About the Author

There was once an About the Author section on this website that had traceable personal details about me, but thankfully, it is lost to time, and can definitely never be dug up by anyone, for any reason, ever.

This version is more fun anyway: here I am statted out in Unknown Armies. I guess I could milk this as a StatSat article, but that would be kinda lame.

Moonglum Games

Obsession: Autonomy. I want to have complete control over my own life and my own body.

Rage stimulus: The capitalist world order and the way it makes us all worse people. No ethical existence, etc. etc.

Noble stimulus: Self-expression through creativity. Realistically, art is the closest I expect to get to the sublime.

Fear stimulus: Being unable to trust my own judgment (Self). 

Helplessness: 3 H / 2 F

Isolation: 6 H / 2 F

Self: 4 H / 1 F 

Unnatural: 1 H / 1 F (I don't want to talk about it.)

Violence: 2 H / 0 F

Socialist 35%: Substitutes for (class) Struggle, Coerces Self, Resists Shocks to Helplessness

Trans Woman 30%*: Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Helpessness, Casts Rituals

Antipsychiatry 55%: Substitutes for Connect, Therapeutic, Resists Shocks to Self

Statospheric Saturdays: I Was A Teenage Werefrog

My second entry for the game jam I mentioned last week. Content warning for harm to children, again (don't worry about this become a pattern. It's FINE). This is a mess in dire need of editing because I was rushing to meet the deadline. For now I'm posting it as is, warts and all, but eventually I plan to revise it and maybe even run it (crazy, I know).

 

I WAS A TEENAGE WEREFROG 

 

Introduction

This is an investigative scenario with the premise that a UA lycanthrope, played straight, is weird enough to be the entire crux of a mystery. Set it anywhere in suburban America.

Objectives

Here are several possible setups for the scenario, plus associated objectives.

A Sleeper cell from out of town: Make sure “The Kevin Situation” doesn’t wake the tiger. Starts at 20% due to being grounded in the unnatural from the outset.

Local rubberneckers about to have their trigger event: Find out the truth behind Kevin Liao’s disappearance. Starts at 10% due to the reduced firehose of new faces and names to keep track of.

Private investigators hired by Kevin’s father because he’s noticed his son has abruptly stopped spending his money: Find Kevin Liao and make sure he’s safe. Starts at 0%.

Note the different implications about possible resolutions.

Timeline of Events

13 days ago: Kevin meets Patricia Albrici at a Humphrey Bogart marathon at local indie theater UnReel. She uses him to charge but he realizes she’s magick and insists she teach him.

10 days ago: Patricia gets sick of Kevin following her around and lures him into conducting a ritual that gets him possessed by a lycanthropic demon.

9 days ago: Kevin transforms for the first time. He spends 9 hours as a bullfrog in the O’Neils’ house over the weekend without attracting special attention, then reverts.

7 days ago: The demon takes over Kevin’s body for about two hours before school. It uses this time to make meticulous notes in Portuguese on all of the children in his neighborhood and plans to abduct and murder them. After school, Kevin takes the time to translate a couple sentences of this weird stuff he doesn’t remember writing, freaks out, and returns to UnReel to try and get answers. He holes up in a disused projection room.

6 days ago: Patricia manages to duck Kevin’s notice at UnReel thanks to a deployment of random magick (“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Chewie…”). She begins asking checkers if Kevin has done anything bad that could be traced back to her and buys a “sexy cop” Halloween costume.

5 days ago: Having learned that Kevin’s been absent from school for several days, Patricia dons her “Officer Albrici” persona using the Stock Wardrobe spell and does damage control at Kevin’s school while she tries to find out more.

3 days ago: The demon regains control of Kevin, sneaks out of UnReel in the dead of night, sneaks up to a house to snatch a toddler, then gets displaced by the bullfrog’s spirit, which idly stares into the window for four hours. Kevin reasserts himself just before daybreak and flees, though several neighbors saw him in bullfrog form.

Yesterday: The demon wins out again. It uses Kevin to snatch a different child, Kaighley Vass, and then butcher her with a garden trowel. Kevin comes back to himself in the midst of scattering the pieces at a trash dump. He runs off into the woods in the midst of a total mental breakdown.

GMCs

Ruoxi “Kevin” Liao: A Chinese foreign exchange student-cum-were-bullfrog. He attends Angus Academy on the dime of his father, the CEO of a major rail company. Even before his lycanthropy, he was a bit of a wild child. He deliberately flunks math and science just to buck stereotypes, and has adopted a slightly ridiculous “All-American” persona to try and fit in; he feigns passion for baseball, Westerns, and the Rolling Stones.

His dream is to become a bigshot Hollywood director; he really loves Tarantino. Most likely, he’s somewhere on the Autism spectrum and he self-medicates with weed in the school parking lot. Lots of people know about him, but nobody knows him well.

For a week and a half, he’s had to share his body with a sadistic and murderous demon and the mellow spirit of a bullfrog.

“Detective” Patricia Albrici: A cinemancer (Book 1: Play, p. 148) with a penchant for gritty crime flicks and a complicated relationship with the prevalence of misogynist themes often found therein. She knows there’s a demon in Kevin, but not that it’s lycanthropic.

Alongside Terry Kidd and Patrick O’Neil, she’s inserted herself into the hush-hush management of Kevin’s disappearance as “Detective Albrici,” and won their trust and silence. She takes her cue for this performance from Fargo (the movie, not the show, of course). She’s starting to freak out about the lack of news regarding Kevin’s whereabouts that her occult underground contacts have brought her. When she finds out about the dead little girl, she’ll go apeshit.

Patrick, Lena, and Conrad O’Brien: Kevin’s host family. They never saw much of him, which Lena finds sad and Conrad is amused by. Patrick, a workaholic corporate lawyer, doesn’t even know that Kevin is fluent in English. Lena volunteered to host Kevin because she hoped he’d be a well-behaved geek who might bring Conrad in line. For his part, Conrad is more or less a pampered neo-nazi with aspirations in what is to him a political environment full of promise.

With Kevin gone a week, Patrick has begrudgingly starting pulling strings to keep things quiet; he wants to avoid Kevin’s father finding out what’s going on at all costs.

Terrence Kidd: The principal of Kevin’s school. Like Patrick, he was late to hear about “The Kevin Situation,” but is going out of his way to keep it under wraps. A surprisingly spry Vietnam vet, he wishes he got to run the school like a boot camp and grouses often about participation trophies and the like.

Stepan Kovac: The media studies teacher. As a Slovakian immigrant, he’s sympathetic to Kevin’s struggles fitting in. He recently agreed to supervise Kevin on an independent study to shoot a feature film, with the hopes he can elevate the boy’s taste above derivative film bro crap. Now that Kevin is missing, he’s sweating bullets, fearing how their relatively close relationship might reflect on him. He’s also the one person really invested in making sure Kevin is safe and accounted for. So far he’s been trying to snoop around on his own, but he’s reached the conclusion he’ll probably have to come clean to “Detective” Albrici at some point.

Kai McDowell, Dong “George” Feng, Nicole Dittmar: Kevin’s hangers-on, or what pass for his friends. Respectively, a nihilistic nonbinary senior who’s checked out of their life until college; a homesick fellow Chinese exchange student whose rebellious streak has just about petered out; and a freshman who’s crushing on Kevin, albeit in a creepy, orientalist way. Since he stopped coming to school, they’ve enjoyed debating what exactly was wrong with him, and where he might have gone.

Key Locations

Angus Academy: The private school Kevin attends. An odd amalgamation; teaching styles range from old-fashioned and conservative to loosey-goosey, post-Montessori weirdness. Its students are roughly 80% filthy rich American kids, 10% filthy rich foreign exchange students (like Kevin) and 10% the offspring of teachers and staff (who get free tuition as a benefit).

Sentry Street: The affluent cul-de-sac where Kevin lives with his host family, the O’Neils. Also the home of the family that bullrog-Kevin stared at three days ago and the Vasses, whose daughter is missing, because demon-Kevin killed her.

UnReel: The indie movie theater where Kevin met Patricia Albrici, and where he’s spent a lot of the last week and a half. It used to be a big attraction listed in guidebooks, but now half the rooms are shut down and its only staff is its geriatric owner and a couple of part-time college students.

The Woods: Kevin’s current location. Really, it would be more accurate to call it “The Park,” because it’s well-maintained and nearby homeowners like to call the cops on people who walk their dogs off-leash. Needless to say, Kevin will have to move on soon.

Complications

Sprinkle some or all of the following in as pacing and bungled investigation demand (other than Transformation, which has to happen):

Ribbit: Every time Kevin tranforms into a frog or gets possessed by the killer demon inside him, the surrounding area is beset by unnatural phenomena: the buzzing of nonexistent flies fills the air and patches of the ground or floor turn into swamp muck and cattails (permanently). If the demon takes over or Kevin is reverting to himself, a physical quirk lingers for 1d10 minutes, such as a long, prehensile tongue or webbed digits. If he’s turning into a bullfrog, it’s the inverse, such as 1d10 minutes of human eyes or a bowlcut on his slimy little head.

These things could happen while the PCs are in Kevin’s presence, or have been witnessed by a GMC. Maybe the GMC functions as a clue dispenser, or maybe they’re losing their shit following a failed Unnatural check, and now they pose a danger to the PCs.

Your Worst Nightmare: If the PCs threaten Patricia (including outing her authority as a magickal farce), she can go all Rambo on them – see the Cinemancy formula spells as a starting point.

False Flag: If the PCs go to the police at any point, it will sooner or later come to light that Patricia is not who she claims she is. This will likely kick off Your Worst Nightmare, and could easily lead to the cops wasting a lot of the PCs’ time and generally obstructing their efforts, if not just arresting them. This is also bad news for most of the GMCs listed above. Depending on how much information has ben gleaned, and how much is then shared with the cops, a manhunt for Kevin is not out of the question.

Transformation: Kevin’s body is again taken over by the bullfrog for 1d10 hours. Ideally, deploy this one in the midst of a conversation with someone who’s seen Kevin recently, and/or in a context that would make his… being a bullfrog, and always having been one a mindfuck. Especially if the PCs are local ponies, this is one of the GM’s best opportunities for a big Unnatural check. Also feel free to fudge the exact point he turns back for similar dramatic effect.

The Bullfrog Strikes Again: The demon gains control of Kevin’s body for another 1d10 hours and kills another child in horrific fashion, with even less effort toward covering its tracks as it continues to indulge its Urge.

Too Many Cooks: A group pursuing one of the objectives your players didn’t pick from the three above gets in their way or misconstrues their involvement for complicity in something really bad.

Inverting the Objective System

Try this as an experiment for using the Objective system for a one-shot: the players know what their objective is from the outset, but aren’t given any milestones. Once you’re almost out of time and ready for a climactic last scene and/or denouement, consult the list of milestones below. Let the players roll the points for each one they completed, plus any other noteworthy actions they took that aren’t listed that you feel should still count.

Then, (in the likely event they are below 100%) have them roll it as a kind of oracle (in the solo RPG sense). Suggestions for a final scene are listed under the different Endings sections, based on the level of success.

The milestones can also help you as GM figure out where to steer the PCs, since most clues are not tied to specific GMCs.

Petty milestones

- Interrogate Kevin’s host family, teachers, or classmates

- Interrogate

- Use minor charge(s) to try and locate Kevin

- Sic the police on one or more involved parties

- Provide proof of Kevin’s location and/or status to a relevant authority

- Prove to a relevant authority that Kevin has not been acting entirely of his own volition

Weighty milestones

- Interrogate Patricia Albrici about

- Use gutter magick or significant charge(s) to try and locate Kevin

- Kidnap, seriously injure, or traumatize one or more involved parties

- Take action to directly ensure Kevin is permanently prevented from harming himself or others

- Exoricse the lycanthropic demon (through some means outside the scope written here)

Endings: Sleepers

00: Kevin transforms somewhere public and wakes the tiger. The PCs get caught in the growing rampage of torches and pitchforks (i.e. gasoline cans and shotguns).

Matched Failure: Kevin’s transforms in front of ponies and wakes the tiger. The riot is small and should be easily contained in the short term, but deciding what to do with the witnesses may be difficult…

Failure: There’s no riot, but enough different people have seen enough of the unnatural around town that the PCs will have weeks of cleanup ahead of them, best case scenario.

Success: The PCs’ only option to keep the tiger asleep are to kill Kevin or some innocent bystander who happened to have seen too much.

Matched Success: The shocking news about Kevin’s violence gets out, but the PCs successfully suppress any unnatural tinges to the story.

01: The PCs get a golden opportunity – through a stroke of luck or possibly occult means – to keep this entire situation under wraps, if they so choose.

Endings: Locals

00: The PCs end up going to prison, either framed for crimes Kevin committed, or else for any illegal actions they took in pursuit of the truth. They don’t get any clear answers as to what Kevin’s ultimate fate was.

Matched Failure: The whole thing ends up a wash. Though the PCs can get off scot free if they lay low for a while, they never find out what became of Kevin, nor can they sift through the various rumors that pile up for any juicy occult truths.

Failure: The PCs don’t get a neat answer as to Kevin’s role in everything, but they do get some undeniable proof of the occult, either from unnatural phenomena related to his transformations or interactions with Patricia.

Success: The PCs gain a complete understanding of Kevin’s sordid last two weeks, but are oblivious to any wider occult implications, and likely have a very inaccurate understanding of how lycanthropy works.

Matched Success: The PCs figure out pretty much the whole of the big picture of the scenario. But if they want to get into the occult underground, they’ll have to find their own ins.

01: The PCs figure out the whole of the big picture of the scenario, and Patricia Albrici or one of her local occult underground contacts ends up teaching them a ritual, cinemancy, or some other real magickal knowledge as thanks, due to blackmail, or for some other compelling and relevant reason.

Endings: PIs

00: Kevin is killed by raiding policemen. The chief (if not someone higher up the totem pole) now has a lot of pointed questions for the PCs about their involvement.

Matched Failure: An occult bloodbath ensues when cops come for Kevin. When the PCs get there, they have to deal with a literal bullfrog handful of dead, metaphorical pigs.

Failure: Kevin is arrested for killing Kaighley Vass. Technically, prison is a safe place, but the PCs are probably not getting paid much, nor having many burning questions answered.

Success: The PCs find Kevin before the cops or anyone dangerous do. He’s freaked out, missing memories most of the last two weeks, and worried about what he may have done He’s also still a lycanthrope, not that he knows it.

Matched Success: The PCs find Kevin having been purged of lycanthropy. He’s freaked out and has little memory of the last couple weeks, and a ton of scary questions. The PCs can send him back to the O’Neils and get paid, but there will be some uncertainty, and maybe some guilt, at the loose ends.

01: The PCs find Kevin in the hands of some sympathetic occultists who’ve just purged him of his multiple undead visitors. He remembers blessedly little and the PCs are happily unaware his body committed at least one child murder when they collect their hefty paychecks.

 

Stat block: Ruoxi "Kevin" Liao

Obsession: Becoming someone people will respect.

Rage stimulus: People's rigid ideas of what I should and shouldn't do.

Fear stimulus: Being treated like a weirdo for reasons I can't control (Isolation).

Noble stimulus: Finding my place in the world.

Budding film bro 40%: Subs for Knowledge, Reads Obsession, Protects Self

Rich kid 35%: Subs for Status, Protects Helplessness, Protects Isolation

Aggressively American 25%: Subs for Connect, Subs for Lie, Subs for Secrecy

Violence: H 1 / F 1 

Unnatural: H 2 / F 1

Helplessness: H 2 / F 2

Isolation: H 4 / F 1

Self: H 2 / F 1

Kevin the Demon

Urge: Stalk and Kill Children 70%

Elementary School Teacher 25%: Subs for Connect, Subs for Lie, Protects Helplessness

Psychedelics Abuser 35%: Subs for Notice, Protects Unnatural, Coerces Unnatural

 

Kevin the Bullfrog

Bullfrog Soul 15% (functions like a demon's urge (see Book 2: Run, p. 110)

Bullfrog Bod 10%: Subs for Fitness, Subs for Pursuit, Subs for Struggle

 

Stat block: "Detective" Patricia Albrici 

Obsession: The seedy underbelly of society, as captured in cynical films.

Rage stimulus: Optimists and kids, and especially optimistic kids.

Fear stimulus: Being trusted (Self).

Noble stimulus: It's a dog eat dog world.

Cinemancer 65%: Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick (adept path)

Armchair Criminologist 30%: Subs for Pursuit, Subs for Secrecy, Subs for Knowledge

Mean-Spirited 25%: Subs for Struggle, Subs for Lie, Protects Isolation

Violence: H 1 / F 0

Unnatural: H 5 / F 1

Helplessness: H 3 / F 1

Isolation: H 5 / F 0

Self: H 5 / F 2

Statospheric Saturdays: Butter Knife (short story)

I forgot to queue this up in time, so this week it'll be Statospheric Sundays, I guess. It's going to take me forever to charge back up after breaking taboo, again. Sigh.

This is a short story based on the ritual of the same name described in Book 4 of Unknown Armies 3e. I wrote it for the 2025 Jam-o-Ween on the UA fan discord. Next week's post will be my other entry, which will be actual game content.

Content warnings: graphic descriptions of gore, harm to children

BUTTER KNIFE

Mikey woke up to the sobbing of an unfamiliar voice. He held his blanket tight with one hand, and his stuffed hippo with the other. He watched the door to his bedroom, waiting to hear Mommy’s or Daddy’s voice. Sadie, the babysitter, had put him to bed before they came home, but he guessed by the dark poking through the bottom of his window shades they would be home by now. 
    He heard only the one person, crying in a way he had never heard. It wasn’t a tantrum, which Mommy had told him not to use to get attention. Neither was it quiet, in the way he had seen Daddy cry sometimes, when he thought he was alone. They – he thought maybe it was a woman’s voice, but he wasn’t sure – went from just crying to screaming, too, then back into a low, shaky kind of cry from deep in their chest. It sounded like crying because they were scared.
    Mikey was scared, too. But he also felt sad for whoever this grownup was, and a little curious. He wondered what could have made them so upset. He got out of bed and reached up to open the door of his bedroom. Once he was at the top of the stairs, he could tell they were down below, somewhere near the back of his house. He breathed faster as he moved further away from his nightlight, by he didn’t think of the grownup as a stranger, or an intruder. Just another person. He was a timid four-year old. His parents had yet to feel the need to issue any lectures on stranger danger.
    By the bottom of the stairs, he could tell they were in the kitchen. He stopped when his foot touched the cold tile of the foyer. The person got quiet suddenly. He thought they might have heard him. They sniffled. He saw through the front door that the street was empty. 
          There was no more sound from the kitchen for a while, so he snuck closer. Rounding the corner, he thought about how good he was at hide and seek. Mommy always took ages to find him. He calmed down a little. He saw the grownup in the kitchen. It was a man. The only light came through the door to the back porch. It hung open a little, letting in moonlight, and it had a new dent in it on the outside, just above the knob.
    The way the man peered over his knees around the room was also less scary. There was something about how carefully he held himself that reminded him of other kids from daycare more than any grownup he’d ever seen. He shuffled a little closer and saw the door to the oven lay open. The man had shrunk into the opposite corner. Something glinted in his hand. He kept looking around the kitchen and seemed to look right past Mikey. 
    He didn’t know what to think of that, but he waved “hi” anyway. As far as he could tell, the man couldn’t see him, or maybe he was too scared to say hi back. But there was nothing scary that Mikey could see. Maybe he had been chased into their yard by the neighbor, or the neighbor’s big, mean dog, and found his way here. 
    He kept walking toward the man, but then he changed all of a sudden. He got up fast, standing over Mikey, making fists and an angry face with his jaw clenched. All of a sudden he looked dangerous. He growled like the neighbor’s dog. Then he shook his head just as suddenly, like a fly had gone into his ear. He brought his hands up. They were still in tight fists. He kept growling.
    The change in the man and how fast it happened made it impossible not to see him as a grownup and a stranger. Mikey ran right back upstairs.

    “Daddy! Daddy!” 
            Myra’s eyes came open a crack. Dave had adjusted back to sleeping through the night a while ago, but she wasn’t sure she ever would. Her head pulsed with pain as she sat up in bed. Drank too much again. When Mikey saw she was awake – and only then, she couldn’t help but bitterly note – he ran around to her side of the bed and started tugging at her hand instead. What made Dave the one to come to in a crisis? She always ended up dealing with him anyway.
    “Mommy! Mommy!” 
    “What is it, sweetie?” She grabbed her phone as she stroked his hair. Nearly four in the morning. She groaned inside, wishing this was a rarer occurrence.
    “There’s a man downstairs!”
    This was more original than his usual ploys to worm his way into their bed, but she was half-asleep. Dismissal was still the best tool she had a hand, so she told him to go back to bed. Usually it was better to indulge him a little, tell him Daddy would handle whatever it was he’d come up with to spook himself. 
             Sooner or later, Mikey would have to realize that his father was just as mortal and flawed as every other man. She took it easy with that because she knew he had his own daddy issues, but sometimes she worried he was unwittingly setting up the same chain of events in their son.
    “But there is a man! Wake Daddy up! Make him go see!”
    “Sweetie, go back to bed. Daddy’ll go downstairs once you're nice and cozy, and… Uh, talk to him. And make sure everything is OK.” 
    Apparently that sounded placatory enough, because he left her side, albeit still wide-eyed. She watched until he’d gone back into his room and closed the door most of the way. With him leaving it ajar, he’d no doubt be back again before morning. Maybe she’d just lay there and let him shake Dave awake next time.

    Dave snuffled out of sleep with a hand clamped over his nose and mouth. He still let out something of a bellow, eyes searching the darkness to make sense of what was going on. The hand pushed down harder. With only a trace to see by from Mikey’s nightlight down the hall, it took him several seconds of squinting before he trusted the fact that he recognized the face peering down at him. Confusion overwhelmed his fear momentarily. Then he saw the knife, and he resumed his freakout, reflexively reaching for something on his nightstand that might function as a weapon.
    “Lay still and shut up.” 
    And he did, as a grisly vision of his son flashed in front of him. His son, his baby boy, slit open across the belly with one long, rough laceration, blood and viscera just beginning to poke through. 
            His body was motionless as he came back to it. Questions as to what Eli Hillam was doing in his bedroom with a truly grotesque blade in hand sank beneath abject terror. He saw the jagged edge already dripped blood and forced himself to look to his side. As far as he could tell out of the corner of his eye, he hadn’t hurt Myra yet.
    Eli peered down at him, evidently taking in a lot in the nearly total dark. He didn’t look angry or excited, just… Harrowed.
    He had drifted in and out of Dave’s classroom almost five years ago. He didn’t like to admit this about any of his students, but he had been forgettable. Quiet, did most of his homework on time, middle of the pack when it came to exams. He’d seemed lonely, but not in any unusual way for a middle schooler. Drew religious symbols in his notebook? Or had that been someone else?
            Clearly young adulthood had not been kind. What had begun as the awkward, blotchy beginnings of facial hair when Dave had known him was now an unappealing crust around his mouth. His hair was oily and he smelled like the street, and also like he’d maybe just pissed himself. His dark eyes had receded into restless pits. 
    Dave wanted to ask what he wanted, but that awful vision of butchery appeared in his mind when he opened his mouth. Eli held the knife up to his mouth as if it was a finger, shushing him. He remained grim, his face barely moving. Dave thought he saw the traces of tear-tracks down his grubby face. 
    “Get out of bed.” 
    The vision returned when he hesitated. This time he saw the cut had gone through to his son’s ribcage, which was no bigger than a basketball, and bile rose to his mouth. He leapt up, hoping to purge that horrible sight from his eyes. Somehow, that worked, which left even more troubled. He stared toward Mikey’s room.
    “I haven’t touched him,” Eli whispered, mouth close to his ear. He took Dave’s shoulder and steered him toward the bathroom. “Go get your first aid kit.” 
    Dave recoiled as his mind filled again with his worst fear. He wracked his brain for where Myra kept the damn thing, but all that came up were similarly awful sights of her. Disemboweled as well, with entrails hanging over her shoulder. Her head lay hanging away from her neck just enough for him to tell her throat had been slashed deeply open, despite her facing away from him on their kitchen floor. He started to weep.
    “Fuck’s your problem, man?” Eli said, then gritted his teeth. At first Dave thought he was worried about waking Myra up, but then he saw blood along his lower teeth, and his demand made more sense. He noticed a dark patch under the kid’s armpit, and how he held his knife arm awkwardly close to his body above the elbow.
    “Don’t get any ideas. Just get me the first aid kit.” 
    Gore overtook Dave’s eyes again. He opened his mouth to either speak or retch, but could produce nothing. 
    “Say it,” Eli said, back to speaking right into his ear.
    “I don’t know where it is,” Dave said. His voice was tiny. Deep down, under the fear, he was repulsed at how emasculated he was by this slobby teenager. But the way those things came to him every time he gave him a command-- something wasn’t right here. He wondered if it was a nightmare, but couldn’t find any solace in detachment. He was unfortunately as present and alert now as he had ever been in his life. The extent of the detail, the horror he felt each time he saw his massacred family, felt real.
    “Fuck!” Eli hissed. The word sent his spit onto Dave’s neck, and he recoiled. Eli gripped his shoulder hard, then pushed him out into the hallway. Despite trying to stay upright, Dave sprawled forward, and as he landed with a thud on the carpeting, the visions wracked him again. Eli ran up and yanked him to his feet. He held the knife toward him not so much like a weapon, but like something volatile he didn’t want too close to him, or even – though the thought felt incongruous – like a magic wand. As if to himself, Eli said,
    “I did not go through all this shit just to bleed out!” 
    As he spoke, Dave saw a shifting of the shadows behind Mikey’s door. His heart sank. He prayed Eli hadn’t noticed. 
    “Then just… Get me a couple towels and come downstairs,” he said. “Do you have any alcohol? I gotta clean this…” He looked down at the wound in his side, paling as he noticed how much blood continued to seep from it. It ran across most of his hoodie sleeve and right side now. His knife hand shook a little. Still, Dave did what he was told, as best he could in the midst of the waking nightmare Eli was somehow inflicting on him. 
    A moment later, Eli tucked a towel soaked with isopropyl alcohol he’d found under the bathroom sink under his arm, then bit into his lip to suppress his howl of pain. 
    “I-I can call you an ambulance,” Dave said. 
    “Like fuck you can,” Eli said. “Think I’m an idiot? Think the pigs are gonna bail you out? Hell no, man, it’s just you and me. You’re gonna do what I say, or-”
    And then they both heard a faint creak of the floor and saw Mikey’s door shift just a millimeter. 
    “Please-” Dave said, eyes clenched but still bombarded. “I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t hurt my family! Oh, god!” The images got worse as he lost control and his voice climbed in panic. Now he saw them move, saw the blood pour from Mikey as his stubby fingers probed the wound, saw Mira’s chest rise and fall with her dying breaths. It was real. It was happening. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

    Daddy lay crying on the floor in front of the man. The man had a knife in one hand now, and he was leaning to one side. The knife was just the kind he got to eat his peas with now he was getting big, not the kind mommy used to cut his sandwiches. He didn’t understand why Daddy was so scared of it. But he was definitely crying from fear. The other man kicked Daddy in the side and then winced in pain himself.
    “Useless piece of shit!” 
    He looked at Mikey. He looked tired and desperate. Mikey thought maybe he needed to lay down. Grownups usually didn’t have problems that could get fixed with laying down or having a snack, he didn’t think, but grownups didn’t usually shout at each other and kick each other, so he didn’t know what would help. The yelling and the bad words scared him, but they shouldn’t scare Daddy. 
    He noticed a flash of light in Mommy and Daddy’s room as Mommy picked up her phone. She did something with it, but then dropped it on the floor because her hands were shaking really badly. The man in the hallway noticed. He turned around fast. Daddy had started to blink and look around again. 
    “Dave! Jesus!” Mommy shouted. The other man started walking toward her with the butter knife. Daddy grabbed him by the leg and started to get up, so the man turned around and held it right in his face. 
    “Don’t you fucking touch me! Don’t call the cops, and don’t let her call the cops, or I’ll make you kill them both!”
    And Daddy’s face scrunched up again and he started crying harder, that same kind of crying as the man had done before, the kind of crying that shouldn’t come from grownups, shouldn’t come from anyone. But he still held onto the man’s leg. Then he pulled him down on the floor with him. The man held the knife up over their heads, pointing it right up at the ceiling.  
    “I said stop, asshole!” 
    Daddy reached out fast and grabbed him under the arm and he screamed, and dropped the knife. Then Daddy hit him in the face and pulled on his arm and made him scream some more.
            Mikey couldn’t watch any more. He turned around and put his back to the door, and he covered his ears and shut his eyes and tried not to listen, either, but the shouting and the crying were too loud, and he could still picture Daddy’s face crushed up with emotions, Daddy’s fist hitting the man in his teeth, the whine he made as he started to beg, the way it faded out until all he could hear was Daddy panting and Mommy saying something he couldn't hear. 

October Update 2025: Moonglum Games Sells Out

 Just kidding, mostly.

 

Highly astute readers may have noticed I kind of just disappeared a month and a half into doing Statospheric Saturdays. This is due to a combination of tumultuous life events (which are mostly still unresolved, unfortunately) and the fact that I did a minor rebrand, for lack of a better term. Hence the title of this post.

 

I'm planning to start doing professional GMing online (feel free to hmu if you're interested!) and I also made the questionable choice to look back at my earliest published projects on itch/DTRPG, most of which I delisted since I think I've grown a lot as a designer even in just a few years. I've decided to leave this blog untouched with the exception of trying to remove stuff that can easily tie my personal life to this blog. Surely a fool's errand, I know, but what with the fascist surveillance state thing going on I figured I should at least try.

 

Anyway, there's a Halloween game jam going on on the Unknown Armies fan discord, so expect the return of StatSat soon, and eventually other stuff again. I have a short story (maybe more flash fiction) based on something from UA in the works right now and an idea for a scenario that also fits the jam's themes. Both will end up here if finished (which is the plan!)

 

Stay safe, fuck the police, and play more games!

Statospheric Saturdays: Rituals for a College Campus

This week, I have three more rituals for you, originally submitted along with two GMCs for a game jam on the UA discord server. They're unified by the theme that they would be useful to members of a Skull and Bones-esque occult fraternity with a postmodern magickal twist (an idea I may end up developing more thoroughly for a future StatSat post). I did refine some of the details of these a bit, for any readers who've seen them before.

Freshman Fifteen 
Cost: 2 minor charges

Ritual action: Share a meal at a university dining hall with your intended victim (fast food joints work too, as long as they’re within 3 miles of campus). Make sure you both get the non-diet soda to wash it down, and that you both eat at least 3,000 (kilo)calories of food. Before you eat again, weigh yourself on a scale while in a moving elevator.

Effect: The next time your victim weighs themself, fifteen pounds of body fat will be instantly transferred from your body to theirs. This causes an Unnatural (3-4) check for both of you. The change in both your bodies is visible at a glance. 

 

Midnight Oil 
Cost: 1 minor charge

Ritual action: Starting at 11:48 PM (local time), drink twelve whole cans of an energy drink. It can be any brand, but it has to be the generic flavor. You must finish them all before midnight. As you empty them, arrange the cans in a circle around you, logos facing inward, and sit in the middle cross-legged. Make sure you cannot reach or see any timepieces. 
Effect: Time stretches and slows around you. For each hour that passes outside the circle, 70 minutes pass within. If someone were to observe you from outside, they’d probably think you're moving in exaggerated, pantomime slow-motion. If they watch for a while and realize that time is flowing at two different speeds in the same area, they are subject to an Unnatural (3-4) check. Similarly, any motion you can see is uncannily fast, and if you pay it any attention you face the same shock.

The effect persists for as long as you stay within the circle and unaware of the current time, so you can knock out quite a bit of homework, as long as you've got a bladder of steel. If you are told or otherwise become privy to the current time, on purpose or not, the magick of the ritual ceases immediately.

Oh, and a word of warning: if you fall asleep in the middle of the circle, you’re very susceptible to demonic possession.

Quiet Enjoyment
Cost: 2 minor charges

Ritual action: Knock five times on the wall, ceiling, or floor between your own living space and an adjacent dorm room or apartment from which you can hear some kind of noise whose source is beyond your control. Shout through the wall that you're calling in a noise complaint if it continues. For the ritual to work, the sound has to drop in response by at least 33.3 decibels (roughly the difference between normal conversation and a whisper) and then return to at least its original volume. 

Repeat this whole process, then call your RA, landlord, or local police (whichever is most accountable for maintaining peace and quiet where you live).

Effect: As long as your phone call is answered, the room/apartment where the sound was coming from becomes unnaturally muted - no sound can be made within, although sounds from without are still audible. The effect lasts as long as your call to the authority figure. Those caught unawares by the effect must make an Unnatural (3-4) check.

 

Statospheric Saturdays: Flavor for Magick Identities

This week, I'm posting a double feature of specific flavor I have used for the unnatural IDs of past player characters of mine. I love how flexible the identities listed in Book 1 and Me, Myself & You are with regards to what the source of the magick is, so here I'm showcasing just how weird you can get with them.

4Chan Diviner (Vague Information)

> Go on 4chan at 3:33 local time (AM or PM, doesn't matter)

> Post a question you want the answer to on the most relevant board

> Check the Post ID

> Find that number in "The Chaosfag's Worthless Guide to Divination" (if you don't know where to find the PDF, you're not cool enough to do this shit. Git gud)

> Read the entry 

> Know a little more about what's going to happen in the future

> feelsgoodman.jpg

The character I made this flavor up for was a member of an online cabal that recruited using 4chan and shadier corners of the internet. His name was Cretin Anderson, he was a forgettably bland-looking 20-something white guy and an avatar of the Disciple, and sadly the campaign never got past corkboarding.

 

Undercroft Psalmist (Terrorize)

The Undercroft may seem like an otherspace, but it’s more accurate to say it’s… A curse? A concept? A fundamental truth of the universe? In sensory terms, most experience it as a dim parlor with olive wallpaper and no doors or windows. There's a perpetually dusty love seat and a rickety end table, and not a whole lot else. 

Psalmists are people with a special connection to the Undercroft, typically developed after spending an unusually long time there, who can transport others into it by reciting to them the poem written below. The Terrorize roll affects the duration of their stay in their subjective experience, but it happens in only an instant of real time. 

Psalm of the Undercroft:
Grains of sand and ticking hands, a churning void to fill
Idle minds are seeing signs in shadows ‘neath the hill

I wander and I wonder at the eyes within the dark
And I weep into the deepness of the toxins in my heart

The nights go by with open eyes and tremors in my hands
And in the day I cannot say the truth my soul demands

The character I invented this for was a nineteen-year-old named Alexander Head who had spent subjective decades in the Undercroft two years earlier, and subsequently been branded insane and slipped through the cracks of society, only to be recruited by the Sleepers. I did get to play as him for a full objective of around 3-4 sessions. 

I enjoy the combination of the sci-fi thought experiment horrifically illustrated in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Hard Time" (season 4's iteration of the mandatory "O'Brien Must Suffer" episode) with the idea of a memetic verbal curse, similar to the King in Yellow play invented by Robert Chambers well over 100 years ago.

Statospheric Saturdays: Happy Medium

This is a more personal than usual entry in this series. I've talked about the fact I'm a therapist before on this blog, and have deliberately brought my love of RPGs into that work. I'm also a lifelong psychiatric survivor, which I consider more useful to my job than any formal training I've undergone.

I had the idea for Happy Medium a while ago, when I had nearly as many bad patient experiences under my belt as now, but very little experience on the other side of the Freudian couch. That is no longer as true, and seeing the specifics of how organizations fuck over patients on a structural, systemic level has not only been eye opening, but also quite helpful in fleshing out this GMC cabal.

I still have more to write about the role of psychotherapy in Unknown Armies because it is a game explicitly about trauma (among other things) and explicitly mechanizes the therapeutic process in ways I find naive, and too trusting of psychiatry as a system built within and supportive of capitalism. Another day, for sure.

Unlike other StatSat posts, I'm going to have an afterword as well as this little introduction. Please read it, too.

 

Happy Medium

Most people agree that the "occult mainstream" is more socially accepted in the wider world than ever before. As we approach half a century since the height of the Satanic Panic, astrology, tarot, crystals, new age medicine, even Paganism, wicca, and Santeria are everywhere. Long, long gone are the days of burning people at the stake because of a fear of the unknown power they had, or were believed to have had. Into this cultural climate steps Happy Medium, with arms wide open.

While many occult practices have, by and large, ceased to inspire primarily fear and disgust among the masses, it can still be hard for many magick practitioners to integrate fully into society. Happy Medium's viewpoint is that the fragmentary, insular, and eccentric communities that comprise the so-called "occult underground" exist in fearful opposition to normality.

Some adepts wear their heterodoxy as a badge of honor, scoffing at those who desire to integrate with society. Happy Medium feels for these wayward souls, but believes that attitude can only hold them back. Magick is a wonderful gift that can change lives, but to use it doesn't make you a god or a messiah. No man is an island, says Happy Medium; what good is the power to change humanity if you insist on setting yourself apart from it?

Beliefs & Objectives

In a phrase, Happy Medium believes in respectability politics for the occult. They want to be sure that in any hypothetical conflict with the occult underground, they're seen as "the good ones", and are left alone, while the "real bad actors" get what's coming to them. They reject the Sleepers' framing of the Sleeping Tiger in a world now so saturated with weirdness; it doesn't have to be all-out chaos when magick and mundanity meet. At the same time, they're no Mak Attax. They are happy to keep the occult underground separate but equal, as it were.

Their focus is on the rehabilitation of occultists' image and wrongdoings. Where the Sleepers want to cover things up at all costs, Happy Medium seeks to smooth things over and reach a mutual understanding. To that end, they operate not as disconnected vigilantes, but under an organized hierarchy, which is just as rife with petty internal politics as you might imagine.

Operations

Happy Medium was founded by philanthropist, retired psychiatrist, and cliomancer (in that order), Patricia Walton. She identifies as self-made, despite being the beneficiary of both occult and socioeconomic nepotism in a dozen subtle and several obvious ways. Her vision remains the guiding star by which the organization operates.

Happy Medium is unique in the occult underground as the only legally qualified, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that regularly interfaces with charges and major cabals. Naturally, this earns them no shortage of revulsion, which is not easy for them to understand, since they perceive their mission as so noble.

Nonetheless, many adepts, and even avatars, who get in too deep lean on the resources they provide: namely, financial and legal support, housing assistance, and therapy. All these services come with strings attached; their goal is not simply charity, but to reform their clients into respectable members of society. They operate shelters in several major cities across the northeast U.S. and have a number of additional offices where those willing to jump through the requisite bureaucratic hoops can be connected to aid, both by Happy Medium and a number of wholly mundane partner agencies.

Mum is not just the word, but a way of life when interfacing with these latter allies. Happy Medium uses coy language, typically framing their clients' real magick as delusion and psychosis (not that there's never overlap), and insisting they play along if they want to keep getting handouts. Legally binding documents and their implicit financial threats are weaponized to further ensure compliance here, although they aren't always enough to contain rebellious and/or unstable mages who have had enough being bossed around and made out to be kooks.

Resources & Organization

Money is king, of course. It is in and of itself self-evidently useful even to people who can bend reality to their will through less conventional means. Connected is Happy Medium's plentiful social capital. Through expert politicking, choice "financial incentives", discretion uncommon among adepts, and, yes, the occasional sneaky spell or two, the organization is in surprisingly good standing considering its volatile clientele.

Many checkers, a solid handful of avatars, and even a few adepts besides the founder are on the payroll. All have had enough exposure to the unnatural to at least keep it together in the face of open displays, and the therapists on staff tend to be especially prepped. They are required to be in therapy themselves, although they tend to need to metaphorize their stranger experiences to their own shrinks.

Although Happy Medium employs occultists, much like in TNI they are rarely promoted very far, and for similar reasons. The organizational culture is forcibly unified to the extent of feeling uncomfortably culty, which is an unpleasantly familiar vibe for many of its clients. Patricia has done everything possible to distance herself from the cliomantic circles of her youth, but out of the kindness of her heart they still find their way to her organization more than most other adepts. Their brand of magick is easier than most to make palatable and useful for her agency's needs, after all.

In any moderate-to-large city in the northeastern U.S., Happy Medium maintains at the very least an office where you can get started on their substantial battery of intake questionnaires and assessments, and then be directed to the nearest relevant providers, which are almost always within a day's drive. They also offer remote therapy and social work services - by Zoom, not astral projection or anything like that, of course.

Second only to the behavioral health staff in number and prominence are the lawyers, all of whose loyalty is thoroughly paid for. Their work on clients' behalf is often dicey, and they are also frequently deployed to protect the organization's good name. However, they tend to be spared the most unpredictable interactions with clients while taking home the best pay and benefits by a mile, a fact they are regularly reminded to appreciate.

Management has the privilege of all the best perks and status without having to regularly expose themselves to the target demographic of the organization. They are the elite, and they and everyone beneath them know it. More often than dissent, this results in employees trampling each others' careers to make it into the club themselves. While this doesn't usually serve the clients, it's tacitly encouraged, in part because the infighting protects the managers' seats at the top.

Drawbacks

For the rank and file, burnout is at least as big a problem as in any other human services work. They're overworked, underpaid, and once in a while they hear a horror story about a colleague being hit with a blast spell.

Additionally, it's not too uncommon for some cabal to get the idea of infiltrating the organization, trying to broaden the availability of its resources without the associated judgment, or even just for purely selfish purposes. Over time, this has prompted a pretty strong paranoid streak amongst the upper eschelon of management.

Uses for Happy Medium in Your Campaign

• If a PC seeks therapy, especially for some hard-to-explain Unnatural notches, Happy Medium is a solution that offers lots of ways to turn healing into blowback.

• Similarly, Happy Medium can offer a lifeline after the law gets involved, which is frankly a pretty likely consequence for the pursuit of many objectives, even at the local level.

• As described under "Operations", maybe the PCs have ideas about how Happy Medium could be run better, or its resources redirected. Do they want to try and fix it from the inside? Or perhaps a more radical approach?

• Maybe someday Patricia loses her shit (again) and the end result is a bunch of highly unstable patients back out on the street to start charging up again, all at once.    

GMC: Patricia Walton

There is a perverse secret behind Happy Medium's seemingly banal structure: Patricia Walton was not always Patricia Walton. Before that, her name was Dawn Miller, agent of renunciation, and before that, Leticia Tobin, down-and-out wife of a poor, sleazy gambler. In seeking better for herself from the latter, she wound up the steward of the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted (see Statosphere from 1e), transformed from a young Black woman troubled by her oppression and its interplay with her undiagnosed autism, to a shrewd white matron with a savior complex.

The thing is, that didn't really solve her problems. Eventually, after years as a magickal social worker, it hit her that nothing had actually changed. She had gone from living in service of a husband who didn't care for her, to fixing the problems of whoever the Room sent her way, and at no point was she getting anything out of the arrangement.

The day this realization hit her, she waited for her secretary/bodyguard to leave for the day and repeated her renunciation, starting another new life. Maybe she should have waited to calm down and think through her options, though, because the Room was just as fickle the second time it spat her out as the first.

The product she became was still white, still an expert of bougie social mores, and she retained her rediscovered drive to put herself first for a change. Unfortunately, she came out even less like her original self, and her altruistic motivations were utterly subsumed by the desire to finally get hers.

She really doesn't care a bit about whose neck she has to step on to satisfy herself. She's done her time on the bottom rungs. Now she wants to reap the rewards, with the aid to others at best a thin veneer, and at worst a disguise for her desire to manipulate others embroiled in the occult and make them suffer as she has. She no longer gives any thought to the life she left behind in the Room, just as she stopped thinking about her daughter long ago. If she had gotten the chance to find her own courage in her own time, who knows what good she could have done. But the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted has twice molded her, leaving only this bitter discard in its wake.

Obsession: putting herself first. Patricia has had two lifetimes of serving others; been there, done that. It's me time now.

Rage stimulus: people who make their problems, her problem. She has a nonprofit to run; she doesn't have time for your whining!

Fear stimulus: confronting the several paved-over layers of her abandoned lives, and figuring out what's still left of her underneath it all. (Self)

Noble stimulus: giving others what they need. At this point, it's so obvious to Patricia how to fix someone's problems. Why wait around, explaining it over and over to them, when you can just bring them in line? They'll thank her later.

Boss Bitch 90%: Subs for Status, Coerces Helplessness, Protects Helplessness

Psychotherapist 30%: Subs for Connect, Evaluates Self, Therapeutic

Third Time's the Charm 60%: Subs for Secrecy, Subs for Lie, Protects Self

Possessions: the definitional girlboss wardrobe, pricey and gaudy jewelry with a couple of cars and a house in the suburbs to match, plus a timeshare in a delightfully quaint Martha's Vineyard cottage.

 

Afterword

Besides the stress healing mechanics, the other place where therapy shows up prominently in the official Unknown Armies books is the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted in 1e's Statosphere, which is *all kinds* of icky, and not just in relation to my profession. 

The agent of this room of renunciation is a Black woman implied to be neurodivergent who got turned into a white woman therapist, which. Wow. Also, it's one of fairly few canon ways to trans your gender, which in connection with other details is pretty wild.

Patronizing and microaggression-riddled writing by Rick Neal aside, it's pretty unclear as to whether this was supposed to be a good, bad, or lateral thing for her. By extension, it's unclear what the reader is supposed to make of her role as a magick therapist. A lot of times, the House of Renunciation is supposed to just be about changes without qualifying them as positive or negative, but when they get this political and intersectional I personally find that quite unsatisfying and centrist-y. 

The emphasis on individual autonomy is super at odds with the fact that Dawn's current existence as outlined feels like it would be a personal hell for her original self. I also really, really hate the preachy bullshit about how if she just had a spine, she (and every other abused wife) should have left her husband and fixed her whole life, easy peasy. I read her becoming the room's agent instead as almost some kind of karmic punishment for not doing that. This reading casts the whole entry in a really ugly light, and my writing Patricia as the result of Dawn rejecting that is an attempt to call that out as the patriarchal slime it is, while maintaining the idea that the room will always fuck you over monkey's paw style (and there's a case to be made that I should have challenged that part, as well).

Happy Medium and Patricia are a response to the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted, but also a response to my experience working against my institutional role as a therapist at a nonprofit for the sake of my clients. Maybe doing both those things in one piece of writing isn't a great idea, I dunno. 

I'll end by stating that I am a white trans woman who grew up in a petit bourgeousie ("upper middle class") family. I'm not trying to claim any authority to speak for all others who share those identities, but I think it's useful information as to why this came out the way it did. 

I'm more invested in the explanation here than I usually am on this blog because, again, this is an unusually personal piece of writing, and because I took some big ideological swings at some shit I'm still navigating and will probably have to navigate the rest of my life. I reserve the right to look back at this in six months and put up a big disclaimer of how hard I'm cringing at some or all of it, but hopefully I have the courage to leave it up, as an artifact of who I am at this point in my life if nothing else.