how much the gamemaster has had to drink.

So, to finish this chapter up, a quick run-down of the avatars, taboos, and powers.

The Demagogue. Cannot admit they're wrong. Ever. Can adjust the world-view of other people. Indistinguishable from skilled lying.

The Executioner. Kills people, but cannot decide who to kill - always has to have someone else tell them to kill someone before they can do it. Lets you get very good at killing people.

The Flying Woman. Females only; doesn't ask permission and doesn't give a fuck about your opinion. Succeeds against any power that would hold her back or keep her down - including fucking gravity.

The Fool. Mind cannot go above 50, and cannot act suspicious of anyone. Gains synchronicity: the world seems to shape itself so stuff turns out as you need it to be. Always have the exact change for pizza, always Peso Pussy Night when you need to get laid, etc.

The Masterless Man. Guys only; cannot have a master, can't stay in the same place for long or own more shit than you can pack up within 12 hours. Gain combat bonuses.

The Merchant. Never gives anything away ("Damn shame about Christmas"), cannot get the worse of any deal. Can call up demons to make deals with them, and at high levels people have to pay you to hurt you.

The Messenger. Cannot deny the truth. In exchange, gets the ability to deliver messages with fewer obstacles, tell the truth convincingly, some vague divination abilities, and the ability to show up somewhere important. Maddeningly vague.

The Mother. Cannot harm a child, or let a child be harmed by inaction. This is pretty vague, since a mother could kill a child to prevent it from being "corrupted." Gains powers to protect/heal children, and at highest level cannot be killed in presence of an endangered child.

The MVP. Cannot showboat, or be publicly proven to have cheated, broken the law, or otherwise tarnish their image. In exchange, draws power from fans to excel at his sport, and at higher levels gives back, his wins translating directly to improvement in fans' lives.

The Mystic Hermaphrodite. Cannot be unambiguous about anything other than dedication to the Avatar path; this is sort of like the version of True Neutral where for every good deed you have to do a balancing evil deed. In exchange you can sense gender identity, when people gain charges nearby, change your biological gender (with a small chance of becoming a functional hermaphrodite), and gain a charge from changing genders and spend them to do random shit.

The Pilgrim. Can only go towards a single goal, and cannot dawdle along the way. In exchange, you have an easier time doing shit, especially long journeys, re-route doors as if they were portals, and can also curse someone to be perpetually trapped in your closet.


That fucker, right there. Can reset any doors you open to his closet. You open the door, you step into his closet. You open the closet door, you step into...his closet.

The Savage. Unable to be deceitful using language, uncomfortable using, building, or repairing machines. Including driving cars. In exchange, you get a body like Brad Pitt, can use your Avatar skill for Tarzan-like antics, talk to animals, and are harder to kill with guns or magic.

The True King. Must have a Realm (land and/or followers) they protect and take responsibility for. So you can be King of 7th Street, King of the Cops, King of the 7th Street Cops, etc. Realm and King are linked, and both can serve and protect the other.

The Warrior. Has to choose some concept or thing they are against - women, sex before marriage, Serbians, drugs, illiteracy, etc. - that they cannot compromise with under any circumstances. In exchange, gains bonuses when pursuing his war against his chosen enemy; one of the examples given was for an Al Quaeda Warrior, which seems in poor taste in 2002.

And that's the chapter. As you can see, the avatars are simpler than the adepts, but no less bugfuck insane. The real fun, of course, comes from mixing the two, since a lot of these aren't technically or mechanically incompatible, only brain-meltingly ideologically incompatible. For example, I had my main villain in my short-lived Unknown Armies campaign as a Bibliomancer/True King - he was the superintendent of the public library system, which constituted his Realm, and all the books were technically his - and since he owned them, he didn't lose charges from loaning them out. But he got proper pissed when people stole or didn't return their library books.

Avatars and adepts are such a weird mix of stuff that even the book brings it up like there's only one or two here and there - the most famous one is The Freak, an Epidermomancer/Mystic Hermaphrodite that's heavily into body modification and masochism. There's probably more than a few insane ways to game the system using avatar/adept combos, but to do it proper requires a lot more patience in gaming than I've ever managed.

Next up: Book 3, part one![/img]

[codeGlaze]

Here's a working link for your first picture from a host that doesn't give a fuck if you link to them.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Here's a working link for your first picture from a host that doesn't give a fuck if you link to them.

Here's the image cleaned up a bit and in base64:

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[/img]

[Blicero]

So were Stolze and Tynes aware of the fact that most of the mechanics in this game were shite? And they figured that the fluff was strong enough to justify the game's existence anyway? Or was there actually some cognitive dissonance going on where they thought these were the rules they used while running the game, even though, in actuality, they would MTP like crazy?

That's something I've never quite figured out when people come out with such obviously flawed resolution mechanics.

[Maxus]

Damn if I know. I once got asked, by a friend-of-a-friend, to give a bit of mechanics advice to a guy 'designing' his own game.

He turned out to be absolutely insane and completely convinced of his own Complete Originality, so he didn't want dice. He wanted it to be played online, so cards were out, as well as something like playing slaps or rock-paper-scissors or a color wheel. It's possible to have made up something based on numbers on webpage and Google Random Search but by this point, he's kept on going on about how he wanted it all be Original and about how fluff and crunch are inextricably linked that I finally just gave up talking.

For the record, by this point, he had the idea of "A steampunk setting in which one corporation maintains a monopoly on steam technology and actually controls thinks. Like Shinra in Final Fantasy 7. Actually, now that I say that, there needs to be other types of crystals which react in different ways to water, than ones that just heat up."

[Username17]

Well, you got a White Wolf hanger-on and a Call of Cthulhu hanger on, and they are writing up a homebrew Mage: the Ascension setting set to someone's Call of Cthulhu house rules. I assume therefore that they thought the rules were good.

What you're looking at is the results of lowered expectations from people playing game systems that are objectively bad. Mage: the Ascension has a terrible rule set. Call of Cthulhu has a terrible rule set. So these guys made some incremental changes to the Call of Cthulhu rules that they thought made the game better, and that made them think that their product was good.

You can see the same sort of lowered expectations leading to fanboyism in silva's posts. He has very little experience with games, and so he rants about how cool Apocalypse World and RuneQuest are. These games are objectively bad, but with limited experience and calibrated they seem good to him.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Unknown Armies is fairly obviously supposed to be a "rules lite" system on the face of it - you've got what's supposed to be a single unifying dice roll mechanic (d100), and character generation could be summed up in about a paragraph, because you only have four attributes, and the skill list is like eight skills plus whatever the fuck you want/can get away with, and it's a fairly limited number of points to divvy up. You can (and we did) argue and decry the laziness of not having a set list of skills and not giving enough points for people to do shit with said skills, but at its root that shouldn't have been super-complicated.

Then it goes to crazy town. There are a bunch of fiddly die mechanics that take the RNG of a simple percentile roll and shit on it. Combat is a complicated mess, every magickal subsystem is its own little unique snowflake, character options are scattered about, sometimes deliberately in parts of the book players aren't supposed to read. Basically, wherever the authors got interested in the system they started adding little fiddly bits from their homebrew campaign, and the result is that what was a boneless system you could hang pretty much any kind of setting on becomes nearly impossible to play as written in practice. It's like all the crazy grognard tables and fiddly bits from D&D that Hackmaster brought in as a joke, but these guys did it seriously - not that they could be fucking bothered with tables, because this isn't that type of game.

[Whipstitch]

But approximating encounters is not a good comparison, since Runequest encounters are also a series of skill checks instead of just one. I was referring to something envolving a single skill check like climbing a wall (under stress) or spotting a trap (also, under stress).

Yes, other settings feature specialists more successful than that. Take D&D, for example. Its skill system has its problems, but it's a very different set of problems and people who want to crank a skill past 11 can find a way to do so. Beyond that, D&D's skill system isn't the games only real mechanic. For example, combatants scale upwards, much, much differently than UA characters do. We may make fun of Fighters a lot here on the Den, but their BAB isn't the problem.

[Ancient History]

Book Three: Part One:
The Living Mirror of Heaven



Our musical accompaniment today will be Do You Believe In Magic. The real version, not the Ronald cover. Tempting as that was.

FrankT:

The third book is only thirty pages, and the difference between it and the game master section is somewhat dubious. You're only supposed to read it if you're going to be playing a Cosmic campaign, which the authors don't really think you should be doing. The first two chapters are 16 pages, and the latter three are so short that they are only 14 pages between them. So we'll be doing chapters 12 and 13 in one post and 14, 15, and 16 together in the next.

AncientH:

This is basically the chapter that gets us into the infamous "cosmic bumfights" aspect of things. When you leave the Scooby monsters of the week behind, and you rise above the level of rival occult gangs duking it out, you're supposed to be at the point where you're a mover and a shaker in the world of the occult underground - someone that can tip or restore the balance of magic, lead the revolution or keep the status quo, even effect the very principles of magic itself.

In reality, it plays out a lot like John Constantine pissing on the King of Vampires.



Chapter Twelve: Cosmic Overview


Remember this? The authors don't seem to.

AncientH:

You are the occult underground.

The idea of the cosmic campaign is that you're one of the lords of the occult underground - not just an occult detective or powerful duke, but something approaching one of the living magickal archetypes of the setting. Your playground is beyond and below the street, the secret realm called the Statosphere; where you have gone through ascension to join the Invisible Clergy to be a godwalker.

Yes, they bolded all those terms. And more.

FrankT:

On the first page of the cosmic overview they reveal that all that stuff about Adepts, the part that anyone actually cares about in this game, is bullshit and they want you to forget about it. Actually, they don't even say that. They just go off on a big rant about how avatar mages scale up to be god walkers by assuming true power by fighting it out highlander style with all the other fuckers trying to follow the same archetype. There is literally no mention of Adepts at all. They don't scale up to the cosmic campaign and there is nothing for them to do in a cosmic campaign. This may be why the third book is so fucking short.

So when the second book sort of made it look like being a mechanomancer of videomancer might be an interesting thing to be but there wasn't really anything interesting for them to do, that's exactly right. The big reveal is... that they haven't actually considered videomancers at all for the metaplot and they don't get a big reveal. Also: go fuck yourself.

AncientH:

The basic idea is that archetypes aren't just abstract figures on tarot cards, they're living ideas embodied by real people - if you raise your avatar rating high enough, you can become the living embodiment of your archetype, and actually change it and sending the last guy to descend back down to Earth (sucks to be you). Of course, when you ascend you basically become an NPC, but there are worse ways to go out.

Of course to get there, you got to kill a few people.


You will never have a chair as fancy as mine!

Seriously, the whole thing about a cosmic campaign is that you have tricked-out avatars fighting each other to take their quickening remove the competition. It would be like if Batman stopped fighting crime for a bit to travel the world beating the shit out of the other Batman-types just to prove he was the One True Batman. There's not a lot of fucking plot you can hang on that, beyond a Highlander: the Series approach, and your reward for seeing it through to the end is that you get to stop playing.

Also, if the number of godwalkers hits 333, the world ends. Nobody knows why or how exactly that works, or how many godwalkers there are. So it sounds a lot like someone was trying to reimagine how Mage: the Ascenscion's apocalypse scenario was supposed to play out...well, fair enow.

As Frank mentioned, thaumaturges and adepts don't even get a mention here. There are no pornomantic godwalkers, no cosmic bum fights to decide the fate of dipsomancy. Which is sad.

FrankT:

Like the previous two books, this book brings out a couple of nearly illegible pages to have their “witness reports” flash fiction pieces. This is wearying. I know it was pretty standard during this period for RPGs to put little one-page pieces of flash fiction into illegible fonts at the beginnings of chapters, but three in a row is over the line.

The actual stories being told are again disjointed and without purpose. This is in essence where the whole “cosmic bumfights” meme comes from. There are powers being described, but the first guy uses his immortality to avoid relapsing into his opiates addiction and work at a video store. Even the “mover and shaker” who is doing awe inspiring magical rituals involving biblical immortals is doing it to... perform boosterism for the Chicago chamber of commerce. That's the “big deal.” Build skyscrapers in Chicago. That's objectively bigger than any of the other schemes that have been talked about in this book, but it still really doesn't seem like it deserves to be on a separate tier from the things mortal humans can contemplate doing.

AncientH:

There's a lot of frustrating things about Unknown Armies. Not just that it doesn't give you the tools to do stuff you might want to do - play a street shaman, stage a demon invasion of New York City, have a familiar, etc. - but it almost seems to go out of the way to keep you from having those things. It wants to be small-scale and underground and I get that, but it just doesn't provide enough context for you to even operate a regular game in, and the rules seem largely designed not to tell you what to do. It is, as someone said in another review, one of those games where first you have to design the fucking game in order to play it.

FrankT:

This chapter lays down Unknown Armies' actual cosmology. It's... a big disappointment actually. There's a big rant about how lots of stuff happens because the second law of thermodynamics makes matter sad (I am not making that up), and then it goes in to the big cosmos reveal: there's nothing in the cosmos. All the stars over your head, the entire galaxy, every other galaxy, and the entire universe out to 12 billion lightyears in every direction is empty void without life or purpose. The Earth is all there is, and even the 8 billion years of universe history before there was an Earth was in some incoherent way a lie. In reality the Earth has been made and remade repeatedly and that's all that matters.

Let me say unequivocally that this is fucking bullshit. The religious philosophy garbage is incoherent garbage, but that's not even what pisses me off. The fucking book in the book is supposed to be cosmic. The chapter is called “Cosmic Overview” and there's no fucking cosmos to view. Over or otherwise. You can clearly see the game's Mage: the Ascension DNA showing here, and it is at least admittedly less bullshit than that. Of course, that's also not setting the bar terribly high.

AncientH:

The "No Justice, Just Us" bit has been done better elsewhere, and even Mage manages a better handle on consensus reality and how you're not sure how much of history has actually happened and how much is in your head. Classic shadows on the cave shit. It's not original, and it's not winning any points from either of us.

More annoyingly, they introduce the Comte de Saint-Germain as an important and mysterious figure. Except he isn't. He is a classic figure in occult conspiracy circles, as evidenced by Foucault's Pendulum, but he's a mortal guy with some tenuous ties to alchemy that lived and died a couple centuries back.

We get a bit more on demons and the afterlife, and props where props are due, it's not pretty. Demons are basically anti-archetypes - instead of the cumulative hopes and dreams of millions of humans, they're the undying petty obsessions of individual humans still clinging tenaciously to existence after the originator died. Which is a long way to say that you can have Hitler come back from the dead riding the body of a seven-year-old girl with a burning desire to enact the Holocaust 2.0, or Mengele possess a fertility specialist and start up the twins experiments again, or Fallen-style serial killers. That's not bad; it does sort of fuck with the original depiction of demons previously in the book though, so I'm not sure how or why you'd make a deal with them or what you're supposed to get out of it.

FrankT:

Like the previous book, this book clues you in to some of the deeper mysteries of the previous chapter and gives you new mysteries to ponder. But I honestly don't care about the name of the videographer who first noticed the ascension of the Naked Goddess, and the new questions are ones I don't give a second fuck about answering. It seriously wants you to fret about who is John Galt Saint Germain. And you know what? I don't give a shit, and I don't think anyone else does either.



Who this guy is or was is supposed to be a big driving mystery, but no one cares.

The big problem I see with this whole section is that the only thing that separates the plot seeds from book three from the plot seeds in book two is that some of them take place outside the United States. Yes, the way you know that things have gone from “global” to “cosmic” is that you might have to go to Egypt. The thing is, by and large these things aren't cosmic problems. They aren't even “global” problems. It's “weird thing is happening in a place and maybe some dudes died.” Few of them are actually things you could tell a story with, and the ones that are fleshed out enough to be a story seed are basically just the sort of thing you might see in an episode of Supernatural. There are some people in Davenport, Idaho who force people to live out tragic plays, for example. Sam and Dean Winchester would solve that in one episode, and probably have enough time to talk about their feelings or get hurt that somebody lied about something. As the supposed payoff for your third level of initiation into the deeper secrets, it's pretty lame.

AncientH:

If John Constantine can save the fucking world without leaving the city limits of London, then that is what he will fucking do. And he doesn't even like London that much, it's just that he's used to it. Having to fly out to Los Angeles or something makes him pissy. So it is with this book.

There's a bunch of stuff here that's supposed to dig deeper into the history of different movers and shakers like burger-flipping occultist conspiracy of Max Attax, but again, who gives a fuck? These are supposed to be your enemies, allies, etc., but they're still talking about individuals and small organizations that don't really share much in the way of common goals. Magick is so idiosyncratic in Unknown Armies that there's not a lot for people to fight over; a couple bibliomancers might go at it over a rare edition, but what the fuck does that have to do with dipsomancers?

Worse, a lot of these individual cabals and sects seem to be...if not independent of the regular adepts and avatar stuff, than not directly attached to it either. It's all weird cults that all seem to have varied levels of understanding of how magick really works, and if they emphasized that it might be useful. One of the major tropes of street level magic is that having a better understanding of how magic works is an edge; it's why John Constantine can keep dealing with a bunch of mafiosos without getting killed, and why you can have a gang rumble a death mage's stash and turn the medical waste of an inner-city abortion clinic into necromantic drugs that are deadlier than meth - to them and their customers.

But we really don't get that. I blame X-Files. For all the weird, freaky shit on X-Files, you always got more conspiracy theory than crime, more backwoods than inner city. Never quite got the desperation and crazy.

FrankT:

Like the previous books, it throws out some rumors. Little sentences or mini-paragraphs of crazy bullshit to provide ambiance. It's basically the same hipster bullshit from the previous books.

Chapter Thirteen: Cosmic Campaign

AncientH:

These are the guidelines for building a cabal for a cosmic campaign. It's a lot like the guidelines for building a Scooby-level cabal, which is to say made of spit and phlegm, and it's not entirely clear if the author read the preceding chapter because that was all about an individual ascending to become a godwalker. It would be like if all the Matrix movies were about getting Neo to the Source so...oh, wait. Fuck.


What the fuck did we win?

FrankT:

This chapter is only six pages long, and like the “campaign” chapters of the previous books in this book, is about giving you ideas to theme your groups. Your groups are still called “Cabals” so there's that. The thing is that these Cabals seem even more half assed than the previous set. You're supposed to be dedicated to winning the highlander game or maybe stop people you think are dicks from winning the highlander game. But... why? Who cares? At least with the Street Level ideas there was a few presented hooks for why you might be a Scooby gang. Here it just talks about how you're fighting against the mythic hermaphrodite or for the flying woman or some shit. It is difficult to convey how many fucks I don't give.

AncientH:

There's a lot of stupid in this chapter. One of the actual cabal examples is "Aquatic Ape Womyn", which is a splinter of Naked Goddess worshippers that think this whole 'naked' bit is degrading to women because they worship an old porn star.

FrankT:

It's important to remember that only a quarter of the previous book had anything to do with Avatars at all. So if you got this far, the chances that you were compelled to keep reading it's probably because you were intrigued by the potential of fry cook sorcerers and self mutilation adepts. This chapter bins all that shit. Now it's all about Avatar Ascension and whatever the fuck. So basically the authors just got distracted by something and never got around to dropping the other shoe for any group the majority of players wanted to talk about.

AncientH:

The big deal is supposed to be the Agents of Renunciation, which are sort of the bad guys of the setting, as far as you can tell the difference or care. They drag occultists into an otherdimensional series of rooms ripped straight out of Twin Peaks, and when you come out (if you do) your obsession is inverted. Misers become generous; warriors become pacifists; compulsive masturbators decide to share the love; etc. Which makes you wonder why there isn't a cabal of liberals ready to hogtie the Koch Bros. and feed them to those people.

And then there are the Sleepers, who are one part cops and one part Doctor Strange. They are occult powerhouses whose job it is to keep the occult underground in line - no pinching babies from the hospital, no selling alchemical supermeth, no letting ghosts walk around in the bodies of coma victims and go back to their families, etc. And in the cosmic-level campaign, you can be the magick po-po. Which is just fucked up on a lot of levels...and again, I'm not sure how the fuck you're supposed to swing it. If you're a global-level videomancer, for example, how the fuck does that work? What can you do, and why would you do it? Are you supposed to take a stand against Videodrome snuff-programs that are empowering a cabal of twisted videomancers? I dunno.


I have become TV.

FrankT:

Next we get into the second long chapter: the Gamemaster section. Where all the stuff that the game is too hipster to tell the players is written down. At least, in theory.


[/edit]This was actually one of my graduate-level engineering professors at the University of South Florida. Yes, his whiteboards did look like that at the end of classes from time to time. He was a pretty chill guy, though. Used to work at Bell Labs. Has a bunch of patents. Getting paid to teach at a university in Florida was like the best snowbird vacation of all time for him.

[name_here]

there's nothing in the cosmos. All the stars over your head, the entire galaxy, every other galaxy, and the entire universe out to 12 billion lightyears in every direction is empty void without life or purpose. The Earth is all there is, and even the 8 billion years of universe history before there was an Earth was in some incoherent way a lie. In reality the Earth has been made and remade repeatedly and that's all that matters.

...What.

WHY?

What possible reason is there to declare the rest of the universe doesn't actually exist? I mean, they get a pass on the history thing because hypothetically the setting has dudes who can shake the very foundations of reality and bend time itself to their wishes, but why declare there is nothing in space?