$30 all PDFs - ends Fri Apr 29 - funded 5 times over already
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atlasgames/unknown-armies-third-edition-roleplaying-game
UA 3 gamma (bookmarked by /tg/)
>>46527194 →
>>46524510 →
>>46524548 →
Do we have a compilation of the material from the other threads yet?
I'm currently working on an official write-up for the Virtuamancer, the Adept School based on playing occult-influenced video games and inflicting game rules on the real world. Two questions:
1.) Is there a better name for the Virtuamancer? I considered "Ludomancer" but that to me feels like it would be more about game theory. One thing I considered is "Virtual-Shaman", since the whole idea of the school is using games to access an altered state of perception and reality
2. I want a more symbolic name for the altered games that Virtuamancers chase after and use to charge up. In my initial write-up I just called them Lesser Games and Great Games, but that's pretty bland. Any ideas?
>>46649162
>Virtuamancer
Reality Dev
>>46649162
Virtuamancer is good for the actual name I think but virtual shaman and reality dev are both cool nicknames. Maybe some sort of play on "chasing the dragon" since these guys behave like addicts.
>>46649578
Chasing the Princess
Here's what I got so far. In three parts:
1/3
The headaches started when you were 10. Your folks took you to a doctor, who recommended them to a neurologist, who did a CAT Scan that came up clean. Nothing physically wrong with you. For the next decade you were in and out of hospitals, plucked out of school by the nurse as you writhed on the cafeteria linoleum, feeling like some tiny demon had peeled back your eyelid and jabbed a red hot fork into your optic nerve. Cluster headaches, the worst pain a human can experience.
It turns out you were one of the lucky ones.
No one ever believed you, but you know what did it. That tinny music piped from your Gameboy’s speakers as your gray and green sprite trekked into Lavender Town. Just a handful of notes evolving into simple midi chords infecting your like a parasite hungry for brain matter and your ceaseless suffering. Much later, you read on the internet how kids in Japan as young as 7 had jumped from sixth story windows or hung themselves in their closets. All because a warped Nintendo coder had embedded something in ultra-high frequencies in the background music for that digital ghost town.
(continued)
>>46650475
2/3
-------
Games used to be so simple. A board with alternating colored tiles and a set of carved pawns. Six sided dice and spinning tops. Black and white pebbles. A deck of cards. Easy. Boring. No meat, no secrets. Something to do when the power’s out and the TV doesn’t work. Everything's on the surface; there are no deeper strata to unearth and sink your teeth into, nothing running in the background, feeding back your input with new challenges and experiences.
Then came the revelations of Saint Nolan and All-Father Miyamoto. Games could be so much more. Your will, transubstantiated into electrons and manifest through a cathode ray. You weren’t just interacting with pieces, you were entering a whole world, the fully realized creations of freshly minted demiurges. Entire microcosmi lay inert until you entered them and breathed life into both the princess and her captor. The best Christmas ever.
(continued)
>>46650489
3/3
------
We’ve come a long way since then, and in the process we’ve lost that magic. Games aren’t singular pieces of mad inspiration anymore, they’re worked over corporate rehashes rubber stamped on an annual basis to keep the bloated behemoths that are the major studios from sinking under their own feted copulance. They’re dumbed down and diluted to attract the largest possible audience and the lowest possible denominator. Games used to mean something more than numbers on a balance sheet. And everyone eats it up. Gotta play Call of Duty 8: Kill All Muslims. Gotta play Assassins Creed: Vancouver. Gotta play Legend of Zelda: Still the Same Game since Ocarina of Time. Empty calories to nourish empty brains.
But you’re different. When everyone was playing Final Fantasy III on their SNES, you were playing Earthbound and realizing that you were inducing the abortion of the endboss in the final encounter. When the rest of your class was having Halo 2 lan parties, you unlocked the ending of Yume Nikki. While your college roommate spent his weekends with pot and Grand Theft Auto IV, you wrote a paper for your Russian Literature class about The Void. You’ve never been mainstream. You’re at once below, spelunking through the industry’s weird underground of Japanese and Eastern-European eccentrica, and soaring above it, an enlightened being unmoved by fancy graphics and shallow moral choice engines.
And somewhere along the way, you started up a game you’d only heard spoken of in hushed voices on remote message boards, played it, and for the first time it reached out and played you.
>>46649162
The game names could be based off of alchemy, perhaps? Materian Games and Chrysopoeian Games?
>>46650583
>>46650583
Not sure if that fits the theme. Alchemy is about physical substance, but this school is about altered states and elevated perception.
>>46650668
The transmutation of gold also represents perfection of the human mind and soul.
>>46650723
Narkies already did this in the 2nd edition, it'd be better to find new themes.
Shame Stolze didn't learn a few things about running a Kickstarter from Wick. Would've been so fantastic to see this beating his shitty Europeans & Evil GMs reprint.
>>46650740
Ah, true. And yeah, altered states is different from alchemy.
Okay, so perhaps representing legs of a journey? Threshold Games and Ordeal Games?
>>46650779
This I can dig! My other idea had to do with Depth, a la the old Iceberg meme. Real crazy stuff, the stuff that requires huge stress checks against multiple meters, is towards the bottom, whereas lighter stuff that can still provoke a response is closer to the surface (though never above it; surface games are for sheep).
More Virtuamancer stuff. Let me know what you think.
-----
Switch off for a second son. Let’s talk shop.
Picture an ocean covered in garbage. Plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, burger wrappers and six-pack holders. They float to the surface because they have no weight or substance. They’re nothing but colorful packaging filled with moldy air. That’s what 99% of the mainstream gaming industry looks to anyone with even the smallest amount of insight. Just so much flotsam tossed and turned by the currents which arise from beneath. They are the scum of a sea that hides far richer experience, and are marked as such.
Beneath the surface, though, that’s where the good stuff is. Virtuamancers sort these games into three levels of escalating complexity and capacity to alter your state of mind; as such they are widely called Deep Games.. First are Threshold games, or threshers. A thresher serves two purposes: to open the mind of the player to the possibilities and altered states provided by the school, and to sift the unworthy from the dedicated. Beyond the threshers are Ordeal games, or crushers. Crushers force the player through a gauntlet of psychological and metaphysical trauma, carving off pieces of her psyche unable to cope and replacing them with refined wisdom and insight, like fresh skin grafts on the quivering flesh of a burn victim. Finally, in hadal limits of this vast and dark ocean are the Crucible games. It’s said that a person who can experience a crucible game emerges remade, virtually a new lifeform whose thoughts operate wholly on new levels from other men. It’s the ideal which all Virtuamancers strive for: to be exposed to a virtual world and conquer its puzzles, and welcome it in turn to conquer them.
>>46650817
>Tfw my love for cute girls puts me into horror of the depths tier.
I'm okay with this.
>>46651878
That is a fantastic analogy in the opening. I love it. You've got skill with these similes and metaphors.
>>46652375
Thanks! I need to refine it and the second paragraph more; the chief quality of Stolze's writing is its pithiness, such that he never uses two words when one will say the same thing.
Not sold yet on the three game types that I came up with though (threshers, crushers and crucibles). The other thought I had was naming them after the three deepest levels of the ocean (Bathyc, Abyssal and Hadal), but I feel like using more common terms is truer to UA.
I'm loving UA3 so far, but I've gotta admit; the new Adept schools and Avatar Archetypes really aren't doing it for me except fir the Cinemancers and the gun guys. Anyone else feel like this?
>tfw no Delta Green crossover stretch goal
>>46652521
The clothingmancers are actually pretty neat. Versatile power set, too.TFW for all the crazy postmodern magick, the most useful School in the entirety of UA2 was the boringly medieval snake magic from the Mac Attax sourcebook
>>46651878
Need to head out but here's a little bit more:
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Deep games have been around since the dawn of the medium, when Polybius turned a healthy fraction of Portland, Oregon’s arcade goers into drooling, epileptic insomniacs before the government swept them all up (the machines and the droolers). For two decades, they lurked in the industry’s peripheral vision, showing up in remote boardwalk arcades, random Blockbuster rental cases and on floppy discs passed around college campuses. Most were the products of diseased minds grasping at dimly glimpsed truths, and using silicon and Assembly code as sounding rods for the vast dimensions they’d cracked open.
Two things changed that. The first was the Internet, which of course changed everything for everyone everywhere. Suddenly these games which before were whispered-of artifacts could be easily copied, disseminated and discussed. Usenet groups sprang up to get to the bottom of the weirdness, and eventually people with commonly warped perceptions of what a game is and could be started grouping up to form indie studios. They didn’t amount to much at first, but overtime their output began to amass in a vast watershed, which was unleashed by Advent Virtual Interactive.
AVI’s make-up, location and history is a maze of lies. From their failed Kickstarters and their web hosting, anyone investigating them has been lost in a mire of shell companies that loops back on itself.
And another cool thing I can't back. Shit
>>46652546
No loss as far as I'm concerned. I think The Fate is better when you look at it as an implication of the possibility of including more UA stuff in a DG game than it would be if it was outright stated that New York's occult underground in DG and the Occult Underground in UA are the same thing.
There was also some discussion in one of the previous threads about how you can bring UA into DG and be fine but you can't bring DG into UA without contradicting some core elements of UA's setting.
>>46652521
I like them for the most part but I feel like they're overall less "provocative" than the ones in 2e. The new schools are cool and weird and fitting for the time period but there isn't really anything that gets a "wow that's fucked up" reaction like Epideromancy and nothing as tragic as Mechanomancers needing to sacrifice memories to make anything serious.
>>46655767
Agree here. I don't look at these and think 'horror', for the most part. Except maybe animal sacrifice in the Agrimancer.
>>46652521
Some are pretty lackluster, but its not like All of the old schools and avatars where great too.
>>46652521
I think on the whole, they're not nearly as dark as some of the earlier schools. I do like them, but overall they're a little weaker and could do with some tweaking to play up the creepiness.
I think the photography-based one is underrated in creepiness terms though, what with their collections of photos, where all those of their enemies have their eyes torn out and so on.
>>46659167
Ah, that's true for sure. And the way it can pull off voodoo shit - I think it explicitly mentions a 'chainsaw' style damage suddenly happening - would be horrific in real life.
>>46660923
Did somebody say damage like a chainsaw?
>>46663227
Haha, yes... I was thinking of this, by the way:
"The damage done resembles the mode of defacement. If you burn up the picture, the target looks like they got burned. Tear it in half, they look like they were hit with a chainsaw or a machete. Scribble on it with a black Sharpie and they get covered in bruises and contusions."
>>46646813
Damn it. I want both this and Ironclaw. I guess I know where my bonus is going.
>>46653902
If you did it would have to be a very different DG than canonically described.
>>46655767
Agreed. I got the impression that some of it's down to there simply being less untilled material available but it also feels a little like it's also due to the whole 'tiptoeing around tragedy' thing that saw Madness Meters get renamed to Shock Gauges (not that I'm hung up on that particular detail, it's just indicative of a strategy to broaden the game's popularity. Plus the old schools aren't gone, porting is pretty easy).
>>46664728
>If you did it would have to be a very different DG than canonically described.
I think I posted it in a previous thread, but I think the best way to do it would be the universe in DG as being the way it is as a result of the previous Clergy deciding that humanity shouldn't rule the universe and trying to make the universe as inhuman and unwelcoming as possible. In this, Azathoth would be the sleeping, trapped potential of mankind to rewrite reality, and his court a perversion of the Clergy who, instead of ruling reality, mindlessly ensure that Azathoth remains dormant. Waking Azathoth would entail the end of reality, mankind becoming as the Great Old Ones in one chaotic nightmare. And the magic sorcerers can often do in DG is a result of the failure of the old Clergy to properly wipe out mankind's influence.
Of course, all of that could just be the delusions of the insane cultist as you prepare to Mozambique Drill him.
>>46664728
Yeah, I definitely get a sense that 3rd Edition is overall aiming for a less... grimy tone. It's not a bad thing, and all the grimy elements of older editions still fit, they're just less the focus.
>>46665172
There's also this option for a UA/CoC crossover: http://ua.johntynes.com/content_comments.php?id=P3154_0_3_0 along with all the attendant archetypes.
