Having some time off this weekend, I thought it would be a good idea to tackle one of the most complex character generation systems for day 1, and so I chose Unknown Armies, a game with a modern-day setting in which characters court supernatural disaster to make the change they want to see in the world.
In the third edition (which is the one I'm working from) players ideally create their characters together in a session 0, collaborating with the GM to build a yarn map of connections among themselves, various gamemaster-run characters, and locations relevant to the story. The process involves both the player's manual and the gamemaster's book. I'm flying solo here (and there's kind of a procedure for that), but I've also posited two other members of my character's cabal for the purposes of establishing connections and filling in certain slots on the sheet.
First, a little background
We start with the purpose of the cabal, which was the first concrete idea I came up with about the whole process. I'm starting here:
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| Image via Know Your Meme |
If you spend a lot of time online, you've probably seen this image as a shorthand for conspiracy theorizing. For those of you not familiar with the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, that’s a still from the episode “Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack.” (it’s kind of a long lead-in, but bear with me.) Two of the lead characters (Mac and reading-impaired Charlie) get office jobs as mailroom workers so they can get health insurance. Anyhow, Charlie freaks out because he sees the name “Pepe Silvia” on all the mail but can’t find “Pepe Silvia” to deliver it,* and decides that there is a conspiracy here.
So, this is our starting point. The goal of our cabal will be to stop Pepe Silvia, as soon as we figure out who he is and what he wants. Each member of the cabal has seen this name in a context that raises questions, and in connection with an uncanny event that hurt and/or confused them.
For the other members of the cabal, I’ll come up with just enough information to support the character generation process for my own character. There’ll be two other PCs: an ingenue and a burnout, with me somewhere in the middle. My character will be named Brad Milgram.
The ingenue is a newly-hired librarian named Steve. How did Pepe Silvia hurt Steve? He didn’t, but Steve discovered Pepe Silvia through handling reference requests for other people including Brad and Tina, and he saw a pattern start to emerge. That’s not what clinched it, though. Steve saw something disappear one night when he was walking home from a date, and he concluded from his work for (among other people) the other PCs that the disappearing thing was linked to Pepe Silvia.
The burnout (or near-burnout) is an ex-cop who retired early because of a supernatural incident that she has connected tp Pepe Silvia. Since her retirement she’s worked for various security companies, mostly as a low-level supervisor. She was married but isn’t anymore. (Or maybe she is and is actually-but-not-legally separated. But she says she “isn’t married anymore” and will say nothing further about her former spouse.) She’s the most openly obsessive of the group, and the one furthest into occultism. Her name is Tina, which is short for Martina. How is she connected to Steve? Same way Brad is. How is she connected to Brad? He had some kind of run-in with her while he was trying to investigate Pepe Silvia on his own, trespassing at whatever property she was guarding.
We'll define Brad in game terms below, but the short version is that he's an IT support tech who's recently begun experiencing visions.
Part One: The Big Picture
I've already covered some of this above. The first step is to determine the purpose of our cabal: that's stop Pepe Silvia.
The next step is for each character to start putting notches in meters. Five meters for different types of stress compose what the game calls a Shock Gauge: Helplessness, Isolation, Self, the Unnatural, and Violence. Each meter is a continuum for two opposed abilities, and your character will both lose and gain proficiency as they "harden" notches on these meters. (Hardened notches represent successful attempts to cope with stresses on the axis in question; there's a separate meter for failed attempts, which we'll address later on.)
The relationships between elements in a meter can be kind of abstract. Helplessness opposes Fitness with Dodge; Isolation opposes Status with Pursuit; Self opposes Knowledge with Lie; the Unnatural opposes Notice with Secrecy; and Violence opposes Connect with Struggle. As you harden a notch on any given meter, the first ("upbeat") ability declines and the second ("downbeat") improves.
So Brad will harden up to five notches on his Unnatural meter, due to an uncanny experience that I would ordinarily narrate for the group. I decide that Brad's encounter happened on the job, when he was facilitating a systems upgrade. Borrowing an absent employee's cubicle to monitor some aspect of the job, he he got an overwhelming sense of…something…from the papers on the desk he was using. Prominent among the papers was a document with the name "Pepe Silvia" scrawled across it in black Sharpie, a name that oddly appeared in several nonsensical comments among some pieces of legacy code that had hampered the transition. The employee whose cubicle he borrowed, Brad later learned, died under mysterious circumstances a few days after that call. It was a weird thing, but kind of vague and abstract, so I’m only going to give Brad two hardened notches for it. (Steve has only one; Tina took five.)
The next step is to add an element to our yarn map and draw a connection between it and another element. I add a location, the office building mentioned above. It’s the Bosque Building, home to several small-to-mid sized businesses including a couple that have rented entire floors. I connect it to Tina—she’s worked security there, and it’s the place where she first encountered Brad.
Next we define the PC's Obsession. This is tough; the book stresses that it’s an important choice. I’m going to choose making shit work. Brad can’t stand bugs and fatal errors and bad circuits and other things that impede the proper functioning of stuff. He doesn’t always have to understand how he got a thing working, but he can’t leave it alone until it’s functioning more or less as intended. (Weirdly, the form-fillable character sheet I downloaded for this game doesn't have a dedicated space for recording Obsession. I ended up using the Distinguishing Characteristics slot instead.)
Then we add an Identity for Brad. Identities are a cluster of key self-concepts that each character has, and they let you do more stuff in game. Brad's kind of job-focused, so I'm going to make that his first Identity: IT Support Tech. At some point I'll have to give that a rating, and add some features. But not yet.
Part Two: Get Plugged In
The rulebook describes this as a why phase after the who and what of Part One. Here we start defining relationships among the characters and each character's relationship to the group as a whole.
And indeed the first step of Part Two involves defining your character's relationship to another PC. There are five key types of Relationship in UA: your Favorite, your Guru, your Mentor, your Responsibility, and your Protégé. You don't need to fill all of those boxes during character generation, but you do need to put at least one other PC into one of those boxes. I figure that Tina kind of scares Brad, he sees she’s pretty close to the edge. (Steve's relative naiveté concerns Brad in a different way.) I’m going to make Tina Brad’s Responsibility. She doesn’t have anyone else and she’s half a step from falling off and, oh yeah, she owns firearms so she’s perfectly capable of taking some other people down with her. Brad thinks he and Steve, but mostly he, have to help Tina keep her shit together. This Relationship will start at a rating equal to Brad's Knowledge score (which is not set yet, because we still have notches to harden).
Next we give Brad a second Identity. I want something weird and not entirely under Brad’s control. Shopping the supernatural section, I see “Visionary” under the “Vague Information” heading. Sudden, unpredictable, involuntary impressions of disturbing supernatural shit? Sign me up!
And then we establish another Connection between two elements. I put “Carol” on the board and connect her to the Bosque Building. She’s the receptionist for one of the companies that rents a whole floor there.
Now, I define Brad's relationship to the cabal as a group. Brad’s already used “responsibility,” but there are four options left. I think the cabal’s going to be Brad’s Guru. Alone, each of them is groping blindly for answers. Together, they can actually fix some shit. And Brad, as we know, is obsessed with getting shit fixed, or at least jury-rigged. The Guru relationship will start at the same value as Brad's Notice score.
Part Three: Dig Deeper
This part is mostly about filling in background, but that includes mechanical elements as well as more yarn-mapping.
First, time for more notches. This time we choose two meters and harden up to ten notches altogether. Again, don’t want to push things too far, so I’ll cap this step at six. I’ll put four on the Isolation meter (partly his job is isolating, and so are his visions, kinda) and the other two on Helplessness.
Now another PC link. That would be Steve this time. I don't have to assign a Relationship but that would simplify this process a little so I’m going make Steve Brad's Protégé. Steve is younger, less hardened, and Brad wants to make sure that he doesn't get irreparably damaged in pursuit of the group's goal, so he hopes he can give Steve some guidance along the way. The Protégé Relationship starts at Brad's Fitness score, for some reason.
Now, in addition to an Obsession each character has three Passions: Rage, Fear, and Noble. Here we decide what sets each of those off. What really honks him off are people who stand in the way of fixing what’s busted, whether it’s out of malice, apathy, policy, profit, whatever. His deepest fear is a vision showing him a catastrophe he won’t be able to do anything about. And his nobility is that he genuinely loves to help people. Once per session, for each passion, that stimulus will allow the player to flip a percentage die roll. Additionally, I have to link the Fear stimulus to one of Brad's meters; Helplessness seems like the logical choice.
Next, some attention for our Obsession; we have to link it to one of Brad's Identities. It seems fairly obvious to me that Brad's Obsession for making things work is directly linked to his job Identity. I put a star next to the name of the Identity on his sheet, and now he can flip rolls linked to this Identity at will.
Part 4: Foils and Fine Details
Ideally, this part is where you set up some sub-conflicts between and within characters, as well as getting down some finer details about everything. Mostly it seems to be about the second thing.
First, add up to ten more notches on two meters. Brad will harden three each on Violence and Self.
Second, add another Element and Connection. I stick a photo of an abandoned house on the board, then I add a direct connection between Steve and the house. This, I say, is where Steve witnessed the strange disappearance that marked his first direct encounter with the supernatural. (In a real game, Steve would have a veto over that, but since Steve is just a sockpuppet for this exercise I'm treating his consent as read.)
Third, it's time to assign Features to my Identities, as well as numerical values. Starting with the second part, I have 120 points to split and will assign 70 to "IT Support Tech" and 50 to "Visionary."
As far as Features go, mundane Identities are treated differently than supernatural ones. A mundane Identity has one feature called "I'm a [name of Identity], of course I can [thing that sort of person does on the regular]." It also can be used to substitute for one Ability, and will have two other Features (which can include subbing for a different Abilty). Stretching things maybe a little, I start with "I'm an IT Support Tech, of course I can hack a network." I decide that this Identity can be used to sub for Secrecy (as in network security) and Knowledge (as in Internet research, though Steve will be better at this), and as a final Feature I decide it can be used to Evaluate another subject's Unnatural meter (where Secrecy is opposed to Notice).
Visionary won't require anything like that sort of decision-making. Supernatural identities don't have an "of course I can" element and don't substitute for other abilities. Some allow for rituals (if Brad were a card-reader, for instance), but the whole schtick of Visionary is that it's out of Brad's (and my) hands and under the GM's purview. So I don't add any Features for Visionary.
The next step is called Pay the Piper; it's where you find out how many failed notches you've racked up, and whether you've pushed yourself beyond your capacity to handle stress. Brad has 19 Hardened notches, which is under the limit of 25, and they're pretty well spread out. Dividing by five and rounding up, that gives Brad four Failed notches on his meters. I give one to each meter except Unnatural, which (despite Brad's scary-ass power) is one of the least hardened of his meters.
Now I can go back and assign values to those Relationships: Guru 50, Tina 45, Steve 50. I also need to fill in Brad's Wound Threshold, which the rules tell me has a baseline of 50, and which none of my choices have altered, so I enter that.
And that should give us the more-or-less complete Brad Milgram, less any Connections drawn to him by other players (and which wouldn't show up on his character sheet).
Brad Milgram, member of "the Gang" Passions:
Current Cabal Objective: Stop Pepe Silvia Rage: People who block fixing shit
Obsession: Make Shit Work Noble: Helping people
Fear: Visions of disaster (Helplessness)
Meters:
Helplessness: Fitness 50 / Dodge 30 Relationships:
Isolation: Status 40 / Pursuit 40 Favorite (open)
Self: Knowledge 45 / Lie 35 Guru (the Gang): 50
Unnatural: Notice 50 / Secrecy 30 Mentor (open)
Violence: Connect 45 / Struggle 35 Responsibility (Tina): 45
Protégé (Steve): 50
Wound Threshold: 50
Identities:
I'm an IT Support Tech*, of course I can hack a network.
Score: 70%
Substitutes for Secrecy. Knowledge; Evaluates Unnatural
I'm a Visionary, I have involuntary and unpredictable visions of disturbing things.
Score: 50%
*I don’t think it’s ever openly stated, but the fairly obvious implication is that Charlie, who canonically has a severe reading disability, is misreading “Pennsylvania.”
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