Book Four: Part One:
For the Gamemaster
Music:
Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World
FrankT:
Clocking in at 108 pages, this is the second longest section in the book. This section is absolutely off limits to all players of all power levels, and talks to you man to man as a gamemaster. There are six chapters and some appendices in this section, but the first three chapters are already more than half the section at 66 pages, so we'll include the appendices with the second part (and conclusion) of the book.
AncientH:
Okay, so I think it's time to be real with you here: this isn't a typical urban fantasy RPG. I think you've already kinda gathered that, but I want to make it explicit. It's not that every book peels back more of the onion to reveal the festering occult world teeming underneath, it's that the book is deliberately designed to conceal information from the reader, which means that any poor sumbitch playing Mister Cavern is going to have a bitch of a time putting everything together. Seriously, if this RPG was better organized, I could probably cut the pagecount in
half AND double the actual content. All the rituals, one chapter BOOM, DONE. All the artifacts, one chapter BOOM, DONE. All the avatar rules one chapter BOOM...you get the idea.
I honestly don't know if that's part of the ongoing appeal of the game among a select crowd or not. I know that I was fucking pissed when I got to the section on lycanthropes and demons and shit and said out loud "Why the fuck wasn't this even fucking
hinted at earlier?"...and the reason is, of course, because the players aren't supposed to know, because the player characters aren't supposed to know. It's the whole scrabbling around in the dark feeling you get, where you don't even know what's within the realm of possibility, and maybe you can rip the mask off the monster at the end and maybe it's decomposing face comes off in a gooey mass of decayed skin and greasy hair. I
get that, I just don't like how they went about it. But if they did it any other way, we probably wouldn't be talking about this book.
Sometimes novel design is undistinguishable from incompetence.
Chapter Seventeen: GM Overview
What's good for GM is good for the country.
AncientH:
Here is the Occult Underground.
We've been getting these little snippets at the beginning of every book, and they're really sort of the basic design document in four sentences. Or if not, they should be. There is a great deal
implied in these theses, but they never quite deliver. You might expect, for example, that here you will finally get the low-down on the occult underground that's been sporadically addressed throughout this book, maybe get an idea on how to really
run an Unknown Armies campaign.
Stand back, you fools!
FrankT:
This chapter is where the designers talk directly to the GM and tell them everything they feel like the people actually running the game should know. And one of the most important things you should know is that almost all of the big secrets they were throwing around are bullshit and have no answers. They come out and level with you, the gamemaster, that all the crap about the afterlife is just a red herring and they really don't know or care what the whole list of archetypes look like and probably half of them or so are unfilled and don't worry about it. They give the low down on the Comte de Saint Germain, which is that you know,
whatever.
So the structure of the book is that the
players are supposed to go through multiple layers of initiation, at each new level being told that some (most) of the things from the previous level were bullshit but being given new truths which are closer to the big truth. Then the GM gets to be at the deepest level, where the big reveal is that it's
all bullshit and the GM is just supposed to string players along, keeping the long con going as long as possible by using spooky voices and spouting cryptic deepisms. Given that premise, it seems very strange that there are 106 more pages in this chapter. Having given the game away and essentially admitted that there honestly isn't a game in here, the rest of the pages could honestly be blank. But mysteriously, they are full of text.
AncientH:
I get the feeling that Tynes and Stolze were trying to be
meta. The essential problem to these kind of initiation puzzles reminds me a great deal of Roger Ebert's summary of
The Ninth Gate:
Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate," a satanic thriller, opens with a spectacularly good title sequence and goes downhill from there--but slowly, so that all through the first hour there is reason for hope, and only gradually do we realize the movie isn't going to pay off. It has good things in it, and I kept hoping Polanski would take the plot by the neck and shake life into it, but no. After the last scene, I underlined on my note pad: What?
...
It's just that a film of such big themes should be about more than the fate of a few people; while at the end I didn't yearn for spectacular special effects, I did wish for spectacular information--something awesome, not just a fade to white.
It's a fundamental problem, and it's not unique to Unknown Armies or the Ninth Gate. It's something that Umberto Eco really underlined and wrestled with in
Foucault's Pendulum: there is no great magickal truth. No ultimate secret knowledge that perfects the world, no goal to work for except those we set for ourselves, no ultimate occult authority behind it all. They could have ran with that in a different, more humanist way - let the PCs see behind the lies of the charlatans and self-deluded, let them make something of themselves, figure out what they want to do and let them do it. Instead, they tell Mister Cavern to keep the PCs chasing shadows down the rabbit hole.
FrankT:
There are extended writeups for eight of the various groups that got name dropped in earlier books in the book. Each one gets an average of three and a half pages, so it's not really
that extended. But it's longer than the off hand mention they got in the player section. What's really strange about all this, is that some of these groups are nominal player character factions. I would think the little spiel about how the Cult of the Naked Goddess or Mak Attack got their start and what they believe would be
useful to players who were considering running a campaign where they were members of those organizations. But I guess I'm just old fashioned like that.
About the only big reveal in the Cult of the Naked Goddess writeup is that when they didn't mention Adepts in book three except as a page citation in the oddly misplaced demon chapter, it wasn't because they forgot. It's because the authors apparently regard Avatar magic as “true magickal ascension” while the path of the Adept is... something else.
Not true magick? Fuck if I know. It's a false path or something. Basically: the authors are trolling players hard. A very large amount of this book is composed of false paths to lead players astray so the GM and game designers can laugh at them. The book is honestly pretty dickish.
AncientH:
There's a lot of crap on the House of Renunciation and its Agents, which seriously is a bit like the Outer Church from Grant Morrison's
The Invisibles except less interesting in every conceivable way.
The Sleepers, it turns out, are basically there to enforce the Masquerade and are an ancient and venerable magickal order. Except they're not, really, it's just a magickal serpent eating its own tail because the "ancient" guild was brainwashed in 1945 by a now-defunct group of Chinese mystics into believing that. You ever notice that every group in this setting is entertaining some form of self-delusion?
By the way, they give you stats for a typical agent of each of these groups, and they suck about as bad as you'd expect. They're not optimized, so they're going to fail more often than they succeed, and not just at magickal tasks, but mundane shit too.
The New Inquisition starts out as one man's attempt to control magick, and then rapidly goes into telling you why adepts suck because they can't plan.
Mak Attack just wants to bring magic to the masses. They are 500 members strong, which is quite a lot by occult underground standards, and their established means to do this is to get wageslave jobs at McDonalds ("the Scotsman") and dispense magickal wisdom with the happy meals and Big Macs, and conduct big joint rituals which might have resulted in the 9/11 attacks (hey, a part that was added after the first edition!)
I don't honestly remember a lot about the Global Liberation Society from earlier in the book, but these are basically anarchists who group together in an effort to take down "hierarchical power structures." Also, they secretly want to blow up the world to make a better one. Really, they're cartoon supervillains, and just about as inept as COBRA.
Hellboy has more competent villains.
The Order of St. Cecil are what the New Inquisition should be: death to all magick users, death to all magick. Ultimate antimagickal goon squad.
Satan's Chosen Temple: a goth-girl does the ouija-board-in-a-cemetery-at-midnight bit and accidentally learn how to summon demons, and this snowballs into her setting up her own little Satanic religion. The head goth-girl can call 'em up and exorcise 'em, but seems stuck in thinking they're actual Christian-esque demons, and her ambitions seem to top out at money, sex, magickal powers, and cool clothes.
I actually think some of these are usable groups, although the "adepts are dumbasses" bit still grates.
FrankT:
Like most masquerades, it seems like it would be a lot of work to hide the magic in this setting. Several of the player character factions are attempting to get rid of it and teach the mundanes about magick. This seems like it would be extremely easy. You lay some magic down on TV, and then... you're done. People believe in magic. It's like the whole Traditions in Mage or the Sabbat in Vampire, I'm genuinely unclear as to why or how they haven't won already.
Now part of it might be explained away as them having just really terrible plans. The Mak Attaxers apparently work at McDonalds and periodically give mystical revelations to people waiting for their happy meals. This seems like a stupid plan, and really even when they describe the deep inner workings for the game master's eyes only... it still seems like a really stupid plan. You'd think there would be some deep conspiratorial reason
why everyone goes to work at McDonalds and fights magical threats on the side, but there really isn't. The authors just thought the image was funny and/or cool and there's no thought behind it at all.
May need to work on this plan a bit.
AncientH:
After that, they give us "GMCs" - these are random NPCs in normal gamespeak parlance. NPCs are actually an important part of the game ecology because they give players an idea of the possible; sticking them back here in the GM-only section is fairly worthless. Worse than that, the stats are terrible. "Jim Smith" has Speak English 45%, and that's his highest language skill.
Also, we get two non-magickal street-level NPCs and then two global-level Dukes (one of which doesn't have any magic, but has the Distracting Breast Implants 45% skill and a hand of glory) and then three cosmic-level NPCs, one of whom doesn't get stats (The Freak), and the other two who don't have the skills to justify their position there.
Then we get three
generic characters "Average Police Officer," "Average Police Detective," and "Stock Thug."
...why fucking bother?
FrankT:
For reasons that defy ready analysis, we get fairly specific character sheet information for a bunch of dudes you'll probably never meet. For example, we know exactly how many hardened and failed sanity checkboxes are filled in on all five tracks on... a burger flipper in DeKalb, Illinois... a murderous anarcho-terrorist who seems like an easy going bro... a homeless woman crashing on a satanic couch. This might actually be useful if there was a generic NPC list or something, but there isn't. Each of these characters is squirreled away into the writeup of one of the groups. There's no easy way to browse these things and they don't constitute a 'Monster Manual' for this game – that part (such as it is) comes next. These are just there to make most of the writeup of each group so small scale as to be nearly useless, with each one buried deeply enough that the only way you're going to use the statline of “Lili Morgan” is if you're actually fighting against (or for) the rooms of the renunciation house and specifically have to deal with specifically Lili. Her writeup takes up two thirds of the damn page.
These writeups also underline how bullshit this whole “no skill list” thing really is. The aforementioned Lili Morgan has a fucking “cheap shot fighting” skill. Can she even
use that after she has already hit a dude? I don't fucking know. Another character has “shoot hoops” as a skill. Someone else has “make gobs of money.” What the actual fuck? Characters don't have skills like “drive” or “repair things” or “do their fucking job” or whatever, so apparently pretty much everyone fails at their normal tasks automatically if they have to make a major check in any routine action. Also, what the hell kind of bullshit merchant are you if you only make gobs of money 75% of the time?
AncientH:
Better than the guy who can only speak English 25% of the time.
The Captain: I'm The Captain-- --I'm from **** Brooklyn-- --and I can barely understand **** English!
-Warren Ellis,
Nextwave
FrankT:
The monster manual is six pages long. NPCs are called “GMCs” which is hilarious when you think of all these people as cars. There are seven extremely specific characters, one of whom has no stats because it is an eyeroll inducing “unstoppable, unkillable, near-omniscient plot device” and the other six are distributed two per tier (street, global, and cosmic, although of course those words still don't mean what the authors think they mean). There are also
three generic characters: police officer, police detective, and thug. You might think that you should get stats for reporters or guard dogs or fucking innocent bystanders, but you don't. Because go fuck yourself.
Also worth noting: this isn't the monster manual with the demons or those snow revenants mentioned in Book 2. That's in a different part of the book. Also because go fuck yourself.
Chapter Eighteen: GM Campaigns
As opposed to Anti-
GM Campaigns.
AncientH:
I don't know what else they were supposed to call this chapter. "Campaigns," maybe. "Campaign Planning." Really it's just a collection of...not campaign
ideas, but all sorts of talk about
atmosphere and
narrative and
thematics and oh my fuck how fucking old are we that we have to read this shit again?
I don't know that I've ever read a
good section on campaigns, but you generally can't go wrong by following the three simple rules:
1) You need a struggle or goal bigger than any one character
2) You need to keep the focus on the PCs
3) The actions of the PCs need to have a measurable effect
That probably sounds
too simple, but you'd be amazed at how easy they are to fuck up. "Alienation" as a theme for a game sounds like a great idea, but it's harder to pull off for a group of characters than it is for one character - and UA is already a game where the individual character can overwhelm the table-time just by talking. Likewise, it's easy to get lost in the convoluted plans/confrontations of the NPCs or the plot-railroad to get the PCs to the next big scene you have planned - but you don't ever really want the players to be sitting there at the table listening as you have two MC-penis NPCs talk over them, an audience to the MC's little psychodrama. And, finally, the player character's actions (or inaction, as the case may be) needs to have some visible effect. Even if it's only that the sun rises one more time.
FrankT:
This ten page chapter is pretentious even by the standards of this book. It attempts to get you to refer to serial storytelling as “picaresque.” That is not actually what that word means. Like, I could totally understand if someone described picaresque fiction to you and you came away with the idea that it meant a series of sequential stories with their own self contained beginnings, middles, and ends, but that's really
really not what the fucking word means. Once again, the authors are spending so much effort at looking cultured and in-the-know that they end up leaving their fly unzipped and their ignorance hanging out for everyone to see.
The actual meaning of picaresque, if you were wondering.
AncientH:
There's a little bit of stuff on plotlines that is almost useful, but really it looks like it was cribbed hastily out of a "how to write" handbook. There's no
there there, nothing to really tie the advice in to the game setting. It's pretty generic, and blah, and not fucking useful.
FrankT:
This chapter frankly has no business being in the GM section at all. One of the core unanswered questions of Unknown Armies from the player's perspective is “What the fuck are we supposed to do?” This chapter presents themes you might want to employ and campaign structures you might want to hang the game on... but it presents them to the
game master. That is
bullshit. Whether you're going to play a one shot or a campaign is not up to the MC of the game to fucking fiat from heaven, it's a group decision. The other players need to be in on this, because they are either going to show up at the flat one day or one day a week for the next four months. That's a really big difference in time commitment, and you can't just bulldozer that shit onto people under any circumstances.
AncientH:
Even failure can be satisfying, however. No, really.
Right now you may be scratching your head. "You mean that my players, who've been meeting every Wednesday night for eight months working towards taking over the world--they're going to be satisfied with an ending where they don't take over the world?"
It can be done, but only if they choose not to take over the world.
Good luck with that, guys.
For the victory to be sweet, there has to exist a chance of failure. Failure is, in many cases, the price of success. If you're not willing to allow your PCs to lose, then their victories are hollow.
Let them fucking fail.
FrankT:
This chapter actually suggests that the MC should make one of these. I genuinely don't understand why you would do this, but I've been told by some people that they find this sort of preparation useful. It's really hard for me to even evaluate this stuff, because the preparation it is suggesting looks way too fiddly to me. The map isn't the territory, and I don't really get how a bunch of lines with words like “disdain” on them really help you write a story. But different strokes for different folks. Also, those other folks are assholes and I'm right and they are wrong and all that.
AncientH:
Do whatever is satisfying.
THis basically sums up the whole fucking chapter.
Chapter Nineteen: Running the Game
I don't know either.
FrankT:
Chapter 19 is also 19 pages long, which would be a clever numerology thingy if they had done anything clever like that with the rest of the book at all. Mostly, I think that's a random coincidence. This chapter gives the MC weird and pretentious advice for storytelling. They want you to use funny voices and hand out props. Yes, really. There's some good advice (for example: don't contradict yourself when describing things), some bad advice, and really a lot of pretentious advice. Really none of this has to do with Unknown Armies per se, it's a fairly extended “What is Roleplaying” section, and it starts on page 275 of the book and is supposed to be secret from most of the people playing the damn game. Actual things that are actually relevant to the game this book is nominally about start on page 280. So it really spends quite a bit of ink ranting about the author's theories of narrative flow and preferred amounts of setting description detail.
AncientH:
I'm not clear on how this advice differs from the bullshit they were spouting in the previous chapter.
FrankT:
Much of the basic rules on skill checks, wound points, and combat initiative are here because they are secret rules and the player characters aren't supposed to know what the speed threshold to get an extra action is. It's hard to make sense of this, since the other half of these purposefully incomplete rules are separated by over two hundred pages in this fucking book, but even joined together it appears to be incomplete and kind of horseshit. There is a rant about how you have significant leeway when deciding whether to make a check be minor, significant, or major. This rant is called “Fuzzy Logic” and is all about hot this is non-Boolean logic states, which is not what fuzzy logic is or what it's for and seriously what the actual fuck? The issue here is that minor checks pass automatically for people who have the specific skill you just thought of already written on their character sheet, while significant checks are pretty likely to fail if you don't have the skill, and major checks are certain to fail. So the choice of what kind of skill check to call for
should be based on how thoroughly you want to fuck over players who didn't successfully divine that you were going to call for a “make gobs of money” check at some crucial juncture. But they don't really go there. I
suspect this is because they don't actually understand how their system works.
AncientH:
I'm not sure the writers actually understand the rules, because while their default reaction is to "make shit up" and references
A Hundred Years of Solitude. I have trouble with people referencing magical realism novels in RPGs, because you've essentially got a system for some minimal amount of
emulation, and the whole thing about magical realism is that it's very low-magic - no strict rules, some things just happen because thematically they're appropriate at the time. I don't mind MCs bringing in
new material, or putting a new spin on existing material, but if things happen just because you're in strict magical teaparty mode.
FrankT:
There is an entire page given over to extremely specific but random sounding ritual magic items that can be called upon in short order if the MC needs a ritual component in a hurry. 42 dead wasps? Five Cheetos dipped in blood? $2.17 in pennies? Sure, why not? A few of these are, to me at least, duds. But the hit rate seems decent enough. These things sound like the kind of thing a wizened old street shaman might demand as part of a ritual to do something or other. My only real complaint here is that it's not actually in a place in the book you're going to find. Like, ever. It's on page 285 of the book, right between the expanded rules for casting tilt magic and the expanded rules for failing sanity checks. In the age of searchable pdfs, this wouldn't be a big deal, but with actual dead trees editions, reference sheets should be in places they can be referenced.
AncientH:
The dipsomancer and narco-alchemists PCs would like to have had the rules for drugs about a hundred and fifty pages ago.
FrankT:
There are rules for riots breaking out. These rules don't really make a lot of sense. Apparently using magic around mundane people causes riots? That seems like the kind of thing that should have been mentioned 288 pages earlier.
Like, this is seriously immersion breaking. There's apparently a whole thing where magic causes people to turn into torch wielding mobs like you were playing fucking
Promethean, and they don't bother to mention this until halfway through the last section of the book. What the actual fuck?
AncientH:
There's actually a half-relevant section on including aspects of the player character's daily lives in the game. They even reference the
X-Files and Mulder's terrible porn habit and Scully's dog. That said, they don't actually go into detail about how players are supposed to flesh out their own characters or something, so it's relevant but not terribly useful.
FrankT:
The rules for being drunk, taking speed, and driving a car in bad terrain are all in the GM section because apparently it would be unreasonable for the players to know that drinking alcohol impairs their characters. Look, I don't fucking know, alright? Immediately after talking about the secret effects of recreational drugs it goes back to talking about effective setting narration for the GM to use. Possibly this is an elaborate ruse to fool shifty players who skipped to the end of the chapter to see if there were any rules they were missing, but I'm guessing that this part of the book looks like a ransom note or a surrealist collage is because this book has no credited editor.
AncientH:
And that's the first half of the last book. We've about maxed out my tolerance for bullshit MC advice, so it can't be too far downhill from here. As a sometime-Mister Cavern, all I can say is
don't read the advice in this section. Yes, there's a few bits of prose that sound down-to-earth and wise -
this is a trap.