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What if it's something like 30 years ago the local High School team beat some rival team for the first, and last time in the school's history. Their sole trophy on display. All the rituals around sports have power, and when it all focuses on the veneration of one specific game, and exaggerations of the opposing team, things can get larger than life. What once was teenagers just beating a better equipped team is now our brave hometown heroes defeating an army of bestial foes. One giant today, but as the homecoming game gets closer, there's going to be more. What happens when the whole opposing team arrives and there's no one to stop them.
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Feb 11, 2018 00:20
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Ok, I'm on a roll. Make it 50 years, I think that still makes sense in football history, maybe 40. I don't follow sports and I'm just going by the Superbowl number. Here's the truth, and you filter this out in bits and pieces. They really are Nephilim. It turns out that when a group of people defeat a powerful enemy, the legends of that enemy can take physical form. They're born from obsession, so in some ways they're like man-made demons. Speaking of which, they can see and hurt demons, so word around town is that demons aren't coming anywhere near town. They say that the sons of God walk the Earth. The giant is the first of the Nephilim, and as the homecoming game gets closer, the rest of the team will show up to play another game on the same football field, back before the high school burned down and was rebuilt closer to town... Where was that field anyways... Maybe the next clue is a dead pig is found, its bones broken. The guy who found it says it looks like teenagers beat it to death with baseball bats, but it's more like giants were throwing it around like a ball. The entire team of Nephilim will incarnate on Homecoming. If an opposing team isn't assembled to beat them, then the big city team gets a symbolic win, which will affect the town in very real ways. Also they'll be back again next year. If the local team can somehow be convinced to move the venue to location of the old football field, the old game will repeat, play for play, resulting in a win. Dr. Arbitrary fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Feb 11, 2018 |
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Feb 11, 2018 00:50
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Ok, I'm on a roll. This is some pretty cool poo poo honestly.
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Feb 11, 2018 00:58
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Yeah, this works way better because human obsession and symbolism and belief are still at the centre. Nephilim being a thing from the past that are still going independently of humans don't feel very UA, but nephilim being a product of human obsession, kind of like an archetype that at its core can't actually be embodied by a real person so it just manifests on its own, is UA as all hell.
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Feb 12, 2018 18:45
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In our latest session our bunch of weirdos hired a cab driver from Manchester to come to London so he could drive around the M25 (big road encircling the city) repeatedly until he got enough momentum to take a hard left turn into the astral where they drove to find the nightmares of a young Omani boy who is in a coma, only to find themselves physically trapped in an astral recreation of a folk of Arabic folktales. Things began to unravel when one of the players noticed a tree surreptitiously having a smoke break, at which point they discovered that the majority of the experience was populated by otherwise out of work actors taking a side gig from "the director". Of course, that's when the boy's actual nightmares turned up, causing the actors to run away and leaving the cabal in deep deep trouble. It was pretty loving Unknown Armies.
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Feb 13, 2018 14:58
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By the way, Civil War reenactors, or at least a small fraction of them, are very familiar with the ghosts of battles. A reenactment ritual is generally pretty easy, especially when you're performing them year after year. The first reenactment of a battle can be magically hairy, but as long as the uniforms are close, and the two armies aren't trying to intentionally change the outcome of the battle it's basically a sure thing, even when things get weird, most people just write it off as adrenaline. I was imagining a bit where a reenactor calls up someone from the group trying to get leads on a previously unknown civil war battle that's shifted out of dormancy. He eventually finds that there were no battles even close, and dismisses it "Sorry, I thought it was something else, it's probably high schoolers pulling a prank. Don't worry about it... but if you dig up any old rifles or find the bones of a Confederate soldier, give me a call." Maybe the group does go digging around in the fields, maybe they bring a metal detector or a dowsing rod. They could dig up a leather helmet, or maybe a chunk of cement with a bit of cut metal tube sticking out, maybe it was a lamppost? (Or a goalpost!)
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Feb 14, 2018 03:32
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One of my players is having a tough time grasping what gutter magick is and how it works, especially how it is distinct from ritual magick. Obviously I'm doing a bad job of explaining it. Does anyone have a good explanation/summary that I could send her?
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Mar 20, 2018 17:13
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Ritual magick = you completed a quest to find Necronomicon and are rewarded with your classic horror game occult spell, somewhat detached from this game's postmodern magick shtick. Gutter magick = you stumbled upon this kind of harebrained ritual and by the magic of trial and error it happened to work and now you kind of think you understand the vague idea behind it and if you don't have your enemies tooth this time you probably could mcgyver around it with enough of his minced fingernails.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:23
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Ritual magick is old, it is exact, and it is pre-written. Someone else devised the ritual; you're just finding it in a scroll or old book or one of Edison's wax cylinders. You have to do it exactly as described or it won't work (and even if done exactly as described, it still may not work. poo poo's fickle). Gutter magick is something you come up with out of desperation by forcing a bunch of symbolic actions into something that looks magickal, and by God it worked. It doesn't have to be exact; like Lichtenstein said, if you wanted someone's tooth but couldn't get it you could probably make do with nail clippings. Ritual magick is casting a circle of demon protection from the Necronomicon by lighting the specified candles, drawing precise and correct circles in salt, and chanting correctly as laid out in the book. Gutter magick is Wyatt & Gary in Weird Science: creating a woman's body by approximating a scene from Frankenstein with a Barbie doll as they wear bras on their heads.
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Mar 23, 2018 03:10
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Gutter magick is basically like writing a threatening letter using magazine clippings. You can write pretty much anything, but it takes a long time and your vocabulary is going to be limited by the sort of magazines you have on hand. And whether the threat gets much of anything done depends on who you send it to and how much of a reason they'd have to be scared. But all it takes is scissors, some source material, and time, whereas a good specific threat takes a lot longer and has more opportunity to be traced back to you.
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Apr 1, 2018 06:58
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I have a question about followers in REIGN. By spending one point, you get ten threat 1 followers. That's 10d of damage right there... but it's going to get eaten up over time as you lose them during fights, not to mention all the advantages that a group of ten unskilled but able-bodied people on your side gives you. But it also seems that it's a short-lived advantage. They're probably going to get chewed up as you use them in battle. It seems generally unwise to spend character points for something that's going to last maybe three serious combats. Am I reading this wrong? Surely the followers aren't meant to "recharge" during downtime, right?
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Apr 17, 2018 13:59
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Down With People posted:Oh poo poo! imo i'd use it as a prompt to explore the "dead worlds" that get created every time 333 archetypes ascend and reality gets rebooted. this giant is actually the last remaining sentient from a discarded version of reality and it's really hard to find because the criteria to open the gate between its dead world and our current world is extremely specific and somehow tied to the aggromancer's farm. hell, the giant might not even want the sheep for food - it's possible they were worshipped as minor deities in the dead world (kinda like cats in ancient times) and when the giant saw two of them he grabbed them because he thought they would protect him back in his dead world.
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Apr 19, 2018 23:41
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paradoxGentleman posted:I have a question about followers in REIGN.
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Apr 20, 2018 13:49
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Haven't listened to this yet but Greg Stoltze went on this podcast to talk about REIGN 2e: http://roleplayingexchange.com/2018/04/19/episode-26-greg-stolze-discusses-upcoming-reign-kickstarter/
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Apr 20, 2018 13:53
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My group just finished up our second UA campaign. This game was set in a small town in Michigan in 1980-something. The main plot centered around a big scary thing that was sealed in the abandon mine and a spooky cult that wanted to release the thing. In the end the big scary turned out to be a wendigo and we killed it using the power of rock and roll and beating it to death with blunt instruments.
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May 5, 2018 01:28
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I am starting a fantasy campaign using Wild Talents instead of Reign because I don't want this to be a huge army sim, but something akin to a 16 bit RPG. I am wondering the best level to start the party out of. All magic and talents will be given through items instead of character creation and I'm wondering how many points to give them to make exceptional humans. Is 125 too low or should I go to 150?
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May 31, 2018 14:39
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CommaToes posted:I am starting a fantasy campaign using Wild Talents instead of Reign because I don't want this to be a huge army sim, but something akin to a 16 bit RPG. I am wondering the best level to start the party out of. All magic and talents will be given through items instead of character creation and I'm wondering how many points to give them to make exceptional humans. Is 125 too low or should I go to 150? Interested in this idea. Can you share more?
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Jun 1, 2018 13:21
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I don't know if this was posted before but I found this podcast, featuring Greg Stolze talking about the upcoming Reign 2e. https://roleplayingexchange.com/2018/04/19/episode-26-greg-stolze-discusses-upcoming-reign-kickstarter/
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Jun 1, 2018 14:26
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Strange Matter posted:I'd go 150. Since cool stuff is coming from items they can all take advantage of the Focus flaw (or not, since if it's a universal thing you can just wipe out that particular Flaw) which can give you some pretty cheap stuff. There's not much to it other than the fact that the players will be playing the patron hero of their towns, and like most bad 16 bit RPGs, the towns will all be one dimensional towns (Mining town, Hunting town, Merchant town, etc...). The idea is that the players will represent the ideals of the town and be the exemplar of the people there. They will also have innate abilities; think the non magic jobs of FFV. So if someone wants to make a dragoon, I'll give them Jump. If someone wants to be a hunter, I will give them Aim (get double dice from spending a round to aim). If someone wants to be a berserker, I'll give them Dual Wield (they don't lose a dice for doing multiple attacks a round). That type of thing. I have ideas for the story, but we'll be doing a world building session so we can iron down the world and I can start to craft the narrative around the heroes themselves.
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Jun 1, 2018 14:35
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Our UA3 game has gone thoroughly off the rails, in an extremely good way. Last night's session ended with one of the PCs outlining their next steps. quote:Here's what we do: buy some cheap drugs, commit supernatural GTA and break into the Houses of Parliament... In 1988
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Jun 1, 2018 15:31
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I'm deeply interested in knowing how they plan to accomplish that.
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Jun 1, 2018 22:12
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inklesspen posted:I'm deeply interested in knowing how they plan to accomplish that. Magick
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Jun 1, 2018 22:45
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Just read a really good comic with perfect UA feel, "Strange Attractors" by Charles Soule. It's about a mathematician who believes he's figured out the patterns that allow NYC to function, and must perform routine, ritualized behaviors in order to keep the system running. Along with tiny examples of cause and effect at work.
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Jun 1, 2018 23:53
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inklesspen posted:I'm deeply interested in knowing how they plan to accomplish that. Well. (Doodmons, don't be a prick and ruin the campaign by reading the spoiler box, ok?) (This is long, so heads up) The game is set in London in the modern day. Back in the mid 19th century a group of French Freemasons and occultists who were obsessed with literally building a new tower of Babel and ascending to heaven moved to London. They ran into a man called Thomas Wren who had been keeping himself alive for the last thousand years by using a Ritual every century to stop himself aging. He took a shine to these freemasons and taught them some of the occult lore he knew in exchange for various favours and them acting in his behalf. This turned out to be a mistake. One of the things they learned about were avatars, and particularly ascensions. This sounded an awful lot like ascending to heaven, so they decided to try and make it work for them. But they weren't happy just one of them doing it, so they decided to gently caress around with metaphysics. They spent the next thirty years building various bits of occult infrastructure in the city, weaving it in to tube tunnels, the sewers, and so on. They spent vast amounts of effort getting their agendas as civic planners through, but they managed it. The final piece of the puzzle was a "labyrinth" under the houses of parliament - with this finished, they had basically made themselves an available enormous artifact. They started to use the artifact to suck the power of the collective unconscious of London into the labyrinth. They effectively siphoned off every bit of supernatural juice in the city. As this process started the city began to suffer - mass nightmares, emotional breakdowns, spates of murder. The freemasons fell to infighting with one faction wanting to press ahead and one realising that this might, actually, be a terrible idea. The pro-ascension faction headed to the labyrinth to start the final process of punching through reality to the stratosphere. The anti ascension faction panicked, went and confessed to Wren, then with him to the labyrinth to confront their fellows. They end up having a bust up, including guns, inside an enormously complex and delicate piece of occult machinery. This turned out to be a really big mistake. The ascension kicked off but they hosed it up. Instead of catapulting the masons into the stratosphere, they just broke open a direct connection to the stratosphere through the astral. They got wiped from reality like they'd ascended and everything went to hell in a hand basket. The surviving masons desperately upkeep the remain machinery to stop it going SPRLING and wiping out Westminster or something. This worked pretty well except for a lot of "leakage" into the capital. Put simply, London is way weirder than you'd expect, and the amount it's weird increases the closer you get to parliament. This drew the attention of a lot of the underground, some of whom concluded it was a great place to ascend, asumpt, and generally dick around with. Eventually it drew the attention of a bunch of traumashamans (adepts who thrive on pain, trauma and horror) from Edinburgh who were looking to net some sweet sweet major charges. They found out about a thing called a vortex - a young kid who is so consumed by obsession, with no filters, than they break a bit and basically start spending charges direct from the stratosphere. They decide that if they can traumatise a kid into reflecting an obsession with nightmares, they can blanket the UK's capital in a WMD of pain and trauma and net Hella charged. Normally phenomenally rare, but they know the stratosphere is easier to access in London, so they keep an eye out for a psychic kid in London who fits the bill. To really prime the populace, they team up with an avatar of the cuckoo, who starts screwing with the occult underground in London, and they start dealing a new drug that makes people more receptive to stratospheric phenomena. They decide on the son of the Omani ambassador as their candidate, and build a sort of horrific theme park in the astral designed to traumatise the kid as much as possible. They drug him and put him in a chemically induced coma, then abduct his mind to their hell park. The kid slowly starts seeing his trauma and fear as the normal way to live, and starts reinterpreting reality through that. Enter the PCs: John, freelance journalist and cult survivor who is a cameraturgist; James, a Guide and bartender; and Nolan, the True King of London. They rescue the kid from the astral with the help of a motoshaman, but he's... Not in great shape. Worse, he's now fully in the underground, which is not a place you want to be at eight. Things begin to spiral as, inadvertently, they expose him to more occult weirdness, until he witnessed someone bring killed and snaps. The vortex starts spewing out all this nightmarish horrific crap... But there's a counter measure already in place. The artifact the freemasons built still works, and instead of that pure manifestation of fear lashing out against the people of London and generating those awesome charges, it gets sucked back into the machine, powering it up again for the first time since 1874 when the last ascension screwed up. The machine starts up the process again, and the ascension engine tries to pick up where it left off. This causes a hell of a lot of instability in reality, as the ascension is a thing that, when it happens, sort of gets written out of reality - it no longer happened so much as just is. 1874 is like the epicenter of a metaphysical earthquake. Panicked, the PCs make their way to the Omani embassy in south Kensington to try and shut the kid down and stop this going to poo poo, but as they get close, reality seriously begins to break down. They find themselves, a friendly entropomancer, and the motoshaman dumped in 1988 with no obvious way home... Other than to find the kid and work out how the hell to stop all this getting worse.
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Jun 2, 2018 08:50
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New Requirement Thread Up! Welcome to Milton, a small town in Michigan on the upper peninsula. Milton is an
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Jun 6, 2018 15:49
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Has there been any Godwalker chat? Because, ooph, that was a book? I'm trying to decide how to feel about it more critically than "it was enjoyable."
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Jun 12, 2018 13:57
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Anniversary posted:Has there been any Godwalker chat? Because, ooph, that was a book? I'm trying to decide how to feel about it more critically than "it was enjoyable." It too enjoyed it, but think it reads like a let's play of UA. Which is fine.
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Jun 12, 2018 19:49
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I liked YOU a lot better.
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Jun 12, 2018 23:52
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So has anybody gotten Books 4 or 5 yet?
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Jun 15, 2018 05:06
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Just a heads up, there's going to be a supplement available on Free RPG Day this Saturday. It has a scenario called 'Maria in Three Parts.' http://blog.atlas-games.com/2018/06/unknown-armies-attack-free-rpg-day.html If there's a game store by you, they're probably participating, but I know that we only got 15 copies.
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Jun 15, 2018 05:17
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Manofmanusernames posted:So has anybody gotten Books 4 or 5 yet? They're available in PDF on Backerkit for anyone who backed the Kickstarter. I haven't really been paying attention to whether they are commercially available yet. AFAIK they are not planned to be available in print.
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Jun 15, 2018 05:52
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Bodybags are never going to stop being amusing to me. First you tell your bound demon to kill a bunch of fish cultists. So far so good. Then you tell it to protect you, and it burns down the hotel and destroys your car, and all the other cars at your isolated desert hotel. Not great. Then you tell it to get you a car, and it disintegrates the head of a passing driver, you fail your check and freeze, and it floats away. You have to abandon it, of course, because the police ARE coming, but how could that possibly go wrong?
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Jun 21, 2018 04:07
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Heya, Greg put up a Kickstarter for Reign's 2E.
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Jul 22, 2018 04:58
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A Greg Stolze project that looks like an actual fantasy RPG game book. Color me impressed.
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Jul 23, 2018 20:08
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December Revolution sounds supremely cool. I'm tempted by print books but shipping is such a nightmare.
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Jul 28, 2018 05:17
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Reign 2e has a little under 48 hours left.
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Aug 19, 2018 04:07
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I personally think the Age of Sail & Cogs, which is the Heluso and Millonda updated for Age of Enlightenment, is the most interesting one in REIGN: Realms. It is quite an eccletic mix of settings they have going there.
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Aug 19, 2018 12:33
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I'm kinda digging the Hogwarts by way of Paranatural one.
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Aug 19, 2018 14:59
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There are a lot of them I'd like to try, honestly. I'm glad they managed to get the kaiju one. ...a terrible doubt occurs to me. Does the 30$ include Reign: Realities in pdf form? e: I mean, what else could "all the electronic stretch goals" mean? e2: just checked, someone made the exact same question, and the answer is positive. Phew! paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 19, 2018 |
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Aug 19, 2018 15:07
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paradoxGentleman posted:There are a lot of them I'd like to try, honestly. I'm glad they managed to get the kaiju one. Yes, Realities is just the print collection of all the PDF stretch goals that everyone is getting. IDK if you'll get "Reign:Realities.pdf" but you'll get all the content.
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Aug 19, 2018 15:12
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