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Strange Matter
Oct 6, 2009

Ask me about Genocide
UA3's Adept Schools seem based more on delusion, and especially group delusion, instead of self-destruction. Their paradoxes and symbolic tensions are less about ruining your life in exchange for skewed enlightenment and more about being so certain that the world works in a way that it demonstrably does not that your state of being sheers from actual reality.

In that sense it lacks a bit of the bite from earlier editions, but replaces it, I think, with a somewhat dimmer view of human society. A lot of the new schools are based on collective belief and subculture. Where Adepts pre-UA2 are lone nuts thrown into the gutter of human society, UA3 Adepts are guys who, instead of getting into the club, go off and start their own weird club with its own dresscode where they can play all the Croatian dubstep they want.

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Capntastic
Jan 13, 2005

A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Modern social media and community technology has allowed the fringe weirdoes to organize and obsess over their little fetishes

[Looks at thread title nervously as Ironside title theme begins blaring]

Jenx
Oct 17, 2012

Behold the Bull of Heaven!
Honestly, while they are less self-destructive, I actually prefer the new adepts to the old ones. Reading stuff on the internet has basically convinced me that most people who read UA don't seem to get how adepts work anyway, so might as well just make them really really weird, instead of borderline suicidal (and in some cases - there's no borderline either). Plus, you've got gun mages, smoking mages and farming mages - if you can't get hyped up about that, then the problem's with you.


Also, someone requested an Actual Play, the one I know of is this one here: http://cucullus-non-facit-monachum.obsidianportal.com/ This is from one of the guys from the Unknown Armies Fan Page facebook page. You can also find people sharing anecdotes and such from their own UA3 games they've run there as well.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Weren't a lot of the old Adept schools self-destructive enough and/or had restrictive enough taboos that they wouldn't really work in a group of people trying to work together towards something that wasn't dead on the theme of the adept school? Like, say, a group of PCs?

Chernobyl Peace Prize
May 7, 2007

Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

I think the new adepts fit the contradictions-and-sacrifices model just fine.

Agrimancy: The value in mastering nature is nurturing life, and the easiest way for you to gain charges is to take life. Plus, it's a very direct "the things you own end up owning you" because you have to give your time and effort to slow-roll into the power to...make it easier to do a lot of the stuff you were already doing. And you break taboo when faced with the kind of adversity that you were trying to ostensibly tame or hedge against in the first place. You're a bully of the natural world and you back down the first time it stands up to you.
Cameraturgy: You're trying to preserve temporary moments forever, but you have to use an inherently volatile and transient medium to do so.
Cinemancy: [This one's particularly fun] You show your appreciation and understanding of your subject matter by reducing it to the most hackneyed bullshit that any idiot already knows. The only stories you can tell are bits and pieces of things that used to be original, and god help you if you try to do something that defies convention.
Fulminaturgy: Depending on taboo type: Guns are powerful in theory but do nothing for you in practice (to the point where using their significant blast breaks taboo) versus the price of freedom is being chained to eternal vigilance.
Motumancy: You care about upending order so much that you have to eventually burn yourself out of caring about anything. And actually trying to fix or build something? hosed.
Sociomancy: You want to be part of a group that brings people together, but ONLY that group; everyone else can go screw.
Vestimancy: You craft the thing that gives you an identity, but it's never really your identity. There's no REAL you anymore, and the strongest things you can do are either make yourself even less-you, or make people "remember" trivia only sort of about you.
Viaturgy: You gain power over journeys by sacrificing the ability to ever settle on a final destination.

One of the key differences that jumps out at me compared to past editions is how a lot of these tend to feel more hollow because their effects are a lot more insidious and less immediately damaging, but paradoxically, much worse for you as a person with an identity and human agency. Past edition drunks and hoarders can REALLY gently caress their lives up, but you can still low-key function with a house full of books or a semi-permanent non-zero BAC, and at the end of the day you're "drunk person" or "person with a lot of books." Cameraturges operating in earnest have all the hoarding tendencies but if someone even nudges something out of place they're hosed, because they're perfectionists chasing a perfect memory OF perfectly arranged constructed memories. Agrimancers and Fulminaturges can bluster all they want about their subject matter, but wilt in the face of genuine confrontation.

If past edition magic is about how hard you're willing to be on yourself for power, UA3 magic seems to be a lot more about how desperate you are to avoid anything that challenges your existing beliefs to desperately cling to whatever power you've already scraped together through poo poo you were already planning on doing anyway.

Strange Matter
Oct 6, 2009

Ask me about Genocide

Zereth posted:

Weren't a lot of the old Adept schools self-destructive enough and/or had restrictive enough taboos that they wouldn't really work in a group of people trying to work together towards something that wasn't dead on the theme of the adept school? Like, say, a group of PCs?
This too. Stuff like Pornomancy and Videomancy are as close to unplayable as you can get in a lot of campaigns. UA3 Adepts are more team players, but that's just because their rituals and taboos don't lean as strongly towards isolation.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
One thing though, UA2 Adepts make great antagonists.

I had planned out a campaign a while back after a friend complained that there were no Supernatural RPGs where normal people with no magic powers are viable opposition to the supernatural threats.

Had a whole thing where each player had been on the wrong end of a magical weirdo, and we're all in court ordered group therapy together.

The scenario starts by them all in their final session, explaining what their delusions were, how they understand that their brains made up weird stuff to help deal with trauma, and that they are ready to move on with their lives.

Afterwards, they meet up at a bar, and decide to get revenge on the freaks that hosed up their lives.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:

Sociomancy: You want to be part of a group that brings people together, but ONLY that group; everyone else can go screw.

Sociomancy also has the interesting contradiction of having to make a subculture your identity and subsume yourself to it... until it no longer presents enough novelty for you to get a charge, metaphorically or literally, at which point you have to drop it like a hot rock and find something else to subsume yourself in. You have to embody both the total devotion to your Egregor that brings power and the disinterest necessary to detach. (This is also a nice way of modeling general nerd fandom trends, incidentally.)

tarbrush
Feb 7, 2011

ALL ABOARD THE SCOTLAND HYPE TRAIN!

CHOO CHOO

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

One thing though, UA2 Adepts make great antagonists.

I had planned out a campaign a while back after a friend complained that there were no Supernatural RPGs where normal people with no magic powers are viable opposition to the supernatural threats.

Had a whole thing where each player had been on the wrong end of a magical weirdo, and we're all in court ordered group therapy together.

The scenario starts by them all in their final session, explaining what their delusions were, how they understand that their brains made up weird stuff to help deal with trauma, and that they are ready to move on with their lives.

Afterwards, they meet up at a bar, and decide to get revenge on the freaks that hosed up their lives.

I love this.

Also thanks everyone, it's really helpful to see the contradictions in the new schools.

The Lemondrop Dandy
Jun 7, 2007

If my memory serves me correctly...


Wedge Regret
Anyone have a link to a pile of evocative photos for the first session/worldbuilding?

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


Zereth posted:

Weren't a lot of the old Adept schools self-destructive enough and/or had restrictive enough taboos that they wouldn't really work in a group of people trying to work together towards something that wasn't dead on the theme of the adept school? Like, say, a group of PCs?

meh, the restrictions for some of the old adept schools are certainly more limiting than others, but ultimately they're only as big of a hassle as your GM feels like making them. it's the same kind of problem in any RPG where the "downside" to tremendous power isn't mechanically enforced so much as narratively enforced - i.e. taking an extreme allergy to vitamin C in shadowrun, or having to meticulously track spell components in D&D. like sure, if you play the game literally RAW and the GM is acting in the spirit of those rules, then whatever narrative penalties are required would be evenly represented. but most people aren't playing elfgames to have to obsess over the specific diet of their cyber samurai, or to track the contents of a spell component pouch with the accuracy and granularity of a military requisitions depot, so it kind of makes sense that the avatars in UA3 wouldn't have really overwhelming narrative drawbacks, because those are only meaningful when your GM remembers to enforce them.

you can have a videomancer and a pornomancer be in the same party, assuming that you don't have to literally roleplay all 24 consecutive hours in a game day. as long as the team agrees "okay we'll go out and do our magic investigating between X and Y pm and otherwise you can gently caress-off to go do whatever" then there's no explicit reason why they would run into taboo. it's the same kind of logic inherent to the 15 minute adventuring day in D&D, where having no outstanding consequence for resting for 8 hours the second your spells run out causes all kinds of weird conclusions about the game world.

it also strikes me as a no-pain-no-gain scenario. an epideromancer, a booze hound, or a bodybag could ruin your loving day with trivial effort, but only because they've completely ruined themselves past the point of no return.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
Got my books today. Just realized that Naked Goddess is a defined avatar channel now!

Edit:

I was thinking, if some godwalker tried to usurp the spot, I wonder if she would even resist. It doesn't sound like she was terribly thrilled to ascend in the first place.

Dr. Arbitrary fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Apr 14, 2017

Chernobyl Peace Prize
May 7, 2007

Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

Got my books today. Just realized that Naked Goddess is a defined avatar channel now!

Edit:

I was thinking, if some godwalker tried to usurp the spot, I wonder if she would even resist. It doesn't sound like she was terribly thrilled to ascend in the first place.
It's also one of the most adept-like Avatar channels, in that it utterly destroys your interpersonal relationships and ability to get along in the world in any meaningfully engaged way. Which makes sense considering the legacy.

hito
Feb 13, 2012

Thank you, kids. By giving us this lift you're giving a lift to every law-abiding citizen in the world.

The Lemondrop Dandy posted:

Anyone have a link to a pile of evocative photos for the first session/worldbuilding?

I've got a few I've been hanging on to, but not a "pile". Is there a way we could set up a multi-goon album for everyone to dump good pictures in to?

Wapole Languray
Jul 4, 2012

Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:

Agrimancy: The value in mastering nature is nurturing life, and the easiest way for you to gain charges is to take life. Plus, it's a very direct "the things you own end up owning you" because you have to give your time and effort to slow-roll into the power to...make it easier to do a lot of the stuff you were already doing. And you break taboo when faced with the kind of adversity that you were trying to ostensibly tame or hedge against in the first place. You're a bully of the natural world and you back down the first time it stands up to you.
Cameraturgy: You're trying to preserve temporary moments forever, but you have to use an inherently volatile and transient medium to do so.
Cinemancy: [This one's particularly fun] You show your appreciation and understanding of your subject matter by reducing it to the most hackneyed bullshit that any idiot already knows. The only stories you can tell are bits and pieces of things that used to be original, and god help you if you try to do something that defies convention.
Fulminaturgy: Depending on taboo type: Guns are powerful in theory but do nothing for you in practice (to the point where using their significant blast breaks taboo) versus the price of freedom is being chained to eternal vigilance.
Motumancy: You care about upending order so much that you have to eventually burn yourself out of caring about anything. And actually trying to fix or build something? hosed.
Sociomancy: You want to be part of a group that brings people together, but ONLY that group; everyone else can go screw.
Vestimancy: You craft the thing that gives you an identity, but it's never really your identity. There's no REAL you anymore, and the strongest things you can do are either make yourself even less-you, or make people "remember" trivia only sort of about you.
Viaturgy: You gain power over journeys by sacrificing the ability to ever settle on a final destination.

If I may offer an alternate conception of the paradoxes:

Agrimancy: It's all about proving man's dominance of nature, but the inherent paradox is that nature is the only thing that can gently caress you over. The thing you draw power from by dominating and enslaving is also the exact biggest threat to you existence and power. An Agrimancer is at war with the entire natural world all the time. It takes a lot of time and work to make charges, and it all goes away if you slip on a patch of black ice. Agrimancer's must look like paranoids, constantly monitoring the weather for any tiny change or being paranoid around any animal they don't own.
Cameraturgy: The paradox is pretty simple for them: They're obsessed with an inferior copy of a genuine event. They get charges from photographing emotional moments, literally taking in everything through the lens of a camera but never experiencing it themselves. They get charges from peeping on a wedding, not having one. They get to see all the life everyone else is living while they just get to keep the lifeless reminders.
CInemancy: More to the point, they're both obsessed with and eslaved by film: A cinemancer literally has to reenact the acts in film living in a constant imitation of imaginary people, the films that define them only existing as a way to learn more rules and cliche's to act out. The art itself is worthless to them, only how it makes people think and act matters.
Fulminaturgy: To clarify, they aren't Gun-mages in that they focus on shooting, but instead focus on the social and cultural importance of the Gun. There's two varieties, one believes that guns are most potent as a symbol of power and authority, but lose their charges if they ever actually shoot one, while the other sees guns as the ultimate liberator and equalizer the way for the lone man to stand against the world, and they violate taboo if they're ever unarmed.
Motumancy: Yep, you got it clear: they're people who live by destroying, particularly other peoples worldview and morality. Basically every motumancer is on a fast track to violent self-destruction because they can never do anything constructive or beneficial for others by definition.
Sociomancy: The real paradox is that the social group you follow is both all important, it defines your life totally in every way, and completely pointless, because you'll drop them the second they stop being novel or interesting to you without issue. The bonds of communty are both all powerful and totally disposable.
Vestimancy: Yep, you are what you wear, but to such a degree that that's all that you are.
Viaturgy: They get powers over cars and movement, but literally violate taboo if they sleep in the same building more than once. Viaturges travel for the sake of traveling, gently caress the destination, the journey is literally everything.

Sargeant Biffalot
Nov 24, 2006
A lot of the more self-destructive original adept schools were described as being like junkies who would go on big magical benders which they know are delusional and bad for them, in the expectation of at some point breaking taboo and trying to go straight - Oneiromancy and dispomancy being the most extreme, but entropomancy and epideromancy were also described in the fiction as working this way. The new schools all lean more towards the cliomancy/plutonomancy side of things where they are like conspiracy theorists who don't want to and can't break out of their worldviews, so it makes sense that they would, like them, have less extreme requirements that someone could stick to for years on end.

Strange Matter
Oct 6, 2009

Ask me about Genocide

Sargeant Biffalot posted:

A lot of the more self-destructive original adept schools were described as being like junkies who would go on big magical benders which they know are delusional and bad for them, in the expectation of at some point breaking taboo and trying to go straight - Oneiromancy and dispomancy being the most extreme, but entropomancy and epideromancy were also described in the fiction as working this way. The new schools all lean more towards the cliomancy/plutonomancy side of things where they are like conspiracy theorists who don't want to and can't break out of their worldviews, so it makes sense that they would, like them, have less extreme requirements that someone could stick to for years on end.
This fits in nicely with the metaplot of UA3, I think, in that things have gone wrong in really unexpected ways. The universe was supposed to end on 3/3/2003, but since the Freak and the Comte derailed it, everything's gotten even weirder, and the now the Adepts, who before were isolated junkies killing themselves left and right, and now banding together into something resembling orderly systems.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Can you still play old-school adepts in the new system, maybe with some modifications?

It would be weird if your magick (and your belief system) changed because the universe around you was changing in ways you couldn't deny.

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.

Halloween Jack posted:

Can you still play old-school adepts in the new system, maybe with some modifications?

It would be weird if your magick (and your belief system) changed because the universe around you was changing in ways you couldn't deny.

Yeah, it's super easy to port and sokme of them got refreshed in book 4. They'll mostly just work as-is and for the edge cases you should refer to the DIY Magick School Charge Pricing Guide.



A lot of the "fanglessness" of the new schools is due to shift from "what if these self-destructive habits were magic?" to "wow, people on the internet get really weird about common subcultures, wonder if they'd be magic". This is sometimes really cool (love the jabs at NRA, tv tropers and 4chan). Kinda wish meme magic and church of kek erupted earlier, that'd be fun in this game. Also, fulminaturgy should imo with only the pacifist taboo, it's both a great paradox and a tasty troll.

The two schools I really dislike are the agrimancy and motumancy. The former is just all around lame and the charges/taboo mechanics seem really unexciting and the latter seems really stuck in its own rear end - both deeply embedded with ~metaplot~ and its abstract labelling minigame. I just don't feel them at all.

I also find it difficult to judge the setting chans/updates. On their own, I think the old ways are a bit stronger, but the new ones are oftentimes really cool twists on 2ed expectations. It's just that since no one ever actually played the old editions, it might be tricky to properly leverage things that are cool in context for UA neophytes.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Strange Matter posted:

This fits in nicely with the metaplot of UA3, I think, in that things have gone wrong in really unexpected ways. The universe was supposed to end on 3/3/2003, but since the Freak and the Comte derailed it, everything's gotten even weirder, and the now the Adepts, who before were isolated junkies killing themselves left and right, and now banding together into something resembling orderly systems.
Is that what happened? I didn't see that, although admittedly I'm not super-far into the books. If the Clergy was at 332 and the Freak and the Comte both tried to ascend at same time, then I would imagine the universe would indeed bug out. Good thing the House was there to act as an error trap.

fake edit: Holy poo poo the House of Renunciation is really the universes' developer suite and bugfix environment. Gotta fix those glitches before we deploy to the live environment.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin

tarbrush posted:

I love this.

Also thanks everyone, it's really helpful to see the contradictions in the new schools.

If you like this concept, let me share what I've got, adapted to the new books.

I plan to write out a few index cards with identities on them, and a hint at the trauma:

Underground Boxing Promoter 30%
Mutilated by a magical freak.

Owns a rare book store 30%
Lost a dear family member to a magical freak.

Worked in pornography industry 30%
Manipulated for a weird sexual fetish by a magical freak. (No rape, just weirdness)

Etc.

The first one an epideromancer wanted the character to fix a fight under the threat that if he didn't do it, he'd rip his dick off. Things didn't work out, epideromancer followed through on the threat.

Second one: Take a well known contemporary novel, maybe Harry Potter, Twilight or 50 shades of grey. One of the major characters in these stories is a loved one who was somehow stolen from reality and put into a book by a customer who then published a hit novel. When you read those books, sometimes the dialogue changes and they beg for help.

Third one:
Guy took a role in a cuckold porno years back as the husband. He's in the bedroom watching TV waiting for his wife, who keeps getting delayed by visits from the plumber, pool guy, pizza delivery man etc. Eventually falls asleep. Years later, a beautiful woman seduces him, beings him to her home, plops him in the bedroom in front of a TV and says she'll be right back. Guy feels compelled to watch TV, and eventually falls asleep, wakes up and the house is empty. Weird, except it kept happening with different women and on the third time he was able to will himself out of bed, opened the door and saw the woman who had just seduced him loving a pizza delivery guy. Lady told him to go wait in the bedroom and despite wanting to run, he followed the order.

I'm going to try and make a good number of these, each associated with a potential villain.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Lichtenstein posted:

Also, fulminaturgy should imo with only the pacifist taboo, it's both a great paradox and a tasty troll.

I 100% agree with this and if I ever ran UA3 (which will be never 'cause I don't run games but still) this is the first thing I'd houserule out of existence. Stolze even mentions in a sidebar that the alternate taboo structure for Fulminaturgy is something he included simply because there was a certain subset of playtester that heard "gun mage" and got super excited to play a magic-powered badass blowing people away like John Wick right up until the found out what the school was really like and he wanted to throw them a bone, but to me the fact that it played out like that is a feature and not a bug. He even tells the reader that it's entirely possible to make a gun-toting badass in UA, you just don't need to be an adept to do it. The central paradox of a school of gun-fetishist adepts that are all about the Gun as a symbol of power and authority who lose all their mojo the instant they actually shoot someone is one of the strongest new schools in the game imo.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
Totally agree with the gun mage thing.

If someone really really wanted to play the variant, I'd probably up the cost of the spells because of the change. Also, their totem had better be tiny because good luck being discrete with a rifle on your back.

Wapole Languray
Jul 4, 2012

The writeup specifically says that you can have your gun disassembled and stowed in a briefcase or backpack, just as long as you're carrying all the pieces it counts as "having it", at least for the purposes of generating charges and preventing taboo.

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

WE HAVE TO CONTROL OUR ENVIRONMENT
IF YOU SEE ME POSTING OUTSIDE OF THE AUSPOL THREAD PLEASE TELL ME THAT I'M MISSED AND TO START POSTING AGAIN
Sounds like Enter the Gungeon.

quote:

Agrimancer's must look like paranoids, constantly monitoring the weather for any tiny change or being paranoid around any animal they don't own.

But why wouldn't you be paranoid about animals you don't know? You can't trust them.
Quoting this so it shows up next to my custom title.

Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Apr 15, 2017

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
I was thinking about story hooks and plot stuff and had an idea.

You've got Minor, Significant, and Major Charges, but who's to say that's the limit? What if there's an equivalent to ascension for an adept, charges on the same level of the mojo involved in TO-GO.
This is up to you if it works or not, but there's no reason that an adept wouldn't think that this could be true.

Entropomancer- Gamble with your life, and the lives of every person on earth. Maybe set up a nuclear bomb in Moscow and tie the trigger to a coin flip. 1 in 6 like Russian Roulette won't do it. A coin flip might. A revolver with 5/6 chambers loaded will definitely work. If you lose, you've got about a thousandth of a second to spend your charge, so better have an idea of what you want to do with it.

Plutomancer- Acquire all the money. Maybe not all of it, but depending on how the cosmos feels about M0-3 currency, it could be a transaction worth 3.33 Trillion up to 333 Trillion if the value of all derivative contracts count. Maybe it'd be easier to get bitcoin accepted as the primary reserve currency, then acquire 51% of them and change the rules so that you have all of them.

Cliomancer- Maybe there's one historical site that trumps them all, maybe it's the birthplace of the first man. No magical methods seem to work to find this place, but it's because it's giving off so much magic that it pegs the sensors no matter what direction you're facing, everywhere on earth. Maybe you could triangulate it if you used artifacts or adepts in space, but probably not, might be faster to scour Africa looking for the birthplace of humanity. The book says the Moon has a Major charge, but maybe it's got something stronger.
Or maybe you've just got to kill every single other Cliomancer, get into orbit and claim the whole dang earth.

Bibliomancer/Dipsomancer - Oldest existing book, oldest existing intentionally created alcohol. Either probably exists in some clay pot sealed in some cave somewhere.

That's off the top of my head, other schools might have a method, they might not. None of these have to work, and it's probably best to not let anyone try.

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

WE HAVE TO CONTROL OUR ENVIRONMENT
IF YOU SEE ME POSTING OUTSIDE OF THE AUSPOL THREAD PLEASE TELL ME THAT I'M MISSED AND TO START POSTING AGAIN
Dipsomancer: Try and out-drink an Australian. Or be so good at drinking that you get in the Guinness World Records book, become Prime Minister, and then get a beer named after you.

Sargeant Biffalot
Nov 24, 2006
The problem is each school weighs the worth of charges differently - majors for dipsomancers and cliomancers are huge things you need to quest for which can change the world, for entropamancers and epideromancers they are relatively obtainable but have a limited array of more personal effects. If you wanted to change to a four charge system you'd have to rejig everyone's costs.

Of course, since there are no set major spells or rituals, you could give them variable potency and flavour - maybe only minor and significant charges are fungible, "major charge" actually covers the whole spectrum of stronger forces above that. So the Sea of Tranquility and Gorham's Cave both have a major charge but if you want to mess with people's ideas about prehistory you need the latter.

Lichtenstein posted:


The two schools I really dislike are the agrimancy and motumancy. The former is just all around lame and the charges/taboo mechanics seem really unexciting and the latter seems really stuck in its own rear end - both deeply embedded with ~metaplot~ and its abstract labelling minigame. I just don't feel them at all.

Agrimancy is lame as is but would be great in a hard reboot UA as the last modernist magic school, barely hanging on with a casting penalty and only available by apprenticing to the few remaining masters. Mechanomancy doesn't really make sense in that slot any more because the cultural loss it's meant to reflect - the rise of consumer goods and the decline of individual tinkering and craftsmanship - has to a degree been reversed by the rise of hacker culture/makerspaces/etc, hobbyist computer/drone stuff, arguably the home computing revolution in general. There's no reason there shouldn't be new spontaneous mechanomancers.

On the other hand the idea that if you want to learn agrimancy you have to seek out some 200 year old wizard confined to an increasingly isolated family farm, surrounded on all sides by hostile agribusiness macrofarms, concerned that his failing magic won't keep him alive for much longer - that's got resonance. But the book presents it as a new school which is less interesting.

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

WE HAVE TO CONTROL OUR ENVIRONMENT
IF YOU SEE ME POSTING OUTSIDE OF THE AUSPOL THREAD PLEASE TELL ME THAT I'M MISSED AND TO START POSTING AGAIN
What's Agrimancy again? Because if it involves seeing Nature as something inherently inimical to humanity and that must be completely tamed & subjugated by Humanity-trust me, that loses you a few friends.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin

Sargeant Biffalot posted:

The problem is each school weighs the worth of charges differently - majors for dipsomancers and cliomancers are huge things you need to quest for which can change the world, for entropamancers and epideromancers they are relatively obtainable but have a limited array of more personal effects. If you wanted to change to a four charge system you'd have to rejig everyone's costs.

I thought about epideromancer cosmic charges for a while and I don't think it makes sense unless it was something like managing to torture yourself nonstop for 333 days.

In any case, there's no reason for cosmic charging methods to actually work. You could do all that and just end up with one regular boring major charge. You should probably not put the idea in your players' heads that they should try to get one. Antagonists on the other hand, this is a great motivation for them to do tremendously disruptive things that your players need to stop. In the plutomancer example, even if it generates only one major charge, it's still going to wreck the world economy.

It's also just fun to think about, what is the natural progression of an Adept who wanted to take things to their ultimate conclusion, taking things so far that afterwards, the school of magic won't even work because there's no room to go forwards, like a billionaire Bibliomancer rebuilding the Great Library of Alexandria, acquiring the oldest copy of every book in existence. No more charging is possible because it's already all done, YOU DID IT!

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I actually really like Agrimancy in theory, but in practice I sort of wonder how you'd wrap an Agrimancer into a campaign that isn't entirely about their farm or similar issues. They're very location-based (their altar, at bare minimum, and presumably the rest of their farm), don't do much beyond their specialty, and don't really seem to be aligned with other occult underground goals -- it seems like they've got the same "how do we hook the adept into the plot? / do we have to build the plot around the adept?" issue that UA 2E had.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
That's easy. Someone makes the farm an element during the group campaign creation phase. Boom. Done.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
I think it'd be better as an antagonist, creepy farms are a great place to send characters, especially with the crop maze spell.

Also just noticed the entry for sex ghost in book three.

Cool Dad
Jun 15, 2007

It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

So is UA 3 the first rpg with rules for cancer?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

You've got Minor, Significant, and Major Charges, but who's to say that's the limit? What if there's an equivalent to ascension for an adept, charges on the same level of the mojo involved in TO-GO.
This is up to you if it works or not, but there's no reason that an adept wouldn't think that this could be true.
The thing is, charges give you the power to change the world. To pull any of these off, you'd already have become one of the most powerful people in the world, and probably the most powerful person in the occult underground.

The charge you'd get from doing any of these things would have to be some kind of mystical apotheosis on par with Ascension (or even greater), or inducing some kind of mystical singularity that would almost certainly end the campaign (like "the concept of money no longer exists").

Kemper Boyd
Aug 6, 2007

no kings, no gods, no masters but a comfy chair and no socks
Back when UA was still a new thing, it had a problem for me. It made Mage seem really boring and middle-of-the-road by comparison.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
All the WoD games are, at their heart, about white middle class suburban reality being an illusion. UA is about playing lumpenproletarians who cannot avoid facing that truth.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin

Halloween Jack posted:

The thing is, charges give you the power to change the world. To pull any of these off, you'd already have become one of the most powerful people in the world, and probably the most powerful person in the occult underground.

The charge you'd get from doing any of these things would have to be some kind of mystical apotheosis on par with Ascension (or even greater), or inducing some kind of mystical singularity that would almost certainly end the campaign (like "the concept of money no longer exists").

Absolutely. They're not really appropriate goals for PCs under normal circumstances, but they're an idea for what powerful NPCs might be up to.

Adept schools aren't hobbies. They're obsessions and addictions, the kind of thing for an adept who has gotten a major charge at least once.

This is the kind of thing that turns millionaires into billionaires. They don't know when to stop.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Kemper Boyd posted:

Back when UA was still a new thing, it had a problem for me. It made Mage seem really boring and middle-of-the-road by comparison.

Mage is a power fantasy that hems and haws and kind of buries the lede as far as being a power fantasy, and also has a lot of baggage of older versions that leaned into the whole "consensus reality" thing which the current version has officially disavowed... but still has a bunch of mechanics that are just consensus reality with very thin, very obnoxious in-universe explanations of how they're really something else, honest. It would be better if it ditched the latter (not least since UA does it so much better) and committed more to the "actually, the universe is wrong" :ssj: stuff.

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Mage is ostensibly and explicitly a game about "giving a poo poo," and its problems flow from how people with a certain viewpoint imagine giving a poo poo and making a difference in the world. Like, people who cannot grasp politics without talking about taking out their wands, joining Dumbledore's Army and fighting Voldemort. (The Traditions hate the Hollow Ones because they're totally on-the-nose about living for aesthetic.)

Unknown Armies says that people who are 100% devoted to Giving A poo poo are insane by any conventional definition. You can't be an Entropomancer by tweeting dank Pepes.

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