Forum Replies Created
SuperDave51 articles turn up on a phrase search of the archives. Of course, some of them are reviews, and UA is just mentioned in passing in others. Let’s see, out of those, I count 17 articles that look like they are specifically UA and are directly useful for a campaign. But that doesn’t include the tons of articles that would be useful for UA but which don’t specifically mention UA. And then there’s all those Kenneth Hite articles which are full of ideas but which often aren’t directly applicable. And you can always add to the number of articles there by writing some and submitting them.
Anyway, if you subscribe, be sure to be sure to put down the name of someone who already subscribes as a referer. They get a free one-month extension to their subscription, and it costs you nothing.
SuperDaveAnd I must say that I was very glad to see the “minimum of 30 (or whatever) but below your stat (or skill)” rules dumped in favor of the simpler shifts. I could see that being pretty confusing for my players. And the BOHICA and OACAWA terminology–well, everybody knows what “crit” and “fumble” mean, so why play cute with the vocabulary? I kind of liked them but I was glad to see them gone. The 2nd-edition rules are much easier to grasp, and I think they’ll be much easier to introduce to new players.
(Oh as long as we’re looking at things like this, I noticed there were some leftovers from the 1st edition in the 2nd-ed version of “Pinfeathers”–and the first 3 GMCs have skills that exceed their stats, which was not allowed even in the 1st-ed rules. But you’ve probably already been told that on the UAML.)
SuperDaveSweet.
I think, though, that I’d give them the chance to try to influence the ascensions so that they’d end up with a Godhead that just might have enough humanity in it so that it decides not to devour large chunks of the population. Hope can be a great motivator, even if the chances are very slim. I know some may say that hope is anti-Lovecraftian, and I agree, but we’re talking about merging the CoC and UA settings, and UA has a lot of room for hope. I don’t think it would be UA if there weren’t a chance of making things better.
I’ve also come across this site–not sure who it belongs to, but I bet it’s somebody well-known around these parts: http://www.angelfire.com/ma/starrywisdom/ To whoever made it, kudos!
Now to play with ideas about merging the House of Renunciation with Carcosa. Mwahahahahahaa!
SuperDaveThanks, Werner, that’s a very interesting thread–it brought up a lot of things I hadn’t thought of. I think that Negative Focus Shifts might be just what I’m looking for–I guess I missed them thefirst time around. (And had a hard time finding them–yo, Greg and John! Next edition, bigger index!)
Now I just have to wait until my group starts feeling like a change from the current (surprisingly fun!) D&D3e campaign, so I can spring UA on them and try out the rules.
SuperDaveI like that too, Donato. And I was figuring on leaving the St. Germain/Nyarlathotep question open–is he helping us just so that when he steps up as #333, he’ll infect our Godhead with his Nyarlathoteppy self? Which would make humans into the latest Minor Servitor Race.
I like to use Lumley-esque/Derlethian ideas as smokescreens, since they’re so obvious and essentially hopeful that they’re the kind of thing humans who don’t really understand the nature of the universe would come up with.
But then so is the idea of Godhead, too–although a new, weak Godhead would probably be no match for the likes of Cthulhu. Unless ours got powered up by, say, the sacrifice of a billion souls first. Or five billion. Or, what the heck, all six billion–who needs ’em anyway?
SuperDaveJohn and Greg, UA2 is great–a lot clearer, a lot easier to get into, a lot more complete than UA1. I’ve been reading it, fascinated, for the past week, in between teaching classes. I’m having visions of how to use it to teach English to Japanese university students. (I realize I’d better think again–imagine the trouble I could get into!) I can’t wait to expose our local gaming group to it.
Many thanks. And thanks also for this site–much easier to get around than the Atlas site, and more appropriately dark.
SuperDaveI’ve recently read UA2, and for some reason it grabbed me a lot harder than when I read the first edition, what, a couple years back? ANd it grabbed me pretty good then. Anyway, I got thinking about UA/CoC/DG too.
It seems to me that the first thing you gotta do is resolve the Big Cosmic Dilemma, which is that UA treats humanity as the pinnacle of existence, whereas a Lovecraftian universe is predicated on humanity being a tiny little flyspeck on the Great Old Ones’ fried eggs. Once you do that, everything else falls into place readily enough.
There’s a lot of ways to go about it, but what I’m planning on, for the moment, is merging the Dreamlands with the Statosphere. The Celestial Chorus are the gods of the collective unconscious, after all, so they fit just fine in the DLs. But when the Chorus is full, the result is not a total makeover of the universe–it’s much more local. What you get is the birth of the Human Godhead, something that can compete with and defend us from critters like Cthulhu (who happens to be the Star-Spawn Godhead).
And since the Chorus is almost full (naturally), not only is it crucial for the players to influence the nature of that Godhead by trying to get the right Ascensions up there (who wants an evil Godhead? plenty of people, unfortunately), it’s also a very dangerous time, as the movers and shakers of the cosmos are starting to notice these little hairless-monkey things. We’re accumulating just enough power to attract attention, without having enough to defend ourselves.
The rest of it–game system, ritual magic (all CoC magic can be turned into UA rituals–the most powerful spells can be major rituals), adepts and avatars, madness, monsters, and so on all slot together without a lot of trouble.