(This is one of several topics about my Unknown Armies hack: See THIS TOPIC for general notes about this UA hack and THIS TOPIC for notes about Adept Magick.)

The GM's job in this Unknown Armies hack will be very similar to the MC's job in Apocalypse World. The style of GMing that AW uses is one of the biggest draws for me to do a UA hack into AW in the first place. There will be differences in flavor, of course (e.g. the gonzo weirdness of the UA setting replaces apocalyptica).

GMing Unknown Armies[/size/

Agenda & Always Say
The list for "Agenda" and "Always Say" for UA hack is identical to AW (except replacing "Apocalypse World" with "Unknown Armies", of course).

The Principles

The list of principles is also the same, except that Barf Forth Apocalyptica becomes something like Suffuse everything with the weird and occult (I'll word it better than that eventually).

GM's Moves

Again, for the most part the list  is the same as AW. I'm not sure if I need to create new moves for things like unnatural phenomena that come up  in UA, or whether those can just be easily folded into the existing GM moves with the Principles to guide flavor?

The 1st Session

The basic idea will be the same, though the Threats on the sheet (Hunger, Ignorance, Fear, etc.) will be re-skinned to fit UA (see below). I don't have much to say yet, but I'm putting it down as a reminder to myself to come back to this (and also to invite any suggestions or thoughts).

Fronts

I think that the same basic idea applies, but again I might change the exact wording.

Fundamental Scarcity

UA isn't about scarcity like AW is, but obsession isn't that different from hunger or thirst in some ways (the motivation is different but the effect is similar). I'll need to change the name to something besides "Fundamental Scarcity"... maybe just "Theme" or something like that?

This list is a quick draft off the top of my head and almost certain to change:

• Alienation
• Decay
• Perversion
• Ignorance
• Fear
• Envy
• Ambition
• Cosmic/Transcendence
• Obsession

Threats

The same basic principle as AW certainly applies, though I'll need to make a new list (even if some of the changes are cosmetic/flavor).

This is a first draft going through the AW list of threats and will likely change dramatically before the final version:

Boss (based on Warlord and part of Brute)

• Cult leader (impulse: to own people)
• Prophet (impulse: to overthrow the status quo)
• Collector (impulse: to own)
• Alpha wolf (impulse: to hunt and dominate)
• Executive (impulse: to increase power and wealth)
• Dictator (impulse: to control)

Grotesque

• Glutton (impulse: craves satiety and plenty)
• Pain addict (impulse: craves pain, its own or others)
• Mindfucker (impulse: craves mastery)
• Savage (impulse: craves freedom and mastery)
• Godwalker (impulse: craves transcendence)

Society (partially based on Afflictions and partially on Brutes)

• Law Enforcement (impulse: to restrict & punish transgression)
• Mobs (impulse: to riot, burn, kill scapegoats)
• Cults (impulse: to victimize & incorporate people)
• Family (impulse: to close ranks, protect their own)
• Movement (impulse: to identify and attack outsiders)
• Violence (impulse: to justify and promote violence)
• Social norms (impulse: to victimize anyone who stands out)
• Everyday life (impulse: to dominate and restrict people's choices)

Locations (based on Landscapes)--I'll probably change the names of the below, but the impulses fit

• Prison (impulse: to contain)
• Breeding pit (impulse: to generate badness)
• Furnace (impulse: to consume things)
• Mirage (impulse: to entice and betray people)
• Maze (impulse: to trap, to frustrate passage)
• Fortress (impulse: to deny access)

The Unnatural (partially based on Afflictions)

• Artifacts (impulse: to be desired and fought over)
• Unnatural phenomena (impulse: to trigger obsession or fear)
• Unnatural beings (impulse: to preserve own existence)
• Demons (impulse: to lie and to get a body)
• Invisible clergy (impulse: to manipulate events in their own image)

Agenda / Dark Future

Really the same as AW

Stakes

Also the same as AW. I might tweak the list of stakes to stick to in the beginning, but I haven't thought about it much yet.

Cast

Again, same basic idea as AW. However, my gut feeling is that UA isn't quite as friendly as AW to the idea that every NPC is defined and you never deal with faceless transactions (e.g. in UA, you can and do go to the grocery store and buy food from faceless tellers that you don't interact with in any meaningful way. (In fact, I'm pondering a peripheral move that's like "Circles" in Burning Wheel, since the extended cast and the society around the PCs is so much more populous than AW.)

I think it might be part of the difference between the mundane world and the Occult Underground: in the underground everyone is an individual and there are no faceless interactions...

Overall Countdowns

I see Countdown clocks working exactly the same way in UA that they do in AW.

Motifs

Creating and incorporating motifs into a campaign is a fun piece of advice in UA. Motifs aren't exactly in AW (though the advice about apocalyptica and asking questions about the Psychic Maelstrom and re-incorporating, etc., drive at a similar goal, I think).

This ties to the Suffuse everything with the weird and occult Principle. I like the tip in UA to create a list of Motifs that will be recurring elements in the setting.

Maybe these can be done spontaneously or built up through uses of the "Open Your Brain" move (which will be  tweaked and renamed, but work the same as it does in AW in general--see the first thread linked above). Or maybe as part of creating Fronts, each Front will have a couple Motifs attached to it (with the Home Front also having several Motifs).

However I do it, I'm planning on making the establishment and use of motifs a part of GMing this UA hack.

...

More to come later. I welcome any comments.

I created a new topic to talk about Adept magick (HERE). I'll continue to put general rules and notes in this thread.

EDIT: I also created another topic to talk about GMing the UA hack (principles, 1st session, fronts, threats, etc.) HERE.

Thanks for your comments, grepogor!

Seize by Force

It's funny... I've read the seize by force move a dozen times and I'd built up a very distinct idea of what the move did. I haven't played Apocalypse World yet; I'm currently running a Dungeon World campaign, so I feel like I have at least a fair idea of how AW would run at the table, but seize by force isn't in DW.

Anyway, I hadn't ever thought about the move the way you described it (it always felt like a more... "militant" move to me, like a battle scene instead of a fight scene, or something). I'm not sure why I had that idea; I haven't read it again in the last month or two, so it hasn't been fresh in my mind while working on this hack. But I reread the move a couple times after reading your reply and, for whatever reason, the move looks entirely different to me now. I think it was the name.

Further, I'd been looking at the two systems (Unknown Armies and Apocalypse World) and how they work (e.g. both, for the most part, have the PC rolling against a fixed difficulty that wasn't based on the specific situation, but rather on what's on the character's sheet--whether AW's miss/weak hit/strong hit or UA's rolling against your own skill). For reasons too long to explain right now, the act under fire move in AW struck me as similar to the "major skill checks" in UA, while most of the other AW moves felt more like "significant skill checks" (with "minor skill checks usually being stuff you don't bother rolling for in AW). That thought in the back of my head had lead me to think about act under fire as the default move to whip out whenever there was major consequences and you were rolling under intense pressure. I hadn't thought about it for a few days before writing my initial post, but I think it colored my sense that act under fire would basically replace seize by force for toe-to-toe combat.

Long story short, I'm reconsidering including Seize by Force... :-)

Madness

Thanks for your thoughts on Madness Meters, as well. I've been thinking about Madness a lot since reading your post and below are my current thoughts:

The Meters

I like your idea of cutting down to only three meters and I think your split makes sense. Violence and Unnatural feel distinct and are two that play a very immediate role in how many conflict scenes play out. The other three (Helplessness, Isolation, and Self) seem more similar in effect and stresses; I'm struggling to articulate exactly what they have in common, but I think it's that Violence and Unnatural are more likely to make you freak out right the fuck now, while Self, Isolation, and Loneliness are more likely to eat at you and erode you and totally fuck with your sense of who and what you are.

I even think it can be called "Self" and the lists of stresses can be combined. Even though there are differences between the three, Isolation and Helplessness hit you in a similar way to the cognitive dissonance of having done something you didn't think you would ever do...

Hardened Notches and Stress

I've also been intrigued by your idea about cutting down to a single stress track. While I want at least the three stress types for Hardened notches, I don't necessarily want to split them for the stress track (the Madness Clock).

In UA the only difference that the rank of the stress makes is to determine whether or not you make a stress check; it doesn't impact the difficulty of the check or change the severity of consequences.

Basically it works like this:

• If the rank of the stress is higher than your Hardened, then roll; if it's equal to or lower, then don't roll
• If you succeed at your roll, mark the lowest unmarked Hardened notch (i.e. your Hardened goes up by one)
• If you fail, mark the lowest unmarked Failed notch (i.e. your Failed goes up by one) and choose one of the reactions: panic, paralysis, or frenzy

So translated into AW mechanics, every failed stress check does 1-stress regardless of the severity of the stress trigger and every successful stress check causes +1-hardened.

If I use that system, then the Hardened wouldn't act as armor; instead they'd act as the threshold of whether or not you have to roll.

Hmm. So I'm trying to choose between that or treating stress as harm and Hardened as armor (e.g., a 5-stress event against a 2-hardened character would cause 3-stress).

What I'm currently leaning towards is having 3 separate "Hardened" tracks (one for each of the three madness meters) but only a single madness clock (so there would be a harm clock and a madness clock). This is in large part because suffering a mental derangement is based on any track filling with failed notches; the only difference the balance of failed notches across stress tracks makes in UA is the description of how your character acts (4 failed notches in Violence has different quirks and ticks than 4 failed notches in Self, for example). While those descriptions are great, the amount of simplification that can happen by having a single madness clock is worth the loss, I think (KISS).

The Stress Check

The stress check will be handled by a new peripheral move something like this:

When you suffer stress greater than your Hardened rank, roll+hard. On a 10+, get +1-hardened. On a 7-9, choose 1.

• get +1-hardened
• flip-out (panic, paralysis, or frenzy)

On a miss, take 1-stress and flip-out (panic, paralysis, or frenzy).

In UA, if you fail a stress check you have to choose one of three reactions (in addition to gaining another failed notch): Panic, Paralysis, or Frenzy. They're basically what they sound like (run away, freeze like a deer in the headlights, or attack the source of your stress until the cause of the stress is gone). These are built into the move above.

I'm thinking that the above move is only for acute stresses with a clear source (like most Violent or Unnatural stresses). For chronic or diffuse stresses (like isolation for extended periods or the cognitive dissonance of having done something you didn't think you could ever do) I'm thinking there would still be a move, but either you wouldn't have to choose one of those reactions (it's all about the slow erosion into madness without the moment of flipping out) or maybe there's a separate list (like Withdraw, Anxiety, or Anger, or something like that--I haven't really worked on it yet).

Stress Ranks

In UA, there are 10 stress ranks and Hardened goes up to 10. I'm trying to decide if I want to condense that. It would be easy to condense it to, say, 5 ranks by saying that rank 1 & 2 stresses become 1-stress, rank 3 & 4 stresses become 2-stress, and so on up to rank 9 & 10 being 5-stress.

This would have two main impacts:

• The size of the list of stresses and the number of Hardened notches
• How long it took to become a sociopath (see below)

I really don't know whether I'll do 10 (like UA), 5 (halving the list), 6 (and making them clocks?), or some other number...

Getting Crazy

If the madness clock fills up completely, that doesn't mean you're "taken out" or out of play. Instead you don't roll anymore: If the stress is under your Hardened, nothing happens and if it's over, then you automatically choose a reaction as if you failed.

The first time the clock fills up, you pick up a mental aberration. These are basically disorders that are "permanent" unless cured and that are closely tied to your obsession.

You can walk around with your madness clock filled all the way for most of the game, really.

Also, I'll need to figure out if that's too fast. 6 "slots" on the clock is potentially only 6 rolls away if you fail consistently... It might also depend on how available treatment and "mental first aid" are. It probably isn't worse than wounds, as long as treatment is fairly easy to get.

Getting Callous

Hardness is not benign; it helps you deal with stress, but you become callous. Mental stress makes characters vulnerable, but also makes them human.

In UA, you become a sociopath if two hardened tracks fill up all 10 hardened notches or if the character's total hardened notches exceeds 35. You suffer the below consequences until you get treatment

• You can no longer use your Passions*
• If you're an avatar, you can't use that avatar skill

(*Passions have a mechanical impact, so this is not just a role-playing change--I haven't talked about it yet, but I will)

The exact number (e.g. 35) would change since there's only 3 tracks now. Also, as I mentioned above, I might use a different number than 10 for the number of stress ranks and the number of hardened notches. But I am planning on having a threshold where you become so calloused that you're a sociopath.

Treatment

There will be rules for healing madness and hardness (in fact, the moves will probably be more detailed than the harm moves, since I'm not planning on having an Angel equivalent--there's a first aid move to stabilize someone who's dying and the rules for healing naturally are the same as AW, but if you go to a hospital, that's more of a time and narrative thing than a move--i.e. it's like going to an NPC Angel in AW).

The rules for helping madness will be similar to the UA rules (mental help before they're crazy and after they're crazy, plus "psychological first aid"). I'll work on defining those moves once I have the madness system nailed down, but they'll probably look something like on a 10+, remove a madness stress and a hardened rank, on a 7-9, choose one.

Madness and NPC's

NPC's Flipping-out

NPC's are definitely vulnerable to madness, especially flipping out (panic, paralysis, or frenzy). It seems to me like this is mainly relevant in fights or similar conflicts. The longer-term stuff, like is an NPC going crazy, is probably better handled as GM moves rather than mechanics, but knowing if they totally flip-out is definitely relevant in a fight.

So... my three current ideas are:

• to work it into the Basic Moves and other Character moves (so NPC's flipping out in your favor is a choice you can take for certain moves--mainly violent or unnatural ones)
• to make it GM moves (so the GM can have them run away or go berserk or whatever), or
• to have a separate peripheral move to determine if they freak out and how

I don't like the third option. I'm leaning towards a combo of the first two: Some moves have stress reactions built in and also stress reactions are part of the GM moves.

How hardened the NPC is against that particular kind of stress (Violence, Unnatural, etc.) can be a tag for NPC's and groups. How it all plays out is up to the GM, based on principles (e.g. barf forth apocalyptica (revised for the UA setting, look through crosshairs, respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards, etc.).

Riots

The rules for groups rioting is something I like in UA that helps give certain tenets of the setting some teeth. Unlike personal madness and flipping out for NPC's (see above), I'm thinking this should be a peripheral move. Like suffers harm, it's one that you want to miss. The bonus to the roll would be based on how overt the effect is (and/or modified by the size of the crowd, etc.).  I'll worry about the specifics later but wanted to jot it down while I was thinking about it.

...

I'm out of time tonight (I've already stayed up too late). As always, any and all responses and comments are very welcome!

(I had to split into two posts because it exceeded teh maximum length...)

Madness Meters

Madness meters are absolutely core to UA, in my opinion. My current plan is to treat them as "wound tracks" basically.

"Hardened" notches will work like they do in UA (if the stress is equal to or less than your number of notches, you don't take stress, etc.). "Failed" notches will also work the same, basically.

There will be a "when you take stress to one of your madness meters" move that is similar to the taking wounds move in AW, but which incorporates some of the ticks and madness consequences that come from stress damage. It will also cover things like freezing, running, etc. (giving choices of exactly what you do when you flip out, like in UA).

(I might wind up making hardened notches like AW armor (e.g. the roll = roll+stress level-hardened notches), but I probably won't, since you can't roll +10 in AW...)

It's more record keeping than AW usually is and it's a bit more complex than wounds, but basically it should work very similar to how it works in UA (with a peripheral move instead of rolling Mind), so I don't anticipate any major issues (e.g. it isn't more record-keeping than it is in UA).

Basic Moves and Peripheral Moves

The Basic Moves are mostly the same.

Open Your Mind (Weird) will work very similarly, but instead of opening to the psychic Maelstrom, it's paying attention and looking for the weird and occult and unnatural in a scene. Basically, its UA flavored. If you've read Last Call or the other books in that series by Tim Powers, many of them have idiosyncratic ways of doing mini-divinations, plus the UA stories and setting are full of weird coincidences and portents--those are the kind of stuff I have in mind. And, like the AW move, it encourages the players to ask the GM to throw in weirdness and it also gives a move for when they don't know what else to do. So really, it's just a re-skinning for the UA setting. Plus, Greg Stolze mentioned in one of the UA supplements that giving visions or flashes is so useful he's surprised he didn't make it a free move that every character has...

Seize by Force is being cut completely. It just doesn't seem to fit the vibe of UA to me.

Instead, I need to make a combat move...

Combat

The deadliness of combat is another core trait of UA, in my opinion. I want to capture that... but I also want to tweak it.

"Act Under Fire" (or a tweaked version of it) is the core combat move. You have to roll a strong hit before you do what you want without bad stuff happening back. That said, "failure" from weak hits is about hard choices. I don't really want characters dying left and right (though I don't want it completely off the table, either). Getting hurt is often a choice, but so are other, often more painful, consequences.

I'm thinking that there will be one or more playbook moves that allow a different style of combat. There will also be a lot of emphasis on how it's set up.

I'm also thinking of making a separate move for gunfights, but I'll look at that closer when I get to that point--basically if I decide it adds something, I'll do it, if not then I won't.

Going Aggro is a much better option when you can set it up that way (for one thing, if they push you, you'll actually get to shoot them instead of having to roll a 10+ or else accept some nasty choice). Plus, usually you want something if you're pulling out a gun or knife (even if it's to get them to back the fuck off and leave you alone).

Or shooting them from behind or while they're tied up is also good.

And like UA, combat shouldn't be the first choice (I loved the first page of UA, 2nd ed. combat chapter with its "6 ways to avoid a fight" article). Violence happens, but going toe-to-toe, in a fair fight, and trying to kill them is a dangerous thing to do and you aren't likely to walk out unscathed. I see it usually happening when something else gets botched or when they call you when you go aggro.

Magick

This is an important area, obviously. I'm playing around with several ideas but nothing is fully gelled yet and nothing is set in stone.

Adept Magick

I've mainly played with two approaches here: 1) Either each formula spell is a move and there's a move for random magick, or 2) there's a more generic set of moves (with each of the five "themes" of adepts having a different combination of them) and a set of "qualities"/"domains"/etc. by school that determine what you can do those moves with and/or to (sort of like an Ars Magica "Verb"/"Noun" system, but with both the verbs and nouns having a very different flavor and categorizations, since it is absolutely not meant to be a universal magick system--an Urbanomancer can mess with traffic, groups in his city, crowds, city hierarchies, even city vermin, but he can't do jack to traffic on a country highway and he can't do shit to probability in a gambling den (even if he could get the game interrupted by police or make you get in a wreck on your way home).

I lean towards the second, but I'm only willing to go for a more streamlined, flexible system if it keeps the UA feel. Often "universal magic systems" have entirely the wrong feel (like I mentioned, I don't want it to feel like Mage the Awakening or Ars Magica). So for now I'm going to try (and I'm optimistic), but I may end up scrapping it.

Charging Moves and Charges

I'm pretty sure that each adept school will each have a charging move. What that looks like will depend on which of the five  "themes" it belongs to.

For example, "Control" schools (dipsomancers, entropomancers, and epideromancers) are all about harm and penalties now in exchange for charges (or, in the case of entropomancers, the real chance of injury, penalty, or consequences). These are things that are done real-time in scenes. You do the harm (e.g. getting drunk, cutting yourself) or take the risk (e.g. playing catch with knives) and suffer the consequences. And you get the charge immediately.

The Acquisition, Hierarchy, and Manipulation schools are more about setting up and "harvesting" charges. They're handled like either "gigs" or surplus/want resources from AW. They're primarily done between sessions or in downtime, though each has the ability to happen real-time (like finding a rare book during a scene or being given cash). The three will have differences in how they're set up, but I'm not far enough along yet to say exactly what they are. (As an aside, I love how AW handles things like gigs and surplus/want and it's one of the things that really made me want to convert UA to AW, since in UA, certain schools just seemed so much easier to get charges and other schools often felt like they had to derail the story for a bit to get charges).

And finally, Creation schools have to spend the time and resources. they work similar to Savvyhead workspaces ("to make X you need to do/find/spend A, B, and C"). They also have something they can sacrifice to add to that (mechanomancers can give up memories and narqis can get high, suffering a penalty).

That's not all there is to getting charges (e.g. Mechanomancers and dipsomancers both can use significant historical artifacts to get extra juice, like drinking out of the coffee cup JFK used during the Cuban Missile Crisis or incorporating the first gramaphone into a machine), but that's the basics. I also haven't talked about the diffrence between Minor, Significant, and Major charges, yet. that's because I haven't worked it out completely yet.

Once you have charges, I'm not exactly sure how to handle them. I'm leaning towards mimicking UA: You keep a tally (so you might have 6 minor charges, 2 significant charges, and 0 major charges after building up for awhile) and you spend them for spells. They're sort of like "Hold", I suppose (I've idly wondered if there's a way I can make them Hold and do something clever to take advantage of AW mechanics, but nothing's come to mind yet...).

I'm also sort of brainstorming about simplifying it a bit or tweaking it to take advantage of AW mechanics. I only have very rough ideas, so I'll let them stew longer and talk about them later.

Taboos

Similarly, each "theme" of school has a type of taboo. For the most part, if you violate your taboo you're stripped of all your charges.

"Control" schools can't give up their source of mystic control (e.g. dipsomancers can't sober up). "Acquisition" schools can't give away what they have (even for a good reason--e.g. plutomancers may be rich but live as paupers) and can't damage the thing they collect. "Hierarchy" schools must constantly be in contact with their obsession and can't be away from it long (e.g. videomancers can't miss an episode of any of their shows). "Creation" schools are limited to their own, bizarre, hyper-specialized variation of a common form of creation and are largely cut off from the bulk of mainstream equivalents (e.g. mechanomancers can't incorporate any piece of functioning tech that came int ocommon usage after the 1800's). "Manipulation" schools use a type of human interaction for power but are cut off from authentic, non-ritualized versions of it (e.g. pornomancers can't make love or enjoy sex as a way to be closer to someone),

Rituals

I've been rereading Last Call by Tim Powers (one of the inspirations for parts of UA, especially for avatars). Because of that, and my general preferences, I want to make rituals a little more common.

Basically, I want tilt and proxy rituals to be "postmodern" rituals that can be designed and created by anyone with the know-how (which includes any adept, any conscious avatar, and any one with any thaumaturgy training--probably represented by a move). They're probably created similar to Savvyhead Workspace, though with the list of components based more on the lists in UA. Maybe "Proxy Rituals" is a move and "Tilt Rituals" is a move... something like that.

Then there are the old rituals, from the pre-modern era of magick. these are just like the rituals in UA. Each does something specific. They are often pretty overt and powerful, but usually take a long time to cast. Also, the vast majority of them don't work anymore and no one knows how to make more like them.

These really work just like UA rituals. Each one is "equipment", not character moves. You find, steal, or buy them. Each one is a custom move. The GM can make them up as needed, plus I'll probably convert some or all of the rituals in UA and the supplements I have.

As equipment, the GM can make GM moves like taking it away, making them pay, or activating the downside of their crap (which might be that someone knows they have it and wants to take it from them).

I haven't really thought about stuff like "how many rituals can they have memorized"--maybe a number equal to their Sharp? Like I said, I haven't really thought about it much.

Avatar Magick

Ah, avatars. After reading Last Call, I love avatars. (When I first discovered UA, I was much more drawn to adepts, but I've found my tastes shifting over time--mind you, I still think adepts are cool)

I'm thinking that each avatar is a "mini-playbook" that adds on top of other playbooks. Recently, Sage LaTorra and crew out out a Dungeon World supplement with a few mini-playbooks and that's what I'm using as a rough model. There's an intre mov

You have to attune yourself to the avatar (basically go through the "becoming an avatar" steps in UA, except there's no mechanical effect yet). After that, the next time you get an advancement, you can buy the first channel of the Archetype. I'm not exactly sure what the attunement process looks like. Maybe it's something like an obligation gig? Maybe you just have to follow the taboo for a certain period (whether that's downtime between sessions or time in session)? I haven't worked on that yet.

There are probably four moves per avatar--one for each "channel" in UA. I'll probably base them pretty closely on the UA avatar channels, though a few I'll tweak either because I think I can make it fit UA better or because I personally just dislike a certain channel.

Each channel move will have prerequisites. The first prerequisite is having all the channel moves below it. I also have the idea that the taboo gets stricter at each step and so you basically have to "attune" to each step like the initial boost. (This is why low-level avatars are fairly common, even among people who don't realize they're avatars, but the higher channels are mostly made up of clued-in avatars who are consciously walking the path of one of the archetypes).

As far as the taboos go... the UA method of saying your skill drops every time you violate doesn't really fit the AW system. UA, as a percentil system, can bump skills up or down a little bit with little impact, but +/-1 is a big deal in AW... plus there isn't a separate stat for avatar magick anyway.

I'm thinking that if you violate a level of taboo, you lose all channel moves of that level and higher (so violate the taboo of the 3rd level channel and you just lose 3rd and 4th channel moves, but violate the most basic level 1 taboo and you lose all channels). This is a temporary thing. There will probably be some sort of "atonement/re-attunement" move, or maybe you jsut have to go through the "attunment" process again (no advancements required since you've already bought them).

If that's too harsh, there could be a peripheral when you violate your avatar taboo move so there are 3 tiers of consequences (strong hit, weak hit, miss) and only a miss (or a strong hit if it's roll+level of infraction, like the wounded move) do you lose complete access, Other options include things like "-1ongoing until (x)", etc. Hell, there could even be options like drawing the unwanted attention of either your archetype or opposed members of the Invisible Clergy... It's all still in the early phases at this point.

Adepts becoming Avatars

On the one hand, the Freak is cool and I know that adept/avatar combos are part of the canonical UA setting. But I've seen a number of annoying combinations that feel like players trying to tweak their characters (like Masterless Man combined with Epideromancer--which I suppose could be cool, but it was done for the mechanical combo, not the story potential). The UA setting says that to be both you basically have to be crazy, but the rules for the taboos don't always enforce that.

The point is that I want it to be posible for an adept to become an avatar, but I want it to feel like a big deal.

The first thing is that you can't start as an adept and an avatar at character creation. That's personal preference and I realize not everyone will like that.

Second, the attunement process is about focus. During that period, you can't use your charging moves and you lose all your current charges (effectively you violate your adept taboo by focusing on an archetype instead of your magick). If you get a charge, then you have to start the attunement over. (Note that I'd allow a plutomancer to receive money but choose not to get a charge, or a videomancer to wathc their show without getting a charge, etc.)  So during the attunement process, you are basically cut off from your Adept magick completely.

Maybe I'll just say that you can't use any of your current charges rather than saying they're stripped...?

Then I imagine that the successive levels of taboos for each channel get more restrictive.

The first level is largely proactive ("act like this and/or do this at least this often and you're good") and the amount of effort and concentration it takes leaves plenty of time and energy for pursuing your adept magick. The fourth level is very restrictive (basically you have to act like the archetype almost every waking moment). Being a first channel or even second channel avatar and being an adept of a sympathetic school should be fairly easy (as long as they aren't totally opposed--you couldn't be a plutomancer and the avatar of the Wealthy Philanthropist or the Trust Fund Kid, for example). but third channel and fourth channel avatars who are also adepts should be hard. The two have to be very sympathetic and closely matched and it pretty much dominates your life (though high-level avatars and adepts are both pretty obsessive already, so they're the types to try it).

Again, any thoughts, criticisms, and suggestions on what I have so far are very welcome. :)

Thanks!

Thanks for the comments, guys. I haven't really worked on this since my last post because I suddenly got busier than I expected. Plus, with the time I've had I've been reading a lot of threads about AW and about hacking AW and trying to get a better basic understanding of the blood and guts of AW so I can do a wraith hack more justice.

But I am still working on this so stay tuned... :-)

I loved Wraith: The Oblivion when it came out and it still has a special place in my gamer heart, so I was intrigued by the Necrology hack by fnord3125 (Brian Peters) and read through all of the posts yesterday. It's rekindled my interest in running a Wraith campaign and I think that Apocalypse World would work well for the type of stories I want to do with Wraith these days.

Fnord3125 mentions in his hack that he chose to focus on the interactions with the living world and so chose to cut a lot of the Wraith politics, etc. I really like the direction he's going, but it got me thinking about running a Wraith campaign in the opposite direction: Instead of focusing on Wraith as a way to tell ghost stories, I want to use the Wraith setting for a dark, fantastic quasi-"post apocalyptic" game (with your own death being the "apocalypse" and the necropoli, Shadowlands, Tempest, etc. being the fucked-up post-apoc world you're in now). Really, it's the setting (especially the Tempest, Labyrinth, Oblivion, Malfeans, etc., plus the epic scope of some of the storylines) that really grabbed me. Though (like Necrology), I'm planning on lessening or cutting the influence of Stygia and the Hierarchy because I want it to be more local and about the characters in the campaign...

In many ways I'm keeping it very close to Apocalypse World--even keeping many of the same playbooks with cosmetic re-skinning. There's also a lot of great stuff in Necrology that I plan on stealing liberally (with grateful acknowledgements to fnord3125).

I'll be adding more posts soon as I continue to work on this. I just started thinking about it yesterday and am still in early phases.

Also, I admit that I may not ever finish this. I'm in the middle of another campaign right now and haven't run the idea by my players yet. We've only played one Wraith game. It was a smaller story arc within a larger Changeling campaign. It's still talked about fondly over a decade later, but it's also made the group nervous about ever playing Wraith again since I went straight for the jugular--it was a classic "underworld descent" right before the climax of a long, epic campaign and I made it very dark and intense (even for Wraith)...

-John B.