[UA] UA Junior.

[Joshua Knorr]

I'll concur with everyone else and say that UA Jr. sounds pretty keen.
Quite frankly, sounds disturbing as hell also but I can live with that.

I'd definetly do it as a sourcebook, with new rules that represent the
differences between kids and adults.  Thankfully UA already does a pretty
good job on handling psychology, so all it takes is a modification of
pre-existing rules.

Adepts: As has been said before, childhood and obsession (can) go hand in
hand.  Particularly for the kind of screwed-up personality types and
lifestyles that the bread and butter of UA.  I'd say that the vast majority
of adepts practice self-developed schools because finding an adept stable
enough to teach a child and yet depraved enough to be willing to do so is
pretty damn rare.  So those kids with the knack will pick it up around
idiosyncratic tendancies.  A couple exceptions may be things that translate
easily such as bibliomancy (comic books, anyone?) and the occasional
entropomancer.  What's changed is that even though child adepts are
strong-willed, they still haven't fully developed psychologically (see more
on this below with Madness Meters).  The practical upshot of which is that
sitting on charges, particularly sigs or majors, will start to "bleed" into
a kid's psyche and do some serious damage.

Avatars: Very rare, again for the reasons of having an underdeveloped psyche
and sense of self.  Being an adept is "relatively" easy because it's all
about the dominance of one's ego.  Avatars have to walk a delicate line
between one's Self and the Other one is following.  What you'd get, at best,
is a kind of hero-worship where the kid has latched onto a particular
personification of the Archetype (possibly the current IC member) and does
something similar to Idolmancy with it.  At worst, the first time the kid
taps strongly into the Archytpe he/she is overwhelmed by the sheer power of
it all and his/her soul is almost completely burned out.  Result: a
'godtouched' child who may represent a way for the Archetype to meddle in
the physical world without all the unpleasant consequences.  For a little
while, at least, until the kid completely breaks down and either dies or
goes catatonic.

Madness Meters: On one hand, it doesn't take much in the way of
psychological trauma to seriously warp a kid for life.  On the other hand,
kids can be surpringly resilient, sometimes even moreso than adults.  There
isn't as much garbage in a kid's head to color his preconceptions of things.
One idea is that kids get positive shifts to their Madness checks - a kid is
more likely (than an adult) to take a stimulus and assimilate it into his
worldview than to freak out about it.  The downside to that is when they
fail, some very serious damage has been done that may not be easily
repaired - matched failures leave you with 2 notches and may have an effect
on your Fear stimulus.

Joshua Knorr


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