[UA] Terminus, GA

[Wrider]

If it was created by a Major charge it could easily be a good wish gone wrong.  Someone asks for a "special" place for members of the Occult Underground, and they got it.  Possibly a place for them to hide that they cannot leave...

----- Original Message ----
From: Chris Williams <lord_of_the_geeks at hotmail.com>
To: ua at lists.unknown-armies.com
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 10:12:59 PM
Subject: [UA] Terminus, GA

I brought this up on RPG.net, so apologies if you've seen this already. 
Traffic's been kind of low here lately, and since you guys always have such 
great ideas, I thought I'd throw this out here and see what you have to say.

I'm gearing up for a game that will hopefully go run the full UA gamut, from 
street to cosmic. I want the game to begin in a fictional city. Like, not 
only fictional to you or me, or other real world people, but fictional to 
most of the game setting, too. I want it to be a city that's somehow less 
than completely real, but still existant. The people in the city are real. 
Most of the property is real. It's just that the city, somehow, isn't. It 
exists within, but kind of to the side, of our world.

The city in question, as per (I thought) an awesome suggestion on the 
RPG.net forums, will be Terminus, Georgia. Terminus is a sort of bastard 
brother to Atlanta. I haven't ironed everything out yet, but the general 
idea is that at some point an adept got a hold of a major charge and when he 
spent it, things didn't go quite as planned. Perhaps the city is a 
byproduct, or maybe an Urbanomancer went too far and symbolically merged 
with his city in an attempt to protect it and instead ended up becoming 
something new. At any rate, Terminus exists, and people live there, but it 
isn't quite real. Also, Terminus quietly dreams of it's own destruction and 
recently, seems to be trying to die.

The plan is for the PCs to slowly catch wind of this information as the game 
slides from the street level into the global range. Let them figure out that 
there's much more to the world than what they know, and then when they start 
to get comfortable with that, let them see that even this, this new world 
they've discovered, is also false. It's false, and it's dying, and as it 
does so, it will take them, everyone they know in this city, love or hate, 
with it. And then they have to figure out what to do about it.

I'm not completely sure how to handle all of it, but I've got a few ideas of 
how to illustrate the city's falsehood. Early on, the PCs might just notice 
things like how no major corporations have their main offices or 
headquarters in the city. The city never seems to make national headlines. 
No one from Terminus has ever become famous. As the characters learn more, 
and perhaps discover knowledge of some adept schools, they might begin to 
wonder why Terminus seems to lack any Urbano- or Cliomancers. And once it 
becomes really obvious that something strange is going on, maybe more overt 
clues will occur. When no one's around, landmarks will change. Neighborhoods 
will trade places.

I'm kind of envisioning Terminus acting as a seive, or maybe more 
accurately, a roach motel for the occult underground. Normal things and 
sane, well-adjusted folks can move in and out freely. The worst that will 
happen is that they'll find the city so unremarkable, so unmemorable, that 
they'll eventually forget the details. Even if they saw a shooting, 
eventually, after leaving, they'll just remember about how they used to live 
in that one violent town down in Georgia. More clued-in people, though, will 
find the situation a bit different. Through happenstance and synchronicity, 
they find it difficult to leave. Kind of similar to the Urbanomancy spell 
"Wrong Turn," they'll find that the harder they push to get out, the more 
they seem stuck. If they try too hard and too long to make an escape, they 
might find themselves subject to a curse similar to the trapping aspect of 
the 4th Pilgrim channel, or maybe just subject to the city's violent whims.

So how does all this sound? Do you think it could make for a fun setting? 
Are there any hideous, glaring faults with it? Does the cosmic roach motel 
aspect smack too much of railroading?


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