[UA] Hey! Help make my game weirder!

[Chris Williams]

First off, I apologize for the length. I intended to type up a brief little mention of my game followed by the question at the end, but I got carried away. Sorry! Secondly, I don't think any of my players are on this list, but if you guys are, I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't read this. Okay, with that out of the way, here goes:

After a few big life changes, a lot of delay, and then moving to a different town, I finally got to start the UA game I've been wanting to run for over a year now. I've got a big plot all planned out for the players to ignore, NPCs
made for them to either adopt, "dispatch" or ignore, and a setting that
they can feel free to pick at until it all comes crashing down. The characters at the center of all of this are 3 fairly quirky, but mundane people, all living in the same apartment complex. We have a reporter for the lifestyles section of the local paper, who happens to be obsessed with recording the stories behind people's lives. There's an ex-thug who has been trying to stay clean for the past 9 years, and now works with an anti-violence outreach program. The last PC is a bicycle messenger who has an obsessive love for the city they live in, and who happens to share his apartment with his old, cantankerous ex-military grandfather. 

The session began with with some mostly mundane stuff, like the reporter interviewing the ex-thug, the messenger delivering paychecks and Chinese food, checking up on his pigeon-feeding grandpa, and finally having to deliver a note to one of his NPC neighbors on his way home. When he got home, he had discovered that the NPC in question was dead, having apparently suffocated himself near the radiator. The PCs did the usual responsible stuff, like notify the police and the landlord. They of course also did the usual PC stuff and snooped around in the guy's home. The reporter was sad to lose yet another unrecorded history and swiped some of his journals, the bike messenger just nosed around in general, and the ex-con was wracked with fear of being caught and tried to convince the others to cut the shit and get out of the apartment. 

So what did they find? The apartment was wall-to-wall shelving, each unit housing row after row of VHS tapes. The journals the PCs took appear to be full episode synopses, and general examination shows no real pattern or significance to the shows or episodes, though they haven't had a terribly long time to really study them yet. They DID find a note card that contained the instructions for the Ritual of the Smoking Head, which one of the players managed to pull off. All they found on his old, out of date computer was about 40 pages of Friends fanfic that involved Ross turning into a leopard gecko, but they went ahead and copied most of the files onto the journalist's flash drive anyway. They also came across the deceased's pet, a leopard gecko named Ross. Also in the apartment were various reptiles, all in very well constructed, homemade cages, though these were understood to belong to the ex-roommate of the deceased, who had moved out a few weeks ago. Lastly, they found a name and an address for a dealer in antiquities and books.

It seems pretty obvious that they found a dead videomancer who may or may not have had a herpemancer for a roommate up until recently. Either that, or the guy just REALLY liked TV and his old roommate REALLY liked reptiles, and more specifically snakes. There could be weird magick involved, or the guy could have committed suicide. Other than the number for the dealer and the ritual, which is practically a red herring all on it's own, even when it does work, there might not be anything supernatural at play. It might just all be a little sad and plenty weird. However, if it IS weird, what kind of stuff should they find in the journals, or on the computer files, or back in the apartment, should they want to break and enter? Red herrings and dead ends are just as appreciated as general, genuine UA-style weirdness.

Thanks in advance, 
Christopher Williams

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