[UA] Darkening Children's Tales

[rowan at media.mit.edu]

> It seems to me like a good UA scenario, actually.  Say the kid becomes
> godwalker of the Fool (or some other archetype appropriate to a child). 
> Then he receives a vision of the statosphere, which his mind interprets
> as a big adventure through a mythical land of Kings and Flying Women and
> wild Savages, much like the various child's fantasy stories he's read
> (Narnia, Alic, Oz, Lord of the Rings, etc)... (insert references to
> Sandman: A Game of You here)
> 
> His behaviour changes, parents are concerned and investigate, can't get
> anything out of him, call in some specialists (the PCs, who are probably
> in this case social workers, school teachers, child psychologists, etc).
>  Child explains aout this magic(k?) land he visitedand such.  Rival
> avatars show up and the PCs have to protect the child and figure out
> what was going on.  Could be good for a one shot, but hard to involve
> typical UA PCs (maybe if someone somewhat 'in the know' got wind and
> pointed out the kid to the PCs).

Actually, that sounds a lot like the idea I posted a while back about Avatars 
being a crossover point with White Wolf's _Changeling_. I was interested in 
integrating my favorite bits of Kult and the WoD with UA, and I found that the 
Changelings became more interesting with each recasting.

Consider: someone grows up with, for various developmental reasons, an obsession 
with acting out a certain role... let's say "The Messenger". As he shapes more 
and more of his life around this role -- wearing appropriate symbols, following 
certain compulsive taboos -- he finds that certain things make his role of 
"messenger" easier (and his psychological health begins to deteriorate as the 
other sides of his personality are neglected, putting him out of touch with 
mainstream reality). One day, this unbalanced man is visited by a vision of 
another world, one outside of time and space, where people take their places in 
an elaborately symbolic court wearing the full trappings of their "true role": 
Guardian, King, Healer, Troubador, Seer, Traitor. The man recovers from this 
vision with the realization that he is one of THOSE people -- that he is 
actually a courtly Messenger from this other world, trapped on Earth in 
ignorance of his true identity, and that there are probably many more like him. 
He seeks out and finds others who play these roles, some of whom have already 
found each other and formed small societies where they are free to play out 
their "true selves" away from the skeptical eyes of the public. They develop the 
magical powers that arise from their roles, they construct elaborate rituals and 
protocols based on a mishmash of what they interpret from their glimpses of the 
Statosphere, and they go out into the world on quests to foster new Changelings 
and carry out the goals of their archetypes. Oh, and, of course, they spend a 
lot of time reinforcing each others' delusions.

You could make an intersting game out of one of these societies, asking some 
questions like: Are some people "destined" to be avatars, and their obsessions 
with the archetype simply due to manipulation of probability by the Clergy? To 
what degree do different "avatar societies" differ in their cosmology? Do 
societies exist that contain only one avatar type (a group of Peacemakers who 
believe that they are fallen angels, for instance), and what does their 
cosmology look like? How do children fit into this, with their credulity and 
their willingness to slip into character for extended periods of time?

-Matt Norwood

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