Have we done an Unknown Armies thread recently?I was looking through my files and realized, I have lost all the PNGscreencaps of the really odd conspiracy theories that they had in 2nd edition, like the remote controlled chimpanzee w' John Dillinger's penis. If you have crazy shit, please post!Secondly, I realize I have never played "copyright and tm" UnknownArmies....we have always hijacked another system and just focusedon the best part of the game which is.......the information trade game."He knows something you don't"which of course leads to in-game versions of the conspiracy bulletinboard, which leads to wierd conflict, which gets resolved in cosmic bum fights...Anyone up for some cool bullshit?
this should be included.
>>94714402Masturbation and Porn are also likewise a psy-op.The true power is in building up sexual pressure, then speed.When your boner reaches lightspeed, nothing can stop it.
Cats have their own secret societyThey attempt to collect owners who can meet their ends.They communicate via scents they leave on their shared borders with other cats.Rank is determined by fur color, with black being the highest.Lovecraft's dad was onto something?The catbox is a test of their owner's faithfulness and willingness to put up with their shit.Literally.
>>94714279I used to play and run a LOT of unknown armies in the 00s and 10s, but honestly UA feels like it no longer fits the world.UA was always, IMO, best run as a "present day, present time" game set somewhere the players were familiar with. It was about peeling back the skin and seeing what "really" goes on. It was about saying there were bizarre lies being told that people didn't spot, saying the truth is insane and you'd sound insane to say it, etc. That worked with the 1993-2013 sort of zeitgeist, where it looked like things were improving or teetering in the balance, but that there was a dark undercurrent.Honestly, today, normal people FEEL like there is something wrong, are sure there is something bad and they can SEE the shape of it but not the details.In UA parlance, the tiger woke up and nothing happened.That can't be right.the 2020s do not WORK by UA's paradigm, and honestly I think it was going that way when UA 3rd edition came out, which is why the new lore for UA 3rd fell so flat for my entire extended UA contact group.I can give UA stories and cool shit from the past, but nowadays I only use UA 2nd's system as a nice modern semi-realistic system to base games on, but not the setting or lore, and I dislike UA3's system entirely.
What the fuck is going on with your line breaks?
>>94714921There are actually three different popular styles of line breaking, each of which was used in a different timeline. When people argue over what the "right" one to use is, you're seeing friction where multiple phases of reality were stitched together badly.
>>94714808Same with Delta Green. Still, I'm nostalgic for the old days. Care to regale an old warhorse with your tales?
>>94714957Pretending to be a schizophrenic isn't interesting.
>>94714808BRO!this guy gets it....Unknown Armies is no longer an RPG....it's real fucking life!
>>94715522How is Delta Green the same?Isn't that Mythos and Dark Ops based?
>>94714808I'll agree to this. I was excited for a return to UA, but it seems that the game was really reliant on the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist. And now the zeitgeist evolves so rapidly, humming with potential and importance and then discarded a week later after yet another national tragedy that barely barely makes a blip on the news...I just don't think any game could capture that. There was a hopeful sort of terror going into and coming out of 2000, exactly the kind of paradox that UA was built on that doesn't exist today. It's all numbness.
I cope by pretending it's not 2025
>>94721238>>94721427I honestly think rebuilding UA from the ground up as a different game would be the better choice.....seriously.
>>94714443YOUR BODY BETRAYS YOUR DEGENERACY
>>94722433MY COCK IS MADE OF NUCLEAR LASERS!!!
>>94714402Baste and immortanpilled.
>>94715522>Care to regale an old warhorse with your tales?Ran a Mak Attax game once. There's an old pic I saved from 4chan of a woman, naked but covered in slices of american cheese, her mouth visible but the rest of her face covered, squirting ketchup onto her nipple. I had a player open the walk-in freezer to find THAT stood in there, chattering its teeth and twitching like a Jacob's Ladder extra.This was back when creepypasta was starting to gain traction but not gone mainstream yet, so you could feasibly take a weird pic or story from the internet and run it as an encounter in UA.One of the players was a longterm UA veteran, playing a dipsomancer. The rest of the group were virgins. The look on their faces when the dipsomancer's cellphone rang, he picked up, and I put on a gravelly "drank acid and chainsmokes" voice and said>I KNOW WHERE YOU WORK. YOUR KIND ALL OWE ME A FAVOR IN EXCHANGE FOR NOT DYING.was priceless. Oh, a friend once ran "scooby-doo in unknown armies".>Velma's a pornomancer, hiding her "ascension of the naked goddess" body tattoo under those frumpy sweaters>Daphne is Velma's sub and assistant>Freddy is a Mechanomancer, he used to be a thing with Daphne but traded his memory of their relationship to make the mystery machine run>(if you doubt the above, remember fred's uncle is "the count von jones" who owns a fully automatic coffin factory in a dracula style castle, and then think about all the devices he builds)>Shaggy is, like, a narco-alchemist>(remember he's canonically vegetarian but clearly high as balls, that fits the narco purity thing)>Scoob is Shaggy's Familiar, fucked up as that is. I think he was the spirit of Daphne or Velma's dad or uncle or something, hence why he's so protective of her>We found and killed an Epideromancer Clown then edited the footage to look normal>The Scooby Gang work for the Sleepers, keeping the tiger asleep by making people believe it's all fake while they put down dukes who go rogue.
>Velma's a pornomancer, hiding her "ascension of the naked goddess" body tattoo under those frumpy sweatersHoly Shit Yes. Keep telling me more!
>>94731500It's been a long, long time since that game. Like, I am pretty sure it was halloween '08. I know I posted about it on /tg/ at the time but that was in the days before every post got archived, and it's not in the suptg archive. So I can't really recall details.The player party WAS oddly synchronous. I played shaggy, having worn an olive shirt and jeans that day and having a shit goatee. My drunk hungover friend was visiting town and played scoob, and didn't understand half of what happened and slurred. Fred and Daphne were played by people who were, at the time, in a relationship but it wasn't going to last, and Velma was played by someone who knew how to wield her sexuality like a weapon.But it's been so fucking long I can't recall any of the description in detail, any of the wording the GM used, anything like that. Sorry.
>>94731500You. shut up.>>94721427It's funny because all the stuff we have IRL now was just things in the game back then.It is funny how an idea in real life suddenly becomes very different. I mean...think of vampires....
so, does anyone have those rumor pages?search engines and the net gets me nothing...
>>94729698>The Scooby Gang work for the Sleepers, keeping the tiger asleep by making people believe it's all fake while they put down dukes who go rogue.Holy shit that's such a good and fun idea.
>>94734320Just read John MacAfee's old twitter feed, or this:https://www.unnaturalphenomena.com/wp/?cat=68
>>94735155Also Useless Tables.
>>94721238>but it seems that the game was really reliant on the turn-of-the-century zeitgeistI've just realised one of the things that I think really underpins how much things have changed without us knowing.Consider Videomancers. The whole POINT of the videomancer, the central paradox underpinning their magick, was that you were together in isolation because everyone was watching the same show at the same time. Original vidiots picked a totem show they watched every time it aired, charged by doing that, and dropped their charges by missing a broadcast.That relied on>long-runner shows>syndication>broadcast TV times>episodes dropping one at a timenow none of those things exist in television, and even if they did, there are so many channels and shows that you don't have that "everyone watches the same thing" feeling. You don't have the water-cooler talk the next day about an episode of dallas or seinfeld or the simpsons, where you can revel in the fact that everyone was "there".But you know what? There's something similar to how Videomancers functioned. They don't broadcast at the same time every day/week/etc, they're a bit less dependable, but they very much have the same or a higher level of dedication to their show, of assuaging loneliness by having everyone "together" in the audience, the same kind of..yeah I'm talking about vtubers. Vtuber fans are the new Videomancers.
>>94736421>Vtubers are the new VideomancersNani o itteiruyo!!!???
I remember one of the rumors was that there was an underground laboratory where John Dillinger's Penis was grafted to a Chimpanzee that was cranial-modified to be remote controllable...
>>94735155I've got five posts archived on that.
>>94720458Worse, in fact, because we don’t even have the promise of a new, better world.
>>94741688
>>94714279in case you hadn't heard, they shut down the Statosphere program for UA3. not even deliberately, Atlas Games just didn't renew it because DrivethruRPG sent the message to someone who no longer worked for the companywith the community content program shuttered and no official books since Bring Me The Head of Comte Saint Germain the game is basically dead
>>94741858Statospere program? enlighten a fool?That was tied to DriveThru?
>>94736421I still haven't gotten around to reading 3rd edition and what it did to the various Adept schools, but a campaign themed around the evolution of magic and adepts from the 2000s until now sounds extremely interesting. >Bibliomancers have it easier than ever since you can just get books delivered by mail, but the proliferation of AI and book mills likely will fuck with their charges so they have to be careful of others slipping in shit books with their hauls.>Cliomancers are forced kicking and screaming into tracking and creating meme trends to generate charge capable locations. Now any time some idiot goes viral they have to start staking out their locations which gets more cutthroat but also juices the hell out of the entire community.>Dipsomancers and Urbanomancers probably don't change much.>Entropomancers are fairly steady but more likely to hide their addiction under making content for Youtube and to fund more dangerous stunts.>Epideromancers are likely dying off as a concept or morphing into something else since cutting isn't quite as big as it was in the 90s/2000s. >Mechanomancers likely haven't changed much but continue to feel more quaint in their ideals.>Narco-alchemists can likely move about more openly in public depending on their location.>Personamancers losing magical power as putting on masks becomes less of a fringe weirdo thing and more common to survive in society.>Plutomancers have so many fucking new scammy ways to make money now it's insane. Hell likely every single NFT ecosystem as a Plutomancer sitting at the stop just fucking sucking up charges constantly. Inflation might be fucking up the lower-tier ones though.>Pornomancers are probably dead between the normalization of porn, people leave the circle or die off, degrading VHS tapes, and lack of VCRs. Someone might upload that to the web, but either it goes up in the early net and has awful quality or goes up later on and gets buried under a tidal wave of new porn.
>>94742135you could write and publish your own books for 3e using the official letterhead and templateafter the kickstarter and the one free rpg day module they did it was the only source of new content for the gamethere's nothing stopping people from just doing it themselves without the official store page, but discoverability is basically zero so if you don't know any superfans good luck finding anything they writenot a huge deal since people rarely posted there anyway but it sucks to see it go down due to neglect and sheer bureaucratic incompetenceI personally liked oddities and endlings, gourmeturgy, praviturgy, strygomancy and GOAD
>>947424693rd edition sucked due to a rather dumb skill system overhaul and shift away from paradox as the main theming of the adepts.Still, I kind of can imagine some schools splitting and evolving more than merely disappearing:>Videomancers basically split between streamer/V-tuber watchers maintaining the old "solitary yet united via the transmission" paradox and the binge watchers trying to juice up on the power of over consumption where the entertainment becomes a chore and they grow numb from the overstimulation.>Idolamancers have their internet taboo lessened by the power of the social media making having online presence a part of the anonymity, not antithesis of it.>Personamancers basically get a choice between losing relevance and power or adapting to the new reality where the masks are accepted and despised at the same time.>Some new group takes up the name of Pornomancy, either powered by the rise of amateur porn, parasocial porn (onlyfans) or online hentai.
>>94742469>Entropomancers are fairly steady but more likely to hide their addiction under making content for Youtube and to fund more dangerous stunts.At least one adept understands Entropomancy as a method of gaming the cosmic recommendation algorithm.>>94745643There should be at least a few old videomancers who still charge off the local news. Adepts are very stubborn people and legacy media can last a long time.Speaking of which, I live in a not very large town that still has a physical newspaper, which is now largely a vanity project. But some of the people in town still read it and the county posts all its official business in there. There's probably an adept school here. Old media carries prestige, despite being less connected to actual society. So you can be a reporter who everyone respects, despite no one listening to them. Maybe a personamancer/iconomancer variant based around impersonating dead brands? The future is nostalgia for a world no one lived in.
>>94745898>Old media carries prestige, despite being less connected to actual society. So you can be a reporter who everyone respects, despite no one listening to them.At this point it's a perfect paradox that could be used to fund a whole full new school, the Mediamancers.I'd also say that the Mechanomancers would actually have a small renaissance, since their core paradox of archaic, overly idealistic futurism has become even stronger nowadays with the slowly creeping tech pessimism.
>>94745940You could leverage legacy media and have power whenever you control a piece of modern media through old means or vice versa. Get an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica by faking it through Wikipedia citations. Introduce an LLM hallucination into an official court transcript. Or get someone fired because the NYT ran an expose on their weird blog. The conflict between the sources of truth and the sources of power is the paradox here. Whenever you make media do something off obscure or false information, that gives charges.Call the practitioners Pedants, who want to correct the record.
>>94746190That's a great idea! Now, what would their taboo be? I thought about taboo of using the old media, but your charging method means that they need to use them still. Maybe the Pedants could be weakened by losing their connection to their media connections? Being cut off from writing their column to local newspaper or being suspended on their twitter could both taboo them.
>>94745643I rather like the skill system, and isnt paradox still the main theming of the adepts in 3e?
>>94746238Harm to reputation is a good taboo. Pedants cannot admit to falsifying records, documents, etc or be shown to have done so in recorded form. They can talk about it informally, but producing evidence is what triggers them. The sources are powerful only as long as they are unblemished, in the eyes of others.That makes their charging method more paradoxical. The more they charge, the more likely they are to taboo, which makes it harder to charge in the future off that source. Pedants jump between sources, leveraging their rep's limited shelf life for a while before adopting a new brand.
>>94746557Additional thought: Accounting and finance would be an excellent job for a mediamancer. If you've ever read Money Stuff, finance is full of documents basically nobody reads but everyone trusts.
>>94746557Great idea! Also, make the potency of charging dependent on the source. The sources with great renown give more power, meaning that to get significant charges they need to get to at least state news level.
>>94746586The power of the charge should key off the number of people affected. So large sources are more likely to be significant, but falsifying the weddings column of a major newspaper matters less than altering the headline of a mid sized one.I also really want this to be adept behavior. It just looks so stupidhttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/628796/teen-added-thousands-fake-translations-scots-wiki
>>94746361>>94745643I don't think adept parodoxes were ever a serious or important part of the game in any editionI think the devs just made up magick schools that sounded cool and then tried to tie them thematically with mumbo jumbo after the factat the end of the day they all boil down to some variant of "inconvenience yourself in exchange for magick powers"
>>94746190A school of magi, based on Fake News. Jesus wept, you're going to make me miss the Cryptomancers.
>>94749560That kind of already was a theme in Unknown Armies, just in the Statosphere. I think it was attempted coup of the Messenger by the False Messenger, betting on the inherit unreliability of the news, the Truth that can be a Lie and the Lie than can be a Truth.
>>94749779Sounds about on brand. I gotta know though, what makes Mediamancers different from Cryptomancers?
>>94751386Cryptomancers are focused on the personal nature of lies and truth. Whereas Mediamancers care about society and power. Mediamancers control systems, cryptomancers control individuals. There is nontrivial overlap, but it is mostly with German cryptomancers (charge through fraud, taboo if caught) instead of English (charge through learning, taboo if lie). There are fewer German cryptomancers left than English cryptomancers, so that opens up possibilities.
>>94749153Paradox was much stronger in 2nd edition Adepts than 3rd and the game was better for it. It gave good character hooks, 2nd edition adepts were inherently conflicted. They could never be at rest, since their charging gave them something to want while simultaneously causing conflict. This was sometimes detrimental to groups, which could devolve into an Adept cleanup squad, but it was something.3rd edition adepts can be "a guy on a farm" or "a lady with a camera". Less inherent conflict. This can still work if cabal play properly motivates the group, but it is harder and less thematic.
>>94752243Yeah, that was exactly my point. Agrimancer can live as a normal farmer, particularly if he's rich enough to pay off others to do taboo braking stuff. Camaraturge is likewise capable of being your run out of mill analog photo snob photographer. Basically, they can engage with their chosen subject without looking like maniacs to their fellows, which goes against all that adepts were earlier. Bibliomancer looks like crazy hoarder to a librarian and a Herpetomancer would be seen as a suicidal freak to a herpetologist.
>>94745940>Mechanomancers would actually have a small renaissance, since their core paradox of archaic, overly idealistic futurism has become even stronger nowadays with the slowly creeping tech pessimism.Mechanomancers have evolved for the social media age. They can now sacrifice others memories of them, provided they were only observed digitally. The digital will never be real, but magic can transmute it into something solid. More than one influencer has burnt their following to make a new toy.
If I were penning UA 4th at the moment, rituals would be born, live, and die a lot faster.The meme zeitgeist would empower something for a short time and then it'd be gone.At the moment, a popular one would be "Nothing Ever Happens", but who knows if it'd still work in a year.
>>94763393Instantly made me think of that fucking grimace shake memeDuring the height you could actually make it a murder shakeNow even if they brought it back it'd be just another event food
>>94752243>>94754777I get where you're coming from but Bibliomancy is one of the most boring adepts in the whole franchiseYou collect expensive books and you can't damage books. There's nothing weird or antisocial about it.Everyone remembers the iconic mages, Dipsomancy and Epideromancy and Pornomancy, but on further reflection the older editions had their share of duds.Cliomancy is central to the lore but it sucks. Some of the spells are neat but the charging method is dull and the taboo is nonexistent. You just... visit places.
>>94765515I always thought pornomancers were incredibly stupid. The cult of the naked goddess as a faction is interesting, but "you have to recreate scenes from this specific magical porno actresses career," is dumb.I could see something where pornomancers get charged from jackin' it, and their domain would be all about manipulation and attraction, and their taboo would obviously be something to do with actually having sex or something.
>>94765531Pornomancers are a Mystery Cult, a throwback to oldschool religions where to join you had to go through some secret initiation where you can't speak of it, but everyone who is your brother or sister in the cult has shared it. In classical terms, the "mystery" is the secret initiation and its meaning.A re-enactment of the central mythology of the cult is usually a part of the Mysteries - for example, we believe that re-enacting the Demeter myth as a live-action play was done during the eleusinian mysteries.Pornomancers add to the "mystery" aspect by them NOT knowing the true meaning of the mysteries of the naked goddess - they know she ascended to the Statosphere, they know what she was doing, they can re-enact it, but they do not know WHY it worked.To me that's always been one of the fun parts of Pornomancy; they're an ancient style of religion brought to what was then a very modern style. They mash together passing bootleg porno tapes to your mates with joining a mystery-cult, and in unknown armies style they also fuck with the definition of "mystery cult".
>>94767347i always thought Pornomancers just liked to fuck.
>>94770755No. If you start liking it, you break taboo.
>>94765515Cliomancy seems like something that actually exists, unlike most of the others. I like that about it.
>>94770755what >>94770777 saidthey can't fuck for romance.The Pornomancer video tape shows the Ascension of the Naked Goddess, a woman who was an entirely unconscious avatar who ascended to the Statosphere without every being aware of it (that we know).Her exact archetype is unknown, but no known renunciant fell through the House when the NG ascended, and it's widely believed she's something new, born out of the postmodern age.She was a porn star, generic, who ascended midway into a porn shoot. Tapes of the act have a religious, ecstatic influence on those who view them, but copies degrade the quality, meaning earlier-generation tapes are stronger.Pornomancers are, one and all, Cultists of the Naked Goddess. They do not fuck for pleasure or for love, but because re-enacting the life of the Naked Goddess gets them closer to Her.The Sect of the Naked Goddess are aware of the Statosphere, of synchonicity, have a religious dogma called Affinity - the "covalent bond between emotional attraction and cosmic correlation". They're a sex cult who don't do it for the sex. Creativity from rote mimicry. Their magick works by creating and enhancing affinity. They hit guidance, coincidence, good luck, persuasion. They're not good at direct change, but they're good at people.Their minor charge is an hour or so of Naked Goddess sex ritual, which means re-enacting her tapes, not necessarily the tape where she Went Up, but any from her entire catalogue.Their significant charge is the same, but it has to be more accurate - with people who look the part (except you), on a set that looks the part, with clothes and props that look the part.Their major charges come from being the first person to re-enact PERFECTLY anything from the naked goddess's life, even outside her porn tapes. Kiss her highschool sweetheart just like she did, under the bleachers in her school uniform on homecoming day in the rain (after researching it). Only the first to do anything gets the charge.
>>94770884I know one of the potential archetypes for the Naked Goddess is the Whore Everyone Can Have But You.
>>94771037>the Whore Everyone Can Have But YouIsn't that just yourself?
>>94771053NTA, but it's the in-universe theory that she's an archetype of desire and revulsion, envy and contempt in one. And that the other candidate, Alex Abel, would have become The Black Guy Who Achieved All That You Should Have or something like that.
