[SPAM] Re: [UA] Re: London (was American attitudes and things)

[Adrian Long]

Well, I don't often post around here, but this has piqued my interest.

In general, I've found the most UA-able parts of life in the UK come
from the small, rural villages - or at the very least the suburbs.
Basically, from the places where everything seems normal until you
stay there too long and start spotting the weird creeping in around
the edges.

To find the UA-worthy material, I've always looked for the obsessions
rather than looking at what's there and out in the open.

I've got some ideas for London, but I'll post up some thoughts on more
rural and suburban areas first...  I'll warn you all, this is going to
be a long one!

Rural - The Forest of Dean
--
When I ran a game with a section set in The Forest of Dean (where I
used to live) I drew on a number of odd little places that showed a
bit about obsession.

Two of the old craft guilds that still remain (and haven't been
corrupted into old-boy's networks like their sibling guild, the
Freemasons) have their headquarters in the forest - in a building
where they hold their own courts based on their own laws.

The Freeminers and the Verderers (Deer-keepers) both have their own
quirks, but in the forest, so many of the place names are based on old
mining and quarrying language or after plantation areas within the
forest.  You've got "New Fancy" named after a colliery.  You've got
"Boy's Grave", which is named after either a gift (a freeminer's
personal mine) or a forest plantation.  This obsession with mining is
quite odd in the modern day, however, as commercial coalmining in the
forest effectively ended in the 1960s.  But the freeminers still meet.
 They still have their "gifts" and the guild continues.

Added to that, in more modern times, the area's become something of a
haven for artists and craftspeople.  As an example, there's a
sculpture trail in the forest, which is basically a walk through the
woods with a number of incredibly strange sculptures along the way...
Including one incredibly creepy one which is basically some graves set
into the forest floor, with brass nameplates on them with the names
scratched out.

Creating this trail was clearly a labour of love for somebody, and I
used it as the basis of a school of magic based on the creation of
sculpture - it was based loosly around the structure of mechanomancy,
but with the adept losing emotions rather than memories, and the
scultures created could be used to manipulate emotions and passions.

The one obsession I could never work out exactly what to do with are
the damned sheep.  The forest was lousy with them.  As it's
technically common grazing land throughout the forest, the sheep are
not kept in fields, but are instead roaming free.  They're allegedly
looked after and controlled by the "sheep badgers", which is the
faintly disturbing local name for the shepherds.  When foot and mouth
disease hit britain a few years ago, they had to try and cull the
sheep from the forest.  The government estimate was that there were
round 600 in the forest.  They gave up the cull after killing 2000.  I
went home to visit my folks shortly afterwards and saw my first small
flock within 5 minutes of entering the forest.

What's more, EVERYBODY has an opinion about the sheep.  To some
people, they're a symbol of what makes the forest different.  To some
they're a livelihood.  To some they're a nuisance.  To some they're
food, and to others they're nature reasserting itself.  Mention them,
and you've either got a friendly topic of conversation for the next
hour or you've got an argument.  You can't mention them in passing...
they just take over.

Sprinkle that with a light dusting of one of the weirdest local
english dialects known to man (called varest) and a generous helping
of post-industrial decay (after the coal and iron ore mines went, the
place fell apart for a while), and you've got a really weird place
that's just great for slightly unconventional UA.

--
Suburban - Egham
--
I've not found so much that's particularly weird in my current home
town beyond the stuff that's always weird about suburbia, wherever you
go.  But, within my home town I have found a few odd obsessions based
on local pride and obsession with local history.

The things I did find tend to all relate to either monuments, or to
one particular moment in history.

With regard to monuments, there's a bit of an obsession with the dead.
 We've got a large building sized air forces memorial
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Forces_Memorial) commemorating the
20,000 or so dead from the air force in WWII. Right next to it we've
got the JFK memorial, which is a big lump of carved rock plonked on an
acre of land which is technically part of america - it was given to
the US in memory of JFK.  As students we used to drunkenly invade
america fairly often, and I'm pretty sure that it could make a fairly
handy ritual component to an appropriately skilled individual.

Then there's the moment in history.  Apparently, we've only got *one*
moment in history.  The Magna Carta.  It was signed here in 1215.
Okay, so it was signed here and voided within the same day due to
having been signed under duress, and didn't really get signed properly
until two years later in Hereford, but that's beside the point.  It
was signed here first, and nobody's going to take that away from
Egham!  The town is littered with magna carta references.  There's
statuary in the town, there's heraldry in mosaic murals and whatnot...
there's lots of references to us being "historic" egham.  The Magna
Carta obsessives are determined that egham will be remembered for it's
*one and only* historical moment.

Of course, the catch is that it's not the one and only historical
moment.  For a start, the field where the Magna Carta was signed is
called Runnymede - a contraction of "runieg mede", which is anglo
saxon for "meeting place meadow".  It gets it's name from the fact
that it was one of the more significant places where the Witanagemot
met.  The witangemot was one of the precursors of parliament, existing
from the 7th to the 11th century.  It was a council that advised the
king on pretty much anything to do with the administration and
organization of the kingdom, and was the group that determined the
succession.  In saxon times, the monarchy was not necessarily
hereditary - it usually turned out to be so, but sometimes it didn't.

There's more besides, but the fact that all other history is occluded
by our dubious claim to the Magna Carta tells me that somebody out
there is determined to keep our history hidden.  Somebody trying to
keep the cliomancers out, perhaps?  If the public don't know about it,
cliomancer's can't use it!  Perhaps there's somebody out there who can
only work with the hidden history - the secret, forgotten parts?
Somebody who feeds on human ignorance?

--
City Life - London
--
London's got so much big, in your face history and so many big, in
your face quirks that... well, they're not really that interesting or
quirky anymore.  Cliomancer knife fights are likely to be pretty
common as they all try to keep control of as many historical sites as
they can, but whilst all of that's going on, other things are likely
to be stirring as well.

Forget the big musuems or the major tourist traps, and look at the
small attractions that are run by one or two obsessive guys with their
own money.  Look at the small zoos and the small museums.  There's
probably a museum of spoons somewhere.  I know there used to be an
exhibition of automata (Cabaret Mechanical Theatre - alas it closed in
2000).  There's the old operating theatre - a musuem of surgery.
There's a museum of childhood.  There's a museum of elizabethan
theatre.  There's a museum in Southwark with a large section on
London's legends and superstitions.

There's a museum of gardening, which just happens to also include the
tomb of Captain Bligh (of mutiny on the bounty fame), who is about as
far divorced from gardening as you can get.

Basically, in London, Obsession is perfectly acceptable, provided you
make a museum or a gallery about it.  As a result, I can see it
becoming a bit of a haven for some of UAs obsessives, provided they
can get somebody to handle the business side of things and sort the
arts council funding out for them.  Adepts with business managers -
frightening thought, really.

Then there's the way that the community works - or more accurately,
the communities.  London has a huge overall community made up of a
great many individual communities - and if you try to separate them,
they'll resist.  Even though half of them don't get on with each
other, and spend most of the time trying to beat each other up.

London doesn't have a single unifying identity, although it's
convinced that it does.  It's essentially made up of a number of
villages - partly as a way of coping with the sheer scale of the
place, partly because that's how it started - lots of cities, towns
and villages which all grew and overran each other.  Each has its own
identity, and each has its own communities and unspoken laws.  What's
more, these identities don't stay the same.  Gentrification and
redevelopment reinvent whole villages every couple of years, with a
slum suddenly becoming a wealthy high class environment and what were
once virtual palaces now becoming tenements full of gang warfare and
drug abuse. The potential for warring true kings and urbanomancers is
phenomenal.

Then there's the subcultures - almost like secret societies
infiltrating each and every one of London's villages.  Each trying to
spread and grow without ever becoming too well known, because the
moment the mainstream gets a hold of a subculture, it explodes out of
all recognition, loses itself and dies a public death in the media.

It's those villages and subcultures that hold people together in
London - that let them feel like a part of something that big.  But if
you happen to be in the wrong place, or in the wrong subculture, the
potential for finding yourself alone in a crowd is phenomenal!

--
I was going to write more, but alas I have no time!  Maybe more later...

--
Adrian Long