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robotnik2004A few months ago I mentioned the film student who was interested in trying to turn Unknown USA into a screenplay. He and I have bounced a couple of emails back and forth since then with him asking for clarifications and elaborations of various things on the wiki. All y'all who have GM'ed before know how fun and rare and self-indulgent that is, somebody actually asking you to yammer on at length about some old game of yours. So that's fun.
The first question he hit me with was "what's the deal with Danny Greer?" and my answer turned into a frickin novel, which, among other things explains what the hell I thought was going on in that session with the Hollow Earth and the Silver Age Knights of the Road and the Oneiros. Which you sure didn't ask to read, but that's what LJ-cuts and the vertical scroll bar are for.
It's interesting for me to come at the game again through the eyes of somebody just reading the Wiki because, for all its thoroughness, there's a lot it leaves out. Basically the players used the wiki as we played the game to record their theories about what was going on. I as Game Master occasionally clarified points of fact or filled in things they may have forgotten, but mostly I let the players take the lead on what was entered there. That means that the wiki is a great resource for things the players figured out, but it has very little that a) the players didn't figure out or b) all the players knew in the first place and didn't feel necessary to post. So from my point of view, Danny was a major character (until after Session 12, when Chris F., his player, moved away from Boston and had to leave the game), but I can see how he makes barely a ripple on the wiki.
I'll try to give you the gist of his storyline, and then what you do with it is up to you. Seven PCs (8 if you count Sue and more if you count the one-shot sessions) was a good number for our game because on any given Monday two or three people wouldn't be able to make it, and besides, we all wanted to play. But unlike a game, 7 is a lot of protagonists for a screenplay, so if you decide to cut or combine characters, I won't fault you for it. Just don't make me pick: I love them all!
OK. So when we first meet Danny in Memphis in Session 3, he's just been let out of prison where he served seven years for kidnapping a low rent televangelist named Sam Lully. He's a big, quiet, sort of slow talking, lumbering guy with a bad prison buzzcut and a five mile stare. Looks like he's not all there, touched in the head or something. The first thing he does when he gets off the bus from prison is toss his meds in the trash, along with his parole officer's name and address. Without his meds, Danny hears voices. Mostly, he hears old songs, songs that nobody else believes ever existed (most typically one about daffodils). But he also hears voices uttering prophesy. Sometimes helpful, often scary: one recurring creepy one being "GOD IS RED." And he's being pursued or harassed by Lully's goons who are part of a weird cult/pyramid scheme called IAM.
What we know of Danny's story at the start is this: once, Danny had a happy, normal life, with a wife and two kids. They lived in a mobile home in Winona, Arizona. Something terrible happened to him. He says his home was struck by a meteor, but nobody believes him. He lost his mind, his wife, and his kids. Now there's a chunk of meteorite in his skull and he hears weird voices, picks up radio stations nobody else can hear. And he remembers things that nobody else remembers. He remembers old pop songs and brands of cigarettes and TV shows that nobody else does. He remembers how America was different before. Not a lot different, just a little. But better, nicer, truer. Most of all he remembers his family and his home. He's been in and out of psychiatric institutions and prisons and halfway houses ever since. And all he wants is to get back home. But he can't. She's dead and they've taken the kids away.
In play, Danny was a bit of a weirdo even in a group of weirdos. But he was gentle and reliable and tough. Many times Joe or Reese or especially Mickey would get goaded into some fight and the guns would come out and it would look like there was going to be blood for sure, and Danny would charge in and drag the others out of there to safety.
In a flashback before Session 6 or 7, we played some of Danny's backstory with Rev. Lully: Some point in the 1990s, after Danny had lost his family, before he'd learned to deal (slightly) with the voices in his head. Lully, then operating a cult disguised as a cult deprogramming center, came to see him in a mental institution, and told him that unlike his regular doctors, he knew about the voices, because he heard them too. And he told Danny a whole freaky story about the Deros and the Teros, evil and good robots that live in the hollow earth and control our minds with radio waves. (Google "the Shaver Mystery" if you haven't heard of the Dero and Tero before.) Danny was freaked out, could tell Lully was bad news, but Lully wanted Danny's help, and the help of his third eye, to fight the Deros. Lully had Danny signed over to his custody.
So, what was going on with Danny and Lully? Well, to answer that I have to bring in cliomancy and MONARCH and the events of Session 12. In Unknown Armies, as I think you know, there's a school of magic called cliomancy, which means history-magic, and cliomancers get their charges from the psychic energy that builds up around important historical sites. But even though cliomancers are obsessed with history, they can't actually change the past, they can just memories. All the cliomantic spells are variations of memory changing and mind control. (I've always thought this was a cool cynical statement about history by Stolze and Tynes.) Anyway, in the UA rulebook, if you've read it, you'll know that the cliomancers claim to be descended from the wizards of Atlantis, but this isn't true. Somebody cast a cliomantic spell on the cliomancers themselves and screwed up their memories so they only think they're from Atlantis. I liked that little anecdote so I Americanized and updated it, making the cliomancers a CIA mind control project called MONARCH and swapping Atlantis with Lemuria and the Hollow Earth and the Dero and Tero mystery. (I also tossed in elements from the role-playing game Nephilim, which is where I got a lot of my info on nephilim and orichalka and the like.)
So Danny was hearing voices, and Lully insisted the voices were robots from the Hollow Earth, but Danny didn't want to believe him, and there was a whole rich backstory involving CIA mind control and MONARCH and William Jennings Bryan III, who we didn't make up - apparently, according to the internet at least, the grandson of the great Populist orator William Jennings Bryan was a CIA mind control expert in the 1950s. (That's one of the many awesome facts that the players, not me, contributed to the game.)
BUT, before we could uncover all this rich conspiratorial goodness, Chris F., the player of Danny, got a job in another city and announced he had to leave the game. So the tripartite story of Session 12 was an attempt to explain and wrap up Danny's whole story. Go reread that if you haven't recently and then I'll explain what was going on there.
To begin with, there was never any Dero and Tero. Those were just crazy stories in pulp magazines. The adventure of "Doc Lully's Pulp Heros" described in Session 12 was (originally) a fantasy in the fertile mind of a nerdy sci-fi loving kid growing up in the 1950s named Sam Lully.
But then, in the turbulent 1960s, the cliomancers of Project MONARCH (led by William Jennings Bryan III and including a nerdy grad student named Sam Lully) decided to use the Oneiros to change history--in particular, to crush the radicalism erupting in the late 1960s and make America loyal and placid and true. At the same time, a bunch of hippy radicals (the League of Good Trips, led by William Jennings Bryan IV, son of WJB III) tried to interfere and change history their way, creating a groovy world of freaky far out loving. But as described in the Session 12 Dear Brother letters, the two groups foiled one another and it was not Captain Trips' utopia of liberation or MONARCH's dream of control, but Sam Lully's pulp fantasy of Tero and Dero that, amplified by the Oneiros, "became" history. Not in the sense that it actually happened, but in the sense that everyone present became utterly convinced that it had.
So MONARCH, originally a CIA mind-control program, became infected with its own mind control, and utterly devoted to fighting the (previously non-existent) mind control robots from the hollow earth. They kept working at changing history - never actually changing history, just changing people's minds, trying to remake America in their own paranoid image, screwing with history, making the country more and more frightened and alienated from its own past. Over time, MONARCH would fall apart as a CIA operation (somebody said they were privatized in the 1980s - all the mind controllers went into telemarketing and kids' TV), but a version of the group resurfaced in the 1990s, under Sam Lully's control, as the IAM cult.
Now what does all this have to do with Danny? Well, Danny's house was struck by a meteorite of orichalka. It killed his wife and a chunk of the stuff was embedded in his skull. And orichalka erases magic. It destroys Nephilim (as when Homer Beulay killed or trapped the Nome King in his coal mine and when Waylon killed Abaddon with his car), it kills Selenim (as with the larger meteor that killed the Buffalo in 1938 and destroyed all magic in Kansas), and it erases cliomantic mind control.
So, when Danny got the chunk of orichalka in his head, he could suddenly see through all the ways MONARCH and IAM and every other cliomancer anywhere had changed history, remembering things the way they were before. A lot of what he remembered was trivial, detritus of history like songs and cigarette packs, but he also remembered a kinder, truer America.
Chris' abrupt departure meant we couldn't play out all the ramifications of this story at length. (There was a session I really wanted to do where the PCs tracked down the Eye-Biting Man in the Black Hills of the Dakotas and got the Oneiros back from his insane survivalist band and learned the terrible fate of the rest of the Silver Age Knights of the Road.) But everyone was happy with the retirement we found for him. Of course he couldn't go home again. That was the pathos of his whole story. But he found the next best thing, a place where (thanks to the massive orichalka meteor that struck the Yucatan and killed the saurians) he could clearly remember and (thanks to the secret radio station) maybe help others to remember too.
Symbolically, Danny was the "Dorothy" of our group, because of his initials (D.G., Dorothy Gale / Danny Greer), because in the Oz Tarot Dorothy was the Fool, and because all he wanted was to go home. In the flashback to the night the meteor struck, Danny was watching The Wizard of Oz on TV with little Harmony and baby D.J. Harmony quizzed her Daddy about Dorothy: what does "there's no place like home" mean? Why did she want to go home so much? Isn't Oz much nicer than Kansas? After Chris left, Angie sort of took his place as Dorothy (initially it had seemed too obvious to make the one girl be Dorothy).
So the Danny / Lully / IAM story never quite got resolved the way we all wanted it too, but that tripartite Session 12 was great fun, and I think Danny's story had a lot of heart. (All credit to Chris' portrayal of him, which managed to be inarticulate yet deep, big-hearted yet superficially weird. His whole story was about history and how nostalgia is a burden and how you can't really go home again. And it was cool to have Harmony and D.J. show up in Session 17, looking for their Dad and foiling Lully. There's no reason they won't find him down there in Mexico someday.
Whew! As you can see, you asked more than you knew. But that's the story of Danny Greer, and I'm pleased to have told it here since the wiki doesn't do it justice. Do with it what you will.
More answers to come. (Shorter ones, I promise.)
Rob
(Of course, the exact date that the story takes place is not clear. We played the game in 2002-2003 and generally assumed it was "nowadays," but there were few specific contemporary references. There's talk of Google and the internet, but there's no reference to 9-11 or the Iraq War or anything like that.)
You know that many of the non-player characters are real historical figures, right? Legal Tender Coxey was the real life son of the real life "General Jake," Jacob Coxey (1854-1951), who named him "Legal Tender" as a sign of his devotion to monetary reform (thus mystically tying Legal's health to the health of the American dollar) He was born in 1893, just before the 1894 march of Coxey's Army (see Wikipedia). In real life, Legal Coxey died in childhood of scarlet fever in 1901 or so. In our game, yes, Legal would have to be well over 100, his life preserved by its sorcerous connection to the American economy. The scene where he betrays his fellows & kills the actual Dan Siegel and steals his name, was sometime in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Barron Collier is real too (1873-1939). His life was presumably extended by exposure to the water-ka / Fountain of Youth - even though that's now in the hands of Walt Disneyworld.
The first question he hit me with was "what's the deal with Danny Greer?" and my answer turned into a frickin novel, which, among other things explains what the hell I thought was going on in that session with the Hollow Earth and the Silver Age Knights of the Road and the Oneiros. Which you sure didn't ask to read, but that's what LJ-cuts and the vertical scroll bar are for.
So! To begin with, QUESTIONS!Whew! You started with a doozy.
#1. Concerning Danny Greer
There is a small problem with adapting the charater of Greer. Namely, I fear that with a few exceptions (I'm thinking mostly of the incident in Chicago with the brainwashing and such) I'm not really sure who he is or what he actually does. His character bio reads only a single line, and other than the fact that I know where he is, and that he's got two kids, I don't know anything about him really. I intend to go over the Dear Brother letters once more, and this time with a very cautious eye, so maybe that will clear a few things up, but presently I just don't know enough about him. Also, the fact that he has two kids, one of which, if I remember correctly, is close to being an adult, leads me to ask the following:
It's interesting for me to come at the game again through the eyes of somebody just reading the Wiki because, for all its thoroughness, there's a lot it leaves out. Basically the players used the wiki as we played the game to record their theories about what was going on. I as Game Master occasionally clarified points of fact or filled in things they may have forgotten, but mostly I let the players take the lead on what was entered there. That means that the wiki is a great resource for things the players figured out, but it has very little that a) the players didn't figure out or b) all the players knew in the first place and didn't feel necessary to post. So from my point of view, Danny was a major character (until after Session 12, when Chris F., his player, moved away from Boston and had to leave the game), but I can see how he makes barely a ripple on the wiki.
I'll try to give you the gist of his storyline, and then what you do with it is up to you. Seven PCs (8 if you count Sue and more if you count the one-shot sessions) was a good number for our game because on any given Monday two or three people wouldn't be able to make it, and besides, we all wanted to play. But unlike a game, 7 is a lot of protagonists for a screenplay, so if you decide to cut or combine characters, I won't fault you for it. Just don't make me pick: I love them all!
OK. So when we first meet Danny in Memphis in Session 3, he's just been let out of prison where he served seven years for kidnapping a low rent televangelist named Sam Lully. He's a big, quiet, sort of slow talking, lumbering guy with a bad prison buzzcut and a five mile stare. Looks like he's not all there, touched in the head or something. The first thing he does when he gets off the bus from prison is toss his meds in the trash, along with his parole officer's name and address. Without his meds, Danny hears voices. Mostly, he hears old songs, songs that nobody else believes ever existed (most typically one about daffodils). But he also hears voices uttering prophesy. Sometimes helpful, often scary: one recurring creepy one being "GOD IS RED." And he's being pursued or harassed by Lully's goons who are part of a weird cult/pyramid scheme called IAM.
What we know of Danny's story at the start is this: once, Danny had a happy, normal life, with a wife and two kids. They lived in a mobile home in Winona, Arizona. Something terrible happened to him. He says his home was struck by a meteor, but nobody believes him. He lost his mind, his wife, and his kids. Now there's a chunk of meteorite in his skull and he hears weird voices, picks up radio stations nobody else can hear. And he remembers things that nobody else remembers. He remembers old pop songs and brands of cigarettes and TV shows that nobody else does. He remembers how America was different before. Not a lot different, just a little. But better, nicer, truer. Most of all he remembers his family and his home. He's been in and out of psychiatric institutions and prisons and halfway houses ever since. And all he wants is to get back home. But he can't. She's dead and they've taken the kids away.
In play, Danny was a bit of a weirdo even in a group of weirdos. But he was gentle and reliable and tough. Many times Joe or Reese or especially Mickey would get goaded into some fight and the guns would come out and it would look like there was going to be blood for sure, and Danny would charge in and drag the others out of there to safety.
In a flashback before Session 6 or 7, we played some of Danny's backstory with Rev. Lully: Some point in the 1990s, after Danny had lost his family, before he'd learned to deal (slightly) with the voices in his head. Lully, then operating a cult disguised as a cult deprogramming center, came to see him in a mental institution, and told him that unlike his regular doctors, he knew about the voices, because he heard them too. And he told Danny a whole freaky story about the Deros and the Teros, evil and good robots that live in the hollow earth and control our minds with radio waves. (Google "the Shaver Mystery" if you haven't heard of the Dero and Tero before.) Danny was freaked out, could tell Lully was bad news, but Lully wanted Danny's help, and the help of his third eye, to fight the Deros. Lully had Danny signed over to his custody.
So, what was going on with Danny and Lully? Well, to answer that I have to bring in cliomancy and MONARCH and the events of Session 12. In Unknown Armies, as I think you know, there's a school of magic called cliomancy, which means history-magic, and cliomancers get their charges from the psychic energy that builds up around important historical sites. But even though cliomancers are obsessed with history, they can't actually change the past, they can just memories. All the cliomantic spells are variations of memory changing and mind control. (I've always thought this was a cool cynical statement about history by Stolze and Tynes.) Anyway, in the UA rulebook, if you've read it, you'll know that the cliomancers claim to be descended from the wizards of Atlantis, but this isn't true. Somebody cast a cliomantic spell on the cliomancers themselves and screwed up their memories so they only think they're from Atlantis. I liked that little anecdote so I Americanized and updated it, making the cliomancers a CIA mind control project called MONARCH and swapping Atlantis with Lemuria and the Hollow Earth and the Dero and Tero mystery. (I also tossed in elements from the role-playing game Nephilim, which is where I got a lot of my info on nephilim and orichalka and the like.)
So Danny was hearing voices, and Lully insisted the voices were robots from the Hollow Earth, but Danny didn't want to believe him, and there was a whole rich backstory involving CIA mind control and MONARCH and William Jennings Bryan III, who we didn't make up - apparently, according to the internet at least, the grandson of the great Populist orator William Jennings Bryan was a CIA mind control expert in the 1950s. (That's one of the many awesome facts that the players, not me, contributed to the game.)
BUT, before we could uncover all this rich conspiratorial goodness, Chris F., the player of Danny, got a job in another city and announced he had to leave the game. So the tripartite story of Session 12 was an attempt to explain and wrap up Danny's whole story. Go reread that if you haven't recently and then I'll explain what was going on there.
To begin with, there was never any Dero and Tero. Those were just crazy stories in pulp magazines. The adventure of "Doc Lully's Pulp Heros" described in Session 12 was (originally) a fantasy in the fertile mind of a nerdy sci-fi loving kid growing up in the 1950s named Sam Lully.
But then, in the turbulent 1960s, the cliomancers of Project MONARCH (led by William Jennings Bryan III and including a nerdy grad student named Sam Lully) decided to use the Oneiros to change history--in particular, to crush the radicalism erupting in the late 1960s and make America loyal and placid and true. At the same time, a bunch of hippy radicals (the League of Good Trips, led by William Jennings Bryan IV, son of WJB III) tried to interfere and change history their way, creating a groovy world of freaky far out loving. But as described in the Session 12 Dear Brother letters, the two groups foiled one another and it was not Captain Trips' utopia of liberation or MONARCH's dream of control, but Sam Lully's pulp fantasy of Tero and Dero that, amplified by the Oneiros, "became" history. Not in the sense that it actually happened, but in the sense that everyone present became utterly convinced that it had.
So MONARCH, originally a CIA mind-control program, became infected with its own mind control, and utterly devoted to fighting the (previously non-existent) mind control robots from the hollow earth. They kept working at changing history - never actually changing history, just changing people's minds, trying to remake America in their own paranoid image, screwing with history, making the country more and more frightened and alienated from its own past. Over time, MONARCH would fall apart as a CIA operation (somebody said they were privatized in the 1980s - all the mind controllers went into telemarketing and kids' TV), but a version of the group resurfaced in the 1990s, under Sam Lully's control, as the IAM cult.
Now what does all this have to do with Danny? Well, Danny's house was struck by a meteorite of orichalka. It killed his wife and a chunk of the stuff was embedded in his skull. And orichalka erases magic. It destroys Nephilim (as when Homer Beulay killed or trapped the Nome King in his coal mine and when Waylon killed Abaddon with his car), it kills Selenim (as with the larger meteor that killed the Buffalo in 1938 and destroyed all magic in Kansas), and it erases cliomantic mind control.
So, when Danny got the chunk of orichalka in his head, he could suddenly see through all the ways MONARCH and IAM and every other cliomancer anywhere had changed history, remembering things the way they were before. A lot of what he remembered was trivial, detritus of history like songs and cigarette packs, but he also remembered a kinder, truer America.
Chris' abrupt departure meant we couldn't play out all the ramifications of this story at length. (There was a session I really wanted to do where the PCs tracked down the Eye-Biting Man in the Black Hills of the Dakotas and got the Oneiros back from his insane survivalist band and learned the terrible fate of the rest of the Silver Age Knights of the Road.) But everyone was happy with the retirement we found for him. Of course he couldn't go home again. That was the pathos of his whole story. But he found the next best thing, a place where (thanks to the massive orichalka meteor that struck the Yucatan and killed the saurians) he could clearly remember and (thanks to the secret radio station) maybe help others to remember too.
Symbolically, Danny was the "Dorothy" of our group, because of his initials (D.G., Dorothy Gale / Danny Greer), because in the Oz Tarot Dorothy was the Fool, and because all he wanted was to go home. In the flashback to the night the meteor struck, Danny was watching The Wizard of Oz on TV with little Harmony and baby D.J. Harmony quizzed her Daddy about Dorothy: what does "there's no place like home" mean? Why did she want to go home so much? Isn't Oz much nicer than Kansas? After Chris left, Angie sort of took his place as Dorothy (initially it had seemed too obvious to make the one girl be Dorothy).
So the Danny / Lully / IAM story never quite got resolved the way we all wanted it too, but that tripartite Session 12 was great fun, and I think Danny's story had a lot of heart. (All credit to Chris' portrayal of him, which managed to be inarticulate yet deep, big-hearted yet superficially weird. His whole story was about history and how nostalgia is a burden and how you can't really go home again. And it was cool to have Harmony and D.J. show up in Session 17, looking for their Dad and foiling Lully. There's no reason they won't find him down there in Mexico someday.
Whew! As you can see, you asked more than you knew. But that's the story of Danny Greer, and I'm pleased to have told it here since the wiki doesn't do it justice. Do with it what you will.
More answers to come. (Shorter ones, I promise.)
Rob
#2. AgesThis is more straightforward than the Danny question. Angie is the youngest of the main group - I think she's like 19 or 20. Ben is a recent college graduate, which makes him mid-20s. Sue is in her late 20s. Mickey is in his late 20s or early 30s and Reese is in his mid-30s. I'm not sure if it's explained on the wiki, but Reese and Mickey begin the story as friends and compatriots, having done some odd jobs for the Dixie Mafia together and spent some time in jail. Waylon is six or seven years older than his brother Reese, which makes him early 40s. Danny is in the same vicinity. (Danny's daughter Harmony is 16 or so at the time the main story takes place; his son Danny Jr. is 10 or so.) Blind Joe Biscuit is probably not actually over 100, since it's established that he's a close contemporary of blues legend Robert Johnson (b. 1911) (there was a scene, possibly not on the wiki, where Joe was taunted by Johnston's spirit, now in thrall to the Man). And I believe Joe's fateful meeting with the Man at the Crossroads (at which Joe was a young man) took place during/just before the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. So "over 100" may be an exaggeration. I'd peg him as 90 or so. But given his lifestyle, it would seem his lifespan was extended by some occult means.
How old are the characters? I know that Blind Joe is over a hundred, and judging from some Dear Brother comments I get the impression that Ben is fairly young (maybe late 20s or so) and I'm pretty sure I recall something that said Angie was the youngest of the group, but as for the others, I'm somewhat flying blind. This applies to pretty much everybody, not just the main characters: for Legal Tender Coxey certainly seems pretty darn old himself, but how old? His father was around well before the 20th Century began, and I got the impression that he was in his middle age years or so when he backstabbed his crew in Kansas in the late 40s (I think it was. Slowly I'm basically creating files on the main characters, as of yet though I'm going on memory for several aspects though, heh). How some folks got to be that old, Barron Collier, Tender, Joe, I simply chalk that up to mystical processes taking their toll and extending life.
(Of course, the exact date that the story takes place is not clear. We played the game in 2002-2003 and generally assumed it was "nowadays," but there were few specific contemporary references. There's talk of Google and the internet, but there's no reference to 9-11 or the Iraq War or anything like that.)
You know that many of the non-player characters are real historical figures, right? Legal Tender Coxey was the real life son of the real life "General Jake," Jacob Coxey (1854-1951), who named him "Legal Tender" as a sign of his devotion to monetary reform (thus mystically tying Legal's health to the health of the American dollar) He was born in 1893, just before the 1894 march of Coxey's Army (see Wikipedia). In real life, Legal Coxey died in childhood of scarlet fever in 1901 or so. In our game, yes, Legal would have to be well over 100, his life preserved by its sorcerous connection to the American economy. The scene where he betrays his fellows & kills the actual Dan Siegel and steals his name, was sometime in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Barron Collier is real too (1873-1939). His life was presumably extended by exposure to the water-ka / Fountain of Youth - even though that's now in the hands of Walt Disneyworld.
