Welcome once more to our monthly roundup of offerings from the Statosphere, the community-generated content portal for the Unknown Armies RPG. This month, we're taking a look at a trio of titles to drop into—or even kick off—your campaigns.
First up is Game Over by Alex Powell. This 10-page document is a school of magick, but also presents additional, related material. The school described, as the title indicates, is that of ludomancy: attaining magickal power through playing video games.
Ludomancers generate charges by "grinding" through games in marathon sessions; anywhere from a couple hours to tens of thousands. Ludomancy formula spells then allow Game Genies to "override" reality with video game logic: there's a spell called Red Potion that heals wounds, but you have to eat an apple or apply band-aids over a wound first; the aptly-titled Video Games Cause Violence is a digital voodoo doll that allows you to hurt someone in real life by harming a designated avatar inside a game.
Game Over also presents two artifacts, as well as a demon-banishing ritual involving CD-ROMs, paper clips, and copious amounts of mouth wash. The document wraps up with two GMCs: the harried programmer behind ASCIIopolis and a ludomancer who figured out how to hit the "reset" button on life.
Next up in the roundup is Sunnywoods Wellness Center by WJ MacGuffin. Weighing in at only five pages (including the title page and credits), this is slim document indeed, but presents a nice little location that is quite appropriate to the Unknown Armies universe: a mental health treatment center for members of the Occult Underground.
Because of the rather…unique aspect of the lives of adepts and checkers, talking about one's supernatural woes with a traditional therapist is likely to lead only to institutionalization and heavy medication. This is where Sunnywoods comes in. Located in a nondescript strip mall, the Center, mechanically speaking, helps characters transform failed notches to hardened notches.
Of course, a magickal therapy center is going to attract a lot of attention from strange and unusual parties, and Sunnywoods presents several ideas for enterprising GMs, as well as a write-up for the woman who runs the Center, Linda Hewitt.
Lastly, we have Raiders of the Lost Mart by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. This is an "official" Atlas Games product, perhaps intended as an example for community creators to follow. It is a "campaign starter kit," and does indeed deliver on this over the course of its 24 pages.
We are presented with five pre-generated PCs "broken and damaged and ready to go," a group objective, a first-session scenario, and GM hooks, GMCs, and additional objectives to pursue. Raiders centers the cabal on a group of night shift employees working for a big box retail store ("All-Mart," ahem) where occult artifacts occasionally manifest on the store shelves.
Raiders delivers on its promise of providing a plug-and-play campaign. The potential for fun with the mysterious "exostock" of dangerous artefacts (animate lawn chairs, a "shampoo of shapeshifting") is obvious. The all-too-real regular night patrons may be the scariest part of the setting for anyone who has ever had to work the late shift at a retail establishment…
All three documents are well-edited and cleanly presented. Game Over even includes its own original photographs, though the text is somewhat marred by a rendering error that makes it thin and hard to read. Raiders, naturally, has the slickest look of the three products, with gorgeous character sheets sure to wow your players. Each is priced around the $2.00-$3.00 mark.
Note: all product links in this article include the article author's Affiliate Program code.
contributed by David Larkins
First up is Game Over by Alex Powell. This 10-page document is a school of magick, but also presents additional, related material. The school described, as the title indicates, is that of ludomancy: attaining magickal power through playing video games.
Ludomancers generate charges by "grinding" through games in marathon sessions; anywhere from a couple hours to tens of thousands. Ludomancy formula spells then allow Game Genies to "override" reality with video game logic: there's a spell called Red Potion that heals wounds, but you have to eat an apple or apply band-aids over a wound first; the aptly-titled Video Games Cause Violence is a digital voodoo doll that allows you to hurt someone in real life by harming a designated avatar inside a game.
Game Over also presents two artifacts, as well as a demon-banishing ritual involving CD-ROMs, paper clips, and copious amounts of mouth wash. The document wraps up with two GMCs: the harried programmer behind ASCIIopolis and a ludomancer who figured out how to hit the "reset" button on life.
Next up in the roundup is Sunnywoods Wellness Center by WJ MacGuffin. Weighing in at only five pages (including the title page and credits), this is slim document indeed, but presents a nice little location that is quite appropriate to the Unknown Armies universe: a mental health treatment center for members of the Occult Underground.
Because of the rather…unique aspect of the lives of adepts and checkers, talking about one's supernatural woes with a traditional therapist is likely to lead only to institutionalization and heavy medication. This is where Sunnywoods comes in. Located in a nondescript strip mall, the Center, mechanically speaking, helps characters transform failed notches to hardened notches.
Of course, a magickal therapy center is going to attract a lot of attention from strange and unusual parties, and Sunnywoods presents several ideas for enterprising GMs, as well as a write-up for the woman who runs the Center, Linda Hewitt.
Lastly, we have Raiders of the Lost Mart by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. This is an "official" Atlas Games product, perhaps intended as an example for community creators to follow. It is a "campaign starter kit," and does indeed deliver on this over the course of its 24 pages.
We are presented with five pre-generated PCs "broken and damaged and ready to go," a group objective, a first-session scenario, and GM hooks, GMCs, and additional objectives to pursue. Raiders centers the cabal on a group of night shift employees working for a big box retail store ("All-Mart," ahem) where occult artifacts occasionally manifest on the store shelves.
Raiders delivers on its promise of providing a plug-and-play campaign. The potential for fun with the mysterious "exostock" of dangerous artefacts (animate lawn chairs, a "shampoo of shapeshifting") is obvious. The all-too-real regular night patrons may be the scariest part of the setting for anyone who has ever had to work the late shift at a retail establishment…
All three documents are well-edited and cleanly presented. Game Over even includes its own original photographs, though the text is somewhat marred by a rendering error that makes it thin and hard to read. Raiders, naturally, has the slickest look of the three products, with gorgeous character sheets sure to wow your players. Each is priced around the $2.00-$3.00 mark.
Note: all product links in this article include the article author's Affiliate Program code.
contributed by David Larkins
