Unknown Armies Third Edition arrived, and I'm feeling old.

So I backed the Unknown Armies Third Edition Kickstarter, but to save on shipping I had the books sent to my family in the US; between my parents, my sister-in-law and my wife, travelling relatives brought them home for me.

It all looks very nice: three reasonably slim hardbacks in a slipcase that folds out to be a GM's screen. Pretty cool. Book one is your player's handbook: character creation, magic schools, archetypes, etc. Book two is your GM's book: campaign creation, setting info, antagonist groups, and so on. And book three is just a big dip-into-able book full of weird potential setting elements. I can see opening it to a random page to find something to add to a game.

I initially thought that this would be daunting -- three books, after all, and we're not talking about D&D where a lot of that is library content. But the total page count is still only about 450 pages, which is more than second edition but not that much more. I don't know why I find big games daunting, but at the moment I think that I just couldn't commit to drilling down and really learning a complicated new game system.

Of course, UA 3rd ed. isn't really complicated, and it isn't really new. Still, the mechanics have undergone a lot of change from previous editions. Personally, I approve. Previous editions of UA had a pretty good dice system at heart, but it suffered from being neither one thing nor the other: it was simple enough to produce a lot of vague moments where the GM had to make on-the-fly decisions but still complicated enough that you constantly had to look things up, especially during combat, which had lots of finicky spot rules. It worked not too badly, but there were times when it could be very frustrating.

This version is even more slimmed-down, with stats and skills gone and the bit of the system that was most distinctive, the madness meters, moved front and centre. The base skills that everyone has now derived from how Hardened you are on a meter. So if you are very hardened to Violence, for instance, you're good at Struggle, but correspondingly bad at Connect, the skill that lets you relate to regular folks. This is combined with a catchall skill system, Identity, which is a little bit like a Cover in Sorcerer if you ever played that. Basically, you have a catchall skill like "grizzled private eye" or "wealthy socialite" that covers the skills appropriate to the job or role. You can have more than one, so I could have "fry cook" and "blood magician" and maybe even another. It works, and I think it patches the otherwise odd outcomes the otherwise loose skill system might produce (like, just going off the madness meter system, you can't be both physically fit and good at dodging, which is bizarre, but if it really matters to you you can stick one or the other in your identity). So you get the benefits of simplicity with fewer of the problems of occasional bits of detail. Overall I'm pleased with the changes.

In addition to a revised core system and some helpful campaign-generation advice (which is the biggest challenge of UA, I think), you get the other stuff you'd expect in a new edition of the game.  There are new magic schools and new archetypes, which are cool, although I'm not sure why magic schools are all new but the archetypes are about 50/50. They presumably guessed correctly that next to nobody would buy 3rd edition who didn't already have 2nd, so ... Anyway, not a whole lot has changed in the way these mechanics work, except that they're rolled into the Identity system, so that if you're an adept or an avatar, that's one of your Identities, one that lets you cast spells or use channels but not do a lot else. This goes a long way toward making magic-types not as capable as their non-magical counterparts, something that was sorely needed in previous editions.

And perhaps I could. I gave up my last UA game because I was badly burned out, but that was years ago. Perhaps it's lain fallow in my mind long enough. We'll see. I started reading it expecting to think "well, I loved this game but this huge new edition that cost $125 is not for me," but actually ... maybe.

RPG a Day, Day 31: The final chapter

So today's post is about my favourite RPG, but naturally I'm going to talk about my favourite games in general, not just one.

Notes:

You can find Stars Without Number and its various supplements here. I have not really looked at Sine Nomine's fantasy stuff much, but I find it hard to believe it isn't equally great.

Here is the online version of the Ralios game writeups I liked so much. If you played in "Once Upon a Time in Kerofinela," you may find the tone familiar; it was a big influence.

My most recent big UA campaign was "Rose Crescent," which I ran in 2006. I wrote it up -- much of it anyway -- on my old livejournal; you can see the posts here. I don't have the notes for my previous two campaigns, "The King Leopold Society" and "Unknown Ellroy."

Beyond the Supernatural is goofy fun, and has some cool art. The supplement, Boxed Nightmares, came with a little newspaper, which was pretty cool.

I do like the props in CoC, like these ones from Propnomicon:

RPG a Day, Day 27: Everything old is new again

Today we talk about new editions. I got cut off right near the end of this one, but I think you can extrapolate what I was going to say. A good bad game is a delicate thing, much like a good bad movie.

Here is a picture to make this post look better on social media. 

EDIT: I am reliably informed that UA3 is go. Yay!

Inspiration is everywhere: Day 5

Today the heat and tiredness have just sapped my ability to think. I don't have any idea what to write about. But that's why we have a system, right? Let's go to the shelves. 

The gift of friend Chris (whose cool DIY Mass Effect costume blog you can find here), this copy of the infamous Simon Necronomicon is part of the overlap of my collection of occulty nonsense and my collection of Lovecraftiana. Its textual history has been covered in great detail by Dan Harms, but that's not what we care about. What we care about is whether there's anything in this load of goddamn nonsense that might be useful in a gaming context!

Behold its arcane majesty. 

I think there is a certain amount. Firstly, sometimes you just want to bash out a little occult ritual text or artwork and you don't give a hoot in hell for authenticity. When that happens, you can't go wrong with some of this book's high-falutin' pastichery (or cut-and-pastery as the case may be). Something like: 

Thee I invoke, Serpent of the Deep!

Thee I invoke, NINNGHIZHIDDA, Horned Serpent of the Deep!

Thee I invoke, Plumed Serpent of the Deep!

NINNGHIZHIDDA! 

You could give me twenty tries, and I'd never come up with Ninnghizhidda, Plumed and/or Horned Serpent of the Deep. And I like to think I'm good at names.

The Simon Necronomicon itself could also figure in games. Most games written by people who actually know anything about the field would die with shame rather than incorporate the Simon text (though I seem to recall that it does get mentioned in some Call of Cthulhu supplements, maybe?). But consider Unknown Armies, where magick tends to come from weird places. Alternatively, you could have a CoC tome (particularly in the Delta Green setting) that was written by some hack to capitalise on perceived Mythos weirdness but which nonetheless has magic properties.

Yeah, so our author -- let's call him Paul Lilak* -- is that fascinating mix of carnival barker, isolated weirdo and basic-model hippy that you get hanging around occult circles pretty much anywhere in the world. He mashes together some real-world mythology, some stuff he just made up, and some stuff ripped off from other sources. And through some combination of occult alchemy, even though the original materials didn't have magical powers, the mixture does.

So here's everyone ripping the piss out of Lilak, because everyone knows that his book is a load of bullshit, and he's getting increasingly crazy-furious, since he knows his crap works and that these magic-nerds aren't even bothering to try it. And serious occultists avoid it like the plague, so the only people even gaining the magic from the book are small-timers, lonely teenagers and dumbasses. That has potential.

(*I don't expect anyone to get this joke.)

Inspiration is everywhere: Day 4

As you may have noticed, a lot of my inspiration and resources come from charity shops, car boot sales and so on. Sometimes I'm not even there! When my wife is out looking for a bargain, she will also keep an eye out for anything I might like. This week she scored me a copy of Chew, Volume 1: Taster's Choice in a charity shop. In celebration of this generosity, I've decided to take this week's inspiration post from Chew!

Tony Chu, the main character, is a cibopath -- a psychic who gains impressions from eating things. If he eats an apple, he gets an impression of the sunshine, the tree, the place it was grown, pesticides, what have you. He is, for obvious reasons, a vegetarian. The world of Chew is one where chicken is outlawed, and Chu and his partner Mason Savoy hunt the big international chicken-smuggling rings. It is, as you might expect, not a wholly serious book. 

So the obvious thing to take away from Chew is cibopathy itself. Here then are three variations of the ability: a ritual for Unknown Armies, a spell for d20 (I don't have psychics in my game) and a psychic power for World of Darkness. 

It Tastes Like Murder, and Murder Tastes Pretty Fuckin' Good

Power: minor

Cost: 3 minor charges

Effect: For the next three hours, anything the caster eats will create a potent image in his or her mind of the item's origins and history. The images are vivid, as if the caster experienced them. Eating a meat product of any kind will therefore trigger a Rank 3 Violence check. Other experiences will trigger Stress Checks as appropriate. 

Ritual action: Draw a mystic sigil on an edible substance such as rice paper or cake frosting using your own blood. Cook the sigil using a specific mix of herbs and oils, then eat it. If any part of the sigil is left uneaten, the ritual doesn't function. 

Chew's Cantrip of Cibopathy

Level: Clr 4, Brd 4

Components: V, S, M

Casting time: 10 minutes

Range: Personal

Target: Object

Duration: Instantaneous

The caster must eat a small amount (at least a full mouthful) of an object in order to use Chow's Cantrip. The god Chew then grants the user a vision of the past or purpose of the object being consumed. The cleric may then ask a question about the history or function of the item, which the DM will answer in the form of a subjective, emotional impression. Multiple attempts at using this spell produce the same result each time. 

Material component: the object to be eaten.

Cibopathy (ESP, ***)

Cost: 1 Willpower

Pool: Wits+Composure or Wits+Crafts

Effect: Like Psychometry (Second Sight, p. 41), Cibopathy allows the psychic to perceive impressions attached to objects -- specifically, to edible ones. This usually takes the form of a general overview of the object's history, unless there is a particularly traumatic or emotional experience associated with it (for instance, eating the body of a murdered person would give an image of the killing). 

Dramatic Failure: the psychic receives a revolting, nauseating image of some disgusting part of the object's past. A successful Stamina+Composure roll prevents noisy vomiting. 

Failure: the cibopath receives no information from the object. 

Success: the psychic receives an impression of an important or emotionally charged part of the object's past. 

Exceptional success: the psychic experiences a sped-up vision of the object's "life" or history. 

Modifiers: 

+1: the object is food, cooked and prepared as such. 

0: the object is not prepared food, but is edible (a plant, an animal)

-2: the object is not digestible (dirt, a penny, paper)