[UA] Tim Powers

[Michael Daisey]

I am not convinced Tim Powers is all that and a bag of chips, to
coin current idiom.

I have read "Last Call" and "The Anubis Gates", and while Powers is 
a lot of fun, his characters seem pretty flat.  They have epic and
mythic qualities, which works well with his writing, but the lack the
grit and grime of the James Ellroy book, "Black Dahlia", that I'm 
reading now which is making me consider a UA campaign set in the 40's.

In fact, I would say that UA owes more to Ellroy than Powers.  While
the godwalker idea seems pretty directly derived from him, the basic
idea of people emulating their archetypes goes back to priests and
their gods.  In fact, in a weird way the godwalkers remind me of
clerics, bruisers of fighters and adepts of magic-users in the old AD+D
style of play.

It just seems to me if there was ever a game designed to take its cue
from the real world and make it fantastic, rather than drawing on the
fantastic primarily, UA is it. 
 

-- 
Michael Daisey
----
"It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the
oath." Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), Greek dramatist. Fragments, no. 385.