[UA] Dissemination idea

[Dylan Craig]

Hey, all

An interesting challenge presented itself recently in my game. One of the
players has an occultist/priest character - an ex-member of the Order of St.
Cecil - and I'd been grappling with the problem of how to give this
person -some- knowledge of the UAverse without just letting them read through
the sourcebooks. Said character had Occult Lore at 55% as their obsession skill,
so I wanted the benefit to be palpable without being served up on a plate.
Similarly, this character spends a lot of time in-game researching, so I wanted
some way of rewarding this without having to spoon-feed the guy module hints.
But; how to do this?

What I ended up doing this afternoon, which seems to have worked out nicely, is
to photocopy the magick, unnatural and artifacts chapters (and a few others at
random) from the book, shuffle them, add in some loose pages from the reject
trays of the copy center (someone's Biochemistry thesis index, a couple of pages
on the sociology of famine), cut the pile of pages into eight with the
guillotine machine so that I had an inch-high stack of card-sized fragments,
shuffled them again, and let him pick half the pieces, sight unseen.

He now has a (literally) fragmentary knowledge of lots of aspects of the
UAverse, but nothing coherent, which suits me fine. Every now and again I'll cut
one of my campaign notes pages into eight and add them to the pile. And now,
when he spends an afternoon researching, I can hand him one of the remaining
fragments. Of course, if he spends long enough doing this, and lots of time
putting together the scraps, he'll eventually know the Big Picture - or, at
least, all the players.

I'll keep everyone posted on how it works from here on in (first game on
Sunday). If anyone on the list tries it out, let me know too.

--
"When you hear sweet syncopation / And the music softly moans
T'ain't no sin to take off your skin / And dance around in your bones"
Dylan Craig · Writer and Observer · Cape Town, South Africa
Contact Details: http://www.eyeballkid.co.za/contact.html


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua