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.
Showing posts with label Optional Rules. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Optional Rules. Show all posts
Tuesday, 31 March 2020
Tuesday, 17 March 2020
320 - Reworking Rituals
Optional Rules: Reworking Rituals
Ritual magick occupies a liminal space in Unknown Armies. It’s a more serious undertaking than splashing around in the kiddie pool of gutter magick but doesn’t require the life-shattering investment of adept mind-rending. It’s capable of breaking the laws of nature but it’s also limited, specific and difficult to obtain. It’s often the last stop on the train away from normalcy.
Rituals without Identities
By default ritual magick requires the ‘Casts Rituals’ identity feature. Gutter Magick can be cast with a single hardened notch in unnatural and a secrecy roll but the hard stuff is off limits unless you’ve made a serious character investment. Within the context of ritual magick having the reputation of being rife with frauds, traps and uncertainty this makes some sense - an uncultivated arcane mindset is a good explanation why it might work for some but not for others. It also means that clueless nobodies who stumble across occult knowledge usually get off scot free, if disappointed.
For GMs who wish to grant their PCs and GMCs access to rituals without this restriction: casting rituals without an appropriate identity feature is done with the secrecy ability and the result is automatically flip-flopped to the worst outcome. Bonuses from blowing enough charges or priming your attempt with a gutter magick blessing still apply but it will always be fraught with danger.
It’s not all bad, even a botched ritual should count as a significant milestone towards an objective for learning an identity with the ‘Casts Rituals’ feature.
Ritual Components & Modification
Rituals are like secret holes in the universe, places where a little extra give was left to keep things running smoothly or handwaved out of laziness and forgotten about. Places where the laws of previous incarnations of the universe bleed through and play havoc with our ideas of physics and nature. Owing to the nature of the invisible clergy these holes were placed by consensus, with the right know-how you can widen or even move them to grasp more power.
One way is doing this is to substitute especially resonant components, things defined almost as much by their rarity as their relevance. Symbolic connection isn’t enough, what we think of as important is only half of the puzzle. Divining the hidden identity of such an object is a local objective for minor rituals and a global objective for significant ones. The pay off is increased potency, the effects of the ritual might last longer, have greater power or be less taxing to cast (even free) so long as you incorporate the component. Rare instances can even be used more than once.
The other way is to meddle with their connection to this universe. This is a far graver undertaking which not only risks destroying the ritual in a storm of unnatural phenomenon but changes things for everyone. Pulling off something like this is a global objective for a minor ritual and a cosmic objective for a significant one. This could make a particular target off limits to the ritual or widen or shrink the acceptable ingredients. It's a good way to make enemies out of anyone who was relying on the old formula, but if you're able to pull off a stunt that shifts the cosmic fabric this much then you can probably afford to not care.
Ritual magick occupies a liminal space in Unknown Armies. It’s a more serious undertaking than splashing around in the kiddie pool of gutter magick but doesn’t require the life-shattering investment of adept mind-rending. It’s capable of breaking the laws of nature but it’s also limited, specific and difficult to obtain. It’s often the last stop on the train away from normalcy.
Rituals without Identities
By default ritual magick requires the ‘Casts Rituals’ identity feature. Gutter Magick can be cast with a single hardened notch in unnatural and a secrecy roll but the hard stuff is off limits unless you’ve made a serious character investment. Within the context of ritual magick having the reputation of being rife with frauds, traps and uncertainty this makes some sense - an uncultivated arcane mindset is a good explanation why it might work for some but not for others. It also means that clueless nobodies who stumble across occult knowledge usually get off scot free, if disappointed.
For GMs who wish to grant their PCs and GMCs access to rituals without this restriction: casting rituals without an appropriate identity feature is done with the secrecy ability and the result is automatically flip-flopped to the worst outcome. Bonuses from blowing enough charges or priming your attempt with a gutter magick blessing still apply but it will always be fraught with danger.
It’s not all bad, even a botched ritual should count as a significant milestone towards an objective for learning an identity with the ‘Casts Rituals’ feature.
Ritual Components & Modification
Rituals are like secret holes in the universe, places where a little extra give was left to keep things running smoothly or handwaved out of laziness and forgotten about. Places where the laws of previous incarnations of the universe bleed through and play havoc with our ideas of physics and nature. Owing to the nature of the invisible clergy these holes were placed by consensus, with the right know-how you can widen or even move them to grasp more power.
One way is doing this is to substitute especially resonant components, things defined almost as much by their rarity as their relevance. Symbolic connection isn’t enough, what we think of as important is only half of the puzzle. Divining the hidden identity of such an object is a local objective for minor rituals and a global objective for significant ones. The pay off is increased potency, the effects of the ritual might last longer, have greater power or be less taxing to cast (even free) so long as you incorporate the component. Rare instances can even be used more than once.
The other way is to meddle with their connection to this universe. This is a far graver undertaking which not only risks destroying the ritual in a storm of unnatural phenomenon but changes things for everyone. Pulling off something like this is a global objective for a minor ritual and a cosmic objective for a significant one. This could make a particular target off limits to the ritual or widen or shrink the acceptable ingredients. It's a good way to make enemies out of anyone who was relying on the old formula, but if you're able to pull off a stunt that shifts the cosmic fabric this much then you can probably afford to not care.
Monday, 4 November 2019
188 - Downtime
Optional Rules: Downtime
It’s over. Maybe you got what you wanted: the villain was defeated, the day saved and you and your friends victorious. Or maybe not, life’s not fair and often someone getting what they want is at another’s expense like it or not. Regardless of the outcome, it’s time to move on and build towards your next objective.
But not all of life is highs and lows and adventure, between the drama you’ll need some time to destress and put yourselves back together. A broken leg won’t heal if you insist on going out crime-fighting every night. Downtime rules cover what characters get up to during extended off-screen moments - if you’ve finished an objective or stalled out on one they can be used to sum up some productive things a cabal gets up to in the weeks or months when it isn’t changing the world. And provide consequences for those choices when play resumes.
Pursuits
Pursuits are the things you focus on during downtime. You’re assumed to take care of the incidentals of day to day living, but it wouldn’t be Unknown Armies if you couldn’t neglect your health or your loved ones in the pursuit of personal gain. By default you get a single pursuit per downtime but can take up to two additional pursuits in return for risking greater complications due to spreading yourself too thin (which are covered in the next section).
Physical Recuperation: Use the medicine rules on page 74 of Book 1: Play to assess the rate of recovery based on whatever method you choose: be it kicking your feet up at home with some ice packs or wheeling your leaky carcass into an ER and crying “hit and run”. Recovery that takes up to half the period covered by your downtime counts as one pursuit, anything higher counts as two (but only if you decide to do anything else). Another PC can provide medical assistance with one of their identities as a pursuit if desired (the effort counts as Continuing Education for them).
Therapy: As above, use the therapy rules on page 75 of Book 1: Play provided you’re willing to subject yourself to some kind of mental health support. Each pursuit is good for one roll under the Helping The Disturbed category at a level determined by your therapist. Another PC can use a pursuit to provide this therapy with one of their identities if desired (the effort counts as Continuing Education for them).
Quality Time: Put in the hours with your nearest and dearest to show them how much you care, social connection is good for you too. For each pursuit spent developing your connection with another person add 5% to that relationship with a successful roll on an ability or identity relevant to what you do together.
Continuing Education: Whether going to night school or obsessively practicing in your garage, working on your skills pays off in terms of competency. Gain 1-5% (1d10 divided by 2, rounded up) in an identity per pursuit spent on it with a failed roll on that identity (or a successful roll for avatars). The penalty for pursuing multiple pursuits doesn’t make this easier for non-avatar identities, if the roll wouldn’t fail without the penalty you don’t get the benefit (but you still risk complications).
Charge Gathering: Outside of charging rituals or weird artifacts (which should be handled as a Unique pursuit) this is an option only available to adepts. Roll your adept identity, gaining the sum of the roll plus your school’s omega (assume it’s zero if you don’t know it) in minor charges. If you manage to scrounge up more than 10 you can trade that many up to a significant charge (now and only now) since this activity is abstracted.
Treading Water: One thing that’s off limits during downtime is pursuing objective milestones, that’s strictly on-screen business. However you can work to keep progress you have, each pursuit spent treading water protects against 1d10% of deterioration to the percentiles of a standing objective or the carry over to a new one with a successful roll on an ability or identity relevant to how you do maintenance on it.
Unique: This covers everything else that idle magi might get up to when they aren’t busy changing the world. Casting rituals, figuring out how artifacts work, setting up a new cabal clubhouse after the old one got burned down. Exact details of how this category works are up to the GM on an individual basis, but should involve some sort of roll, at least for the purposes of determining whether there are complications.
Complications
Unknown Armies is all about actions having consequences and downtime is no different. Given that downtime pursuits are a metaphorical barrel on a street corner labelled “FREE STUFF” it’s not surprising that there might be some dirty needles at the bottom. By default a matched failure or fumble on a pursuit roll lets the GM pick a complication from the following list. If the player is greedy things get worse. If they’re juggling two pursuits their rolls are at a -20% shift and if they’re ballsy enough to go for three then in addition to that penalty any failure triggers a complication.
The exact nature of a complication should narratively play off the pursuits chosen by a player. At the GMs discretion the player may use this to highlight what they’re most willing to risk.
Injury: Physical and mental trauma, the past can come back to bite you or pushing too hard can mean risking your bodily or psychological integrity. Take 1d10 wounds or a stress check (of a high enough rank you need to roll dice, no freebies) on a gauge determined by the GM. Bad screw ups during treatment for these things are covered under their individual sections in Book 1, use those where acceptable.
Gaffe: Whether it’s neglect or familiarity breeding contempt not all relationships are happy ones. Maybe you screwed up, maybe it was completely beyond your control. Regardless, lose 1d10% from one of your relationships as it sours.
Rust: Not keeping up with a passion or career risks dulling your skills. If you’re too busy burning the midnight oil trying to summon grandma's ghost for a chat about your inheritance your suffering work ethic might mean demotion at work. Lose 1-5% (1d10 divided by 2, rounded up) off of one of your identities.
Taboo: For adepts and avatars there’s a fine line to walk on the path to power. Screwing up costs all your charges for the former or 1-5% (1d10 divided by 2, rounded up) off your identity for the latter.
Objective Decay: If you have an incomplete objective that you’re taking time off from or are planning to build on your previous success then leaving it alone risks your work turning fallow. Knock 1d10% off of those objective percentiles as you lose momentum or your opposition screws around unopposed. Ideally the GM should only go for this if the players intend to keep going with what they have, but it’s understandable if cutting into their work sours them on it after the fact.
Unique: Whether it’s their chickens coming home to roost or foreboding omens on the horizon, the GM can use this miscellaneous category to resolve unfinished business or seed new complications and hooks to be dealt with when play resumes. Or just mess with the players in general.
It’s over. Maybe you got what you wanted: the villain was defeated, the day saved and you and your friends victorious. Or maybe not, life’s not fair and often someone getting what they want is at another’s expense like it or not. Regardless of the outcome, it’s time to move on and build towards your next objective.
But not all of life is highs and lows and adventure, between the drama you’ll need some time to destress and put yourselves back together. A broken leg won’t heal if you insist on going out crime-fighting every night. Downtime rules cover what characters get up to during extended off-screen moments - if you’ve finished an objective or stalled out on one they can be used to sum up some productive things a cabal gets up to in the weeks or months when it isn’t changing the world. And provide consequences for those choices when play resumes.
Pursuits
Pursuits are the things you focus on during downtime. You’re assumed to take care of the incidentals of day to day living, but it wouldn’t be Unknown Armies if you couldn’t neglect your health or your loved ones in the pursuit of personal gain. By default you get a single pursuit per downtime but can take up to two additional pursuits in return for risking greater complications due to spreading yourself too thin (which are covered in the next section).
Physical Recuperation: Use the medicine rules on page 74 of Book 1: Play to assess the rate of recovery based on whatever method you choose: be it kicking your feet up at home with some ice packs or wheeling your leaky carcass into an ER and crying “hit and run”. Recovery that takes up to half the period covered by your downtime counts as one pursuit, anything higher counts as two (but only if you decide to do anything else). Another PC can provide medical assistance with one of their identities as a pursuit if desired (the effort counts as Continuing Education for them).
Therapy: As above, use the therapy rules on page 75 of Book 1: Play provided you’re willing to subject yourself to some kind of mental health support. Each pursuit is good for one roll under the Helping The Disturbed category at a level determined by your therapist. Another PC can use a pursuit to provide this therapy with one of their identities if desired (the effort counts as Continuing Education for them).
Quality Time: Put in the hours with your nearest and dearest to show them how much you care, social connection is good for you too. For each pursuit spent developing your connection with another person add 5% to that relationship with a successful roll on an ability or identity relevant to what you do together.
Continuing Education: Whether going to night school or obsessively practicing in your garage, working on your skills pays off in terms of competency. Gain 1-5% (1d10 divided by 2, rounded up) in an identity per pursuit spent on it with a failed roll on that identity (or a successful roll for avatars). The penalty for pursuing multiple pursuits doesn’t make this easier for non-avatar identities, if the roll wouldn’t fail without the penalty you don’t get the benefit (but you still risk complications).
Charge Gathering: Outside of charging rituals or weird artifacts (which should be handled as a Unique pursuit) this is an option only available to adepts. Roll your adept identity, gaining the sum of the roll plus your school’s omega (assume it’s zero if you don’t know it) in minor charges. If you manage to scrounge up more than 10 you can trade that many up to a significant charge (now and only now) since this activity is abstracted.
Treading Water: One thing that’s off limits during downtime is pursuing objective milestones, that’s strictly on-screen business. However you can work to keep progress you have, each pursuit spent treading water protects against 1d10% of deterioration to the percentiles of a standing objective or the carry over to a new one with a successful roll on an ability or identity relevant to how you do maintenance on it.
Unique: This covers everything else that idle magi might get up to when they aren’t busy changing the world. Casting rituals, figuring out how artifacts work, setting up a new cabal clubhouse after the old one got burned down. Exact details of how this category works are up to the GM on an individual basis, but should involve some sort of roll, at least for the purposes of determining whether there are complications.
Complications
Unknown Armies is all about actions having consequences and downtime is no different. Given that downtime pursuits are a metaphorical barrel on a street corner labelled “FREE STUFF” it’s not surprising that there might be some dirty needles at the bottom. By default a matched failure or fumble on a pursuit roll lets the GM pick a complication from the following list. If the player is greedy things get worse. If they’re juggling two pursuits their rolls are at a -20% shift and if they’re ballsy enough to go for three then in addition to that penalty any failure triggers a complication.
The exact nature of a complication should narratively play off the pursuits chosen by a player. At the GMs discretion the player may use this to highlight what they’re most willing to risk.
Injury: Physical and mental trauma, the past can come back to bite you or pushing too hard can mean risking your bodily or psychological integrity. Take 1d10 wounds or a stress check (of a high enough rank you need to roll dice, no freebies) on a gauge determined by the GM. Bad screw ups during treatment for these things are covered under their individual sections in Book 1, use those where acceptable.
Gaffe: Whether it’s neglect or familiarity breeding contempt not all relationships are happy ones. Maybe you screwed up, maybe it was completely beyond your control. Regardless, lose 1d10% from one of your relationships as it sours.
Rust: Not keeping up with a passion or career risks dulling your skills. If you’re too busy burning the midnight oil trying to summon grandma's ghost for a chat about your inheritance your suffering work ethic might mean demotion at work. Lose 1-5% (1d10 divided by 2, rounded up) off of one of your identities.
Taboo: For adepts and avatars there’s a fine line to walk on the path to power. Screwing up costs all your charges for the former or 1-5% (1d10 divided by 2, rounded up) off your identity for the latter.
Objective Decay: If you have an incomplete objective that you’re taking time off from or are planning to build on your previous success then leaving it alone risks your work turning fallow. Knock 1d10% off of those objective percentiles as you lose momentum or your opposition screws around unopposed. Ideally the GM should only go for this if the players intend to keep going with what they have, but it’s understandable if cutting into their work sours them on it after the fact.
Unique: Whether it’s their chickens coming home to roost or foreboding omens on the horizon, the GM can use this miscellaneous category to resolve unfinished business or seed new complications and hooks to be dealt with when play resumes. Or just mess with the players in general.
Sunday, 23 June 2019
054 - Counter Coercion & Giving Coercion Fangs
Optional Rules: Counter Coercion
Risk freaking out, be traumatised enough to take it in stride, or roll over. Those are the three current reaction options under Unknown Armies’ coercion rules when threatened. However an alternative resolution when someone backs you up against the wall and things turn ugly is to make threats of your own.
When confronted with a coercion attempt if you have means to coerce that person in turn you can invoke the doctrine of mutually assured destruction to short-circuit their threats. Your estranged sister shows up at your wedding and threatens to ruin the day with tales of your sordid past if you don’t lend/give her a bunch of money? You’ve got grandpa’s ear and if she wants a snowball’s chance of any inheritance when he dies she’ll keep it to herself. You’re standing on the brink of respective Isolation and Helplessness checks but if you both back down things can proceed undisturbed, uneasily.
A tense situation in which the threats go unresolved is probably worth a rank 2-4 stress check on Self, Isolation or Helplessness depending on the circumstances. It’s a stop-gap solution in which both parties have tipped their hands and are left uncertain about whether the other will be able to seize the advantage (or blow up and wreck the whole thing in which case everyone gets to face the consequences).
Optional Rules: Giving Coercion Fangs
A standard success on a coercion check yields a rank 1 stress check (assuming no passions come into it). Everyone has at least 1 hardened notch in every meter (unless you hold GMCs to a different standard) and given how gauges and core abilities work in 3e it’s not unreasonable for them to be much higher, so is the juice worth the squeeze?
One interpretation is: yes, absolutely, if you want to ding someone’s meters you need to put the work in and find a way to incorporate as many of your and their passions as possible and if that doesn’t work then up the ante. Escalation is entirely possible, you just have to be willing to actually go through with it. That works and is well in line with the game’s themes. It’s also a fact that imposing a stress check on someone whether they succeed or not has ongoing consequences to their gauges and may be worth limiting.
On the other hand it’s important enough to merit an identity feature per gauge all to itself and you may feel that threatening someone with a gun is worth more than the rank 1 violence check which everyone can pass by default. Social combat might also be more important to the themes you and your players want to run with, higher powered coercion encourages it over other forms of conflict resolution.
If you find coercion lacking consider bumping the base ranks up a point or two for each tier of success (ie. success 2, matched success 3, crit 4) plus the default 1 rank per passion of the involved parties invoked. Alternatively (or concurrently) grant circumstantial boosts of 1-3 ranks: a gun is more threatening than a knife and photographic evidence of infidelity pushes home the point that someone could wreck your marriage over just mentioning that they know about your affair.
Risk freaking out, be traumatised enough to take it in stride, or roll over. Those are the three current reaction options under Unknown Armies’ coercion rules when threatened. However an alternative resolution when someone backs you up against the wall and things turn ugly is to make threats of your own.
When confronted with a coercion attempt if you have means to coerce that person in turn you can invoke the doctrine of mutually assured destruction to short-circuit their threats. Your estranged sister shows up at your wedding and threatens to ruin the day with tales of your sordid past if you don’t lend/give her a bunch of money? You’ve got grandpa’s ear and if she wants a snowball’s chance of any inheritance when he dies she’ll keep it to herself. You’re standing on the brink of respective Isolation and Helplessness checks but if you both back down things can proceed undisturbed, uneasily.
A tense situation in which the threats go unresolved is probably worth a rank 2-4 stress check on Self, Isolation or Helplessness depending on the circumstances. It’s a stop-gap solution in which both parties have tipped their hands and are left uncertain about whether the other will be able to seize the advantage (or blow up and wreck the whole thing in which case everyone gets to face the consequences).
Optional Rules: Giving Coercion Fangs
A standard success on a coercion check yields a rank 1 stress check (assuming no passions come into it). Everyone has at least 1 hardened notch in every meter (unless you hold GMCs to a different standard) and given how gauges and core abilities work in 3e it’s not unreasonable for them to be much higher, so is the juice worth the squeeze?
One interpretation is: yes, absolutely, if you want to ding someone’s meters you need to put the work in and find a way to incorporate as many of your and their passions as possible and if that doesn’t work then up the ante. Escalation is entirely possible, you just have to be willing to actually go through with it. That works and is well in line with the game’s themes. It’s also a fact that imposing a stress check on someone whether they succeed or not has ongoing consequences to their gauges and may be worth limiting.
On the other hand it’s important enough to merit an identity feature per gauge all to itself and you may feel that threatening someone with a gun is worth more than the rank 1 violence check which everyone can pass by default. Social combat might also be more important to the themes you and your players want to run with, higher powered coercion encourages it over other forms of conflict resolution.
If you find coercion lacking consider bumping the base ranks up a point or two for each tier of success (ie. success 2, matched success 3, crit 4) plus the default 1 rank per passion of the involved parties invoked. Alternatively (or concurrently) grant circumstantial boosts of 1-3 ranks: a gun is more threatening than a knife and photographic evidence of infidelity pushes home the point that someone could wreck your marriage over just mentioning that they know about your affair.
Thursday, 30 May 2019
030 - Gutter Magick Redux
Gutter Magick Redux
Gutter magick is a charmingly ill-defined concept in Unknown Armies. Despite playing fourth-fiddle to adepts, avatars and ritual magick, the DIY ethos to playing around with synchronicity and sympathy is flexible enough to bend to any purpose. Here are six new categories of effects that can be summoned up by jabbing reality in the soft parts.
Clue: Ad-hoc divination, like a hunch without the banked roll. Dowse for answers or try to divine a connection to prompt the GM to give you a lead related to the target. The results are unpredictable and down to GM fiat but with the understanding that if it's completely useless why would anyone do it?
Ward: In counterpoint to curses, sometimes you want to baby something through rough waters. It’s no replacement for a bulletproof vest but the next time the warded object or person falls in harm’s way knock 1d10 points off a single instance of physical damage.
Mind-shield: Gain two sticky "phantom" hardened notches on a shock gauge, but they only apply when dealing with specific circumstances and only once. If you whip up protection against the mental hardships of financial ruin the Helplessness check from being arrested after a failed robbery isn’t covered.
Relationship Goosing: This is the gutter magick version of your esprit de corps bonding ritual or a love charm, it will influence an existing relationship but can’t create something that doesn’t exist. If you’ve been a neglectful parent and are regretting becoming estranged from your son this is one way to get the reconnection ball rolling. Nudge an existing relationship in either direction by 5% with a successful ritual.
Countertilt: Duelling occultists aren’t always of the calibre that can fry each other’s brains with blasts. Alternatively maybe you’ve magicked up something you wish you could take back. With countertilting you can pick apart a gutter magick effect already in place. That said undoing is tricky, putting toothpaste back in the tube always takes more effort and usually makes a mess. A successful countertilt removes the sticky quality from an existing gutter magick effect.
Demon-baiting: Demons are a surefire source of magick, by picking at the cosmic fabric that separates life and death like a scab you can encourage something to come through. There’s no guarantees of exactly what you'll get and the likelihood is that someone ends up being taken for a ride but sometimes you’re desperate or stupid, or both. It’s quick and dirty and the results are the same, with a successful ritual if there's a demon in the area it has a shot at nabbing your body as per "Unwitting Victims" on pages 103-104 of Book 2: Run. You're leaving the keys in the ignition and the door open, what happens next depends on the neighbourhood. Hopefully you've got some friends who can negotiate with it.
Layering Multiple Effects
Reality bruising is a sneaky way of jacking up the universe and poking something out of place before it snaps back. It’s like fixing a flat bike tyre by tying off the tube around the puncture, you can get away with it but riding around on a Gordian knot is asking for trouble. Some effects, proxy rituals for example, are intended to be built up to, the following applies to everything else.
For starters it’s progressively harder to stick additional effects on to a target, a cumulative -10% shift applies to gutter magick rituals for someone with an existing reality bruise floating around them. Secondly having a bunch of unresolved jury-rigged magick hanging around can get messy, leakage happens. Every three days more than one unresolved effect is attached to someone a new casting roll at the existing penalty should be made, failure dissipates the effect. Whether the caster or the target suffers any unnatural phenomenon as a result is up to the GM.
Gutter magick is a charmingly ill-defined concept in Unknown Armies. Despite playing fourth-fiddle to adepts, avatars and ritual magick, the DIY ethos to playing around with synchronicity and sympathy is flexible enough to bend to any purpose. Here are six new categories of effects that can be summoned up by jabbing reality in the soft parts.
Clue: Ad-hoc divination, like a hunch without the banked roll. Dowse for answers or try to divine a connection to prompt the GM to give you a lead related to the target. The results are unpredictable and down to GM fiat but with the understanding that if it's completely useless why would anyone do it?
Ward: In counterpoint to curses, sometimes you want to baby something through rough waters. It’s no replacement for a bulletproof vest but the next time the warded object or person falls in harm’s way knock 1d10 points off a single instance of physical damage.
Mind-shield: Gain two sticky "phantom" hardened notches on a shock gauge, but they only apply when dealing with specific circumstances and only once. If you whip up protection against the mental hardships of financial ruin the Helplessness check from being arrested after a failed robbery isn’t covered.
Relationship Goosing: This is the gutter magick version of your esprit de corps bonding ritual or a love charm, it will influence an existing relationship but can’t create something that doesn’t exist. If you’ve been a neglectful parent and are regretting becoming estranged from your son this is one way to get the reconnection ball rolling. Nudge an existing relationship in either direction by 5% with a successful ritual.
Countertilt: Duelling occultists aren’t always of the calibre that can fry each other’s brains with blasts. Alternatively maybe you’ve magicked up something you wish you could take back. With countertilting you can pick apart a gutter magick effect already in place. That said undoing is tricky, putting toothpaste back in the tube always takes more effort and usually makes a mess. A successful countertilt removes the sticky quality from an existing gutter magick effect.
Demon-baiting: Demons are a surefire source of magick, by picking at the cosmic fabric that separates life and death like a scab you can encourage something to come through. There’s no guarantees of exactly what you'll get and the likelihood is that someone ends up being taken for a ride but sometimes you’re desperate or stupid, or both. It’s quick and dirty and the results are the same, with a successful ritual if there's a demon in the area it has a shot at nabbing your body as per "Unwitting Victims" on pages 103-104 of Book 2: Run. You're leaving the keys in the ignition and the door open, what happens next depends on the neighbourhood. Hopefully you've got some friends who can negotiate with it.
Layering Multiple Effects
Reality bruising is a sneaky way of jacking up the universe and poking something out of place before it snaps back. It’s like fixing a flat bike tyre by tying off the tube around the puncture, you can get away with it but riding around on a Gordian knot is asking for trouble. Some effects, proxy rituals for example, are intended to be built up to, the following applies to everything else.
For starters it’s progressively harder to stick additional effects on to a target, a cumulative -10% shift applies to gutter magick rituals for someone with an existing reality bruise floating around them. Secondly having a bunch of unresolved jury-rigged magick hanging around can get messy, leakage happens. Every three days more than one unresolved effect is attached to someone a new casting roll at the existing penalty should be made, failure dissipates the effect. Whether the caster or the target suffers any unnatural phenomenon as a result is up to the GM.
Wednesday, 22 May 2019
022 - Grief's Junkyard
This is the first in a series of posts intended the outline the framework for a game in the same vein as the official Campaign Starter Kits.
“All that you love will be carried away”
- Stephen King, Everything’s Eventual
One step at a time, clawing handholds and kicking footholds into the loamy, black soil you climb higher and higher toward the circle of washed-out, grey light. Thoughts of how long you’ve been doing this seem dreamlike. Maybe you’ve always been climbing? But there are other memories - however distant - of a time before. A time you chose to come here and longing grief that drives you. Then you reach the lip of the Pit and drag yourself out, finally, aching.
A barren expanse under an overcast sky sprawls around you as far as the eye can see. The only thing populating the landscape is wreckage: cars, boats, airplanes, dotted here and there in the distance. If you get close you can hear and see the people trapped inside. The ones who died in them, the ones who people loved.
Getting there is easy enough, pick a pile of debris on the horizon and start walking. There is no sun above the clouds despite the ambient light and reference points that seem to shift independently make it difficult to mark the passage of time or distance with anything other than hunger, thirst or exhaustion. On arrival you’ll find the dead locked in their last moments, seemingly alive but repeating the same loop of actions over and over. All it takes to rouse them is a touch, but careful, you can only wake one. Don’t let go or you’ll lose them forever.
Space works oddly in the Junkyard, each step away from the Pit covers distance as normal but on the return journey the distance yawns, stretching endlessly. Short jaunts from the Pit are easy enough to come back from but each step carries you an exponential distance. Out far enough landmarks shift in relation to each other and navigation becomes perilous. Like a black hole the Junkyard traps you with inexorable distance the further you stray into it.
There is a way to bridge this distance and for many, with all the searching it takes to find the person they are looking for, it is the only way to return before they run out of food or become lost in the Junkyard’s expanse. You can give up the the connection to whoever you hold dearest, whole or in pieces. The Junkyard is a place of lingering loss and grief and in its rapacious non-sentience it will release its grasp on those who willingly feed it.
Entering & Exiting the Junkyard: Like all otherspaces the Junkyard has a specific ritual for entry. You must travel to the site of a vehicle fatality, any will do so long as it has not been used to enter the Junkyard before. At the site, after sundown, start digging. No one who wishes to enter the Junkyard can leave the hole until it is fully dug. It must be deep enough to hide those in it from the outside and the outside from those in it. At midnight, in pitch darkness, start climbing. If these conditions are met the climb will be much longer than it should be, the climber’s memory and consciousness fading into a dreamlike state as they ascend towards the mouth of the Junkyard’s Pit.
Anyone climbing or falling back into the Pit lands in the hole they used to enter. If you’re holding onto a person they come with you, but no more than one. Hopefully your hole hasn’t been filled in yet.
Inhabitants: The Junkyard contains anyone who has died in a vehicle who was someone’s favourite (as in the mechanical relationship) until the time that relationship fades from the person who held them dear or they leave. Additionally a number of outsiders have also taken up residence in the Junkyard’s hostile environment, both temporarily and on a permanent basis.
Exploration: One step from the Pit is equal to one step back, the second covers twice the distance as far as the return journey is concerned, then quadruple and so on. In practice this would be tiresome to calculate, so don’t. Instead measure travel in encounters (say, two per game day). Give the players a handful on their way to their objective and then hit them with several times as many on the lengthy, uncertain journey back. More if they lose their way. Narrate the yawning distance behind them and the growing isolation from the safety of the real world as they move further and further in.
Unknown Armies isn’t exactly suited to hexcrawls. All exploration should be objective driven and based on choices over tedious logistics. Do the players want to take the short but dangerous route or go the long way and use more supplies? Do they want to risk a detour to interact with GMCs who may have information or aid they require? Exploration rolls, based on relevant abilities, should be granted to give players extra information to inform their choices in the right circumstances but never replace them.
Starvation and Other Dangers: Survival in the Junkyard is uncertain. Wreckage is the only shelter, food and water is limited to what little can be scavenged from picked over vehicles and there’s no medical services or mechanics for when people and things break down. Without resources people travelling in the Junkyard are at risk. Healthy Appetites by Alex Powell provides timeframes and penalties for starvation and dehydration.
Alternatively give a cumulative -10% penalty to all rolls for each day gone without, the progression temporarily stalled by a successful roll on Fitness or a relevant identity and reversed at the same rate by adequate provisions. At worse than -40% starvation/dehydration/exposure cause death. Things decay and breakdown quickly in the Junkyard, it’s only by constantly moving on and replacing what’s lost that any semblance of existence can be eked out.
Supply Rules: For players who want to prepare for the journey consider allowing them to build a Supply percentile pool - with milestones for resources and initiative poured into it like an objective - to act as a buffer against the worst. Instead of weathering the consequences when they happen a roll against this value provides material support. In return the available resources deplete as if the roll were an attack against the Supply pool (using hand-to-hand (light) or firearm (heavy, possibly capped) damage depending on severity).
When confronted with hunger, accident or exposure the Supply pool might represent the following:
- Stave off hunger and dehydration for everyone for a day (light).
- Access to first-aid supplies (light).
- Increased hardiness (+10% shift to Fitness rolls) from altitude training for short (one session, light) or long term benefit (several sessions, heavy, 30).
- Access to portable hydraulic rescue tools (heavy, 20).
Depending on the situation there may need to be additional rolls to solve the problem but the right materials are on hand. Matched successes or crits might indicate either supplies of a particularly high quality (+20-30% shift to subsequent rolls) or efficient resources (reduce depletion by half or three-quarters). Standard failures count as a success with complications (ie. extra depletion (+3/+6 points depending on damage level) or inferior tools (-10% negative shift on actions)) whereas matched failures and fumbles indicate no resources are available. Hitting 0% Supply means they’re tapped out on everything.
Specific and unique preparations taken ahead of time are excluded from these rules. They may be useful in the abstract to measure how limited a particular resource is but erring on the side of rewarding player ingenuity is preferable. Roleplaying these preparations is its own form of investment.
The Junkyard’s Appetite: The Junkyard is hungry. It doesn’t want you here. It wants to be left in peace to slowly digest your attachments. You can willingly feed it if you wish and it will reward you for doing so.
This can be used to fend off starvation, it can smooth the path of obstacles, it can even stave off death for a time. Anyone who is willing to give up part of their attachment may use their favourite relationship to substitute for any identity feature, supply roll or exploration roll. The trade off for doing so is that the relationship depletes by the sum of the roll regardless of success. The effects are never explicitly obvious, that gnawing hunger in your belly is overshadowed by dull emotional pain, that teetering maze of stacked wrecks disappears in a mirage as you round the rocky outcrop or that sucking chest wound seems less life threatening for a while.
It is unpleasant to give up something so fundamental this way. GMs are encouraged to apply stress checks.
Monday, 20 May 2019
020 - Random Demon Generator
Optional Rules: Random Demon Generator
Cuban Pete fumbled the Lazarus ritual and now you need some quick consequences for whatever sits upright wearing his brother’s mouldering carcass? This should cover you.
Roll once on each column, slap an Urge stat (20%-80%) on the results and you’re good to go. Some of the combinations are a little janky at a glance, but still workable. How do you ‘acquire self’? Put my bones into the proper grave or else. ‘Express GMC’? I always hated/loved/felt-overwhelmingly-indifferent-towards them and now I’m not going to waste this second chance to prove it. ‘Embody action?’ I only feel alive when I’m running. ‘Create PC?’ ...uh, time travel grandparent possession or a magickal cloning version of Single White Female?
Here’s an example:
Cuban Pete fumbled the Lazarus ritual and now you need some quick consequences for whatever sits upright wearing his brother’s mouldering carcass? This should cover you.
d10
|
Urge Action
|
Urge Object
|
Personality
|
Quirk
|
1
|
Acquire
|
Self
|
Wheedling
|
Can only lie by omission
|
2
|
Protect
|
GMC
|
Brutal
|
Can speak to people in their dreams
|
3
|
Destroy
|
PC
|
Affable
|
Is working for someone else
|
4
|
Worship
|
Group
|
Depressed
|
Climb Walls Like A Spider at 50%
|
5
|
Embody
|
Object
|
Manic
|
Holy water burns them
|
6
|
Undermine
|
Ideology
|
Obsequious
|
Drops the temperature 20 degrees
|
7
|
Control
|
Emotion
|
Mute
|
Incredibly naive
|
8
|
Create
|
Role
|
Sententious
|
Dogs can smell their demonic nature
|
9
|
Express
|
Action
|
Childish
|
Only refers to themselves in the 3rd person
|
0
|
Observe
|
Magick
|
Mechanical
|
Can’t be bound, might pretend to
|
Roll once on each column, slap an Urge stat (20%-80%) on the results and you’re good to go. Some of the combinations are a little janky at a glance, but still workable. How do you ‘acquire self’? Put my bones into the proper grave or else. ‘Express GMC’? I always hated/loved/felt-overwhelmingly-indifferent-towards them and now I’m not going to waste this second chance to prove it. ‘Embody action?’ I only feel alive when I’m running. ‘Create PC?’ ...uh, time travel grandparent possession or a magickal cloning version of Single White Female?
Here’s an example:
Cargnan the All-Seeing aka Murray Garfield (5/8/3/1) really, really, really wanted to be a mall Santa when he was alive. Not in a sick way (actually kinda, it’s probably not healthy to want anything that much), he just got really fixated on the holiday season in a way that made him want to share his childhood recollections of joy with others. Unfortunately the mall Santa circuit in a small rural town is a pretty stitched up racket, so it took years before he finally got called for a fill-in gig at the bowling alley out by the interstate. Then he got hit by a car on the way to work.
As demons go Murray is affable and straightforward, he’ll go along to get along so long as he gets the chance to spread a little of the Christmas cheer he was denied in life. Honest, he knows what he wants is downright benign in comparison to some of the other things out there and he’s willing to broadcast that as a bargaining chip. It’s not as though he can lie about it. Just give him a red velvet jacket, a pillow and an audience of happy kids and he’ll be satisfied ...and, wait, now what’s up with this beard? You can’t do Santa without a proper beard! WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS YOU COCKSUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS!? YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THIS TO SANTA?! NOT A CHANCE! I WON'T GO BACK THIS TIME! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! YOU’RE ALL GOING ON MY LIST! HO HO HO!
Like I said, downright benign.
Urge - Be a Mall Santa 60%
As demons go Murray is affable and straightforward, he’ll go along to get along so long as he gets the chance to spread a little of the Christmas cheer he was denied in life. Honest, he knows what he wants is downright benign in comparison to some of the other things out there and he’s willing to broadcast that as a bargaining chip. It’s not as though he can lie about it. Just give him a red velvet jacket, a pillow and an audience of happy kids and he’ll be satisfied ...and, wait, now what’s up with this beard? You can’t do Santa without a proper beard! WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS YOU COCKSUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS!? YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THIS TO SANTA?! NOT A CHANCE! I WON'T GO BACK THIS TIME! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME! YOU’RE ALL GOING ON MY LIST! HO HO HO!
Like I said, downright benign.
Urge - Be a Mall Santa 60%
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