Unknown Armies actual play

[GreatWolf]

Okay.  Off and on I refer to my first Unknown Armies campaign with fond memories, and I keep swearing that I'll post about it someday.  Given the recent focus on UA, I thought that I would finally do so.  Hopefully someone will find this helpful.

First, I think that it is best to characterize this play as Sim/Char, using light Illusionism.  I say that it was "light" because I did not forbid any character choices, which led to a major shift in plans at one point in the campaign.  (I'll explain that in a bit.)  In general, though, I knew my players and their characters well enough that I was able to anticipate the general choices that they would make.  This meant that I could construct episodes with a certain level of confidence that they would go according to plan.

During the course of this campaign, I also only fudged two dice rolls.  And, as I recall, one of them didn't actually need to be fudged; if I had interpreted it properly, there would have been no need.

I began the campaign with two characters:

Ayalia Jones (I can never spell that first name properly)--played by my wife, Crystal.  Ayalia was a middle-aged maternity nurse dedicated to the preservation of life.

Una--played by my sister, Gabrielle.  Una was a teenaged foster child.  She didn't remember her real parents, and she bounced from one foster family to another.  At the beginning of the campaign, both she and Ayalia lived in the same apartment building in Philadelphia and were already somewhat close.

Later, we were joined by another character:

Nina--played by my sister, Adiel.  Nina was a clockwork creation that the other characters discovered along the way.  Her master had built her using a major charge, so, for all intents and purposes, she was alive.  She was also a total innocent.  When she enters the scene, she has been living for a month in her master's mansion, all alone.  See, her master had died, but Nina continued her regular routine, including putting flowers in her master's room to cover the nasty smell.  To be clear, this wasn't horror.  This was tragedy.  But that characterizes Nina.  She was a painful character to watch as, gradually, her innocence was stripped away.

(When Una and Ayalia figured out that Nina's master was dead, they brought him outside, wrapped in his blankets, and buried him under his favorite tree in the garden.  As they began to cover him with earth, Nina said, "Good night" to her master and laid a rose on his chest.  No dry eyes at the gaming table that night.)

The backstory of the campaign was this.  The Cult of the Weeping Mother (my own invention) waas trying to get the Mother archetype booted from the Invisible Clergy and replacing her with the current occupant of the Weeping Mother archetype.  They were going to do this by sacrificing a totally innocent child in a ritual.  First, of course, they had to raise such a child.  Alex Able got wind of this and, liking the current archetypes where they were, decided to intervene.  He didn't want to kill the child, but he didn't want the ritual to occur.  Also, a one-armed dipsomancer named Barry Dancey had heard about the innocent child and wanted to consume her soul.  If he did so, he thought that he would be able to live forever.  He was terrified of dying.

So, Ayalia is walking home at 4:00 a.m. or so when a strange woman with a tear tatooed on her cheek rushes up to her and hands her a baby.  As Ayalia stands in utter confusion, the woman rushes away, only to be gunned down only a block away by men in a white van.

Ayalia takes the baby home and Una comes up to the apartment.  While they are debating what to do, they receive a phone call from the leader of the Cult, telling them not to call the authorities and to bring the baby to him in Seattle.  They decide to call the police anyways.  When they do, the men in the white van show up.  They run.

So, the campaign is about their desperate flight across the United States (by road) and what happens along the way.  Each session was essentially an episode of a television show.  Some of them related directly to the overarching campaign.  Others were unrelated but developed the characters.

There was even a basic outline for a session.  Each had three parts.

Part One:  Driving

The session always opened with the characters on the road.  This was a time of freeform roleplaying, when the players could incorporate the results of last session into their roleplaying.  This was all about demonstrating ongoing character changes.  For example, Una would sketch pictures that had symbolic meaning for the player.  Perhaps they would talk together.  Anyways, this would continue until everyone was done.  Then we would move to Part Two.

Part Two:  Event

This is where "stuff" happened.  The lead-in varied.  Here are some of the hooks that I used:

"You have $20.  How are you going to buy gas, feed the baby, and find somewhere to sleep?"

"A man steps out into the middle of the highway and fires a shotgun through your windshield."

"You meet three members of the Cult.  They actually seem happy to see you."

Now, obviously, these were roleplayed through.  However, that was usually enough to get things started.  I generally had certain goals for each episode, and I tried to structure things so that, through the character choices that I assumed would be made, I would achieve my goals.  If the players chose differently, though, that was okay.  No character choices were forced by me at all.

Eventually there would be resolution to the event, and the PCs would get back on the road, heading west.  (They went through several cars over the course of the campaign, as they kept getting trashed.)  This would lead to Part Three.

Part Three:  Meanwhile, Elsewhere.....

This is where I would cut to those who were chasing them and do a cut scene.  For instance, one session ended with a cut scene of Barry killing a police officer who had pulled him over.  Another was of Alex Able in his office, planning his next move.  It added a certain urgency to the chase, as the players knew who was behind them.

In addition, as we moved through the campaign, I kept adding little weird hints about the nature of this infant that everyone wanted.  One time, when returning to the house where the baby had been left, the characters saw a young woman in the second-floor window, rocking the child.  However, the old lady who owned the house lived alone, and she had been downstairs for hours.  Another time, at a haunted truck stop (think of something like "In the Mouth of Madness"), ghostly writing appeared on a window, warning the characters.  Later that night, a luminous woman appeared to them, freeing the man whose nightmares had taken control of the truck stop.  All these hints were processed by the characters during Part One of the next session.

And so the campaign continued.  Nina's innocence was stripped away, piece by piece.  Ayalia's commitment to total preservation of life weakened under the continual assault, as she was forced to defend herself by violence.  Una began to see demons behind every bush, her grip on reality weakened through the constant exposure to the strange events that pursued them across the country.

Nina killed Barry.  She put her fist through the back of his head.  I still remember her, staring in shock at what she had done.  Barry sprawled on the blacktop, a pool of blood spreading from his body.  Nina's hands, covered in red.

Ayalia lied to one of her best friends.

Una was tortured in a basement, leaving her horribly scarred.

Ayalia sprained her ankle, jumping from a fire escape.

Una's right arm was shredded by a shotgun blast.

Nina's mind shattered when she murdered again.

And yet....

The child was kept safe.  In the climactic session, the characters were in a shootout in a hut in the middle of South Dakota with the local rednecks who had been insulted accidentally by Nina.  One of the Cultists showed up and was trying to kill the baby.  Ayalia fled the hut with the infant, with the Cultist in hot pursuit.  The Cultist tripped her and took aim at the child.  Ayalia shielded the baby with her own body.

And then the baby ascended.

TNI forces arrived, rescuing Ayalia and Una.  Both required long hospital stays.  Alex Able paid the bill.

Ayalia married a local boy and settled in South Dakota.  Una, having finally found her family, lived with them.  She eventually married and had children of her own.

No one knows what happened to Nina.

===

It is the closest that I've ever had to the perfect RPG campaign.  The play structure was not planned from the beginning, but it worked very well.  In addition, the rules for the game contributed greatly.  The Madness Meters, Obsession, and Stimuli (Rage, Fear, Noble) helped focus the game on the inner lives of the characters, and the hidden damage system brought an element of fear to the game that is often lacking in other games.

I trust that this is a helpful post.  Any questions for me?

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Judd]

That sounds like a whole lot of fun.

Not sure why but a one-armed dispomancer is just PERFECT.

So very David Lynch.

Nice, thanks for the write-up, dig the story and the structure.

Cool.

[GreatWolf]

Well.....

Barry is mostly (70-75%) lifted from Tim Power's Expiration Date, which has a one-armed ghost eater character.

Credit where credit is due and all that.

And regarding structure, it was this campaign that made me realize that games like Whispering Vault or Inspectres that have formal scenario structures make a lot of sense.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf