Unknown Armies is a great little RPG. As I once wrote in a review, “UA is, I’ll be the first to admit, possessed of some flaws — but it bubbles with such creativity, originality, potential, and brilliance that it overwhelms those flaws.” Unfortunately, it never caught on in the way it probably deserved to. (And it probably never will: Too many other games have stepped in and stolen its stuff over the past decade.)

One of the (many) great things about Unknown Armies, however, was the “What You Hear” section. In the world of Unknown Armies all the half-crazed conspiracies and crack-pot theories and urban legends you’ve ever heard are true at one level or another, but in a way completely alien to anything you might have expected. “What You Hear” was basically a rapid-fire conglomeration of one- or two-sentence rumors that peeled back the mundanities of the world and revealed them to be something horribly different. They were a distorted lens through which the world could be viewed and used.

The great thing about them was that they could be used in any number of ways: Disinformation. Intriguing background detail. Full-fledged adventure seed. Idle chit-chat from a nervous underworld contact. All kinds of stuff. And all of it mysterious and enigmatic and awesome.

Circa 2004, a guy named RemyBuron started a thread on RPGNet for people to post UA-style rumors. Here a couple examples:

There is no state of Wyoming. I mean, have you ever met anyone from there?

If you had been crucified would you ever want to see a cross ever again? The common symbol of a crucifix actually wards off the power of Christ rather than invoking it. That most people believe differently is one of Satan’s greatest successes, just above killing a carpenter by nailing him to a wooden structure.

A few months later I started a thread for UA-Style Rumors: Dungeons & Dragons. Recent free-associating resulted in memories of the thread surfacing out of the deep murk of my brain, and I thought it would be fun to track the thread down and loot the stuff I had posted in it. When I did, I was pleasantly pleased to discover that the thread has been periodically revived over the past several years — with the most recent spurt of activity coming just a few weeks ago (and including someone describing it as the “best thread ever“).

Without further ado, here are my UA-style rumors for D&D (including a couple of new ones that never appeared in the thread). Check out the original thread for lots of good stuff from other people.

Mages were all born centuries ago. In fact, they’re not even human. No, seriously, think about it: Have you ever known a kid who grew up to be a mage? Nope. All the mages you’ve ever known are already adults, and most of them are old. Apprentices? Most of them are duped slaves. The few who can actually cast spells are actually archmages. They’re just putting on an act to keep up appearances.

Dragons aren’t really that impressive. In fact, even the biggest of ’em don’t grow any bigger than a large dog. The rest are just bullshit spun by would-be heroes trying to look important.

Why are there are only nine towns in Ten Towns?

You ever notice how the king is never seen without the queen? That’s because he’s really a living mannequin. The real king died years ago. If you watch closely, you can see the queen’s fingers twitching the invisible strings.

Underdark? There’s no such thing. The dark elves just live on the other side of the planet. (Although it’s true that you can get there through the dungeons — some of them go deep enough, although you have to watch out for the gravity shift.) And they’re not evil. That’s just racist elven propaganda. They don’t like anybody without pointy ears and alabaster skin. They think we’re all orcs.

All those monsters who prowl the wilderness? They were put there by the king. The court wizard makes ’em, and most of them are mutated from prisoners. You can see the lights in the wizard’s tower every night from the rituals. Why does he do it? To keep us commonfolk stuck in the cities and the villages. If we were able to travel safely and talk to each other we’d be free of him soon enough.

The gods are a sham. A couple hundred years ago some powerful elven spellcasters set themselves up as “gods”. Now the elves effectively rule the world, and their duped priests don’t even know they’re doing it. The dragons know the truth. That’s why they’re hunted.

Somewhere in the Duchy of Colbane there’s a village. Everybody there is a mind-slave controlled completely by a lich. Everybody.

Bags of Devouring don’t actually destroy anything. They just transport it to another bag. The most powerful person in the whole multiverse is the guy who owns the bag all the Bags of Devouring empty into. I only know this because a friend of mine told me. I’ve never seen him again.

Look, you’ve gotta stop casting fireballs. They’re dangerous. No, seriously, stop laughing. I mean they’re dangerous. There’s this dungeon you can’t go to any more. It’s full of fire. All the time. Some wizard cast three fireballs in quick succession and they all kind of… collapsed into each other. Ripped open a vortice to the Plane of Fire. I used to go delving with a wizard who was scrying on them at the time. He told me that if it had happened on the surface it would have wiped out the whole world. Seriously.

Liches? Not really undead. In fact, most of them aren’t even that powerful. They’re posers. I heard that a bunch of apprentices who couldn’t master more than basic weavings cooked up the whole “lich” thing as a secret society. They used a couple of simple illusion spells to wow a couple of hick villages and build a rep. Some adventurers managed to take out a couple and, hyped up on their own egos, built up the rep of the Liches even more. But now things are changing: The group is attracting more powerful members. And my friend Jacob heard some nasty rumors about that coup in Covartain last year. Something about “lich-ghouls”…

Have you ever noticed how there are always exactly 6 members in every adventuring party? That’s the number of the Beast. Think about it.

Tell me about it. My friend got hooked on those things. This would have been back before I lost my eye. It got to the point where he couldn’t get through a day without drinking one. Then it got worse. He had to use more and more powerful cure wounds potions to get the same kick. He was downing two or three potions every hour. And then they stopped working altogether. That’s when he switched to inflict wounds. Gods, that’s an ugly way to die…

I find designing these rumors for D&D particularly interesting: With UA you can just look a the world around you and add a spice of oddness or magic. But D&D is innately strange and magical. You can’t just say, “There’s a dungeon with weird stuff in it.” Dungeons are supposed to be filled with weird stuff. Shapeshifters and covens and illusions are all part of the package. In order to get that full UA-style punch, therefore, you need to look a the typical expectations of a D&D campaign and then deliberately invert those expectations. Force ’em to look twice and re-evaluate their preconceptions.

Got an idea for your own UA-style rumor? Hit the comment button.

I was running an OD&D version of Keep on the Shadowfell on Thursday night and discovered that I made a mistake while compiling the PDF cheat sheet for the adventure. Specifically, two relatively important paragraphs got dropped:

The kobold tribe is known as the Clan of the Withered Arm. Once in every generation a child of the clan is born with a withered arm, marking them as the future leader of the clan. The clan’s history in the area around Winterhaven actually dates back more than 25 years to a time period when they were driven from their ancestral lands by Necross the Black Mage. The villagers in Winterhaven, however, were largely unaware of their presence: They survived by hunting wild game and generally shunned contact with the civilized races (who they had learned to fear).

Kalarel’s arrival in the area changed all that. He sent one of his goblin lackeys — a brutish oaf named Irontooth — with a band of thugs to take control of the kobolds. They took the kobolds by surprise, overpowered their leader (a kobold named Issitik), and chopped off his arm. Irontooth now wears the withered arm on a chain about his neck.

This was included in the original posts on the website. It just got dropped from the compilation.

You can download the corrected PDF here.

Keep on the Shadowfell was the inaugural introductory product for 4th Edition. When it was released, I shared my initial impressions and eventually ended up writing a lengthy series of essays in which I remixed the entire adventure.

One of the major problems I had at the time was the sheer sloppiness of the module: There were continuity errors in the adventure scenario and numerous self-contradictions in the rules. Ignoring some of the larger creative and structural issues with the adventure, on a very basic level the product was a mess.

In April 2009, Wizards of the Coast released a revised version of the module as a free PDF on their website. I didn’t pay much attention to it because I had already sampled 4th Edition, found it lacking in everything I value in an RPG, and moved on. But I did think it was a rather nice gesture on WotC’s part to make a corrected version of the product available.

Recently, however, I decided to re-visit this material with an eye towards using my remixed version of the module as the basis for an OD&D one-shot. Remembering that the module had been revised, I tracked down the PDF. My plan was to re-read the revised version of the module, see what had been improved, and then adapt my remix notes as necessary if I thought incorporating the changes would be worthwhile.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get past the first paragraph of the first encounter before discovering that WotC’s revision was just as sloppy as the original product.

The original module describes the encounter like this (pg. 16): “The player characters are on the King’s Road traveling toward Winterhaven east to west (or right to left on the map).” They are then ambushed by kobolds, as shown on this map:

The obvious problem, as I detailed in my original remix essay, is that the indicated kobolds are all standing in plain sight for characters traveling east to west along the road.

WotC’s keen-eyed revisers noticed the same thing, but they didn’t want to redo the cartography. So they opted to simply change the direction that the PCs are traveling (pg. 6): “The player characters are on the King’s Road traveling toward Winterhaven, west to east (or left to right on the map).”

Problem solved!

… except that’s completely impossible.

Because two pages earlier in the module we can see this map of the local area:

And, as you can clearly see, Winterhaven is at the western end of the King’s Road. You cannot travel west-to-east anywhere on the King’s Road and end up at Winterhaven.

Mistakes, of course, get made. (For example, both the original and revised versions of the module refer multiple times to the Burial Site being southwest of town. You’ll note that it isn’t.) But what you have here is an acknowledgment that there is a problem that needs to be fixed; a decision being made (either deliberately or ignorantly) to not fix the root of the problem; and ending up with a half-assed effort that just creates an entirely different problem.

And it doesn’t even fix the original problem, because there are still kobolds standing in plain sight.

This is symptomatic of WotC’s general culture of not-fixing (or even anti-fixing).

WORST. PLAN. EVAH.

Dwarves: Oh no! All the gold in our mountain has been cursed!

Dwarven God: That sounds sucky. Here’s a magical artifact to remove the curse.

Dwarf 1: Think we should use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s lock all the dwarves afflicted by the curse into the lower vaults.

Dwarf 1: And then use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s evacuate the mountain.

Dwarf 1: And then we’ll use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll hide the magical artifact in the depths of the mountain.

Dwarf 1: And… then use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll create clockwork bodies for ourselves and inscribe the secret of how to find the artifact on the gears and cogs.

Dwarf 1: And… wait, what?

Dwarf 2: Then we’ll go senile. And centuries from now the grandchildren of our disciples will “con” a small group of adventurers into retrieving and using the magical artifact.

Dwarf 1: What the hell are you talking about?

I guess this is what happens when you write adventure modules by committee. (I really wish I was exaggerating this, but I’m not. Although they technically didn’t plan to go senile, this is, in fact, the background used in the module.)

THE SIMPLE FIX

The artifact wasn’t ready-to-use out of the box. The Secret Masters of the dwarves collected the tears of the Hundred Widows who had lost their husbands to the corruption of the curse. The fist-sized teardrop of gold they forged from the cursed gold needed to bathe for a hundred years in the widows’ tears before it could cleanse the mountain itself.

Unfortunately, long before the teardrop was ready, the dwarves had been forced to abandon the fortress. Or perhaps the Secret Masters arranged for the evacuation, planning to return a century later. Whatever the case may be, things didn’t go according to plan: A hundred years passed and, deep in the bowels of the mountain, the Golden Teardrop was completed. But the dwarves were never able to return to the Golden Citadel, and so the teardrop lay forgotten…

A couple months ago I mentioned that I had created counter-intelligence guidelines for the Gather Information skill. Confanity had mentioned that he was intrigued by them, and I promised to get them posted sooner rather than later. For certain definitions of “sooner” and “later”, I suppose that this has now been accomplished.

Counter-Intelligence: A character can attempt to detect other characters gathering information about a particular subject in the area by making a Gather Information check. The DC of the counter-intelligence check is opposed by the original Gather Information check made in the attempt to gather the information.

Avoiding Suspicion: If a character is attempting to avoid suspicion, it becomes more difficult to detect them. Although the character suffers a -10 penalty on their Gather Information check for the purposes of collecting the information they seek, they gain a +10 bonus to their Gather Information check for the purposes of opposing the counter-intelligence check.

In addition, cautious characters can voluntarily increase the penalty on their original Gather Information check, granting an equal bonus for the purposes of opposing the counter-intelligence check. (For example a character could decide to be extra cautious and apply a -15 penalty to their Gather Information check. Their unmodified check result is 30, which is modified to 15 (30 – 15) for the purposes of determining what information they actually glean. But if another character attempts to detect their presence, they would have to make a DC 45 (30 + 15) counter-intelligence check to do so.)

Modifiers: Apply a -2 penalty to counter-intelligence checks for every week that has passed since the original Gather Information check.

USING THE GUIDELINES

For PCs, these guidelines aren’t only useful to find out if someone is asking questions about them. In fact, they’re generally more useful for identifying competing interests. Who else in town is trying to find out information about the Vault of the Dwarven Kings? Or investigating the Baker’s Street Gang?

Resolving these types of checks requires the GM to know two things:

(1) Who else is looking for that information?

(2) What should the DC of the check be?

The answer to the former question, of course, is situational. For the latter you could either set simple, static DCs as you would for any other Gather Information check, or you could actually resolve the opposed check.

FACTION

I generally find it useful to know what kind of information-gathering capacity factions have in my campaigns. For smaller factions (like an opposing group of adventurers or a small gang of bad guys), this is as simple as looking at the highest (or most appropriate) Gather Information skill modifier in the group.

For larger factions, I simply assign a Gather Information modifier to the group. (This number is essentially arbitrary, although I base it on the size, nature, and resources of the group in question.)

When trying to figure out how suspicious a particular group is (i.e., whether they’re performing counter-intelligence to make sure anyone is asking questions about them) or how pervasive their surveillance is (i.e., how often they’re making counter-intelligence checks), I’ve generally just relied on common sense to make a ruling whenever the question needs to be answered. But if you’re running a campaign where intelligence and counter-intelligence is likely to be fairly common (for example, a modern espionage campaign), then codifying those factors might be useful.

(For example, a Paranoid group might check 1/day; a Suspicious group every 1d6 days; a Cautious group once every 3d10 days; a Naive group might never check. In other words, if the PCs investigate a Suspicious group then there would be a counter-intelligence check made 1d6 days later.)