The Secret Names of Streets
Finished reading the second edition of Unknown Armies.
I'm not prepared to do a point-by-point comparison to first edition but it is, in fact, an improvement on every aspect.
So if you've held off buying it, stop waiting. Well worth the money to someone running or playing Unknown Armies.
From structure to simplification of mechanics to inclusion of first edition supplement material, this is a winner.
posted at 09:02 PST (-0800)
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Crybaby Bridge
I love Unknown Armies. It is a fine, fine RPG.
So in my usual quest to be the kind of compleatist who buys everything for it, I picked up the last 1st Edition supplement, I didn't yet have,
Weep. I'll try to describe it in terms which will inspire you to go pick
up something from Unknown Armies because, really, I think it's that good.
This has six scenarios. Like One Shots, you probably won't want to use
all of them. You shouldn't want to use them all in the same campaign, unless you're going for that psychotic surrealist flavor that some
people may enjoy. But there's a lot of fodder to pull for any kind of UA campaign from this. Here, I'll even list them and what I might
suggest you could take away from it. People reading this who may play in games I run should remember that nothing is true and everything is
forbidden.
- A Few of My Favorite Things -- This is John Tynes, a quick drop-in political Dadaist commentary. Good for a dream like
sense of the world with some satire embedded in surrealism. Probably any character with experience with America could fit in here and
the situations faced are amenable to multiple approaches [fleeing in terror will almost always work, if nothing else] in problem solving.
This is quite good and abbreviated, leaving the GM lots of space to add their own meat to the skeleton.
- Swap Meet -- This is Rick Neal, a longer narrative to thread against your 'normal' campaign. Probably not something I'd
start a campaign with but definitely I'd have in mind when starting a campaign. Lots of really messed up GMCs, lots of cool imagery to
swipe, some fascinating concepts. It's about a place where anything can be bartered for and the kinds of people who want to go there and
what they do when they get there. Great for feeding your PCs a Maguffin
or letting them escape a nasty situation ... by seeking out a nastier one. Yum. Good stuff, here.
- Drink to That -- This is Greg Stolze, a sequel to one of the standard UA campaign adventures of sorts. It's event triggered,
by your ongoing campaign and may not even appear to be an adventure until the culmination. This one is sneaky and subversive and just
right. It's a quiet bomb going off underneath you.
- The Green Glass Grail -- This is Chad Underkoffler, a potentially self-contained side-trip or possibly part of an ongoing campaign.
It's got a really fascinating structure, which allows a GM to build the adventure from a checklist of pieces of the jigsaw, including
choosing the villain of the piece so you could run it differently for different groups. Some fun street level GMCs here, nothing too
abracadabra [other than the grail], and quite a bit of meat to tie it to the usual groups players find themselves entangled with in UA
[ The New Inquisition, the Sect of the Naked Goddess, the Sleepers, and especially Mak Attax ]. This one is rich with elements to pull out
but has a holistic unholy joy to it.
- Stoon Lake -- This is Greg Stolze, again. Clever, with some great GMCs and an under-visible flavor of UA is represented
here. Some great GMCs to shanghai from this story in to others if the scenario doesn't float the GM's boat. It's all about a Bigfoot
attack. I like Bigfoot. I used to seek out news stories about Bigfoot. Here's the last one I
read. This scenario is the sleeper hit for me; I didn't expect to like
it as much as I did.
- Garden Full of Weeds -- This is James Palmer, and is either the weakest or the strongest of the lot. I still can't decide.
It's a little less focused than some of the others [even the checklist of TGGG] but contains some of the most disturbing elements because it
targets things which scare me and piss me off in real life. Rich with huge pieces you could rip out and drop in to your own campaign but
which mutually reinforce the creepiness of this scenario. I think I'd need a very particular group of players to run this for to get the
full effect of it but the payoff for that would be tremendous [much like one of the ways to handle character death in
Over the Edge, which would not work for most groups -- if you've read it, you know
what I'm talking about and if you haven't, I dare not spoil it].
Unlike some of the other supplements I've picked up over the years for Unknown Armies, nothing in this one has been incorporated in to the second
edition. Not that I mind, I'm just saying. I say buy everything you can find for this game and run it and play it and give yourself a nice thoroughly
mindfucking. You deserve it!
I also picked up the second edition rules, because I saw two NEW supplements for second edition Unknown Armies I intend to treat myself to very soon,
but that'll wait until another review, after I've finished reading it.
posted at 15:49 PST (-0800)
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