[UA] 1930's UA

[Tim Toner]

--- Greg Stolze <holycrow at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Paging Mr. Toner, paging Mr. Tim Toner...
> 
> He ran a game of Adventure! for us set in the 1920s
> and, while the
> fistfights on top of moving blimps and the talking
> monkey chauffer might be
> a little off-tone for UA, the business with the Baal
> worshipping cult
> geomantically attuning Chicago to their dark lord
> through sacrifice and the
> symbolism of the stockyards, climaxing with
> historical race riots and the
> barely-halted symbolic incest of a Pritzker heiress
> (at least, we hope it
> was going to be symbolic)... well, that stuff's
> probably usable.
> 

That would be Moloch, not Baal, a critical difference.
 I'm hesitant to say anything, lest I ruin the
surprise for the players, who do read this list. 
Basically, 1919 was Chicago's Annum Horribilis.  

As a transit center, it was hit particularly hard by
the Grippe.  

In the summer a little girl was reported missing, her
body eventually discovered under three tons of coal in
her basement.  The accused killer finally confessed
after three days of nonstop interrogation, facilitated
by the editors of two newspapers as well as a cop
dressed as a priest.  The papers described him as a
moron, and a few went so far as to recommend
proactively removing them from the gene pool.

A dirigible burst into flames over the city, plunging
through an atrium, sending glass, steel, and burning
fuel onto a cluster of cubicles where accountants and
actuaries performed the work now done by computers. 
The pilot and the mechanic both parachuted to safety,
leaving women and children to die onboard.  As a
result of this catastrophe, Anton Cermak, one day
mayor of Chicago who would be shot dead standing next
to FDR in Miami, sponsored the first civil aviation
legislation in the United States, which called for a
ban on dirigibles over metropolitan Chicago.  Several
other major cities, horrified by the accident,
followed suit, thus killing the dream of
transcontinental lighter than air transport.

The White Sox were practically unbeatable, and a given
to win the World Series.  We all know how that turned
out, thus beginning the second longest period of time
a major league baseball team went without winning a
World Series (Boston, for all its griping, last won in
1918.  The White Sox last won in 1917).  The
undisputed winner of that honor?  That would be the
Chicago Cubs.

Prohibition started during the long, hot summer, a
young, fresh-faced entrepeneur named Al Brown arrived
in Chicago, taking up a job as a bouncer.  He wouldn't
be there long.  "Brown" is how the cops knew him--his
friends called him "Capone".

Ah, hell--Mark, Greg, Joe, and Thomas, go away. 
Here's the story behind the story:








In the trenches of World War I, a group of England's
youngest and brightest formed a secret society
dedicated to righting the horrors perpetrated upon
them by their "fathers".  One of them, a rather poetic
fellow, invoked the name "Moloch," the Semitic deity
in whose name children were sacrificed to guarantee
prosperity.  In their eyes, that was exactly what was
occuring.  They were the grease that allowed the
wheels of history to turn.  They formed a tontine
which, within a year, all but resolved itself.  One of
the two survivors, who had taken to calling himself
Moloch, met up with a group of doughboys and told them
all about Moloch and his legacy.  They re-entered the
tontine, expanding its pool, and strangely not
succumbing to the war's brutality.  Instead, they won
more converts to their society, and because most were
Americans, class wasn't an issue.  When they returned
from the war, they found themselves well placed into
society, in a position to do to the world what the
world had done to them.  Chicago would be their home
base, and they would use the death of three children
to symbolically consecrate the city to their will,
using the animosity of Blacks vs. Whites, Union vs.
non, to generate the power they needed to push their
agenda.  

Now this was all for Adventure!, but I had a lot of UA
stuff in it as well.  For instance, the three children
had a paradoxical nature to their existence.  Mary
Pritzger, the heiress who was to be symbolically (and
a little more) deflowered by her brother, was in fact
a hermaphrodite.  The girl who is a boy.  Eugene
Johnson, whose death triggered the Race Riots of 1919,
was swimming near the output of a chemical plant,
which would bleach the skin of Black children for days
(!!!).  The black who is white.  And in the tale, poor
Janet Wilkinson suffers from Progeria.  The youth who
is old.  The symbolic binding of these forces would
give them power over all these aspects in Chicago. 
Their power is in the steel rails and the animal flesh
that personified Chicago, but soon it will transform
into something more ethereal (and I actually freaked
out when I discovered that a statue of Moloch was
basically a big metal minotaur with flames coming out
of its mouth).  There's a lot of 'king' imagery, which
makes sense, since Moloch is derived fromt he semitic
characters that also give us "King."  It was thus
fitting that their power would be broken almost fifty
years later when MLK takes one for humanity, after
going to Chicago and challenging its Northern brand of
segregation.  

Cool how that works out.

=====
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Mencken, 1920