...and that's a wrap.

I didn't quite make the full year, but between everything that's happened in the past 18 months this experiment lasted longer than I originally thought it would. As daunting a task as it was and as much as I hated it at times, it was rewarding to force myself to create something even when I didn't want to or it felt like I couldn't. Lots of sleepless 2AMs and plucking away at my phone on my lunchbreak went into this and in places I think that shows. In others I'm glad I persevered. I've collected, edited and tidied everything I've written here into a single book, it comes in at 238 pages and a bit shy of 200,000 words.

Hopefully some of you will get some use out of it. Hopefully, if nothing else, I'll see the same from you someday soon.

330 - Ongoing Objectives

Optional Rules: Ongoing Objectives

Not all goals have a defined end point, quite a few of them require sustained effort in order to be maintained once they're up and running. Operating a business, running a support group, keeping the thing slumbering underneath the graveyard from rising up and eating everyone in town. This runs contrary to the default assumption in Unknown Armies: that players must always have goals defined by change. One way to address this within the established context is to use it as a background element or framework and make dealing with individual issues their own objectives or milestones within a larger objective (i.e. keep a roof over your cult compound by running a successful bake sale).

Another is to use milestones to shore up the objective percentile as though it were a Wound Threshold, taking hits based on trials and tribulations that threaten its integrity: hand-to-hand damage for petty hits and firearm damage for weighty hits (capped at 40 unless the harm is catastrophic).

In return for sacrificing the opportunity to pursue something proactively the psychological anchor of the objective provides both tangible support and mental shelter. Once per session it can substitute for protection against a stress check or provide material support as though it were a relationship, so long as it’s relevant in either case. Conversely if it hits zero anyone sufficiently invested to benefit from that suffers a rank 4 (plus 1 rank per relevant passion or obsession) stress check to either Isolation or Helplessness at the GM’s discretion. Zeroing out your objective to wreck someone else’s party works as normal, it just hurts more when you’re tearing down something that’s a part of you.

329 - Sweet Reggie

Artifact: Sweet Reggie

Power: Significant

Description: A small, threadbare, blue and white teddy bear. Its black plastic nose droops forlornly and sewn over the feet are a pair of little felt clogs, once part of a more complicated outfit. The fur on the left ear is a singed and melted, the result of someone's aborted attempt to "burn that thing to ash" they wish they'd followed through on.

Effect: Reggie is one of those objects people naively swear is haunted or a conduit for unholy forces. It isn't. Instead it is the product of a very disappointed little girl whose momma was always making promises she couldn't keep, receiving one of Mak Attax's charge-laden Special Orders. If they knew that it would be a hotly contested item for that reason alone.

Reggie creates bad luck for people who don't follow through on their words. It makes no difference the scale of the promise or whether it was in jest or part of an idiom. It doesn't matter if you mean it and then change your mind. If you say you'll do something and then don't, Reggie will get you.

Every one of these lies told in earshot of the bear degrades the result of the liar's next failed roll into one a step worse, failures become matched failures which become fumbles. The degraded luck manifests in a way ironically related to the lie, threatening to choke someone might see food lodged in your throat or get you clotheslined by a dangling electrical cord. If there's no way for this irony to express itself then the effect lingers, cursing the roll anyway and persisting until circumstances allow for more poetic justice.

Reggie can throw out one of these a day - counting from when the lie was told - although several can be running at once. It does this for whoever makes themselves a liar first so you could theoretically protect yourself from the consequences of your words by getting someone else to throw themselves under the bus.

328 - Jack Hamburg, Wannabe Avatar & Professional Catspaw

GMC: Jack Hamburg, Wannabe Avatar & Professional Catspaw

Jack thinks he's channeling The Noir Detective. He isn’t, he fundamentally misunderstands how the statosphere works, what an avatar actually is, and he’s unhealthily preoccupied with Humphrey Bogart movies courtesy of it being the only thing he shared with his dad. The only reason a chump like him has any idea at all is because someone took pity on him and he turned it into a job.

Jack was the youngest of four brothers, separated by just enough years and temperament that he was always the barely tolerated tag-along in his older sibling’s social lives. He ingratiated himself by being obsequious, which was a bit like hanging an invisible “kick me” sign on his back. But hey, at least he was being rewarded with some kind of attention. It’s a habit that has followed him into his adult life and colours his relationship with the occult underground.

When he first learned about the subculture Jack hoovered up all the information he could get his hands on to make himself useful. He’d trade for it and work for it, always keen and always reliable. Once people got used to it he developed a reputation and ended up running questionable errands for an avatar of the Judge who took the set dressing of his role too seriously. Dressed like an idiot, sure, but the results were there. When that arrangement ended after his patron ended up in a nursing home several others were already lined up to offer employment to a reliable minion. He said yes to all of them and just about everyone else that has come after.

Jack is a neutral party, he keeps his nose out of underground politics and keeps his interactions professional. Everybody uses him and everybody trusts him, even those on opposite sides of a conflict. He won’t take any jobs that call for wanton brutality - he’s a little squeamish and not really suited for it - but otherwise it’s open slather provided you don’t mind his obnoxious patter and patronising, weary cynicism.

STATS
Personality: A bundle of bad cliches in a trenchcoat and a stupid hat, Jack can be as insufferable as you’d expect. Nonetheless he is dutiful and dedicated to his clients and he’ll genuinely go the distance for you, if only out of manufactured machismo and commitment to his role.
Rage: Entitlement. Jack won’t stand for clients who think they’re owed more than they’re willing to put up.
Noble: Confidentiality. Jack’s sense of professionalism is built around discretion.
Fear: Vicious dogs (Violence).
Obsession: Epitomize the Noir Detective.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Occult P.I. 50%* (Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Substitutes for Notice.)
Catspaw 40% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Lie.)
Hedge Wizard 30% (Vague Information: Occult Trivia, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	3	3	2	2	2
Failed	1	0	2	1	1

327 - Xipe Totecian Cybernetics

Artifact: Xipe Totecian Cybernetics

Power: Significant.

Description: A combination of cutting-edge technology crudely fused with the vestiges of old religion, Xipe Totecian Cybernetics are the last ditch vanity project of a DARPA-funded bureaucratic blindspot. Couched in terms of combining the latest in high-tech psychological conditioning with age old furrows of human superstition, the project is anything but the promised breakthrough in controlling human behaviour. It appears as an open mouthed ceramic mask depicting the Aztec god of harvest and warfare Xipe Totec, also known as 'Our Lord the Flayed One', festooned with a suite of VR interface equipment and suspended above a zero-g bed.

Essentially the project staff have vandalised a historical artifact by kludging a bunch of electronics on to it. If one of them wasn't an avatar of the hacker it would amount to little more than an expensive and ludicrous art project.

Effect: Ineffective until the mask was added, the suite bombards whoever lays inside of it with intense subliminal imagery and sound. It was intended to shortcut decision-making and moral squeamishness in the same way that military training prepares people to kill. Originally this produced headaches, nausea and little else in test subjects, now it relieves them of human weakness.

Spending time in the suite gives temporary protection against stress checks against Violence and Self, allowing the subject to flip-flop rolls to protect either gauge for an equal amount of time. Failed stress checks, on any gauge, during this time always trigger a frenzy result.

The withdrawal is less pleasant. For those who have gained hardened or failed notches on Violence or Self while under the suite’s influence future stress checks on that gauge are at a -20%. This is relieved only by rainfall (temporarily) or losing those notches.

Anyone hitting 5 failed notches on either gauge under either effect develops a severe alienation from their own body. A heinous aversion to their own skin. An ache to rid themselves of its covering and deliver it to the machine.

326 - Violence of Action

Unnatural Entity: Violence of Action

Fight, fuck, spit, claw, bite, anything for just a few moments more and few moments more and a few moments more. These revenants are a conglomerate of those who died horribly violent deaths, consumed by an urge to struggle and survive. They accumulate on battlefields, in prisons and hospitals, and in the meanest areas of the most lawless corners of the Earth.

Stillness is anathema to them. They haunt these places, trapped by the same impulses that gripped their desperate ends. A gelatinous fog only perceptible to those with unnatural senses that pervades and poisons those who breath it with the terrible purpose of life at all costs.

A Violence infects someone 1-5 temporary Rage passions, made up of the vestiges of the people who died to make the revenant. Ignoring the compulsions of this external anger provokes a Self check of an equal rank, failure results in blind rage as they take the wheel.

The psychological toll of actions taken while under the influence of a Violence are muted while infected. Someone under the influence gains a number of temporary hardened notches in Violence equal the number of passions inflicted on them. The aftermath is another story.

A California motumancer thought he could channel one to empower his rhetoric on the site of a nameless ancient atrocity. His remaining trio of proteges are currently locked in a game of chicken with one another to see if one of them can succeed where he failed. The risk of adding themselves to the formless anger - as he did - against the triumph they can hold over the others. None of them are willing to admit defeat.

325 - Stalemate the Reaper

Ritual: Stalemate the Reaper

Cost: 3 significant charges.

Ritual Action: Light up an unfiltered cigarette and use it to burn out the eyes on a king of hearts playing card. Start smoking the cigarette. Stick the card to your forehead (most people who know the ritual use spit but it’s only traditional, not necessary). Keep smoking the cigarette. When you’re finished with it use it to light another and keep smoking. Do this forever.

Effect: You’re immortal. Kind of. So long as you keep smoking your current cigarette nothing can kill you. You can be beaten, injured and maimed beyond all comprehension but so long as you keep puffing away you’re fine. You take no injury penalties, but actions which are impossible such as running with no legs are still off limits. If you ever stop smoking the ritual fails and you die, even if you’d otherwise be fine. The same thing happens if the card falls off your forehead.

Playing poker lets you pass it on to others. Some regional variations of the ritual use different games like Big Two. Play to a showdown with a single other player and as you show hands, stub out the cigarette on the table and slap the king of hearts face down on top of it. If you win the hand your opponent has 24 hours to place the card on their forehead and start smoking as the ritual effect moves to them. If you lose, the ritual fails and you die.

If you refuse a challenge to a game of poker while the ritual effect is active it fails and, you guessed it, you die.