05 July 2025

Statospheric Saturdays: He Has His Father's Eyes

Dysfunctional relationships among members of the occult underground are more or less a given, and this inevitably causes problems when those people become parents - read Godwalker for a case study. The following is a ritual to leverage this fact for personal gain in a very sinister way.

He Has His Father's Eyes 
Cost: 6 significant charges 

Ritual action: This ritual requires that you're physically able to bear a child. While possessed by a demon, attempt to conceive a child with an avatar. The specific archetype they channel has no bearing on the ritual. 

If you succeed at getting pregnant and making the ritual casting roll, you must start drinking to intoxication and smoking a carton or more of cigarettes every day, and keep it up until the baby is born. It has to happen at a home birth without pain medication, and without anyone being present who has the "medical" identity feature or prior experience at delivering a child. Although the product of the ritual will be immune to the nine months of toxins you've been building up, there is still no guarantee it, or you, survives the process. Lastly, you must be separated from the creature without so much as a glimpse of it. 

Effect: You have just given birth to a newborn diametric (see Book 2: Run, p. 110) of the archetype channeled by the other parent. It will be an unnaturally precocious baby, but equally ill-tempered and contrarian. It only regards you with the loyalty and affection due a parent by their child. You are all that makes sense, the only person it can ever like or obey, and this attitude cannot be shaken off no matter how you treat it. 

Its Againsty identity starts at just 3%, and it also has 3% in an "Unnatural Birth" identity (substitutes for Secrecy, coerces Unnatural, protects Unnatural). It develops rapidly, aging the physical equivalent of one month per day until the equivalent of its eighteenth birthday, 216 days later. Each monthlike day, both its identities increase by 1% until they reach 66%.

 

For good measure, here are some bullet-point ideas for GMCs resulting from the use of this ritual:

  • The daughter of a Flying Woman avatar (presumably a transfeminine avatar fertilized the egg) could be the perfect pawn for a truly evil and misogynistic charger. Other archetypes that could fulfill this role without such a horrible, patriarchal flair include the Rebel, the Firebrand, and the Masterless Man.
  • An avatar of the Fool could be both easy to seduce for occult purposes, and useful in creating a naturally faithful unnatural entity. The offspring of this union could be a genius, or some kind of prophet who can see the influence of the statosphere in everyday life.
  • Want to use this ritual to bring about the antichrist? Try a Martyr, Healer, Necessary Servant, or Solid Citizen.

04 July 2025

Introducing Statospheric Saturdays

Because it's a game that I love and that touches on so many themes that appeal to me,  I've always got a whole bunch of ideas for Unknown Armies content, most of which aren't developed past a conceptual sentence or two. I've also been wanting to get a bit more active on this blog. My solution, inspired in part by the great blog-turned-supplement book Oddities & Endlings, is what I'm calling Statospheric Saturdays.

For as long as I've got ideas and the time to flesh them out (the latter certainly being the likelier to run out first), I will be posting some kind of UA something on here every Saturday: anything from artifacts, rituals, GMCs and factions, unnatural IDs and entities, otherspaces, archetypes, adept schools, and even scenarios and things harder to categorize so neatly, like musings about the game's themes and mechanics.

Tomorrow's inaugural article will be a ritual inspired by the movie Rosemary's Baby. Stay tuned and stay weird!