(UA) This Is The City (take 2)

[John Tynes]

Certainly, a lot of this has to do with the style of play you're looking 
for. Hopefully, UA is flexible enough to support a lot of variance. The 
different narrative structures in the rulebook (p. 117) loosely 
correspond to different existing RPGs. TNI = Shadowrun; Magick Cabal = 
Vampire; Circle of Friends = Over The Edge; Occult Investigators = Call 
of Cthulhu. (Reality Cops is just Circle of Friends with one stubborn 
player who insists on something different.) If you really like one of 
those games more than the others, that's probably the structure you 
should be considering for your UA campaign.

The groups are scattered across the country for geographical diversity, 
and also as examples. Satan's Chosen Temple got a write-up, but it's 
unlikely that *anyone* else in the underground has heard of those jokers. 
They're an example of a localized phenomenon.

One of our goals with UA was to make the world feel as real as we could 
make it. In the real world, a city brimming over with cabals scheming and 
fighting would have corpses in the streets and magick on the nightly 
news. The set-up in UA suggests an underground where things are going on 
in various places, but there isn't a daily dose of intrigue. Look at the 
gaming sub-culture. In any given city, there are a lot of little gaming 
groups, but they have little interaction except at game stores. A few 
times a year, there's a convention somewhere in the area where they all 
come together. That'd be the equivalent of the TNI coming to town, or 
Dirk Allen showing up.

In short, if your PCs are street-level, they're going to be focused on 
their local area and what's going on there, which probably means there 
isn't some big freaky thing going on every friday night at the disco. If 
your PCs are global-level, they should accordingly have the resources to 
do things like travel around the country as needed; that's what TNI PCs 
are for, for example. If they're all dirt-poor, they ain't gonna be 
making moves across the country when the situation calls.

Now everyone may *want* to be global-level. But like the trailer-park 
teenager who dreams of Hollywood stardom, wanting it don't make it so. As 
Greg has pointed out, the reason why Alex Abel is making strides is 
because he's got money, staff, and he pays the bills on time. That makes 
him a player. If your players want to be _players_, their PC concept 
should support that, or the campaign should be geared to make that 
possible over time.

That's the idea, at any rate. A lot of modern-day RPGs seem to suggest 
that there's something happening in their particular niche, 24-7. In the 
real world, that's a fast track to exposure and arrest. If real-life 
criminals amassed the body counts and destruction levels that criminals 
in movies, on a routine basis, we'd be living under martial law.

Regardless, UA is your game, and it's unlikely that changing the locales 
of some of the groups is going to render your campaign incompatible with 
Official Products Handed Down From The God-Kings Of Sumeria. We aren't 
able to pop out a new product every month--several a year is more 
likely--so I wouldn't worry that variant campaigns will be any kind of a 
problem. (I think a high rate of releases can encourage that sort of 
incompatibilty, because so much material gets used up so fast.) It's 
going to take us quite a while just to get the basic supplements out the 
door, let alone start mucking around with things to any huge degree.


<- John Tynes - rev at tccorp.com - http://www.John.Tynes.com/ ->
Passion and determination are two very different things. Passion
is born of need; determination is born of greed. Always assign
greater weight to passion, because mysteries are innocent.