Everybody Wants... & Troy Underground
the start of this year, and Unknown Armies 3e’s aluminium jubilee, had me finally pull the trigger on a project I’d been kicking around for a long time: UA3 as a 2M2T game.
Another of those terms I made up, short for Massively Multiplayer Tabletop, but necessity is once again the mother of invention. I could call it play by post, but that implies it takes the frame of an ordinary UA format with a single cabal and a single goal. I could call it a West Marches game, and that might resolve the problem but leave out the largely cooperative multiplayer focus of the game.
The idea had been kicked around by a bunch of people in the fan club server before, based on Stranger Things or Roadside Picnic, but having dabbled in other 2M2T games using different systems, I knew that UA had unique strengths, the lack of which had made most other games more of a “LARP by text”:
The Objective system gives every character an active, mechanically supported ability to change the status quo at the cost of nontrivial effort and actually having to participate in the game, where most games usually locked PC agency behind tedious gear grinding or outright GM fiat. Meanwhile The Relationship system reflected a character's supporting cast and allies with a dynamic skill%, allowing them to effect a player’s choices at any time they need to.
So I sat down and actually wrote a complete hack for the thing, and the pitch for what would become “Troy Underground” - Troy, Arkansas, pop. 77,000. Originally based in tennessee, and parts of Memphis, Louisville, and later Little Rock, I left most of the actual city in broad strokes to be dug up later by whatever player made it necessary. The premise was that the occult underground, as it existed, was going to be almost entirely player populated. Whatever weird magical power or knickknack you had, it was entirely unique, so anyone who wanted it had to come to you to get it.
I had some other “house rules” as well, testing the recommended fixes for ten years of quirks and issues in the bare books. “Coerces Meter” adds +1 by default, the creation of adept artefacts requiring a gutter magick ritual, and some others. My favourite was “CUSTOM ADEPTS ONLY”...that is, if anyone wanted to play one, it couldn’t be from the books. They had to dig it up online or make it themselves. The rule was mainly a rebuke on 3e’s generally awful adept schools, but also a means of keeping the no-shit magick to the people who would be really passionate about it.
I buckled it all into a discord server on new year’s day, and had people joining before I’d finished, mostly from the UA fan club, a few others from RPGnet. People who wanted to play, but usually didn't have the time or schedule to do a table session. About 14 players in all.
The growing theme among characters emerged as those who bent the status quo. Political fixers, a disgraced cop, and one player who said her objective was to get her character - a megachurch preacher type who says he’s the actual antichrist from the bible - to become the new mayor.
I knew that “a fully player led campaign!” is often snake oil by people who think they can outsource the work, but that’s back to UA’s inherent strengths. What every character in UA wants is whatever weird magic shortcut they can get which would make fulfilling their Objective easier, and aside from the few easter eggs I buried around the city, it’s only other players who have access to their specific, unnatural secrets.
So far, Tim - that's the antichrist - has staged an interview in the city's local heritage centre and a kind of roadside museum, paving a media blitz so he gets a crowd for some giant reality bruising ritual on the threshing floor for his new babylon.
I have a feeling that he and Nick, the ex cop and avatar of the Executioner, are headed for some kind of ugly conflict outside city hall when that hell-powwow kicks off, since Nick's been hanging around there preparing for the next milestone in his plan - although since he’s been keeping it closer to his chest, I don’t want to spoil what it is.
The odometer has ticked over behind the scenes, and I’m starting to throw in little hints of what I’m starting to think of as “metaplot”, as a few GMCs work toward their own plans.
Generally, it’s been kind of slow. The post holiday funk has taken up a lot of people’s time, so posts have been sparser than I’d like. I’m taking advice from players to move the STI from friday to sunday
I’ve been more lenient about nonactive players than I really should have. In future I’ll start really pressing on characters that aren’t working towards their goals.
Next month has the server turn forward, so there’ll be more to report on then.
You can join the server here if you want to