D20 Fantasy: Among The Noisy Heavens

A gang of outback drovers had an arrangement with a local outpost of Mi-Go vivisectionists. They'd offer up the occasional outlaw or captured autochthon for the aliens to chopshop. In exchange, the Million Favoured Ones left them and their sheep alone.

But the bugs appear to have broken the pact. The stockmen's flocks lie dead, decapitated and covered in bizarre burn marks. Strange lights buzz in the skies. Roadwardens investigated the attacks, but only one came back - sans half his skull. He rambled about stars trying to eat him. Then his brains fell out.

To Rule Is My Birthright (GLoG Race-As-Class: Elf)

Gustave Moreau

"And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them. And they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.

And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind."
Book of Enoch [3:7]

The New Age - Play Report Round-Up 1

I've fallen behind on my New Age play reports. Rather than try to remember precise details and give a blow-by-blow of each sessions, I'll be writing up vignettes of interesting moments. 

This is only half of what I intend to write, but considering this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for over 2 months, I thought I'd at least get something out.

Junji Ito

Unknown Armies Adept: Intravenomancy

 

“When you're sitting back in your rose pink Cadillac

Making bets on your Kentucky Derby days

I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon

And another girl to take my pain away”
Rolling Stones

INTRAVENOMANCY

A.K.A. Trackmarkers, Tuskegees, Faucis (Ω + 1)

Are you afraid of needles? You should be. They’re not just an instrument of steel, glass and polymer, but a sacred fetish of scientific progress. A symbol pregnant with magickal power. That which cures the same pestilence it wreaks, that spreads the same agony it wipes away with blissful torpor.

Forget guns. If you’re searching for a postmodern magic wand, look no further than a hypodermic syringe. It commands power no matter who holds it. In the gloved hands of a surgeon it is a sceptre of technocratic paternalism, a divine decree that “doctor knows best”. Yet when possessed by the unwashed masses, it morphs into something else. A terrible thing of contagion and degeneration. An implicit threat of being dragged into that sordid underclass, be it through addiction or disease.

THE FULL BOOT - Play Report

This is a play report of an Unknown Armies shotgun scenario, written by Mellonbread.

The LUMPEN SLEEPERS, a Bostonian occult neighbourhood watch, had gathered for late night drinks in Jenny's dive bar. It was nearly 1:30am, well past final call thanks to unchanged COVID-era closing hours. But they had something important to discuss.

Opera Night

This post is dedicated to Fee Fi Fo Fin's Belli Occulta campaign and the brave Friendlies of Y-Cell, delousing the United Kingdom one parish at a time.

Unknown Armies - Favourite Foods

Based on the series of the same name over on The Rogue's Wallet. I've always loved adding pure filigree to TTRPG characters, and their favourite meals is top of that list. Everyone's gotta eat.

D20 Fantasy - Kill All Druids

A response to Deus Ex Parabola's excellent essay over on Numbers Aren't Real. 

Calder Moore

Ever wonder why nature cultists forbidden from wearing metal go adventuring for fistfuls of gold? It's because of these assholes. The Honourable Guild of Respected Agrimancers. The Druid Mafia.

A cartel of weather wizards, shapeshifters, lay priests and lumpen proles who seek a total stranglehold over agricultural production. Starving entire cities by calling down droughts and flashfloods, installing awakened animal monarchs amicable to their interests, unleashing fungal blights and selling the cure - nothing is beyond the pale for these greenthumbed mafiosos. 

But say you're sick of it. The economic blockades. The price controls. The disappearances late at night. The gangland executions. The government that won't do anything to stop them. What could you do? 

Unknown Armies Pregens

After a few years of skirting the periphery, I've started getting into Unknown Armies. Without an active community for pickup games (the Delta Green fandom is spoiled rotten by N@TO), I'll need to be the one running the show if I want to play. That's fine by me - be the change you want to see in the world.

Unknown Armies Adept: Cadavaturgy

 

“And he meets me in the graveyard, the graveyard where they made my bed, 

Plants a white flower under cold stars, on the grave of the forgotten dead.”

Frank Turner

CADAVATURGY

A.K.A. Resurrectionists, Bodysnatchers, Reliquarians (Ω - 2)

Bodysnatching is an ancient art. We’ve been exhuming people and chopping them into little pieces since the time of Galen, be it for advancing the sciences, stealing funerary goods or venerating the dead. 

Resurrectionists take it a step further, obsessing over corpses to the point they turn into walking memento mori. Their domain isn’t death itself, but what comes after. The decay of flesh and memories. The person-sized void left in the world. How it changes those who remain.