Lamentations of the Unknown Armies

So a while back, I ran an early modern Unknown Armies game, which you can read all about in the early modern Unknown Armies tag.  All the early modern Unknown Armies rules are cribbed from The Ascension of the Magdalene, an adventure set in 1610 Prague and part of Atlas Games' Coriolis imprint, wherein they dual-stat adventures for their house rules and d20.

The main problem I found is that Unknown Armies' sleek and fast ruleset bogs quickly when archaic weapons get involved.  Simply put: their archaic armor rules suck, because they require way more bookkeeping than anything else in the game.  And they slow down combat significantly, because hits now do way less damage.  (As I write this, I wonder if archaic armor ought to just impose a flat negative shift on enemy attacks.  Or, even better, it works thus: When taking damage from a melee attack, a wearer with light armor ignores the lower die, and a wearer with heavy armor ignores the higher one.  So, if some dude punches you and roll an 18, somebody in light armor takes 8 damage, and somebody in heavy armor takes 1 damage.  Armor can still knock off weapon bonus damage if you want, but I'd keep it as a flat -3 and -6 rather than tracking what damage type it is.  Less bookkeeping is superior to more in Unknown Armies.)

So, instead of adapting D&D to Unknown Armies, I've been thinking about going the other way and adapting Unknown Armies to D&D.  Specifically, the other early modern variant — Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  It already has fast combat resolution and early modern flair, including guns and early modern armor.

Rules Tweaks:

For Lamentations of the Unknown Armies, there are only three classes — Fighter, Magic-User, and Specialist.  Magic-users can use both cleric and magic-user spells.  To offset rarer healing, and keep with UA's typical action economy, maybe there's a First Aid or Heal skill for Specialists — using it just after a battle lets you heal a hit die roll's worth of hit points, and the rest gets healed by natural healing.

If you want to port the Madness Meters over, everything works just the way as it does in UA2, Chapter Five: Madness, pg. 64-71.  Stress checks are Wisdom checks — roll a d20 against Wisdom.  If you get lower than the stat (or equal to it), you gain a Hardened notch.  If you get higher than the stat, you gain a failed notch, and panic, paralysis, or frenzy as normal.  (There probably aren't many therapists about, but if you can find a sin-eater of some sort around, the Referee can give them a score between 1-20 to act as a psychotherapist.)

Avatars bear special noting: an Avatar path is a new ability score, from 0-20.  Most people start with 0; your Referee might allow you to start with a couple of points in it if you want.  (Maybe you can sink Specialist points into the Avatar ability?)  If you seek the Avatar path in-game, it takes nine in-game weeks to gain the first point, and another five in-game weeks to gain the second point.  Once you hit two points, you gain another point each time you level up.  If you break your taboo, you make a taboo check.  Roll 1d20 — if you roll equal to your Avatar score or below it, you lose a point in your Avatar ability.  If you roll above your Avatar ability, nothing happens.

Avatar scores directly convert from the Unknown Armies book in 5% increments, so you get your first channel from 1-10 points, your second channel from 11-14 points, your third channel from 15-18 points, and your fourth channel from 19-20 points.  You have a chance for godwalker at 20 points, and if you're the godwalker, you choose your godwalker channel at that level.  (You probably want to check out Ascension of the Magdalene for alternate early modern Avatar manifestations.)

Given the humanocentric universe of Unknown Armies, and the general feel of the setting, certain spells, effects, and adventures probably aren't appropriate, although that's up to the individual Referee.  If you want to give characters the option to be a little more versatile, like in regular old Unknown Armies, let them multiclass.  (I'd recommend keeping XP requirements the same, so if you're a level 3 Fighter looking to become a level 4 Magic-User, your next level-up will require +4,500 XP, or 8,500 XP, rather than +4,000 XP.)  If you determine Magic-Users are the adepts of the setting, start them off with 1 Hardened and 1 Failed notch in Unnatural, and make them go through the same rigamarole (you have to go crazy in a Madness Meter) to become Magic-Users.

Artifact April #20: Shakespeare's The Tempest (rough draft) [Unknown Armies]

[Unknown Armies]

There was a buzz going around Europe's occult underground in the early- to mid-seventeenth century that somebody uncovered an early draft of Shakespeare's The Tempest before it was edited for publication.  (Although the references to it occur right around the time scholars think he wrote it, so it's entirely possible that the early draft started circulating in the occult underground before the play came out.  Then again, it's not like these things are exact.)

Dukes who claim this story is true claim that the original play was less an allegory and more an occult history — the original Duke Prospero was a thinly-veiled Lodovico Lazzarelli, who instead of dying in 1500, retired to some weird island Otherspace that was supposed to be Avalon.  (In this scheme, Sycorax was an immortal Morgan le Fay, served by a legion of Romani hardcases.)

Nobody knows what became of Lazzarelli or Morgan or anybody else — although some of the stories in Europe at that time suspect the House of Renunciation got to them first — but the crux of The Tempest is that Lazzarelli renounced magick and then left the island, leaving his library and artifacts (and Ariel, for that matter) behind.

Now I'll admit this whole thing sounds pretty sketchy, and maybe it's even a more recent hoax, but there's a little corroborating evidence — apparently somebody found some old plans written by Fausto Veranzio and commissioned by Louis XIII for a clockworker device to find the island.  (Apparently, one of the plans was to incorporate Durandal in the design, operating on the belief that it's Excalibur and would sympathetically point to the place where it was forged.)

If we can find those plans, I bet we could hire Knezevic to build 'em.  What do you think the odds are that the island is still there?

Artifact April #19: Durandal [Unknown Armies]

[Unknown Armies]

Power: Significant
Effect: The sword is one-handed, but deals +9 damage.  Furthermore, it deals firearms-style damage (the number on the dice, not the sum) to anybody who is a foe of the Catholic Church.  (Or at least, it did back in the 17th century.  Who knows what would count as a foe of the Church these days?)
Description: The sword is a rusty old Frankish-style one-handed sword that looks like its been knocking around Europe for the better part of a millennium.  (It has.)  A gold inlay in the hilt supposedly contains saints' relics, although it's apparent that nobody has ever had the guts to check.  (Either you risk the wrath of God or you risk ruining the artifact, neither of which sounds like a good idea.)
What you hear: Old rumor suggests that this is the no-shit Durandal, sword of Roland.  (Dukes in the modern occult underground think that's probably a load of horseshit, but who knows?)  Rumor has it that the sword belonged to some long-dead cabal called "The Footmen" back in the 17th century — specifically to their mystical leader called "the Last King."  Of course, all references to the The Footmen disappear before the Thirty Years' War, and nobody knows what they were trying to do.  Occasionally, Durandal shows up in a private collection or at the Swap Meet, but nobody pays a lot of attention to it because how do you authenticate something like that, anyway?

Better Than Any Man, UA edition Part 3 and 4: Bring Out Your Dead

We ended our brief foray into early modern Unknown Armies this past Friday.  No more conversions, as the PCs didn't encounter anything noteworthy.

In Part 3 of our Better Than Any Man game, the PCs stumbled into the town of Thüngen — which Mr. Raggi placed under the control of a capricious group of bandits.  After a couple of desperate combats, the PCs fled Thüngen a little more battered and with their Epideromancer friend unconscious.

They flee the town, ignoring the burning homestead in the distance, and instead go in the complete opposite direction of Karlstadt and Würzburg, hoping to completely avoid the madness of this region and the advancing Swedish Army.  They come to a small pond and run into a fleeing woman, apparently running from the witch trials in Würzburg.  She joins them, and both she and Mannfried attempt to treat the fallen wizard's wounds.

They both fail.  Spectacularly.  The epideromancer Goffhilf catches fever and dysentery and dies within a couple of days.

Tragic.

The group continues to trek through the woods for a couple days, making a 90° at some menacing-looking earthen mounds, and stops as the wizard Goffhilf breathes his last.  They bury him, bed for the night, and awaken to find that they've been sleeping very near a plague-ridden corpse.

Within a day or so, they stumble back to Eger, and the PCs are whisked back to their home time, no doubt leaving a very confused, frightened, and hungry woman outside the town gates.

All told, the final session resulted in four deaths — one from fever and dysentery, and three more within a few days as several characters die of the plague.  One joins a nunnery, and the other continues his mercenary career, now 10,000 ducats richer.

At final count, out of a total of eight characters, six died — probably among my most deadly non-TPK games ever.

Better Than Any Man: Unknown Armies Conversion Notes, Part 2

A quick update: the Unknown Armies excursion into Better Than Any Man continues to go hilariously.  Some bandits died, a clockwork robot died, and a lot of PCs quite nearly died.  (Read about it here.)

Since the PCs are quickly exiting Thüngen next session, it seems probable (although not completely certain) that they will miss Dittmar, the bandit leader.  He gets a roughly two sentence description in Better Than Any Man, but since his potential presence seemed notable, I gave him full statistics in Unknown Armies.  So, without further ado...

Dittmar

Personality: Two-Face from Batman.  He seems like a somewhat suave gangster, but his reliance on chance tends to add a little capriciousness and viciousness to his demeanor.
Obsession: Power.  Money's part of it, but Dittmar really likes the control his position brings.  His reliance on chance is just to keep things interesting.  He's likely to become a postmodern Entropomancer if he's not careful.
Wound Points: 65

Rage Stimulus: Messing with his dice.  He will seriously go apeshit.
Fear Stimulus: (The Unnatural) Predestination.  Really, anything that makes him feel boxed-in or otherwise out of control really bothers him.
Noble Stimulus: Gamblers.  Dittmar has a soft spot for people who roll their own bones, and might join them for a game or cut them some slack.

Body: 65 (Toughass)
General Athletics 25%, Hold Your Liquor 20%, Struggle 50%
Speed: 60 (Ready to Move)
Dodge 35%, Horseback Riding 15%, Initiative 30%, Missile Weapons 50%
Mind: 45 (Pragmatic)
Conceal 20%, General Education 15%, Notice 30%, Strategy 25%
Soul: 50 (Superstitious)
Charm 30%, Intimidation 40%, Lying 35%, Roll the Bones 15%

Violence:  7 Hardened, 3 Failed
Unnatural: 1 Hardened, 1 Failed
Helplessness: 0 Hardened, 0 Failed
Isolation:  0 Hardened, 0 Failed
Self:  2 Hardened, 1 Failed

Possessions: Light armor, dirk (+3), short sword (+6), crossbow (maximum damage 50), wheellock pistol (maximum damage 80).  He also has his lucky dice and 8 ducats on him.

Notes: Roll the Bones is a skill Dittmar rolls every time he rolls his dice to determine an outcome.  With a successful Roll the Bones check, Dittmar gains a hunch (UA, pg. 7).

Better Than Any Man: Unknown Armies Conversion Notes

I'm not going to post everything as yet, but here are a couple of my scattered notes.  I'll probably put them in a pdf or something when I'm finished running Better Than Any Man in Unknown Armies.  Obviously, these notes assume familiarity with both games.  The following notes also reference the Unknown Armies books The Ascension of the Magdalene, Hush Hush, and Postmodern Magick.

Willibald Schwartz

Obsession: Conquering death.  Death is a form of spiritual alchemy.  By controlling the doorway, you control that potential.
Wound Points: 45

Rage Stimulus: Pointing out that he might be insane or deluded.  Schwartz might be a murderous psychopath, but he really doesn't enjoy being reminded of it.
Fear Stimulus: (Isolation) Dying of old age.
Noble Stimulus: Helping children.  Willibald crafts art of the bodies of young children because that's the highest gift he can bestow to one killed so young.  He can't help it if his glass tiger gets confused from time to time.

Body: 45 (Living Well)
General Athletics 25%, Hold Your Liquor 20%, Struggle 25%, Work Without Rest 20%
Speed: 50 (Steady Hand)
Dodge 20%, Horseback Riding 25%, Initiative 25%, Taxidermy 35%
Mind: 75 (Learned)
Conceal 35%, Notice 40%, Occult Correspondences 60%
Soul: 90 (Transcendent)
Avatar: The Magus 60%, Charm 30%, Lying 50%, Magick: Thanatomancy 70%

Violence: 7 Hardened 2 Failed
Unnatural: 7 Hardened 3 Failed
Helplessness: 2 Hardened 2 Failed
Isolation: 6 Hardened 1 Failed
Self: 4 Hardened 5 Failed

Possessions: Rapier (+3 damage), dagger (+3 damage), various fine clothes and ritual components

Notes: Occult Correspondences is Willibald's General Education skill.  It also covers his general knowledge of folklore and occultism.
Avatar: The Magus originally appears in The Ascension of the Magdalene, page 53.  Magick: Thanatomancy originally appears in Postmodern Magick, pages 111-115.
In addition to his own magickal prowess, Willibald Schwartz has access to the rituals Song of Ancient Days (detailed below) and Fires of Pure Will (Hush Hush, page 47).

Schwartz's Glass Tiger

Wound Points: 120

Body: 120 (Savage)
General Athletics 50%, Rip and Tear 65%
Speed: 80 (Swfit)
Dodge 35%, Initiative 40%, Sneak 70%
Mind: 30 (Cunning)
Notice 50%
Soul: 50 (Weird)

Notes: The Glass Tiger's exceptional Body stat grants a +3 to all melee damage.  This is in addition to the beast's teeth and claws, which also grant a +3 to damage.  The glass tiger reduces damage equivalent to heavy armor, removing the +3 damage for sharpness and the +3 damage for heaviness in hand-to-hand combat while also reducing rolled damage by three-fourths.  Guns are deal hand-to-hand damage, but aren't reduced but the tiger's armor.  Magick deals damage normally, although it's not made of flesh, so Magick: Epideromancy blasts do nothing.

Song of Ancient Days (significant ritual)

Note: This is the Unknown Armies version of Schwartz's Journey to the Past spell.  In my version of Better Than Any Man, Schwartz was kind enough to give the PCs all the components to enact the ritual, including a copy of the Fires of Pure Will ritual (a charge-building ritual).  Your Schwartz may not be so accommodating.

Power: significant

Cost: 7 significant charges

Effect: The caster and a group of up to eight individuals participating in the ritual are sent back in time to July 14, 10,000 B.C.  They are sent to the same point in time, although they appear in the same geographic location they left.  (So, if the caster casts this ritual in downtown London, he'll end up in the middle of downtown London...before it's ever built.)  To the outside observer, no time appears to pass — the ritualists appear to flicker for a fraction of a second after the ritual ends.  However, the casters are cast back to 10,000 B.C. for an amount of time equal to ten times the sum of the dice.  As such, a caster rolling a 45 will spend 90 minutes in the past, while a caster rolling a 12 will only spend 30 minutes in the past.
Being sent to the past is a rank-7 Unnatural check.

Ritual Action: This ritual requires a simple stone hammer, particularly of the sort that would have been used in the Neolithic.  The caster should use this hammer to break a sandclock, shouting, "Ula atolnay!" with each hammer blow.  When the clock is smashed, the caster should use the hammer to draw the seal of Prince Seere (a goetic demon) in the spilled sand while reciting a chant in Latin depicting a litany of the demon's praises and epithets.  Once finished, the caster should then use the hammer to smash a sundial, deface a calendar, and destroy a seal of King Philip II Augustus.  Again, with each hammer blow, the caster should shout, "Ula atolnay!"  The ritual completes with the final hammer blow.

Note: For easy reference, Prince Seere's seal looks like this:

Unknown Armies: Early Modern Magick

I finally made a homepage for the 1610 Unknown Armies campaign.

Check it out!

Better Than Any Man, UA edition Part 2: Never Bring an Antlion to a Robot Fight

We actually got into Better Than Any Man this time.

So, last time, some mysterious guy told them that they needed to deliver a note to someone in the past, and if they talked to a guy named Willibald Schwartz...

Laaaaaaaaaaaadies.

...that he would lead them where they needed to go.

At this point, my players seem to adopt the same strategy whenever a dungeon crawl/James Raggi adventure occurs and proceed very cautiously.  They have enough food for a couple of days, so they avoid towns.  They don't talk to anybody.  They meet some Swedish soldiers on the road, but Goffhilf — himself Swedish — manages to avoid any nasty entanglements.

The PCs find the Mound without incident, and having been warned about the oil pit, don't light themselves on fire.  They approach Willibald cautiously and courteously (more or less), and walk away with a time travel ritual and a lead on several ducats' worth of ruby ant statue for their trouble.

The caves and insect shire on Goblin Hill similarly go hilariously, because they avoid random encounters and have a map of the complex.  Once they're sure they have everything they need, the PCs cast Journey to the Past (rebranded as Song of Ancient Days, a UA-style ritual requiring enough significant charges that Goffhilf went whole hog and sacrificed his hand for a major charge).

Once in the past, everyone learned that Maksymilian is a clockworker, because his "bodyguard" Aleksy is actually a gear-powered robot.

Pitting one robot against a bunch of ineffectual prehistorical cultists went something like this:

Upon their return to the present, they managed to kill the antlion guarding the ruby ant statue through a combination of robot punches and magic.  Goffhilf dealt the killing blow with a critical hit blast spell, reducing the giant antlion to so much hemolymph.

As with most of my dungeon crawls, massive player casualties were avoided through luck and skill.  Also noteworthy is a trend I've noticed in supernatural games: weird things don't give the PCs any trouble (giant antlions, crazed sorcerers, etc.), but mundane things give the PCs major headaches (soldiers, constables, etc.).  It was like that in Deadlands, too; we tangled with a Rattler in one of our first sessions, and were routinely clashing with The Devil Himself, but we were terrified of being arrested.

Where will the intrepid time-displaced 1611 occultists end up next time?  Stay tuned.

Money Conversions

So, in the previous post, I discussed my early modern Unknown Armies game.

However, I neglected to share a useful thing I made.

The Ascension of the Magdalene gives a conversion statistic for Venetian ducats to D&D gp.  I also found a reference document converting the various currencies found in 1632.  (That document also relates old currency to modern United States dollars.)

Since all statistics indicate that early modern British pounds, shillings, and pence are roughly equivalent to Warhammer's gold crowns, silver shillings, and copper pennies, I also put those in the conversion.

Using all these statistics, I made a chart that converts Venetian ducats, Dutch lions, Dutch guilders, Dutch stuivers, gp (with a separate entry for the extremely valuable gold pieces in LotFP), sp, cp, WFRP gc, WFRP s, WFRP p, and modern USD.

Hopefully this is useful to you.  View the "1610 UA Currency Chart."

1610 Unknown Armies: Better Than Any Man

So, a week ago, I started to run Better Than Any Man using the Unknown Armies rules.

However, the PCs still haven't started playing Better Than Any Man, because hilarity happened.

In the first session of the campaign, the PCs went through The Ascension of the Magdalene.  For the unfamiliar, the adventure takes the PCs into Emperor Rudolf II's secret, artifact-filled Wunderkammer.  (As it's dual-statted for Unknown Armies and D&D 3.x, it's basically a dungeon crawl, albeit a history-filled, weird-ass dungeon crawl.)

The PCs were unsuccessful in the main thrust of the adventure, but they still managed to leave with a couple of occult artifacts, and 11,500 ducats (approximately 4,600 gp, or 5,750 gold crowns if you're a Warhammer fan) worth of stolen treasure.

Unfortunately, said treasure was stolen from the Emperor, and they fought a couple of guards who saw their faces and fled.

Fast forward to two weeks later, when they've fled Prague and are recuperating in Eger.  In the meantime, those who are not injured have been working, and they've sold one of the stolen tapestries to net 125 ducats (50 gp).  One of them catches sight of some soldiers and warns the others that Imperial soldiers are in town.  Before they can flee, however, one of the PCs is arrested by a contingent of soldiers headed by Jan Mydlář, Master Executioner of Bohemia.  (I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but know that Rudolf sent his chief executioner to apprehend the PCs for symbolic reasons.)

The other PCs take their cart and stolen guns and loop around, making it to the guard station before their friend Goffhilf is led inside.

The PCs open fire on the guards.

In the chaos, Jan Mydlář is wounded and withdraws, Goffhilf gets away, Ross gets away with the cart, but Nicholas is killed by a volley of musket fire.

It's over a week later, after the group has fled the city, that they find the mysterious stranger who sends them to 1631 Würzburg...

As such, no real update on Better Than Any Man, but the PCs have received exposition.  (They've been told to find Willibald Schwartz and complete a task for him.  So that's bound to be entertaining.)

Better Than Any Man: Unknown Armies edition

So, with any luck, tonight I'll be running Better Than Any Man adapted for Unknown Armies.  Last session, I ran the group through The Ascension of the Magdalene.  Now, this group of 1610 occultists will somehow find themselves in the midst of the madness surrounding Karlstadt.

Obviously, the setup will require a little tweaking — the player characters are currently in December 1610 Prague while BTAM takes place in October 1631 near Würzburg — and Unknown Armies's brand of cosmic horror isn't quite compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess's brand of cosmic horror.  ("You did it" versus "The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.")  That having been said, though, there are enough parallels that I decided to make the jump.  (While some of the stuff on Goblin Hill isn't quite Unknown Armies, the whole Karlstadt-overtaken-by-sorcerers-and-Gustavus-Adolphus-isn't-happy-about-it plot is incredibly Unknown Armies.  "Sleeping Tiger" and all that.)

Assuming all goes according to plan, I'll probably post my conversion notes on here at some point.  To tide you over, have a pair of early modern Icelandic necropants, courtesy of that guy at Warpstone Pile.

It will also probably be a good opportunity for a review for Better Than Any Man, because I've been lax with my LotFP reviews lately.