Unknown Armies: Strange Days (Part II)

This post really follows on from the first half of the published adventure Strange Days, a one-shot for Unknown Armies published in 1999, which I am using to test my hybrid D6 system adaptation. Although the scenario was not completed, I also include some thoughts on the system as played at the end of this post.

We left our team of New Inquisition dukes about to call it a day, as the tourists began to disperse after the local festivities at the Bahadea Native American reservation. Banks still had eyes on the second stranger in a black suit, but there was no sign of the one that went looking for the elusive Goodborough. With Big Steve and Rosen returning from the sheriff's office, they kept an eye on the man as he ate a burger at the local cafe / restaurant and spoke on his cell phone. Then they trailed him as he headed in the direction of the motel.

Rosen decided to call Teresa McColl, as the dukes knew she was staying at the motel, and found she was trailing the other stranger covertly herself, convinced he was a government agent, a so-called Man In Black (MIB), here to investigate the Wolf Serpent sighting. The dukes hurried to the motel, and again contacted Teresa, finding out that she was hiding in bushes across the car park, and had identified the room the two men were using. Rosen tried to impress on her the potential danger of her situation, but McColl felt she was onto something.

Meanwhile Goodborough had rejoined the team and went into reception to con the woman on duty there and let her look at the register. He identified the two men as Carlos Sanchez and Jonas White. While he was in reception, he saw a statuesque black woman come in to pick up her keys, whom he recognised as Daphne Lee, which the New Inquisition has down as the leader of the Sect of the Naked Goddess. Lee picked up her keys and left, but bumped into the other three New Inquisition dukes on departing from the motel and recognised Dave Banks.

A very tense conversation ensued as the dukes and Lee both claimed they were here in Bahadea simply for the sights and the local culture. Neither side believed the other, obviously. Lee went to her room.

The dukes decided to call in the presence of Sanchez and White to their pal Ray at the sheriff's office. Already alert for suspicious personalities, the local heat sent a patrol car to the motel to talk to the men, and then decided to stay parked in the motel car park. All night. The vehicle finally left at speed with its sirens wailing at around 0700 the following morning.

Mystified, the group listened in on the police radio frequency, and discovered the body of a tourist, who had been brutally tortured to death, had been found in the waterfront cafe. The place had been locked down by the sheriff, who was now organising civilian posses to quarter the reservation. The dukes decided to head back into the centre of village, to revisit the cultural centre. Rosen was keen to talk to Mary Cloud again.

Reaching the museum, they could see all the police activity around the cafe about 300m away. The team contemplated breaking into the museum, but in the end decided to wait for the curator. They ran into Daphne Lee again waiting outside the front, just as Cloud turned up. The group again ranged through the museum, keeping close tabs on Lee as well. She stopped to have a brief chat with Cloud on the way out, but Cloud didn't tell her anything the dukes didn't know already.

Lee now headed over to the crime scene, which she observed from a distance. Two of the team trailed her. Back at the museum, Rosen had a second chat with Cloud, and this time she revealed that a week before it rained cooked salmon on Bahadea, six people had simultaneously dropped dead from heart attacks in and around the grocery store. The coroner was treating it as a weird coincidence. All the dead were locals. This obviously helped to inspire Cloud's 'wrath of the ancestors' belief.

The dukes decided to head over to the grocery store quietly. Going inside Goodborough could tell the place was charged with some kind of magical power. Oddly, there was nothing in the shop that existed later than about 50 years previous - the brand goods, although new, were all brands that existed prior to 1970 (e.g. Jack Daniels and Coca Cola). Even the cash register and the lights were of models that existed in the 1960s. Goodborough could feel the emanations of power coming from a trap door in the floor.

Rosen distracted the young guy behind the counter by buying something and casting Malfunction to catch his tie in the register drawer. While he pretended to help free him, the others opened the trap door, only to find impacted soil underneath. Goodborough could still feel the magical emanations coming from the ground.

At this point an emaciated, ill-looking stranger entered to shop. The dukes quickly closed the trapdoor and watched him closely as he stalked around the shop; he was paying more attention to the ground than what was on the shelves. He seemed to be muttering to himself irritably. The team then decided to open the trapdoor again, whereupon they saw a set of steps leading down that simply was not there before. Banks and Big Steve promptly failed stress checks (Unnatural).

And there you have it. That's where we left it. We may pick this up again at some point in the future. It was good fun and my first game run in the UA universe, which I enjoy reading about. The D6 system seemed to manage well, although the group was able to achieve some very high results in areas in which they were strong, partly thanks to exploding Wild dice.

Big Steve's player rightly pointed out that he had not been given a chance to shine, but his physical strength is there for back up muscle, and the team studiously avoided fighting anyway or causing trouble, keeping a low profile (although the scuffle between Goodborough and Sanchez could have developed into something - luckily Goodborough managed to escape the potential brawl). I felt they needed one combat-oriented character in case things went south, as probably did the New Inquisition. I ought to have forced a combat encounter to test the mechanics in this area.

I did not really get to test the stress mechanics enough, but the group really did not get themselves into any sticky situations, and when they ran into Lee, parted relatively cordially. Like with the morality / values mechanics in King Arthur Pendragon RPG, it is down to the GM to really keep tabs on this. There is plenty for me to muse on here. Through my work on this I have become more familiar with the UA system as well, so may give that a try at some point in the future.

I probably gave the players too many Fate Points to start with. These allowed them to double a dice score or halve damage made against them, so were really there to help them pass critical tests. There was a tendency to conserve these. The earning of new FPs seemed to work - I used the Passions from Unknown Armies, allowing the PCs to acquire FPs if they indulged these. One of them acquired a satellite phone at the start of the adventure to indulge his fear of being out of touch. If players were generating their own characters from scratch using this system, then the GM would need to be careful of anything that was too generic and almost an automatic FP bank for characters...