GM: Todd Furler
Players: Mike Bogan, Alex Miller, Matt Steele, Jarys Maragopoulos, and more Kubla Players
System: Unknown Armies
Original Post: https://seannittner.com/kubla-2009-saturday-5232009/
Something I’ve been looking forward to for a while is Todd Furler’s Unknown Armies game. This one was even more subtly supernatural than the previous game but kept me on edge about the origins of certain people. As he’ll run it again at Gen Con I don’t want to give away any spoilers, I’ll just go over what rocked and what could have been improved.
What rocked
I got to play with Alex, Matt S., and Mike B. Not that the other players weren’t great, but getting to hang out with my friends while gaming is always a plus. Great players overall.
Todd does a great job of framing the game, giving us a good idea of what to expect and what to drive towards. We all started the game with a common thread in our heads of “let’s make this a great story.”
Todd is very flexible, allowing us to move around the story with ease. For instance, there was a scene where we were questioning an NPC. Clearly he wasn’t supposed to give us all the answers but we put him in such an uncomfortable situation that he finally spilled is guts. I think some GMs would have frozen under that or simply made the NPC act unaffected by his situation, but Todd rolled gracefully with it.
Many of the character interactions, especially between my character and her husband, a senator and his aide and my character’s husband and his friends were just great. We had some excellent dialog and laughs around the table.
The story was very “Twilight zone”. Out there, but not too far out there. Close enough that one could imagine it was real.
Ken’s character’s particular issue. I won’t say it hear but I busted up when I heard what it was.
What could have been improved
Due to the nature of the game there were lots of personal scenes between just two or three players. This felt very LARPish which isn’t a problem per se but it meant that a lot of us missed out on conversations that should have been “on screen”. Not sure what there is to do about that.
I had a secret that I really wanted to get out in the open but couldn’t figure out how to do it. My secret was awesome… just couldn’t fathom a way my character would say it. In our last episode on Secrets, I talk about it a little more. Warning, some spoilers there: http://www.narrativecontrol.com/index.php?post_id=484697
Some of our concerns turned out to just be there to make our characters feel like senators (some political issues to talk about), which was great for giving us fodder for a discussion but later felt like it was brushed aside. Also I didn’t feel a strong threat from outside forces. The mob came up a time or two, but didn’t feel like a real danger. I think both of those could have been solved by having some of our political enemies work against us, creating more urgency for our characters.
The players (and GM) of Buried Secrets:
