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.

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 cadavers 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.

Unknown Armies Avatar: The Bodyguard

systemflaw

THE BODYGUARD

Attributes
In centuries past the egregore of the protector was a knight in shining armour, shielding a waifish maiden from the forces of evil. Now it’s a man in a dark suit, diving into the path of a bullet. Imagery changes, but the substance stays the same; the Bodyguard sacrifices himself to shield those he's charged to protect. 

Unknown Armies Adept: Heliomancy

“Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity”

Richard III

HELIOMANCY

A.K.A. Sunspotters, Peelers, Backburners (Ω + 1)

There’s something transcendent about the pain of a sunburn. Sure it’s probably the constant irritation, swelling and peeling skin. Or maybe it's the reminder that the sun, the giver of all life on Earth, is also that which bestows burrowing cancer, inflicts droughts and strikes all those who behold it blind.

Sic Semper Tyrannis (GLoG Class: Ranger)

Caravaggio

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me."

Psalms [23:4]

Of Blood And Bronze (GLoG Class: Fighter)

Giovanni De Min

When I was a lad, my mother said
"You dry your tears and go to bed,
I know my son will travel far,
Born beneath a shooting star."

In after years, my father said,
As he pulled my hair and knocked my head,
"They mustn't whimper at a scar,
Who're born beneath a shooting star."

A mage I met, and the mage he said,

"I see for you a future red,

Fire and riot, raid and war,

O born beneath a shooting star."
The Claw Of The Conciliator [11-12] 

His Terrible Swift Sword (GLoG Class: Barbarian)

Guercino

The woodsman sighed and stared at his calloused hand, worn from contact with ax-haft and sword-hilt. Conan reached his long arm for the wine-jug. The forester stared at him, comparing him with the men about them, the men who had died along the lost river, comparing him with those other wild men over that river. Conan did not seem aware of his gaze.

"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind," the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. "Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."
Beyond The Black River [63]

Dying In The Dark (GLoG Race-As-Class: Dwarf)

Ana Victoria Esquivel

"They were terrible in a fashion I am not certain I can explain - like apes in that they had hairy, crooked bodies, long-armed, short-legged and thick-necked. It was something in their faces, perhaps in the huge pale-irised eyes. It told me they were as human as I."
The Claw of the Conciliator [303-4]

SIN EATER

Skill: 1. Brewer. 2. Combat Engineer. 3. Metalsmith. 4. Stonemason.

Starting Items: A pick mattock (heavy), or a warhammer (medium) and a buckler shield, a steel chisel (light), a coat of plates (medium), a flask of mushroom wine, a jar of pickled fungus, a pouch of iron nuggets, brass scissors for maintaining your beard and two Tools of the Trade.

Sin Eaters are a slave race of troglodyte labourers. In centuries past feuding Nephilim demanded huge sums of copper, gold, iron and silver to satiate their war machines. When their mine slaves couldn't meet quota, the impatient godlings perverted them into something that would.

The Dogs Of War (GLoG Race-As-Class: Wood Elf)

Francisco Goya

“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth."

Genesis [1:26]

DEODAND

Skill: 1. Herbalism. 2. Butchery. 3. Handcrafts. 4. Astronomy.

Starting Items: An applewood flask of water, a dense brick of pemmican, a heartwood bow (medium) and a quiver of two dozen arrows, a chert spear (medium), an obsidian knife (light), the tanned skin of something you killed (light), cabachon jewellery and two Wyld Trinkets.

The Deodands are to humans what wolfhounds are to wolves. Something that looks like you, but twisted into a form better suited to kill you. Elongated limbs and clawed hands. Massive saucer eyes and distendable jaws with too many fucking teeth. A race selectively bred by the Nephilim into bipedal killing machines with a divine mandate to bring the wild places of Urth to heel.