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Dr. Arbitrary posted:You don't actually have to have that inner struggle, you just need to go through the motions, you know, refusing to be seated at a table with women other than your wife, etc. Regardless of whether there's actual temptation. Come to think of it the Mercenary could be a replacement for the Warrior, devotion to money rather than a cause. This could be actual military contractors or that whole paid political agitator you see today. When you add the mujahid to the equation it makes you reevaluate certain conflicts in the middle east.
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Jul 9, 2017 22:43
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"The Paid Provocateur" is such a perfect modern fit for the archetype. I like the idea that a Soldier of Fortune could channel that archetype too, he's just a bit more aggressive in his methods.
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Jul 11, 2017 21:49
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Hell, that's just the Protagonist Career from WFRP.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:21
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So my friends are finally getting back around to playing some more wild talents. Currently our game is set in our own alternate base setting of clockworkjoe's setup, where a big-rear end event has ended up with all the major heroes/villains apparently gone. Cleans up a ton of issues with a lot of superhero setting that normally have to get hand-waived (like why doesn't hero X swing by and solve this poo poo). My villain who is totally not-shredder found a magic amulet that lets him summon completely not-foot soldiers (actually got through 2 sessions before anyone picked up on it), as well as being able to duplicate a temporary lesser version of itself. Those are sold to minor gangs for instant muscle, and the ninjas happen to also scoop a bit of any loot around to bring back. I figure they'll be using funds to build a good old fashioned technodome or a dimensional portal to pull not-krang through. They'll be contracting through Bob the death-trap-builder, whose powers involve an any knowledge hyperskill, an observation-through-drones power, and some equipment that lets him build poo poo real fast (spys on you, figures out your powers, figures out how to build poo poo, builds it fast). Also I'm considering having Donald Trump be obsessed with the idea of resurrecting Osama Bin Laden just so he can kill him better than Obama did, and now that the pesky superheroes are gone he can send people out to find some magic or devices or something to do that. Between that and government people wanting control over the new super-powered people I think there are some good things to thread in as a evolving background plot that might suddenly become way more important. Any favorite death traps you guys have? I'm thinking of having a fairly simple setup but incorporate several rooms of fun.
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Jul 15, 2017 13:41
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I'm running a campaign starting tomorrow - we've only had the worldbuilding session so far - and I combined all of the starting plot elements into a single narrative prologue so everyone was going off the same "story". I thought I'd share it here and see if anyone has any fun ideas about what you think the answers to the mysteries are/should be, or just any fun plot ideas in general. I think we landed on a setup with a lot of potential. There is a goon player in the campaign but he's agreed to avoid this thread while the campaigns on.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:39
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Pretty nice, I like it. Steve reminds me just a little of Cain, who in the Bible was the first farmer, and the first murderer.
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Jul 20, 2017 01:21
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Strongly considering getting a 333 as my next tattoo. Good / bad / best idea?
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Jul 20, 2017 04:46
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Considering the "cabal/setting setup" process/phase of UA3, how would one set up and recruit for a PbP or asynchronous-Discord-type game?
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Jul 25, 2017 06:23
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I talked a bit about my idea for a campaign start, where the whole collaborative setup is ditched and you're all heading out from a group therapy session. If I write that up in detail, would that be a more convenient setup for people? I'm thinking of giving this Stratosphere thing a shot..
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Jul 25, 2017 09:53
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I talked a bit about my idea for a campaign start, where the whole collaborative setup is ditched and you're all heading out from a group therapy session. If I write that up in detail, would that be a more convenient setup for people? I'm thinking of giving this Stratosphere thing a shot.. I haven't seen that, but it sounds like an interesting/effective setup process; I'd definitely like to check it out.
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Jul 25, 2017 21:37
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I mostly like the new edition, and the GM section has given me a better idea how to structure the game sessions. The group goals and the distractions/obstacles/blowback help me understand what might actually happen in a game. There's one thing I still really don't get, though, and that's how to handle how many charges adepts would have. Getting charges would certainly happen in-game when applicable, but they'd also be happening off-screen as well. I wouldn't spend time in a session just for a fulminaturge to walk around his house with a gun so he can get a minor charge, and making sure the viaturge finds a new building to sleep would only maybe come up if the players were in a small town for a while. Since charges wouldn't all be gained in-game, how do I figure out how many charges an adept would have at a given time that isn't just a blind guess? Similarly, I also can't quite figure out taboos. Some of them feel like they can only be introduced by GM fiat. Agrimancers break taboo if they drive through rain, but as a GM, it only rains if I say it rains. If I never say it's raining, an agrimancer is all reward and no risk. If I say it's raining all the time, that's just loving over the player. If I try to figure out how often it rains and make a dice roll every so often, that's an admittedly small extra hassle on my part, but it also doesn't feel narratively dramatic. Do you have any ideas? How have you guys handled gaining and losing charges?
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Jul 28, 2017 21:15
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Cyrai posted:Similarly, I also can't quite figure out taboos. Some of them feel like they can only be introduced by GM fiat. Agrimancers break taboo if they drive through rain, but as a GM, it only rains if I say it rains. If I never say it's raining, an agrimancer is all reward and no risk. If I say it's raining all the time, that's just loving over the player. If I try to figure out how often it rains and make a dice roll every so often, that's an admittedly small extra hassle on my part, but it also doesn't feel narratively dramatic. How about if, in your campaign, weather science is more advanced than in real life and you can give your player accurate advance warning of when it's gonna rain? That way it's an obstacle they can plan to overcome instead of just a random gently caress-you.
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Jul 28, 2017 21:20
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I think the old farmer's almanac has some sort of weather thing in it. That'd work perfectly based on what I remember.
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Jul 28, 2017 21:47
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:How about if, in your campaign, weather science is more advanced than in real life and you can give your player accurate advance warning of when it's gonna rain? That way it's an obstacle they can plan to overcome instead of just a random gently caress-you. I do like the idea of trying to build things in such a way that avoiding taboo is more of an obstacle than a random move out of nowhere, but weather is just one example. And it still doesn't help me understznd how to figure out how many charges a player adept would have at any one time, unless I make them play out gaining every charge. NPC adepts are easier to figure out, because they have however many charges I think sounds reasonable, but they couldn't complain if they think I'm shortchanging them
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Jul 29, 2017 07:45
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Maybe something like... if someone wants to charge off-screen, they explain how and make a relevant roll (I'd rule this uses an ability, not an identity, just to ensure a Dipsomancer can't 90% Guy You Want To Buy A Drink their way into charges, but that's just me). Success, bam, some charges from successfully playing in traffic / advancing their liver cirrhosis / slaughtering some rabbits / creep shots. On a failure, introduce a complication -- a risk of not charging, maybe even a risk of breaking taboo -- and play out an abbreviated scene with those as the stakes. It could use some refinement, but I feel like this strikes a balance between "arbitrary number of off-screen charges in play" and "play out gaining every charge."
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Jul 29, 2017 08:08
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Shifts are also a bit counterintuitive. In most games, you're just trying to roll high, so if you have a special advantage, it makes sense for your bonus to add to your dice roll. UA, however, is more like playing Price is Right. You only succeed if you roll under your skill, but in combat, the higher you get under your skill, the more damage you do. The book generally recommends a +10% or +20% to your roll if you have an advantage over your opponent. That means your hits will do more damage if they land, but if you apply that normally, that technically makes it harder to hit someone. The lowest an average score will go is 20, so if you get a +20% and apply it how you would in most games, the lowest you could roll would be 21 which would be an automatic failure. The only way I can figure out to do shifts is have a player make a roll, figure if that roll succeeds, and then apply the shifts to the roll after that. If someone is rolling a skill of 45 and they roll 43 with a +10 shift, the roll would succeed because you rolled under a 45, and then I'd add the shift so they do damage as if they rolled a 53, which would otherwise be a failure. Aside from my poor explanation, does that seem like the right way to do shifts in combat?
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Aug 1, 2017 09:02
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I don't think it works that way, because that interpretation of shifts means that they are a straight up penalty if I understand your explanation. I see a shift as a 10 point bonus to your skill, meaning you have a larger window to succeed. If you had a 30% before, now you succeed on a 40. But I don't have my book in front of me, maybe it's really poorly explained in there.
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Aug 1, 2017 09:56
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Cyrai - that is absolutely not how shifts work. Simply put shifts increase or decrease your skill, thus making it easier (or harder) to get a success. They do not affect your roll in any way, only your target number.
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Aug 1, 2017 09:59
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Yep, that makes way more sense. I've never seen a game apply a bonus to the player's ability instead of the roll, but that has to be the way it works
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Aug 1, 2017 15:55
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:But I don't have my book in front of me, maybe it's really poorly explained in there. I looked it up, because I was curious. UA2 defines shifts as a modifier applied to your skill number before you make the roll, and then it gives an example as to how it works. For some strange reason, though, UA3 does not specifically define shifts. There is no entry in the index for them, and searching through the PDF for shifts doesn't come up with a place where they're defined. The closest it comes is under Going All-In, where it talks about focus shifts that are applied to the attacking identity. The only example as to what that looks like in play is in the Firebrand's 91%+ avatar skill, where it says a -30% would make a Brawl 70% become a Brawl 40%. The few places they mention shifts in the rest of the book alternate between saying the shift applies to the ability and saying the shift applies to the roll
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Aug 1, 2017 17:22
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hito posted:I'm running a campaign starting tomorrow - we've only had the worldbuilding session so far - and I combined all of the starting plot elements into a single narrative prologue so everyone was going off the same "story". I thought I'd share it here and see if anyone has any fun ideas about what you think the answers to the mysteries are/should be, or just any fun plot ideas in general. I think we landed on a setup with a lot of potential. There is a goon player in the campaign but he's agreed to avoid this thread while the campaigns on. If anyone is curious, we had our first session. I didn't expect Alvin to use Ghost Roads so soon and I had to improvise a lot, but they seemed pretty engaged by the mysteries so session 2 should be a lot easier. Also lmao at the quote saying that our first session was starting "tomorrow", it was postponed like four times
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Aug 6, 2017 06:18
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I'm excited for the UA game I'm about to run. I think I've figured out the right balance of leaving things open enough for the players during cabal creation to build their own story but not leaving it so open that they flounder because they don't really know anything about UA aside from the rules. I'll tell them that their objective is to make the mayor stop being the mayor any more. Their characters all agree that the mayor should go, but that's all I have planned. I'm going to leave it up to them to figure out why they want the mayor gone, and roughly how they want to go about it. I have some starter ideas if they're stuck. Maybe the mayor is a bad person, but tell me why? Maybe the players are out for revenge, but what did the mayor do to them? Maybe it's part of a ritual, but what's the purpose of the ritual? Maybe they're part of a secret organization that's trying to do something, but what is that organization trying to do? Maybe they're greedy and just want something that the mayor is in the way of, but what do they want? How they want to go about getting the mayor out is also going to be up to them. Do they want to beat the mayor in the upcoming election? Use blackmail to get the mayor to step down? Murder the mayor? If the players are out for revenge, maybe they get proof of what the mayor did and show it to the world. If they're not out for revenge, maybe they frame the mayor for a scandal. Maybe they figure out a ritual to make a duplicate of the mayor that they control and switch it out. After that, it'll be all regular cabal creation and using objectives to drive the story. But I have no idea where they're going to take the idea of removing the mayor, and I really can't wait to find out
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Aug 19, 2017 02:42
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That seems pointless. So you essentially want to set the objective for your players that's (seemingly) mundane and unrelated to the greater cosmology of UA and you don't really have a campaign idea behind it. What difference does it make? By all means, throw it out as an example so that your players aren't stumped by the idea of inventing normies doing normie things, have them do whatever and then your job is to inject some magicks into it to kick the entire thing off. - The easy way is having the antagonist use magick to further his goals, or be secretly warring with another occult underground faction. - Make him a stooge of one of the factions, like keeping heat off local Sleepers or siphoning public funds to the local cell of The New Inquisition. - Alternatively, give the players opportunity to grab some ritual to help with their entirely mundane quest and when they inevitably gently caress up it's a a prime opportunity for Sleepers and other occult freaks to flock in to cause trouble and sling exposition. Tricking them into making a deal with a demon is probably the best case scenario for fuckery. Remember that gutter magick is your friend! Don't be afraid to ask a player of a past brush with supernatural - completely blind, just fish for some low-key generic horror-y stuff (ouija board worked! I told Fred to go die in a fire and he did, very same day!). As the players try to tug at the mystery, it'll turn out things work in a particular, UA way and tend to attract weird peeps. If in need for a proper exposition-slinger, I think NPC Entropomancers are perfect for the job. Have a dude jump on the bus PCs are riding and start playing russian roulette, alternating between himself and the driver and sling some weird magicks if PCs try to rush him, or get cops involved or whatever. He can offer some rambling, semi-correct exposition when PCs catch and interrogate him, perhaps hang around to get them more deeply embroiled in the occult underground and accidentally blow his brains out mid-scene the second they get comfortable with having a friendly GMC around. Anyhow, check this out (even just the preview) for a cool evil magick mayor idea. The 333rd Reich might be just the most post-Trump UA name I've seen.
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Aug 19, 2017 10:39
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Lichtenstein posted:That seems pointless. I think the idea is to start the players with an easily-relatable goal unifying them and justifying why the party hang out together, and then get the players to flesh out the details of this mayor as a group. The supernatural links will easily follow off of that. It's a really good approach, because it guarantees your players all have buy-in to the setting from the start.
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Aug 21, 2017 07:18
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Whybird posted:I think the idea is to start the players with an easily-relatable goal unifying them and justifying why the party hang out together, and then get the players to flesh out the details of this mayor as a group. The supernatural links will easily follow off of that. It's a really good approach, because it guarantees your players all have buy-in to the setting from the start. Yeah, it's more that. None of us have played UA before. I'm the only one who knows anything more than how the rules work, the type of game it is, and some of the adepts and avatars you can be. Two of the players have played exactly two sessions in their life. I've never played with any of the players more than three times. I want to start the game off with a goddamn bang, and sitting through an infodump isn't fun for anyone. Besides, I've realized that why the players are doing what they're doing is much more important than what the players are doing. You can build a story out of anything, but if I know why the players are doing something, I know what interests them and what they want out of the game. The story of the noble players exposing the corrupt mayor is one story. The story of the drug kingpin players bumping off the mayor to protect their turf is another. The story of the Patriotic players dethroning the mayor and saving their town from Godless Liberal Atheism is a third. The story of the fame-seeking players taking out the mayor to burn their name in the pages of history is a fourth. The story of the conspiratorial players neutralizing the mayor to advance the aims of the shadowy international organization to which they belong is a fifth. And there's far, far too many other stories to list. Once I have a better idea which story they want, everything else starts to fall into place. I'm running the game to tell their story; why should I be the one to decide which their story is?
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Aug 22, 2017 04:44
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So my group finished up their second session of UA. The Characters are: Astor, Avatar of the Sexual Rebis and philosopher Max, animal based adept and art therapist Smythe, Epidermancer and traveling salesman Gwuardio, exercise based adapt and body builder Bill Catthair, Fulminturge and prepper Ronaldo, Conspiracy theorist, fast food worker and designated pony of the group. Astor, Smythe and Max all follow the same tumblr blog and Bill and Ronaldo post on the same conspiracy forum. Qwuardio is Ronaldo's personal trainer. The goal is to track down this mysterious slendermanesque figure that's been haunting them all. The first session was char gen. The second the players tried to information about notslenderman out of Gwuardio's mentor Brgenworth. Brgenworth told them if they wanted the information they'd have to prove they weren't just a bunch of ponies. He sent them on an errand to prove their worth, he wanted them to retrieve a bloody Hello Kitty back back from this creepy old man who lives in a house on the edge of town. He gives them explicit instructions not to open the backpack. Some highlights: Gwuardio and Bill sneak in through the pack. They enter into a storage room full of clocks. After searching through it, they open the door to the next room. They find it full of clockwork automatons dancing. They all stop dancing and look at them. There like "gently caress this poo poo" and immediately go back into the storage room and start baracading the door with the junk that's in there. Bill steals a cuckoo clock. Smythe's player showed up late irl. So I gave him a Pursuit check which he failed. They had managed to herd the clockworks outside the house by this point, so I made his car crash straight into a pack of them, one of them getting all mashed up in his engine wrecking his car. Gwuardio tried to punch one of the clock works but he rolled a fumble so his hand got mashed up in the gears. Astor is able to convince the old mechanomancer to let her and Max in by striking up a conversation about obscure occult books. Ronaldo gets in his card and tries to ram one of the clockworks. He fails the roll and the clockwork comes crashing through the window and starts to grab at him. He fails a violence check and send his car in reverse while screaming. Max is able to distract the old man from all the commotion outside by using his animal magick to mimic bird calls. Astor and Max look around the upstairs and find the backpack; it was being used to power a giant clockwork spider thing. After avoiding being murdered by the spider thing, Max deactivates it by yanking the backpack out. I called it after they got the backpack. I want to give them ample opportunity to ignor instructions and open the backpack  Overall I think everybody had fun. What do you guys think? Are we UAing right?
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Sep 10, 2017 06:01
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Does anyone have an idea for a better taboo for an urbanomancer? The whole "not being able to touch city soil" doesnt really make sense with the renewed focus on urban green spaces.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:42
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it just occurred to me that david wong's occult fiction anthology "john dies at the end" and "this book is full of spiders" both work really well as UA stories. they're the kind of UA stories that would happen if the occult underground was primarily composed of disaffected 20-somethings with more free time than common sense. on the surface they're full of goofy poo poo, but if you look just a little bit further there's all kinds of dark human interactions happening. the main character realizing (spoiler in case you care & haven't read the books) that he might be an evil clone of himself and that he likely murdered his original "self" and buried the body behind his own shed is the kind of weird twist that it seems like UA wants to evoke.
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Sep 12, 2017 19:37
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One thing I particularly liked about the novel form of John Dies at the End was that one of the evil forces has the ability to Remove people from existence, and parts of the book actually make more sense when you realize that people have been erased. I'm going off of memory, but I think they take two cars to some destination, even though there's plenty of room in one, and afterwards can't remember why they didn't just all go together.
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Sep 13, 2017 02:21
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Strange Cares posted:Does anyone have an idea for a better taboo for an urbanomancer? The whole "not being able to touch city soil" doesnt really make sense with the renewed focus on urban green spaces. 'outside the city limits' seems fair
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Sep 13, 2017 04:01
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Alternately, the green spaces movement is a direct attack on Urbanomancers.
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Sep 13, 2017 07:40
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Alternately, the green spaces movement is a direct attack on Urbanomancers.
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Sep 13, 2017 16:03
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:One thing I particularly liked about the novel form of John Dies at the End was that one of the evil forces has the ability to Remove people from existence, and parts of the book actually make more sense when you realize that people have been erased. yeah, that power gets explored again in "this book is full of spiders". david's girlfriend, who has only had one hand for both books, actually gets her hand "removed" at the end of the second book as a threat to david and john to stop loving w/ the bad guy's plans, and then retroactively she only had one hand all along, even though conceptually she had two hands for the entirety of both novels, up to this point. I also like how the weird other-world fits right in with UA. JDATE's otherworld is a cast-off from a previous incarnation of reality where the avatar of the Glutton managed to permanently gently caress up the stratosphere by eating all of the other avatars, thus making him supreme ruler of his pocket dimension.
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Sep 13, 2017 16:05
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Zereth posted:Times changing and knocking a leg or two off the chair an adept school is sitting on has happened before, after all.
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Sep 13, 2017 16:58
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Halloween Jack posted:The New Inquisition was so spooked by videomancers, they destroyed World Championship Wrestling.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:12
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There are actually people stupid enough to believe that Kevin Sullivan killed Chris Benoit and his family because Sullivan did a Satanist gimmick in Florida, which is UA as gently caress.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:18
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I'm running an UA game right now, about 5 sessions in. The players are a small cabal in London - the setting is that there's something in London that means that your everyday incidence of weird gets greater the further towards the centre of the city you get. Because of this, the occult underground mostly sets up shop in the suburbs, and goes on "safari" into central London to poke weird stuff and try and acquire power. The players are: Nolan Sorento - True King Consultant Surgeon working at Croydon University Hospital. He was once an arsehole private surgeon but get Room of Renunciationed into being a better human being, and now dedicates his life to helping people and ensuring happiness and stability in his realm (which is a big chunk of south London) John Smith - Cameramancer photojournalist who has a background as a survivor of a cult that actually did get its hands on some rituals and stuff. Things went south and now he has super good survival instincts that sometimes flick over into paranoia. He only eats the most popular food available at the time, leaving him with a diet of Big Macs, Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Steak Bakes from Gregg's. James Stretton - Guide bartender working in the Savoy Hotel. Their finger on the pulse of weirdness in London, the friendly bartender who always has the best advice and can set you on your path. He's also recently trying to be a social media celebrity to increase his influence. He has a minor supernatural power letting him see your future if you drink a cocktail he makes just for you. There are also some key NPCs hanging around: Heather and the Mad Dogs - a group of teenagers, young twenty-somethings and students who are nuts for free running, stupid stunts and dangerous urban survival. Entropomancers, but a pretty decent bunch. Heather knows John quite well because he did some work cataloguing the free running community in the city. The Goldsmiths - plutomancer bankers and financial service workers who get charges off their own misdeeds. They've not actually come into stuff much, but they keep popping up in the background. The Speaker's Corner Prophets - a group of adepts (?) who can predict your future by describing it in allegorical terms when talking about something seemingly unrelated, but only as long as they're doing it in public with at least a small audience of random passersby. Mystic Ken - someone they've made every effort not to know, not because he seems like a bad guy but because his schtick is that he can give you impossibly good advice and information about future events, as long as he doesn't know you in person and does so through the medium of a newspaper advice column. Simon David and David Simon - these guys run a lovely little newspaper/magazine called the "New Londinium" which is basically a local version of the fortean times. They're not strictly in the OU, but they have a good overview of the weirdness that happens in the city. Simon David is a paranoid maniac who is convinced the CIA is trying to get to him. David Simon is a laid back hippy who talks a lot about chakras. They're not sure if they're a couple or not. Old Jack Monroe - a dipsomancer who is friends with James, and who occasionally helps out with drunken insights and weirdness. Malady - an adept of an undisclosed nature who is just riddled with diseases, and who has a tense relationship with Nolan The game started with them looking over the latest New Londinium to see if there was anything of interest in it. Their goal at the moment is to build a "weirdometer", to try and get some data on exactly where the weirdness in London is coming from, and what it means. After an (ill-advised jaunt) to the Science Museum where they were terrorised by the the psychic manifestations of a small boy having nightmares in the embassy opposite ("I'M MR BUMPY LEGS, HEY HEY HEY"), they finally caught on to something that seemed genuinely big - some effect on the Circle Line of the tube that seemed to be interacted with people in the OU. After some experimentation, and the assistance of a couple of entropomancers, they found that if they rode the circle line anticlockwise, got off before the circle broke (the train line doesn't run in a loop anymore) and ran through the service tunnels to catch the next train going in the right direction, three times in total they disappeared from the train, lost six minutes, and reappeared each with a major charge. Oh, and one of their number vanishing into thing air, a sort of addiction-fuelled desperation to do it again, and a second heartbeat each. Things went rapidly downhill from there. The entropomancers insisted on doing it again, right then, and so they did. Now two entropomancers were missing into the void. Heather (their leader) lost her poo poo pretty totally with John who had master-minded the whole scheme, and occult forces seemed to be lining up with a glaring angry eye at all this power that had suddenly rocked up in the middle of London in the hands of (comparatively) rank amateurs. After some investigation they found that the disappeared entropomancers were having their histories unravelled, their friends and eventually families no longer having any idea who they were. Since one of those guys that had gone missing had introduced Heather to her boyfriend, this didn't go down well. Much shouting was had. Investigations seemed to throw up a connection to a body snatching cult going on, where coma patients were abducted from hospitals and care homes and replaced with simulacrums, leading eventually to an underground cannibal restaurant called CHANGS. Things went even more off the deep end and during a gunfight that sprung up between some fake armed police and what they now suspected to be demonically influenced cannibals, they located the key player of the conspiracy, who they believed to be a demon itself, and John burnt his major charge to pluck him out of reality and put him permanently in a photograph. What followed was a confusing jaunt into what appeared to either be hell, a lovely hotel, or possibly a hallucinogenic experience, they got the gently caress out and cut their losses. Everyone involved agreed not to talk about how the ritual worked, and to watch to make sure no one did it again. How well people will stick to this is unknown. I'll summarise story two when we're done with it.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:04
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Sounds awesome!
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Sep 14, 2017 18:35
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Freaking Crumbum posted:it just occurred to me that david wong's occult fiction anthology "john dies at the end" and "this book is full of spiders" both work really well as UA stories. they're the kind of UA stories that would happen if the occult underground was primarily composed of disaffected 20-somethings with more free time than common sense. on the surface they're full of goofy poo poo, but if you look just a little bit further there's all kinds of dark human interactions happening. the main character realizing (spoiler in case you care & haven't read the books) that he might be an evil clone of himself and that he likely murdered his original "self" and buried the body behind his own shed is the kind of weird twist that it seems like UA wants to evoke. Yeah I came about it from the other end. I read JDATE first, it's still probably my favorite novel of all time. So when I heard of UA it sounded to me like JDATE the RPG. Also what do you mean "if the occult underground was primarily composed of disaffected 20-somethings," isn't that just 3e in a nutshell? Maybe that's why I liked it more than other people. Dr. Arbitrary posted:One thing I particularly liked about the novel form of John Dies at the End was that one of the evil forces has the ability to Remove people from existence, and parts of the book actually make more sense when you realize that people have been erased. That's where JDATE trays from UA into COC territory for me. I don't thing the enemies in UA would be at quite that power level. Freaking Crumbum posted:yeah, that power gets explored again in "this book is full of spiders". david's girlfriend, who has only had one hand for both books, actually gets her hand "removed" at the end of the second book as a threat to david and john to stop loving w/ the bad guy's plans, and then retroactively she only had one hand all along, even though conceptually she had two hands for the entirety of both novels, up to this point. The only thing about that is I think in that aspect that's where JDATE goes from UA anthropocentric horror to Lovecraftian eldritch abomination and existential horror of you not mattering in the grand scheme of thing.
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Sep 15, 2017 19:30
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Agree that the lovecraftian stuff is outside the power scheme of UA, but major charges could easily remove someone's hand from existence.
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Sep 15, 2017 20:43
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