Here is the penultimate entry in this little subseries. Getting a bit spooky with this one; UA is a horror game, after all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Smith had no upbringing. He wasn\u2019t born. A glitch in the universe shat him out, fully formed, fourteen years ago. Well, fully formed, sans any kind of blood, bone, internal organs, or soul. If you haven\u2019t already inferred, he is a nonentity (see UA<\/em>2 Core Book<\/em>, p. 304). Of the roughly decade and a half he\u2019s existed, he has spent very little doing anything of note, which is typical of his kind, and necessary for his survival. He wore sweater vests and khakis, walked into a cubicle at a struggling temp firm and stared at its wall eight hours a day. After clocking out, he found a secluded alley, 24-hour diner booth, or the like to spend the night doing nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This changed one night, nearly a year ago now, in the darkened Hot Topic of an isolated shopping mall. Smith sat motionless in the changing room he\u2019d selected to spend the night, the college-age employee either having forgotten he\u2019d gone inside or failing to give a shit when they locked up. The floor-to-ceiling grate outside the store rattled up, and a thanatomancer (see Postmodern<\/em> M<\/em>agic<\/em>k<\/em>, p. 111) by the name of Florence Simon walked inside, pushing her sacrifice ahead of her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As she explained, in brutal detail, her plans for the poor homeless woman she had chosen to harvest a sig from, the aura of terror wafted to Smith like a macabre apple pie on a windowsill. Silently, he unlatched the door to the changing room and watched the proceedings from the shadows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the next three hours, the butcher did her work and cleaned up afterwards. She never even noticed Smith staring. Her victim did, but by that point she had been overwhelmed with agony, her screams long grown indistinct, her tongue cut out. Simon left dragging two heavy black trash bags and a fleshy fetish in a pouch hanging from around her neck. Enthralled, Smith followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simon was on the warpath with an enemy cabal. She had just started charging up nightly for the span of a week in anticipation of some supremely grisly workings. However, on the third night, she caught Smith, because he had become overwhelmed with bloodlust and wanted to join in. Startled and angry to have a carefully planned charging rite ruined, the death mage reflexively unleashed a significant blast on Smith. She expected him to fall to literal pieces, but he just kept kneeling over her gagged and flailing sacrifice, digging fistfuls of meat from his chest cavity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simon went from upset to frantic. She struck out with her flensing knife, severing three fingers from the philosophical zombie. Though they were coated in the sacrifice\u2019s blood, the stumps did not bleed themselves. From this point, her rage and terror escalated to twisted reverence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nonentities are immune to magick, but, though it\u2019s vanishingly rare, they can still practice it. Smith\u2019s obsession with suffering and pain dovetailed beautifully with thanatomancy. He also had the benefit of a devoted tutor. Unaware of what Smith was, Simon had interpreted his immunity to, and fixation on torture as a sign he was some kind of cenobite-esque entity, perhaps one she had attracted after her storied career as a ritualistic killer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately for both, but mercifully for the local unhoused population, their morbid attraction had allowed Simon to forget her feud until it was too late. The cabal got the drop on her, and although Smith harvested four significant charges in the aftermath, she received a nasty stab wound. It wouldn\u2019t have been fatal, though she was in and out of consciousness for most of a day. But once Smith had finished with her attackers, he took one last boon from his mentor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Short-lived as his training was, Smith learned enough of Simon\u2019s ideology to know how to cover his tracks. It had been important to Simon to conduct her sacrifices in public places, but to leave no trace behind. So became Smith\u2019s practice. He disappeared from his job, causing a minor kerfuffle, but before anyone could decide if they wanted to check if he had any emergency contacts, his firm went under. No one who knew him before ever thought of him again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, Smith spends his days stalking and planning his sacrifices, and carries them out at night. His body count is in the hundreds. He has evaded erasure by the universe only because no one has ever associated him with his actions. He takes teeth or knucklebones as fetishes, which now weigh down his pockets, but do not slow his pursuit. He is stealthy, steady, and perfectly forgettable. And no one who he chooses to cross paths with lives to tell the tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is one other oddity about him: he never casts a spell. He never fully learned how from Simon, and moreover, he\u2019s obsessed with the process of the sacrifice and its resultant emotions. He couldn\u2019t care less about exercising mystic power. He is a hollow man suffused with the equivalent mojo of several dozen major charges. It\u2019s unlikely mundane authorities will catch him, but unnatural phenomena have been dogging him for months now. Surely, when he\u2019s discovered by the occult underground of one of the cities his trail of blood passes through, he will go out with a terrible bang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steven Smith, Soulless Thanatomancer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Obsession: Ritualistic murder and the resultant froth of pain, fear, and misery in the victim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a nonentity, Smith has no passions and does not face stress checks. He has a base rating of 15% in all abilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanatomancer 75%: Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soulless Killer 75%: Substitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Struggle, Coerces Violence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here is the penultimate entry in this little subseries. Getting a bit spooky with this one; UA is a horror game, after all. The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4 Many serial killers have been called soulless, sociopathic, heartless. Often there\u2019s an element of metaphor, or at least exaggeration to these accusations. But for Steven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":277085423,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[156081,791468878,937988],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rpgs","category-statospheric-saturdays","category-unknown-armies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/phmf02-2h","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":135,"url":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?p=135","url_meta":{"origin":141,"position":0},"title":"Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 1 – Ed Christ, Epideromantic Savior","author":"Moonglummer","date":"November 22, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the first in what is currently looking like a 4-part... Sub-series, I guess? The idea is GMC adepts who take their magickal practice in an especially weird or unexpected direction. As a teaser, the concepts for the other three are \"Daredevil Sociomancer\", \"Bibliomancer of Action\", and \"Minor Thanatomancer\".\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "RPGs"","block_context":{"text":"RPGs","link":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?cat=156081"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":137,"url":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?p=137","url_meta":{"origin":141,"position":1},"title":"Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 2 – Bucket List Bill, Daredevil Sociomancer","author":"Moonglummer","date":"November 29, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Last week, I started this subseries on especially weird adepts. The specialest of special snowflakes. The following GMC is very,\u00a0very\u00a0loosely based on an uncle of mine, as perhaps all the best UA characters are.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Stay tuned for a bookworm and a death mage in the coming weeks. The Mad\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "RPGs"","block_context":{"text":"RPGs","link":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?cat=156081"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":139,"url":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?p=139","url_meta":{"origin":141,"position":2},"title":"Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3 – Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action","author":"Moonglummer","date":"December 6, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I still have the thanatomancer planned for this subseries, and I will be adding an anagram gematriast as well. After that, I think I might take a break from StatSat for a while so I have time to develop my non-UA posts a bit more. But that's a couple weeks\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "RPGs"","block_context":{"text":"RPGs","link":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?cat=156081"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":143,"url":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?p=143","url_meta":{"origin":141,"position":3},"title":"Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5 – “Evil, Vile” Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic","author":"Moonglummer","date":"December 20, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Here is the last entry in this subseries.\u00a0Levi was originally going to be my PC in an All-Mart campaign that never got past the dreaded scheduling phase. As mentioned a couple weeks ago, I will be shelving weekly StatSat entries for the time being. I have a 4e D&D campaign\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "RPGs"","block_context":{"text":"RPGs","link":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?cat=156081"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":107,"url":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?p=107","url_meta":{"origin":141,"position":4},"title":"Introducing Statospheric Saturdays","author":"Moonglummer","date":"July 4, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Because it's a game that I love and that touches on so many themes that appeal to me,\u00a0 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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "RPGs"","block_context":{"text":"RPGs","link":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?cat=156081"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":109,"url":"https:\/\/moonglummedia.com\/?p=109","url_meta":{"origin":141,"position":5},"title":"Statospheric Saturdays: He Has His Father’s Eyes","author":"Moonglummer","date":"July 5, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u00a0Godwalker\u00a0for a case study. The following is a ritual to leverage this fact for personal gain in a very sinister way. 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Many serial killers have been called soulless, sociopathic, heartless. Often there\u2019s an element of metaphor, or at least exaggeration to these accusations. But for Steven Smith, it\u2019s literal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n