[UA] All Humans are Liars

[Matthew Rowan Norwood]

> > Alien Cultures and Fantasy Races are pretty much
> > devices for exaggerating one aspect of humanity to
> > play around with and examine
> 
> but why not just use humans? giving them big beards to somwhow legitimise
> the two-dimensionality just smack sof laziness to me

This is an interesting topic for me. Different games do this to varying
degrees, and the differences of opinion over this approach generate a
lot of arguments, most of which aren't well-articulated because people
don't seem to understand consciously what they're arguing over.

Take WW games: these are fairly extreme in their "everything's a
metaphor for some aspect of normal human life" approach. There are
really no "Others" at all in WW games: everybody's a human being deep
down inside, and their cultural factions reflect real, human cultural
factions. Some of the opponents approach "Other"-ness, but they all at
least represent forces that we normal humans struggle with: the
indifference of a technocratic society, the inevitable force of decay
and entropy, big corporations, etc.

Kult is also very humanocentric, even though at times the players will
feel that it's not. It's very grounded in standard Western mysticism,
with humans beings at the center of everything. This isn't revealed at
once, though, and once the players work through the hordes of Others
towering over them, they will come to the horrifying conclusion that
they themselves are, in fact, Other.

CoC is perhaps the ultimate in Otherness. 'Nuff said.

UA, strangely, has quite a bit of Otherness in spite of its disciplined
humanocentrism. (OtE seems similar from the posts I'v eread.) The
Otherness of UA stems from its rejection of cultural archetypes
surrounding mysticism and spirituality in favor of postmodernism. Magic
in UA, for instance, is both mundane and completely alien. Each adept in
UA is forced to invent his own unique cultural context instead of
falling into a neat pre-packaged magical tradition that adheres to some
standard cultural ideology. When we ask, "What is the meaning of the
Dreamwalker tradition? (from WW)", we get back a host of cultural
associations for shamanism. When we ask "What is the meaning of
Cthulhu?", we get back nothing except, perhaps, some pseudo-gothic
surrealist undertones. Cthulhu is meaningless, and that's why it is so
terrifying. The same goes for Kleptomancy: it has psychological
associations, but not cultural associations. Its practicioners have to
invent the cultural context for their magic. And that makes their power
completely Other and completely personal at the same time.

Okay, I'm not sure what that rant was about. But I think I'm getting at
something important about this game.

-Matt Norwood

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