[UA] Player stat spread, In Media Res, Bad Man artifact

[Dylan Craig]

> If that's how it worked out in your game, I can pat myself on the ack that
> an "invisible rule" paid off - something that reinforces my setting concept
> so subtly that the players don't even realize it's at work.
Hmm. No, everyone in my group picked reasonably high Mind scores - it's a
heavily-investigative campaign, though, so this was something that went with the
characters. The big difference seems to be that whereas the "norms" tend to have
fairly standard responses to, say, the Unnatural (avoid/blast it, then cover it
with a tarp and leave it the hell alone), the adepts are the ones letting ghosts
into their head for cosy chit-chats, examining the weird glyphs and realising
what they're for, entering psychic duels, etc - hence, extra stress checks and
higher severity. A case of 'enough rope to hang themselves with', I suppose -
mind you, the 'norms' are going in against a dug-in Oneiromantic cult this week,
so we'll see how sane they are by Monday.

But I agree with using Mind for sanity checks. I pitched Mind to my group as a
mental assimilation measure: how fast, and how well, you process your
environment. Which is why Notice is a Mind skill. It also allows the "loopy
fruitbat artist" and the "guy who's so boring nothing bugs him" archetypes to
manifest, something you never get in Call of Cthulu because of the link between
POW and SAN.

> 2.  [This being UA, after all] Some strange magics have drawn them all
together
>at a catastrophic moment - there's a threat to a significant part of the
Invisible
>Clergy and the characters have been manipulated unsubtly into being in the
right
>place at the right time.
An alternate casting of the Pornomancer Sychronicity spell, or various
entropomancer random magicks, work really well for this. I had a Pornomancer
IMUAC who had had one of her fellow acolytes disappear use Synchronicity to
gather "the best people to find Kristin" together in a 7-11 at a certain time,
then made sure her hirelings were on hand to abduct them at gunpoint and drag
them off for the mission pitch.

Nice idea I had: IMUAC, the Bad Man has a major entropomantic artifact (a cell
phone) with a permanent version of that "automatically dial the nearest phone to
the person you want" spell. He's -always- in touch with his customers...

--
"The next instant he was one of the deadest men that ever lived."
Dylan Craig · Writer and Observer · Cape Town, South Africa
UA Campaign Details: http://www.eyeballkid.co.za/blies.html

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