[UA] Dueling Banjos

[Timothy Toner]

----- Original Message -----
From: <holycrow at mindspring.com>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2000 9:27 AM
Subject: [UA] Dueling Banjos


>
>
> >Well, actually I have something to ask: post-modern magick seems to
>focus on
> >underground occult activities and so on. And apparently primarily in
>cities.
> >It always sounded strange to me that something underground would take
>place
> >just near where normal people live their life.
>
> I love the spirit of this statement, and I think "One Shots" played a lot
more around the idea something as marginal as occult obsession tends to
operate at... well... the margins.
>
> RPGs have always focussed on cities.  (Except FRPGs, which always seem
focussed on unexplored ruins and wilderness.  Odd, that.)  I think there's
just an unspoken expectation that a contemporary paranormal game will be set
in a city -- probably a leftover from V:tM (if you're coming at it from the
mainstream) or OTE (if you're approaching from the lunatic fringe).  Do
y'all think there's a good reason for this?  Or should UA shift its focus
away from cities?
>
> Personally, I like the idea of the non-urban shift.  (1) It's different,
and all other things being equal, I think it's more fun to try something new
than try the same old thing.  (2) Most people in the world don't live in
cities -- right?  (IS that right?)  Certainly that's true historically.
Ergo, the Statosphere is probably more loaded with rural archetypes than
urban ones.  (Though, in all honesty, the Farmer is probably not going to be
a significant archetype for most games.)  (Someone want to prove me wrong?)
(3) Given that there's so much more to DO in a city, I'd think it would be
harder to develop an obsession on the occult.  But that's also debatable...

All of this is well said, but there's also a lot left out about cities.
Areas which thrive with life from 9 to 5 become silent as a tomb after the
last commuter goes.  There's a side of the city just as feral as the farm.
I'll never forget running from State Street to Union Station (little more
than a mile) at Midnight to catch the 12:30 train on a Saturday night.
Between State and Clinton lies a hodge-podge of multipurpose buildings; the
Dirksen Federal Building, where a sloping driveway leads to an underground
garage, and on that slope, one half of a real-life Bonnie and Clyde (the
fictionalized version can be seen in the excellent A Normal Life) stole a
gun from a guard after learning that his wife had died of injuries sustained
in their capture, fled almost to the street, and, with a clear path to
freedom, turns the gun on himself in broad daylight, in front of dozens of
passerbyers.  Across the street, on the other side of Jackson is the
Monadnock building, an architectural curiosity, as it was the largest office
building built wthout a metal superstructure.  It isn't tall by any stretch
of the imagination, but it is immense.  Further down, about at the halfway
point, you reach the intersection of LaSalle and Jackson.  It is there that
I became temporarily lost.  LaSalle begins here, and heads North.  To the
south is the Chicago Mercantile exchange, a large limestone art deco shrine
with a statue of Ceres, her arms outstretched, at its peak.  The buildings
on the north side of Jackson are just as tall, and just as imposing, as are
the row of buildings on both sides of LaSalle.  There, at midnight, I was
the only person in the world.  Here was the Loop, the "heart" of the city,
which Chicago promptly empties after business hours are over.  Perfect
metaphor there.  Beyond that, the El tracks, from whence the Loop derives
its name, and then an open expanse so that one can take in the height of the
Sears Tower.  Just a block West is the Chicago river, and from the Jackson
Street bridge, you can see the smooth stone face of the Lyric Opera House
slide seamlessly into the river.  Then you're at Union Station.  And if
you're two minutes late, as I was, you get to explore the Station itself,
since the next train doesn't leave until 7 am on Sundays.  In that one walk,
I had the inspiration for a thousand roleplaying scenarios, a hundred short
stories.  It was, I noticed, a different sort of horror from the Vampire
type, because Vampire deals with the moths who hover about the flickering
flame of humanity, which burns brightly in the night if only to spite the
darkness.  It wasn't the desolation of the Urban rot that can be found a few
miles to the south or west, because, come morning, the streets would thrive
with life.  It was as if the Mississippi River had dried up one morning,
revealing all that it once kept hidden, and you went into the riverbed to
explore.  Never having seen the Mississippi, you can only barely imagine all
that water, coursing through this channel that seems so very wide.  And then
the next morning, the river returns in a great whoosh, and you can scarcely
remember what it was like without water.  Chicago's Loop at noon.  Chicago's
Loop at midnight.  The two are barely reconcilable.

How many other parts of the city live only in brief moments each day?  I
think the mistakes we make in underestimating the city as a campaign setting
is that we fall into the old paradigms of use.  It's night, so we go to
nightclubs.  It's day, so we go to banks.  We never think about the all
important cracks in the city that can only be seen in just the right light.

Ah, I prattle on too long.  As the writer of the horror that was Town
without Pity:  Albuquerque, I eagerly await the establishment of the
database so that we can finally start to hammer out just how weird (and
accurately weird) we can make UAmerica and the world.


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