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Unknown Armies covers a lot of ground, so setting up a game's a little more involved than usual. Most of the published scenarios are designed to accomodate a really wide range of PCs, so they're light on the party motivation angle.
I generally start by asking the PCs to pick any character from any movie set in or around modern times. The last time I did this I got: "William Burroughs in Naked Lunch," "Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2," "Christian Slater from True Romance meets Newman from Seinfeld" and "A Goth Girl".
So then you can help the players stat up their concepts, and get a general sense of the kind of game they're looking for. In the above, PC 1 wanted surreal horror, 2 wanted guns and beatdowns, 3 wanted transcendence and magic and 4 wanted angst.
I also know my players, so sometimes I'll just make a PC for them, based on what I know about their play style, and let them move stuff around.
Bill in Three Parts is an amazing way of getting the party together, since it requires no cooperation whatsoever on the part of the players. Trick is to toss some extra weirdness in during the three scenes to give the players things to think about and investigate once it's over.
There are three books of scenarios: Weep, One-Shots, and To Go. Weep has the single most disturbing and harrowing adventure I've ever read (Garden Full of Weeds), an amazingly complicated race for the Green Glass Grail (A Coke Bottle), and a couple of other fun quandries to throw at your party. One-Shots does what it says on the tin, so the adventures all include pre-gens. Still good, and has Jailbreak which is probably the single greatest one-shot ever written for any game. (Advice - bring a watergun to represent the pistol. Give it to the player who has the pistol.) To Go is a single adventure that spans the US, as the party get involved with choosing who ascends next. Great, but long.
Unknown Armies is just such a tremendous game. I blame it for the recent spate of awful D&D games I have had to extricate myself from. You read UA and think, "Hey. Role Playing Games used to be fun, this one's amazing, maybe this can be fun again." So you go to the geek store, find the local geeks, you sit in on their game of D&D and you realize... "Wow. I could be watching paint dry right now." |
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