Unknown Armies: Millennialism in the age of millennials

Games Discussion Unknown Armies
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So I'm running UA for a bunch of relatively younger folks (early twenties). They've only ever played D&D and the like, they're struggling starving young things, and in Trump's America we're going with the 'Recall the Mayor because he's mind-controlling his subjects' objective because hey, go with what you know.

It turns out very quickly that the most successful, powerful, and group-slicing move is to offer someone a steady job. What began as a harebrained scheme to impersonate a city official in order to fudge a job interview for an entry-level position in City Hall to get closer to the mayor has become a staggering priority shift for a freelance web designer who suddenly has a 9-to-5 job that pays $15/hour, has state benefits, and a pension plan. The web designer who took Internet Troll as one of their identities has become drunk on respectability and is already coming up with apps and Web-based solutions to the mayor's problems. They've even got enough hardened notches in Self from playing devil's advocate online that the party's early attempts to coerce them back into the rebellious cabal's fold just slid right off.

The theme of struggling to pay your bills and lead a normal life while pursuing esoteric occult ends has never been more real for these kids, some of whom would strongly consider turning to illegal means to pay rent IRL and care way more about their creative pursuits than their shitty retail jobs. I had my concerns about whether an RPG about the conspiracy-laden occult underground would appeal to these darned millennials who seem intent on killing every industry out there, but the concept of hidden influences and power players behind mundane goings-on is pretty familiar to these folks. It's been a perfect time for a new edition of UA, is what I'm saying. Thanks.

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It's awesome that you're introducing gamers to non-D&D games, and especially UA. I'm not surprised with their ability to quickly "grok" the milieu of Unknown Armies, since they've grown up witnessing the downfall of heroic figures (e.g., Lance Armstrong), the crumbling of economic structures, and a growing societal distrust of established cultural frameworks.

Out of this environment people are seeking out your individual enlightenment, while struggling to live a dignified existence when your earnings and buying power continue to diminish.

The early 21st century is the perfect real-world time to play Unknown Armies!

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This is a world where a meme of an anthropomorphic frog with a name that was simultaneously the Korean sound for laughter and an ancient Egyptian divinity of chaos helped a dangerous man become President, and identities are being packaged up as archetypes and sold back to us by industrialized cultural factories at an alarming rate (from steampunk to witchpunx). A time where you go with what works because the very idea of a coherent cosmological structure is bizarre, where the most mundane of things gain the most mysterious cultural cache.

We have never lived in a more Unknown Armies time.

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