[UA] Promoting UA at Conventions (was Release Schedule, alternative products)

[Mark Baker]

wild at park.net writes
>Having played in an earlier version of this game at Stabcon, it's a good one, 
>and anyone going to GenCon, I recommend it.
>
Thanks for the praise John, and the feedback you gave after StabCon
really helped me tighten up the scenario a lot. I'm much happier with
the way it runs than I was back in January, especially with a co-GM
taking on the role of Suzanne.

>Some scenarios (and I count Mark's among them, as well as several of my own) 
>throw people into the deep end of UA.  They are _dark_ roleplaying; pulling at 
>real issues and forcing us to look at those issues, and more importantly, our 
>reaction to them.  That's great - I've stretched myself further as a GM running 
>UA than with almost any other game.
>
You're right. With UA (as with Kult), the temptation is to explore the
darker side of the human psyche more fully because the system supports
that in a way no other game system I've found can do. And
writing/running a dark scenario is a challenging exploration into
ourselves as GMs. 'Suzanne' is the blackest adventure I've ever written,
and it took a lot out of me, but I'm proud of the result. The issues and
hang-ups of the characters though are ones that many people would be
uncomfortable roleplaying, so I would always insist on a vetting the
players in advance.

>But that can be offputting to the new player. UA doesn't have to be about 
>scraping the bottom of the barrel of humanities soul.  It can be a postive game 
>also.  It can _even_ be a light hearted game; one could mostly run Scooby Doo 
>(without the stupid dogs) as a UA campaign or a UA one-shot.  Certainly, most 
>of 
>the storylines from the X-Files could be hammered into place without too much 
>effort.
>
I don't know about light-hearted; but I ran one of Gareth Hanrahan's
scenarios at TowerCon in March ('Kind Hearts and Coronets', the one set
in a busy hospital ER), which is much more positive. It went down very
well, and some of the players really got into their characters minds
when I started messing with their heads.
Another of Gareth's scenarios that I ran at StabCon in July 2000, 'All
the Mornings of the World' or 'Fall of a Sparrow' (I never did work out
which was the right title, and both seemed to fit) was also well
received (even by those players who lost two characters). I'd highly
recommend them both as excellent mind-blowing adventures, and great
introductions to UA and the UnAverse, without being dark explorations
into the negativity of man's inner soul.

-- 
Mark Baker
Web Pages: http://www.lange.demon.co.uk/Index.html

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