Unearthed Americana
Sep. 2nd, 2003 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004We played Unknown USA last night. Fun session (for me, at least—I hope all that sitting around the cornfield wasn't too passive for the players) with more guy-hanging-from-a-ferris-wheel comedy than you might think possible. It's great to have Brant back, too. His animated disgust at just about everything that happens to his character is like ambrosia for a GM.
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bryant and jeregenest, both of whom are genuine published RPG authors, with all the wealth and status that entails*, have been telling me, half seriously, half in jest, that we should write up and submit our game as a possible sourcebook for Atlas Games. Knowing me and knowing my schedule, I don't think that will really happen, but their praise is flattering, and it's fun to think about.
If I did ever do it, though, I don't think I (or we—no way I'd do something like this without unloading half the work onto the rest of the gang) would just convert Unknown USA into a scenario or setting book. For one thing, Atlas is already publishing an American road-trip adventure; for another, a lot of our story has been written specifically with the PCs in mind; and for another, I've stolen tons of ideas and crunchy bits from other games and settings, so those couldn't be used in a submission for publication.
But there are, I don't mind saying, some pretty cool ideas at the center of our game, and the exercise of UA-ifying American history certainly appeals to me. So, if I was to convert Unknown USA into something possibly publishable, even though I'm not, if I was, here's a little woolgathering about my hypothetical dream UA project.
(It should go without saying that I don't know anything about the economics of game publishing in general (not pretty, I imagine) or Atlas and UA in particular. Nor do I know their feelings about mucking about with UA canon. Basically I'm just imagining the kind of UA book I would love to read myself.)
Unearthed Americana
(just a working title - a pun on the old AD&D hardcover)
UA:UA would be a setting anthology rather than a book about one organization or a collection of ready-to-play scenarios. It would have six or seven chapters, and each chapter would cover one place and time in American history through the UA lens: Chicago in 1893, Los Angeles in 1952, and so on. A little like the "incarnation eras" in Nephilim. Each chapter would have some "real life" history and setting info, a look at the players in the occult underground of that era, some NPCs and crunchy bits (a magical school here, an archetype or artifact there), and some sample cabals and campaign ideas like in the 2nd edition rulebook (those were my favorite part of the book to read). Maybe some of those first-person "Witness" monologues like in the rulebook too (also a favorite of mine). Or a "What You Hear" section (ditto).
There would be certain consistent threads running through the chapters, both things from canon UA and also things from my version of America's secret history, like the Secret Civil War and the Goldbugs and the various incarnations of the League of Good Roads. But these chapters would essentially be snapshots, meant to stand on their own as settings for play. There would be very little narrative of what happens in between the eras or even how they play out. Ideally, each era would be like the best of the published UA scenarios: no metastory, no "this happens next," just a cauldron of people and factions at each others' throats, ready to rumble. A hyper-tense web of conflicts and clashes, like one of those five-way John Woo Mexican standoffs, just waiting for some PCs to set the whole thing ablaze. (Mix metaphors much, Rob?) The idea would be that people could play in whichever places and eras interested them, (plus extrapolate their own moments in time), and in so doing, let their own play craft the true occult history of America.
And the places and eras? Well, it's trivially easy to list dozens of cool times and places to play in. But these (below) are the ones that come to my mind. They all have some connection to our Unknown USA game, they've all been under-used in RPGs as far as I can tell, and they all have some indefinable quality that makes them seem "UA" to me. I guess they're all moments when and where, as the back of the UA book says, "Something big is going down. You don't know what. But you can feel it all around you." They're mostly gritty, hard-boiled eras but they're also moments where big things really seemed up for grabs. They're places and times where American idealism and American cynicism got right in each other's faces, where the shit came down, where everybody was rushing somewhere but nobody had a map.
Philadelphia, 1776
It all starts here, right? The Revolution UA-ified, with Adam Weishaupt's attempt to replace George Washington (major artifact: Washington's wooden teeth) and Ben Franklin's bid for ascension and the Masonic Civil War and the truth about the madness of King George. Also, the ragged armies of the Revolution, the common people swept up in a battle of brother against brother for motives both pure and black.
Chicago, 1893
Nature's metropolis, America's slaughterhouse. The Exposition, of course, and Burnham's plan to make Chicago the White City. Ken Hite's great Chicago stuff, crossed with our own Secret Civil War between Goldbugs and Silverites. Thomas Edison and the Oneiros. Frank Baum's coat of many colors. The League of Good Roads. The Pinkertons. The Theosophical Sect of the Goddess Revealed.
Oklahoma, 1933
The dust bowl at the depth of the Depression. O Brother Where Art Thou if you play it light, Grapes of Wrath if you play it heavy. Truly a time and a place where the Invisible Clergy was rolling over, where the true meaning of America and democracy was up for grabs. Wild-eyed demagogues and patent medicine salesmen and thunderheads on the horizon. Hobo magic. The Brokedown Palace. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Los Angeles, 1952
For all the Ellroy fanboys. The L.A. of Chinatown and the Black Dahlia and hard-boiled California noir, bleached in the sun yet as black as it comes. It's also Hollywood and HUAC at the peak of the Red Scare, and pretty close to ground zero for the birth of television and the atomic bomb, both moments of considerable occult Americana mojo.
San Francisco, 1968
So 1967 was the Summer of Love. By 1968 the Bad Trip was already coming on. This was the year everyone thought America was coming apart. Hippies, yippies, and freaks versus the hardhats and the Pentagon and the National Guard. MONARCH, the government's Cold War cliomancy lab. Militant black nationalists. The Revolution. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Bill Bryan III and the League of Good Trips, our Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stand-ins. Maybe a Manson Family analogue. Maybe even a bit on Unknown Vietnam. Amazingly, I don't think I've ever seen a game set in the high 1960s.
Memphis, today
Doesn't have to be Memphis, but I think there should be one modern city, and I would want it to be a Southern one. The trick would be to riff on, but not fall into, the easiest stereotypes about the South. I'd much rather play with the scary-ass Southern debutantes of the Daughters of the Confederacy (I can imagine a variation of cliomancy for Civil War reenactors) and the Dixie Mafia in all their trashy beer gut glory than with the standard clichés of Bible-belt preachers or the KKK. Memphis would also let you do something cool with professional wrestling, with the Memphis Pyramid, and, of course, with Graceland and Elvis. That killjoy two-word dismissal in the UA rulebook ("he's dead.") is like a thrown-down gauntlet to Elvis-lovers like me.
I'd probably like one other nineteenth century setting, too. Maybe antebellum New Orleans, if that's not too much of a cliché, with the French Quarter and voodoo and vice and pestilence hanging thick in the air. But six is a lot already.
*OK, that sounds sarcastic, and the "wealth" part is, but they do have genuine status in my eyes at least for having both the creativity to come up with such cool stuff and also the stick-to-it-ness to turn that cool stuff into genuine published work. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to guess which of these two qualities I myself possess, and in which quality I am lacking. Speaking of which, once I post this, didn't I have a dissertation I was supposed to be working on?
bryant and jeregenest, both of whom are genuine published RPG authors, with all the wealth and status that entails*, have been telling me, half seriously, half in jest, that we should write up and submit our game as a possible sourcebook for Atlas Games. Knowing me and knowing my schedule, I don't think that will really happen, but their praise is flattering, and it's fun to think about.If I did ever do it, though, I don't think I (or we—no way I'd do something like this without unloading half the work onto the rest of the gang) would just convert Unknown USA into a scenario or setting book. For one thing, Atlas is already publishing an American road-trip adventure; for another, a lot of our story has been written specifically with the PCs in mind; and for another, I've stolen tons of ideas and crunchy bits from other games and settings, so those couldn't be used in a submission for publication.
But there are, I don't mind saying, some pretty cool ideas at the center of our game, and the exercise of UA-ifying American history certainly appeals to me. So, if I was to convert Unknown USA into something possibly publishable, even though I'm not, if I was, here's a little woolgathering about my hypothetical dream UA project.
(It should go without saying that I don't know anything about the economics of game publishing in general (not pretty, I imagine) or Atlas and UA in particular. Nor do I know their feelings about mucking about with UA canon. Basically I'm just imagining the kind of UA book I would love to read myself.)
Unearthed Americana
(just a working title - a pun on the old AD&D hardcover)
UA:UA would be a setting anthology rather than a book about one organization or a collection of ready-to-play scenarios. It would have six or seven chapters, and each chapter would cover one place and time in American history through the UA lens: Chicago in 1893, Los Angeles in 1952, and so on. A little like the "incarnation eras" in Nephilim. Each chapter would have some "real life" history and setting info, a look at the players in the occult underground of that era, some NPCs and crunchy bits (a magical school here, an archetype or artifact there), and some sample cabals and campaign ideas like in the 2nd edition rulebook (those were my favorite part of the book to read). Maybe some of those first-person "Witness" monologues like in the rulebook too (also a favorite of mine). Or a "What You Hear" section (ditto).
There would be certain consistent threads running through the chapters, both things from canon UA and also things from my version of America's secret history, like the Secret Civil War and the Goldbugs and the various incarnations of the League of Good Roads. But these chapters would essentially be snapshots, meant to stand on their own as settings for play. There would be very little narrative of what happens in between the eras or even how they play out. Ideally, each era would be like the best of the published UA scenarios: no metastory, no "this happens next," just a cauldron of people and factions at each others' throats, ready to rumble. A hyper-tense web of conflicts and clashes, like one of those five-way John Woo Mexican standoffs, just waiting for some PCs to set the whole thing ablaze. (Mix metaphors much, Rob?) The idea would be that people could play in whichever places and eras interested them, (plus extrapolate their own moments in time), and in so doing, let their own play craft the true occult history of America.
And the places and eras? Well, it's trivially easy to list dozens of cool times and places to play in. But these (below) are the ones that come to my mind. They all have some connection to our Unknown USA game, they've all been under-used in RPGs as far as I can tell, and they all have some indefinable quality that makes them seem "UA" to me. I guess they're all moments when and where, as the back of the UA book says, "Something big is going down. You don't know what. But you can feel it all around you." They're mostly gritty, hard-boiled eras but they're also moments where big things really seemed up for grabs. They're places and times where American idealism and American cynicism got right in each other's faces, where the shit came down, where everybody was rushing somewhere but nobody had a map.
Philadelphia, 1776
It all starts here, right? The Revolution UA-ified, with Adam Weishaupt's attempt to replace George Washington (major artifact: Washington's wooden teeth) and Ben Franklin's bid for ascension and the Masonic Civil War and the truth about the madness of King George. Also, the ragged armies of the Revolution, the common people swept up in a battle of brother against brother for motives both pure and black.
Chicago, 1893
Nature's metropolis, America's slaughterhouse. The Exposition, of course, and Burnham's plan to make Chicago the White City. Ken Hite's great Chicago stuff, crossed with our own Secret Civil War between Goldbugs and Silverites. Thomas Edison and the Oneiros. Frank Baum's coat of many colors. The League of Good Roads. The Pinkertons. The Theosophical Sect of the Goddess Revealed.
Oklahoma, 1933
The dust bowl at the depth of the Depression. O Brother Where Art Thou if you play it light, Grapes of Wrath if you play it heavy. Truly a time and a place where the Invisible Clergy was rolling over, where the true meaning of America and democracy was up for grabs. Wild-eyed demagogues and patent medicine salesmen and thunderheads on the horizon. Hobo magic. The Brokedown Palace. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Los Angeles, 1952
For all the Ellroy fanboys. The L.A. of Chinatown and the Black Dahlia and hard-boiled California noir, bleached in the sun yet as black as it comes. It's also Hollywood and HUAC at the peak of the Red Scare, and pretty close to ground zero for the birth of television and the atomic bomb, both moments of considerable occult Americana mojo.
San Francisco, 1968
So 1967 was the Summer of Love. By 1968 the Bad Trip was already coming on. This was the year everyone thought America was coming apart. Hippies, yippies, and freaks versus the hardhats and the Pentagon and the National Guard. MONARCH, the government's Cold War cliomancy lab. Militant black nationalists. The Revolution. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Bill Bryan III and the League of Good Trips, our Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stand-ins. Maybe a Manson Family analogue. Maybe even a bit on Unknown Vietnam. Amazingly, I don't think I've ever seen a game set in the high 1960s.
Memphis, today
Doesn't have to be Memphis, but I think there should be one modern city, and I would want it to be a Southern one. The trick would be to riff on, but not fall into, the easiest stereotypes about the South. I'd much rather play with the scary-ass Southern debutantes of the Daughters of the Confederacy (I can imagine a variation of cliomancy for Civil War reenactors) and the Dixie Mafia in all their trashy beer gut glory than with the standard clichés of Bible-belt preachers or the KKK. Memphis would also let you do something cool with professional wrestling, with the Memphis Pyramid, and, of course, with Graceland and Elvis. That killjoy two-word dismissal in the UA rulebook ("he's dead.") is like a thrown-down gauntlet to Elvis-lovers like me.
I'd probably like one other nineteenth century setting, too. Maybe antebellum New Orleans, if that's not too much of a cliché, with the French Quarter and voodoo and vice and pestilence hanging thick in the air. But six is a lot already.
*OK, that sounds sarcastic, and the "wealth" part is, but they do have genuine status in my eyes at least for having both the creativity to come up with such cool stuff and also the stick-to-it-ness to turn that cool stuff into genuine published work. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to guess which of these two qualities I myself possess, and in which quality I am lacking. Speaking of which, once I post this, didn't I have a dissertation I was supposed to be working on?
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 11:29 am (UTC)This also resolves one of the worries I had, which was adapting the odd cosmology back into the UA paradigm.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 11:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 11:43 am (UTC)- Washington was still Lieutenant General Washington and had not yet been confirmed as head of all forces until post-Saratoga.
- Everyone was too busy running for their lives or fighting the British or dealing with Tories.
- Besides, the Masons had the run of things until 1781.
My reading of history makes a good, solid Masonic Civil War start in March, 1787 after the collapse of the Articles of Confederation and the formation of the Constitutional Conventions. Although you don't have the Madness of King George sending forth his trusted generals into the fray, you do have Evil Alexander Hamilton. Mmmm evil masons.
As a subject I have spent literally years musing on but have not put one concrete word to paper, I speak from a very small soapbox of authority.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 03:08 pm (UTC)IMHO, it needs a mid-19th century era: Emperor Norton, Gold Rush/Comstock Lode, Mormon/US war...