Unknown Armies Pashacon Jam Results

Another Unknown Armies jam wrapped a couple weeks ago. Parameters will be familiar to anyone who's been following this series. Let's see how we did.

 

Mad Magazine #261 Fold-In - A cool evil item, like the Molok Machine. The kind of person who would do this is not someone you want to succeed at their objective.

Baby Bunting - The most deliciously evil entry yet. Unknown Armies 3e is barely even a horror game and the Ordo are the closest the game ever comes to recapturing the tone of prior eds.

The Rose and the Nightingale and The Lone and Level Sands - The first adventure is based on the Gene Wolfe short story of the same name, the second on an anecdote about Napoleon using an opium overdose to euthanize plague infested soldiers so they wouldn't fall into the hands of the pursuing Mamluks. The Eunuch started out as an NPC Avatar for Temple of the Crying Buddha, based on a throwaway line by Tormsen from an upcoming Special Orders book.

 

Goathammer - A mostly useless but flavorful self-negating ritual that invites the players to imagine their own uses for a pissed off, foul tasting farm animal.

 

ALL OUR TIMES HAVE COME - An entry in the style of the old What You Hear prompts, tossing out a handful of ideas without any mechanical detail. I can't think of a single "in-character" segment of an RPG book I've ever liked, but I've written whole adventures based on What You Hear prompts.

 

The Optometrist - Checkers will read this and say "I can fix her." This hastily assembled collection of NPCs and creatures leans on monster manual entries from the core set to do the heavy lifting. That's what they're there for, after all. The operating theater is where it all came together for me. I did the same thing with 2e Thanatomancy.

 

Organizers of the last few Unknown Armies jams have asked why submissions have declined. At first I thought it was like Night at the Opera in the old days. Everybody wanted to run a contest and they all got stacked back to back for months, typically with longer timeframes and bigger wordcount limits (based on the assumption that being rate limited was holding people back from submitting) only to see declining attendance. 

 

I think the reality is that Unknown Armies 3e is a dead game. It was on life support from the moment it released and that life support has been terminated. I also think people are strongly discouraged from writing entries by the lack of response. It's hard to get people to buckle down and write something and it only gets harder if they think nobody is going to read it. This isn't a problem for games with active publisher support, like Delta Green. Most Shotgun Scenario voters don't read every scenario and non-winning entries don't get any feedback at all, but the contest averages almost a hundred entries a year.

 

I want to thank my friends Conscience and Kate for keeping my own interest in the game on life-support, pushing me to run games and helping with scheduling. When I went to Gencon in 2019 it rejuvinated my interest in Delta Green for several years after, and I hope running UA3 at Gencon 2025 does the same thing.