The Eclecticon

lordriffington

d_fuses

• UA is a very easy system to teach.  From memory, I had one player who had some hands-on experience with the system and another who'd read the first section of the rulebook some time back.  By the end of the game, everyone was rolling the right things, flip-flopping, telling me their damage rolls and so on like they'd been doing it since the game came out. 

• With a game like this, where most of the action comes from the players riffing on each other, having the GM not take a seat and keep roaming around the table seems to work well.  When people aren't constantly looking at you waiting for the next bit of plot, they feel a bit more free to have side conversations, make plans and so on.  It's possible that having someone constantly moving around is distracting.  Again, if you were playing, let me know what you thought of the approach. 

• I had a few handouts, but one thing I should have had was a map of the house in which most of the story took place.  I think all nine people around the table had a different idea of how the house was laid out.  Whoops. 

You know what running that one-shot was like?  Running that one-shot was like putting on your favourite pair of jeans again.  It doesn't matter how nice whatever you were wearing was, it's just so good to find yourself in something so completely comfortable.  It was like coming back home. 

Of course, it helps that the scenario was building on two reasonably successful campaigns, so I didn't have to re-imagine a lot of the world, and I already had locations that three quarters of my group knew fairly well and a cast of characters I could walk across the stage if I needed to. 

So, for the benefit of those who weren't there - a quick rundown.  You can get the basic setup here.  Rachel (suyongli ) and Peter (Mr P) Reed, after some out-of-scenario legwork, tracked Jackie to a bunch called Satan's Chosen Temple, and the Temple itself to its temporary digs in Carindale (while a members parents were out of town).  Said member (Lylyth - not her real name - played by sugaryfun) had tied up her boyfriend, T-Joe, while he sucked down a bottle of 'possession juice' in an effort to get a demon to ride him.  Demons, of course, love that shit, and one showed up (played by Mr D) just as the Reeds rang the doorbell. 

What followed in my head was a five-minute introductory scene wherein everyone made their introductions, established what they were after from the night and went off, arm more or less in arm.  Instead, the players turned it into a half-hour dance of shifting alliances (Mr D's efforts to convice someone - anyone - to untie him were enormously entertaining). 

Now, one of the fun things I'd built into this scenario was the familiarity of one of the characters.  In fact, he was so familiar that I was rewarded with groans of recognition fromsugaryfun and Mr P when he started ranting about how he could find Jackie.  GMs out there: if you're looking for a way to revitalise an adversary who's gone a bit stale, have one of the players take them over, but don't tell anyone else.  You'll be glad you did. 

Anyway, the four of them went off to the burned-out tennis courts on Milton Road - Peter and Lylyth more convinced than ever that everything had gone horribly, horribly wrong and Rachel trying to work out what on earth was going on around her.  At this point, I more or less sat back and let the pre-established character conflicts do my job for me.  (Actually, that's a lie.  I did throw an old friend of T-Joe and Lylyth into the mix to test Raymond Chandler's advice about having someone come into the scene with a gun.  It works.)  There was a standoff, gunshots, woundings, a forced injection of heroin and a reenactment of THAT scene from The Exorcist. 

In the end, Rachel and Peter wisely decided to flee the scene (though leaving her car behind to be found by the Police).  The Demon pretty much browbeat poor Lylyth into going through the entrance of Jackie's new otherspatial home, before using her as a trojan horse to get itself over the threshold - kicking her out of her body in the process.  We left things there - in true I-run-Unknown-Armies-like-a-big-literary-tosser fashion, nothing was completely resolved. 

I have to praise the fantastic efforts of my players, all of whom got right into characters they hadn't created and played them to the hilt, often against type (sugaryfun's cries of 'this character is CRAP!' whenever she failed a roll to notice something gladdened my black, dessicated GM heart).  I don't think the scenario I had loosely planned in my head would have worked if the players hadn't been willing to play up the areas of friction between them.  Special credit goes tosuyongli, who had never looked at the game before, but picked up the mechanics with admirable alacrity and ran well with the grungy, bogan nature of the scenario.  I like to think she had fun finding 'Fearsome bitching-out: 40%' and similar things on her character sheet. 

I mentioned the possibility of running this again - perhaps at next year's Gen Con.  Before I do, I'll need to test it on some people who haven't played in one of my campaigns, and won't get all the references to past events.  If the whole thing isn't a complete exercise in self-gratification on my part, it should work well with them, too. 

Failing that, there's always Jailbreak...
 

Albedo ain't much to look at, I guess.  Just a rock, really - one among millions in this here belt, but it had enough fancy-pants radioactive ore to draw Blue Sun way out into the black.  They rode out, built the dome and had a good go at mining the stuff, but there must not've been enough for 'em, I guess.  Few years later they up and left. 

Course, they couldn't well take the dome with 'em, and it probably weren't cost-eefective to haul the life support back from the frontier either.  So for a godforsaken asteroid millions of miles from anywhere, it's got a surprising number of home's comforts.  That is, as long as you don't mind the ceiling always bein' on a shade brighter'n' is truly necessary, or the air recyclers covering everything and everyone in old rock dust.  Least we're pretty sure it ain't glowin' hot or nothin'. 

An' like I said, it's home.  To me, and to a bunch of others - prospecters, mostly.  Yeah, that's right.  Blue Sun left a buncha shiny ore here that was just a bit too much trouble for 'em to dig out, but a man who's willing to live in a half-buried survival capsule while he digs for his big strike can get a lot of rock dug real cheap.  Sometimes he'll even find that strike o' his. 

Course, when that happens it ain't very useful unless there's someone to sell it to.  We've always had a few ships willing to call in and pick up what we've got to sell, and they sometimes drop some folk off who'll set up a store or some such, rather than just grabbin' a rock drill and settin' to.  There's even folk walkin' around all fancy-like, talkin' 'bout puttin' together a railgun to fling them fancy rocks all the way back to Londinium. 

'Course, the bit news at the moment is the upcomin' election.  Sherrif Kwan's been what passes for the law in these parts for as long as folk can remember, but it seems he's comin' up a bit yeller of late.  Some of them railgun men, they say he used to be a prison camp guard, back in the Unification War, and that ain't endearin' Kwan to anyone.  Might be that this time he finds himself with a real challenger this time, and Lord only knows what that'll mean. 

In the meantime, we got surly miners, claim jumpers, vacsuit thieves, spacers lookin' to blow off steam after too long out in the Black and a snake-poison mean witch of a brothel madam.  An' that's not countin' the rumours that Blue Sun's gonna make a claim on our profits for livin' in their cast off junk. 

It ain't quiet, friend, but it's home. 

sugaryfun

I wouldn't say that anyone really knows Dave West.  A lot of people know of him, though.  He's not really what people think of when you say 'crime lord'.  Hasn't been for years, now.  He's like a real crime lord's banker.  You want to pull a heist, buy some wholesale ice, whatever, but don't have the cash?  You talk to Dirty Dave West, he gives you some money and you pay him back when you get your payoff.  The way I hear it, he doesn't even charge more than a token amount of interest - way below what you pay on your mortgage, at any rate. 

What he really takes his payment in is favours, and I mean big ones.  After all, he's just made a score possible that you never could've pulled by yourself, so that success is partially his.  He's been doing it a long time, too, so he's got a network of hard, crimey bastards all up and down the eastern seaboard who'll do whatever he needs doing. 

And you know what?  A lot of what he needs doing involves kacking dukes and breaking cabals.  Sometimes this is pretty direct 'make this idiot disappear' stuff.  More often, some big fish who wasn't so very big a little while ago gets a call to ensure that something becomes property of Dave West, and that the health of the current owner isn't a high priority.  To the sort of people Dirty Dave West helps, that's as good as an open inviation to bring down the hurt and save themselves some time and energy. 

There's all sorts of rumours about why this is.  The bullshit-free truth is that there is no great vendetta.  Dave West doesn't give a stone cold shit about the Occult Underground.  He doesn't care about anything.  Dirty Dave West is a myth and his entire network is a front for the Sleepers.  Yeah, you heard me.  They're proactive, here in Australia - not really a bunch who wait for some freak to go completely balls-out and poke the sleeping tiger.  They see you starting to go a bit off the rails outside the comfort and safety of an otherspace and all of a sudden Dave West decides that he wants something of yours and you - yeah, your health isn't a concern at all. 

It's clever, you've got to give them that.  Of course, like everything else in this world, it's breaking down.  It's been going on too long, you see.  Everyone who's anyone in the criminal underworld knows that he's around, though, and that he's got an agenda they can't figure out.  A lot of them have gotten pretty paranoid, especially the ones who still owe 'him' favours.  They're spending a lot of time trying to put a face - or a plan, or anything at all - to the name. 

Well, they've succeeded, in a fucked-up, more-trouble-than-it-was-ever-worth kind of way.  Not only has something calling itself Dirty Dave West taken direct control of a couple of amphetamine labs in Sydney, another one has called down two hits in Newcastle.  There's another doing large-scale standovers in Melbourne and a fourth importing ecstacy into Brisbane, and that's just the four that I know of.  He looks different in every city and he can't be found - he just walks into some kingpin's private office, says he's running things now, walks out and disappears.  The gangsters are driving themselves batshit trying to figure out where he goes, because they won't believe the real explanation.  They can't find anything because there's nothing to find.  Dirty Dave West doesn't exist when he's not trying to take over the underworld. 

So, problems for them, huh?  Opportunity for you and me, though.  You see, there's a set of documents the Sleepers created to allow them to use him as a front - birth certificate, passport, drivers license, a hundred points of ID and more.  It looks like it's been scattered around the place, but if someone could get their hands on enough documents, I'm betting they could take control of the guy, just like he's doing to the crooks, and that's got to be a prize worth the risk.  If nothing else, his bank account's got to be good for a million bucks or so. 

You in? 

Dirty Dave West is, to borrow a phrase, the greatest character I never created.  Rumours about him and his activities floated around all through the first two River Trilogy campaigns, but I could never find a good way to bring him towards centre stage.  This is my effort to retcon an explanation for why he never showed. 

This is what is written in the Book of the Huli Jin: 

...and the Greatly August Shang Di sent a dragon of heaven to protect the Kings of Zhou, for before the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, the world belonged to the tigers.  The Kings of Beasts, jealous though they were of the successes of men, were held at bay by the power of the Dragon of Zhou. 

It came to pass, though, that the last King of Zhou died, and as his vassals had long since made kings of themselves, ceasing to pay due respect to his line, the king's sons did not adopt his title, and the Zhou came at last to an end.  The Dragon of Zhou died and, in dying, gave birth to seven new dragons - the Dragons of Qi, Qin, Chu, Yan, Han, Wei and Zhao.  As the Warring States battled each other, so did the dragons clash under heaven, for none could find the strength to defeat his brothers. 

It was at this inauspicious time, when the dragons were weakened and divided amongst themselves, that the tigers chose to strike...

So, there you have it.  Three options for the secret history behind the end of the Warring States period.  Whichever one you choose, it's a great excuse for lots of skulduggery, training montages in exotic locations and all-out, high-flying, set-destroying kung fu awesomeness. 

You know white noise, of course.  Everyone does.  You hear it every time you tune a tv, radio, whatever, to a dead channel.  You hear it, in fact, even when you think you can't hear anything.  By the time you're old enough to understand the things you're meant to be listening for - voices, sounds, music - your brain has already learned to filter out the white noise.  You still hear it, but you never think about what you're hearing - and that's bad. 

It's bad, you see, because white noise is a smokescreen.  White noise is what keeps the Black Noise hidden from us.  Put it this way - you know what you see when your tv loses its signal, right?  A storm of little white dots hits your screen.  The Black Noise is the darkness that slips through between those white dots.  It's always there, but we teach ourselves not to hear it. 

It's self-defence, as much as anything.  The Black Noise gets into us when we're newborn children.  It tells us all about fear, and pain, and failure.  It's why babies cry so much when there doesn't seem to be anything wrong.  I think it's why, in the end, we get sick and die - we've heard so much of the black noise that our minds and bodies can't take the stress of it any more.  We stop fighting it and just let ourselves fail and decay. 

Well, not me.  Not any of us, as a matter of fact.  We're going to stop it, and if we can't do that, we'll at least know the truth.  The first step is to wake people up to the sounds around them.  We need everyone to really listen to what they hear, not filter it all out.  Ambient noise - muzak, traffic, radio and tv signals - is the enemy, and it's all got to stop. 

That's not all.  We've got a child who we've been raising in complete silence - and I mean really complete.  Once the world is quiet enough, we'll bring them out and tell them to listen.  They'll hear what the Black Noise is telling us all.  They'll hear all the lies, threats and hurtful things it says.  Most importantly, they'll hear its Plan. 

Once we know what the Plan is, we'll know - we'll all know - what has to be done. 

"Times are getting tough, mate.  The gold's all been dug up and the wool steamers aren't calling as often as they used to.  It's getting harder and harder for a man to find enough work to put food on 'is table, even in this working man's paradise.  Trades Hall says we won the eight-hour day, true, but what d'ya take home after only eight hours?  It's no wonder even the Union men have taken to working longer'n they ought. 

Everyone's feelin' the pinch, mate.  The Maritime Officers walked off work back on the 15th, and Trades Hall's decided we've gotta show our support.  There's a matter of principle at stake.  We've gotta show that you can't screw over the united workers.  The only way we're gonna weather the bad times is together."