Oh Well

Go figure. My venture into Unknown Armies consisted of a character generation session… and that’s it.

Life just keeps getting in the way of any regular gaming for me. Whether it’s things preventing me from gaming, or things preventing everyone else from showing, there just doesn’t seem to be a way around this bad luck.

So, until I can get something going, I’m going to fade into the background. That doesn’t mean I’m gone. Things are starting up again at my game design blog, Scintilla. I’ll also be attending Fear the Con 5 in St. Louis this May, so expect updates about that. And maybe I’ll start posting here about some of the other, non-rpg games that I play.

Game On!

Well, my Shadowrun venture did not work out, for a number of reasons. The game died, which saved me the trouble of telling the GM that I would no longer be attending. I only played for two sessions, and barely got a feel for my character, but oh well.

In more uplifting news, I’m starting up a game of Unknown Armies! I’ve been wanting to run a UA game for many years, but was always running into roadblocks. I finally said “Fuck it,” and decided to start up a game come hell or high water. So last night, I got together with a couple of friends to discuss game and character concepts, and ended up with them making characters.

One of the hardest things I had to do last night was to generate interest in the really cool setting of UA without giving away any of the secrets. One of the things I’m most looking forward to is introducing the setting, and having the players be exposed to it at the same time their characters are. But selling a game without being able to give any details is tough. Luckily, I had convinced one of the players years ago, and the other is basically willing to give any game a good try.

After every session, I’ll try to write a post here about it. It won’t be too story-oriented, but will rather focus on a gaming issue that came up during play, or somesuch. For updates to the story itself, I’m setting up a campaign on Obsidian Portal, which I’ll link to once it’s ready to go.

Unknown Armies (2nd Edition)

Another game from Atlas Games, I pretty much just stumbled upon Unknown Armies. John Tynes was the first name I had any interest in that was associated with RPGs. On his old website, he included some old design notes from this game. I read them, and was immediately interested to learn more. So when I encountered the second edition of Unknown Armies in a store many months later, I had to buy it.

The premise of the game (co-created with Greg Stolze) is that the world we live in contains an occult underground, inhabited largely by outcasts who just don’t fit into regular society. These individuals each hold an obsession that colors they way they look at everything, and which can lead them to insights into the way the world really works. Of course, they each have their own different obsessions, so they still can’t quite agree on what that means, even with each other. This short description does the game no justice, but we’ll touch on some more details of the setting as we explore the book.