How to Run:Unknown Armies

Another one from the original thread, again posted by Pseudoephedrine.

How to Run Unknown Armies

Part One: It's the characters, stupid!

Unknown Armies, even more than most roleplaying games, is about the characters. It's about the choices they make, the people they are, the things they care about. A plot in an Unknown Armies game should be seen as an opportunity to test the moral fortitude of the characters, to strip them down to the barest, rawest elements of who they are. The weirdness is there only as a means of doing this - as a way of instigating a crisis that can't be dealt with through normal coping mechanisms. Weirdness for weirdness' sake is the wrong approach. It implies to the characters that the world doesn't care about them, that it goes on regardless of them. And in Unknown Armies, this is the opposite of the impression you want to create. Every character in Unknown Armies is an egomaniac, an obsessive. The world exists for each and every one of them, and only for them. Be sure that the world you create exists for each and every one of the characters, and only for them.

Part Two: Plot, Resolution and Other Trivial Details

Because of this character-centredness, resolution of a plot is a very different thing in Unknown Armies than it is in other games. A plot is not resolved when every dramatic t is crossed and i dotted, when the bad-guy goes to jail and the good guys return home with loot and experience points aplenty. Resolution in Unknown Armies is personal - it's a character proving to themselves that they really are who they thought they were, despite the consequences. If they can do that _and_ catch the bad guy, well, great. But that struggle is the important part, and the bad guy exists only to cause or exacerbate that struggle. He is part of it, not an outside element that takes screen-time away from that.

Part Three: The Weirdness

Weirdness in Unknown Armies should be low-key. There's a desire when one first gets the game to cram cannibal zombie mutant rednecks together with fetish-ball pornomancer samurai spies and crank the weirdness for weirdness' sake up to 11. This is completely the wrong thing to do. Every bit of weirdness in an Unknown Armies game should tie into the characters and their struggles somehow. Not that they need to be the cause of it, or even necessarily completely aware of what's causing it, but that it should play off of them. A character who gets angered by children being harmed should face struggles involving children being harmed or appearing to be harmed. Someone who struggles to stand up for themself in the face of oppression should face supernatural oppression. The weirdness catalyses crises and problems, it gives them a cosmic scope. It's shouldn't be there to just be weird shit for the sake of being weird shit.