Now How Much Would You Pay?
Eileene periodically makes me watch shows that I should see. It’s good for me. Keeps the well-worn grooves in my brain from calcifying entirely.
Most recently, we watched a copy of “The Lost Room,” a three-episode show the Sci-Fi Channel aired a few years ago. In brief, “The Lost Room” plunges the protagonist into a dangerous subculture revolving around small, common, innocuous-looking things from a not-quite-real hotel room somehow involved in a strange, reality-defying event. These things have strange powers, some of them useful, others less so. A bus ticket, with a tap on the head, causes people to fall, painfully, face-down on a road near Gallup, NM. (Have fun getting home!) A wristwatch hard-boils any egg placed within it. A comb stops time for a few seconds, leaving the holder immune. People obsess about them, pursue them, collect lore about them, track rumors of their movements, try to figure out where the hotel room is and what happened there. Some work alone, some form cabals to pursue half-baked goals.
Uncharacteristically, I was already aware of the show from another source, in this case a newsgroup devoted to the Unknown Armies RPG. The game’s setting—or, more precisely, the default setting it envisions, since the themes at the heart of the game are universal—revolves around a subculture of mystical adepts competing for power, as measured by their decidedly skewed perspectives. The UA newsgroup, and UA fans generally, gravitate to the Fortean, and carry on a steady conversation calling one another’s attention to weird events, weird fiction, and even strikingly weird images which could be mined for useful adventure ideas.
The UA newsgroup was very excited about “The Lost Room” when it came out. Not familiar with the show, I didn’t pick much up from the conversation. Now that I am, I see why it was considered such a fertile ground for UA campaigns. The participants on the newsgroup had missed the entire point, as they so often do.
The newsgroup conversation focused on the weird things—the Objects—and what other Objects might exist without appearing on the show, and what they might do and how to use the Objects together in creative ways. This was interesting, as it was in the show itself, but weird stuff isn’t really the crux of UA.
Nobody talked much about the reason “The Lost Room” attracted all the attention on this particular newsgroup: the tone was right. UA can be adapted to a variety of settings and tones, but the default is one of small-time grifters and thugs preying upon one another as much as upon one another, stealing one another’s mojo out of greed or pre-emptive self-defense or just on general principle. A few make good on their ambition and achieve power and status, at least within the occult underground, but most remain small-time grifters and thugs, waiting for the Big Score. The opening scene of “The Lost Room” shows a sweaty, nervous exchange of a hotel key for $2,000,000 at gunpoint. It comes to no good for anyone involved. UA works hard to maintain a sense that wondrous powers have a price: magic is fueled by obsessive, transgressive, self-destructive behavior. Every form of power has its price, and in UA, the price usually includes a decent, normal lifestyle, not to mention a chance behave decently toward your fellow man. As Wally observes while enlightening Detective Miller on the nature of the Objects, “All that matters? Is the price. That’s what nobody gets. There’s always a price to pay when using the Objects. Whether you know it or not, there’s always a price.”
Like I said, the tone was right.
But even that isn’t the kernel of what made the show such a natural UA match, although it’s close. The bitter heart of both game and show, the irreducible diamond nugget at the center of the concept is obsession. We all have our obsessions, and our psychological triggers, and UA invites us to recognize our own by defining some for our characters. UA characters pay the price of power less because they make a rational decision that it’s worth the price than because they simply can’t be any other way. People who perform hate magic, or lust magic, or chaos magic, do so by embracing that obsession and leaping past rational bounds, but the obsession comes first. It’s there whether they take the plunge or not. In “The Lost Room,” anyone who is in contact with an Object for very long—or, in some cases, even before contact at all—becomes obsessed. They may want more, or they may want to employ their Objects for higher purposes, but it’s the having that’s most important. Several characters plead not to have their Object taken, especially if it’s the only one they have, and the show takes a moment to portray the pitiable “losers,” who once had one or more Objects but no longer do. Like Gollum and his lost Precious, they are the truly wretched.
UA has an occult underground, and weird mystical shit clouding the waters, and an edgy, post-modern noir feel, and they get all the attention, because fanboys like weird, cool stuff. But they aren’t what the game is about. Note: it’s not about magick. Or guns. Or blowing shit up. Or freaking the norms. As the authors themselves say, it’s about obsession, and the price you’ll pay to pursue it. And if the fanboys really want to capture the spirit of the game they adore so, they need to get back to these basics.