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I'm not sure if there's a better place for this question- if there is, let me know. I've just repurchased the Unknown Armies book, having lent my old book to a friend who left it at his girlfriend's house just days before their cataclysmic breakup. I'm hoping to get my regular tabletop group interested in a game later this year and wanted to sound people out as to the best introductory scenario for a group. I remember there being a pretty cool scenario in the UA main book- the three scenes, all with three versions of the same guy- but are there other intro scenarios I should track down? Any must haves, beyond the main book?
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Apr 10, 2013 16:48
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Veritek83 posted:I'm not sure if there's a better place for this question- if there is, let me know. One-shots seems pretty tailor made for what you're looking for: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=AG6001 I've heard good things about Jailbreak from it for intro games.
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Apr 10, 2013 19:33
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Veritek83 posted:I'm not sure if there's a better place for this question- if there is, let me know. Bill in Three Persons, the one you're thinking of, is a really good introduction to Unknown Armies, yeah. The one thing you should be aware of - because I sure as hell wasn't until we actually got to it ingame and it made it very awkward - is that there's a bit where you come across a dead, choked four year old girl in a paedophile's basement and then her dad goes apeshit. We still all had fun but that reaaaally lowered the mood. All the scenarios in the one-shots book are awesome as well. I've heard good things about Weep, too, but again with the depressing things on that one.
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Apr 10, 2013 20:40
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Doodmons posted:Bill in Three Persons, the one you're thinking of, is a really good introduction to Unknown Armies, yeah. The one thing you should be aware of - because I sure as hell wasn't until we actually got to it ingame and it made it very awkward - is that there's a bit where you come across a dead, choked four year old girl in a paedophile's basement and then her dad goes apeshit. We still all had fun but that reaaaally lowered the mood. Yeah, I think depressing and upsetting things may be like...a theme of Unknown Armies. Who knew? I actually just grabbed the One Shots pdf from e23 and am getting through the slowest work day of 2013 reading through. Great call you guys.
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Apr 10, 2013 20:44
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Doodmons posted:Bill in Three Persons, the one you're thinking of, is a really good introduction to Unknown Armies, yeah. The one thing you should be aware of - because I sure as hell wasn't until we actually got to it ingame and it made it very awkward - is that there's a bit where you come across a dead, choked four year old girl in a paedophile's basement and then her dad goes apeshit. We still all had fun but that reaaaally lowered the mood. I had a player who'd put his rage stimulus down as something like 'abused children', figuring it was something flavorful and, I can only assume, unlikely to come up. His character started that sceme freaking out at Bill for cutting up a dude with no mouth, then when Bill said the man took his little girl and he just needed him to tell him where she was there was a complete 180 and that player played through his characters rage stimulus beautifully. That whole adventure helped sell that playgroup on the fact that UA was more than another one of my weird RPGs, though its definitely that too. I'd say a good second adventure is... um, I think its in One-Shots, its the one where they meet a homeless guy who asks them for change and then teleports them into a dreamlike mad city. They met Jesus again, even though he didn't remember them, and in general I think had fun. Though that one is pretty bizarre even for UA and might be a bit much for a first intro. My favorite part about those adventures was outside of their bizarre UA encounters the characters had never met. They found themselves at the cross roads from other sides of the country, and then an identical hobo asked them for change while one was in LA and the other in Boston, I think.
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Apr 11, 2013 00:29
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I dunno. I always like a more gradual introduction into the UA weirdness than Bill in Three Persons. It's not very street level.
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Apr 11, 2013 00:33
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If you have the players, Jailbreak is bar none the best one-shot UA scenario. 3 escaped convicts, 1 captive guard, and the 2 people whose farmhouse the convicts have taken shelter in. 1 gun.
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Apr 11, 2013 08:44
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Flavivirus posted:If you have the players, Jailbreak is bar none the best one-shot UA scenario. 3 escaped convicts, 1 captive guard, and the 2 people whose farmhouse the convicts have taken shelter in. 1 gun. Yeah, just read through about half of it(enough to find out some of the weird stuff) and it looks amazing.
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Apr 11, 2013 14:37
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I can't even find a way to get jailbreak 
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Apr 11, 2013 18:00
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Fenarisk posted:I can't even find a way to get jailbreak Here, it's in this one: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=AG6001
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Apr 11, 2013 22:33
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fez_machine posted:Here, it's in this one: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=AG6001 Another good 1-shot is "And I feel Fine..." from the same book as Jailbreak. Don't run it without writing the ending, though... there's different atmospheric bits that you need to wire in throughout for a satisfying finish. I've run Bill in 3 Parts twice now, and it seems to me that the first part is confusion, the second part is squick/depressing, and the third part brings some laughs. Gotta have the right play atmosphere, though... it needs to keep moving pretty briskly. I've tried to run Break Today multiple times, but the PCs never get anywhere near the Kundalini, and our campaigns burned out around Vegas.
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Apr 11, 2013 22:47
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If you weren't a backer, you might be interested to know that Greg Stolze's RPG of Benevolent Bad Guys and Pontificating Paragons, Better Angels, is out and available: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/114269/Better-Angels
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May 8, 2013 10:26
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That cover looks like poo poo.
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May 8, 2013 10:40
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ravenkult posted:That cover looks like poo poo. I have no idea what's up with that. The inside of the book is well designed and appropriately comicy.
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May 8, 2013 12:12
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ravenkult posted:That cover looks like poo poo. Fittingly, one of its main themes is "Don't judge a book by its cover". But yeah, wow, awful.
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May 8, 2013 12:28
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Something about his books attracts bad covers. eCollapse (did anyone else play that?) was just painful to look at.
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May 8, 2013 12:29
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Speaking of the .pdf, did they move the file? I just tried to download it and there's nothing there. I don't recall seeing anything from them about it moving but I can't download it.
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May 8, 2013 12:35
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rantmo posted:Speaking of the .pdf, did they move the file? I just tried to download it and there's nothing there. I don't recall seeing anything from them about it moving but I can't download it. I can access it from the link they sent out yesterday just fine, from the link they sent out about 20 hours ago.
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May 8, 2013 13:10
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rantmo posted:Speaking of the .pdf, did they move the file? I just tried to download it and there's nothing there. I don't recall seeing anything from them about it moving but I can't download it. I think they're working on a new version of the file because the background dots were obscuring the text on some e-readers.
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May 8, 2013 13:42
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I got a response from Shane with a fresh link that worked, so it's all good now. drat fast response time, I'm really impressed.
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May 8, 2013 14:43
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Jailbreak, as a stand-alone is literally available for free from the Atlas Games website. Or if it's not meant to be, then it's freely available via Google Search, typing in 'jailbreak unknown armies'. https://www.atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/jailbreak.pdf There's none of the UA rules in there but the entire scenario is in there.
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May 9, 2013 04:07
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Kellsterik posted:Something about his books attracts bad covers. eCollapse (did anyone else play that?) was just painful to look at. It's not as bad as Grim War, aka the only Stolze book I didn't keep when purging my home of physical copies of RPGs.
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May 9, 2013 04:09
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BrainParasite posted:I have no idea what's up with that. The inside of the book is well designed and appropriately comicy. The main image was great as a cover until they boxed it in and surorunded it with random comic book panel stuff. It's just visually noisy and weird. But yeah, the game is awesome so who cares?
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May 9, 2013 04:11
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It's Poser ''art'', that's why it's terrible.
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May 9, 2013 04:23
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Hey dudes, if you want to be giant peaches and help a brogrammer out, drop me a PM or an email at andrew AT cardboardshark.com. I need beta testers for the BA browser app!
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May 30, 2013 09:30
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Man, I had completely forgotten about this thread! I actually managed to run a UA one shot, which didn't go all that well, since most of the players didn't show up, and I ended up playing with just too people. However they liked it enough that one of the players later ran that one shot from the book where they introduced the Dark Stalker archetype as one of the possible villains. We had a full set of players for that one actually, and it was amazingly fun to play. The guy modified the scenario and that, combined with my poor memory of the thing meant I could actually enjoy a (almost) street level game. The almost bit is because my character was actually a low-level avatar of the Savage (she had like 50% in her avatar skill, but it's still something), and I feel like I did a great job at portraying just how weird someone gets by dabbling in the occult, even at such a low level. A good scene was when the group decided to leave the place they were living at and drive to somewhere else, and see how things are there. The only problem was my character's Fear stimulus was cars, and it took some amazing convincing and rolls on part of the other characters to make her get in the drat car and not just walk on foot the whole way. The big climax was amazing to play trough as well, with one of the characters (An old doctor with some self-medication problems) being possessed by a demon or something, who then shot most of the other characters, with my character going completely apeshit mad and bum-rushing the guy. (It ended about as well as you can imagine a crazy person rushing head-first towards a guy with a gun might end) *Sigh* Still can't convince these people to start a longer campaign I have prepared and ready to run. And now that I tasted how fun actually playing Unknown Armies is, I want more!
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May 30, 2013 19:49
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ It can be a difficult game to find the right group for! UA stories make for the best stories to accidentally scar eavesdropping party guests with. I was surprised to see that Atlas Games actually released a new splatbook for UA in March! It's the cancelled Thin Black Line book, about the Cecilite church and their incessant attempts to harsh everyone's buzz, and it is a free PDF.
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May 30, 2013 23:16
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Squidster posted:^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Oh god, I actually missed an Unknown Armies book?! poo poo, thanks for giving me the link. I remember just hearing rumors that there was supposedly some new sourcebook coming out, except I kept checking their site and there was nothing there, so I decided that it was just that - rumors.
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May 31, 2013 08:27
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After years of talking about it, I finally got around to building a set of Drama Cards for Unknown Armies. Drama cards are a meta-resource that allow players to take control of a campaign, and really twist things to their advantage. I'm planning on springing these cards on my players this Thursday; I'm not sure if it'll be great or a complete disaster, but either way it should be interesting! If anyone wants to take a look, and suggest cards or see balance issues, I've uploaded them as a PDF to Dropbox (43 mb) . The deck is based on the old D&D 4th Edition cards, so a lot of the art is still stock fantasy. If anyone has a giant resource of urban fantasy art, by all means share and I'll put them in!
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Jun 12, 2013 04:07
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Hey, sooo I recently got a hold and read trough the Spherewalker Sourcebook for Everway, and I ended up being a bit...well not disappointed, but confused. Now, from what I've seen around the net, Spherewalker is usually heralded as basically the single best sourcebook for a RPG ever. And it's not. Don't get me wrong, it's really drat cool, the characters here and there are very interesting and there's some good ideas about how the Everway world works. However, none of it's really all that amazing or original. Like, I knew most of the symbols and ideas that Stolze used in the book already, just from reading stuff, studying historical clothing and so on. Compared to the work Stolze has done with Unknown Armies and REIGN, the stuff in Spherewalker is nice, but hardly matches up to the standards set by himself in his later career. Soo, am I just mistaken, did I just ended up being affected by the hype, or is Spherewalker really just not all that amazing as some people make it out to be?
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Aug 22, 2013 10:16
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Jenx posted:Compared to the work Stolze has done with Unknown Armies and REIGN, the stuff in Spherewalker is nice, but hardly matches up to the standards set by himself in his later career. Soo, am I just mistaken, did I just ended up being affected by the hype, or is Spherewalker really just not all that amazing as some people make it out to be? Well, you yourself said it: it was one of his earlier efforts. At the time, it was pretty amazing - nobody expected it, because nobody really knew who he was. But now, of course, we have Reign, we have Unknown Armies, we have A Dirty World (my personal favorite of the ORE games) - so Spherewalker isn't as spectacular now that we know he can do some amazing things and actually write mechanics to support them.
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Aug 22, 2013 18:42
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Maybe I am a bad GM, but I feel like Bill in Three Persons is not a good introduction for players. My group had a really difficult time with the first and third sequences. The first was just way too deadly for them as they were naturally inclined to try to Do the Right Thing, and the third was just utterly confusing for them. I think from an outside perspective it feels like a sequence of things happen without any explicit reasoning behind them.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:27
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Somberbrero posted:Maybe I am a bad GM, but I feel like Bill in Three Persons is not a good introduction for players. My group had a really difficult time with the first and third sequences. The first was just way too deadly for them as they were naturally inclined to try to Do the Right Thing, and the third was just utterly confusing for them. I think from an outside perspective it feels like a sequence of things happen without any explicit reasoning behind them. What did they try to do in the first? I'd say if any of them died just have them come back in the next sequence and have a corpse show up at the three way intersection. Its fudging the rules a bit, but its not totally implausible game world logic wise. Especially given who the cop, allegedly, is. For sequence three what were they not groking about the set up? It does have a fair bit of crazy to it, was it too much for the players to take from Bill's proselytizing? I know the one cultist with murderous motivations is a bit weird to fit in at first, but most of the other stuff can be waved off with one of the cultists dropping a reference to Waco I would think. At first blush UA has a huge what the hell factor for many people, but if you keep feeding them the information provided and maybe a little custom dialogue to push the players/characters button the right way it can be amazing. I think. I've never actually played. Only GM'd. And my player's knew things were going to get insane fast and could tell from the rules that combat was not something they wanted to rush into.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:47
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To be honest I think Jailbreak is a far better introduction; it's a tense story with plenty of character interactions, and the supernatural ramps up gradually and insidiously. Bill in Three Parts feels more like a fairground ride of UA, taking you on a whistlestop tour of weirdness without much rhyme or reason.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:55
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Somberbrero posted:Maybe I am a bad GM, but I feel like Bill in Three Persons is not a good introduction for players. My group had a really difficult time with the first and third sequences. The first was just way too deadly for them as they were naturally inclined to try to Do the Right Thing, and the third was just utterly confusing for them. I think from an outside perspective it feels like a sequence of things happen without any explicit reasoning behind them. I had a lot of difficulty understanding how it was supposed to work vis a vis the madness meters. Like, the party is timewarped into the supermarket. Shouldn't that call for a pretty hefty Unnatural roll? But that might mean some or all of the party members start having nervous breakdowns just as the fighting starts.
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Aug 24, 2013 23:48
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Flavivirus posted:To be honest I think Jailbreak is a far better introduction; it's a tense story with plenty of character interactions, and the supernatural ramps up gradually and insidiously. Bill in Three Parts feels more like a fairground ride of UA, taking you on a whistlestop tour of weirdness without much rhyme or reason. Agree on both counts. The fact that the three parts feature Bill as an artifact guy, an adept, and an avatar suggest to me that it's intended as "look at all the stuff you can do in this game!"
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Aug 25, 2013 02:23
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http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06-05/news/myths-over-miami/full/ seems like perfect fodder for a UA (or Little Fears) game.
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Sep 3, 2013 12:05
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I just got my copy of Better Angels! I didn't even know they were going out.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:33
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rantmo posted:I just got my copy of Better Angels! I didn't even know they were going out. Yeah I got a mystery email from Publishers Services Incorporated and was wondering what the heck it could be
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Sep 13, 2013 20:53
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Capntastic posted:Yeah I got a mystery email from Publishers Services Incorporated and was wondering what the heck it could be It took me the better part of a day to narrow down the list of possibilities to it. It doesn't help that the tracking on stamps.com is slightly worse than completely useless.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:58
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