Unknown Armies

Avatars

Man of the Land

There's more than just worms under your feet

Attributes: You love the land. You’ve put your life into it, even hinged your life on it. You’re a farmer who lives and dies by how you tend the land. Or a mountain man who lives on what food he can find, and is thankful for every meal the land gives him. Or even a hunter-gatherer of the deepest Amazon, one of those whose never even heard of “subsistence farming”, much less “crop rotation”, but uses everything he kills, and doesn’t take more than he can use. Within your native land you know every bump, gully, spring, and tree.
And the land loves you back. You can see it shiver at your touch, you can hear its call. Your relationship is commensal,, you help it, it helps you. You are a man of the land (or an Earth Mother, this is not a gender-limited thing). When the Earth is healthy, you’re happy. When the Earth hurts, you feel it, too. While your power is most concentrated in your native land, you’re by no means powerless outside of your Home Range.

Symbols: The farmer’s hoe, the Earth symbol (Circle with crossed lines inside), the globe, the smudge of dirt across a brow and in the hair on the back of the hands, the very Earth itself.

Masks: Gaia (Greek), Mokos (Slavic), Prthivi (Vedic), Demeter (Greek), Zemepates (Lithuanian), Cain and Abel (Judeo-Christian), Nisse (Scandinavian), Consus (Roman), Tammuz (Sumero-Babylonian), Paul Bunyan (North America)

Suspected Avatars in History: That old ugly guy in the painting “American Gothic”, Bigfoot, Johnny Appleseed, the Jersey Devil, and there have been some Amish ones, but they don’t get out much.

Taboo: Damaging the land permanently. Sure, you can till some fields. You can shave your face or use one of them fancy “exfoliating” scrubs, can’t you? But get a backhoe or dynamite out, and it’s just like cutting off your nose. It’ll probably hurt as much. Want to commit suicide? Take up strip-mining. But it’s not just you, buddy. Any human-inflicted damage to your land hurts you, too. Men of the Land tend to dislike other people for this reason. Take on more of the hurt to protect your land if you want.

Channels: The radius of your home range is equal to your avatar skill in miles. If you’re outside of your Home Range, you roll at a -30%, so long as you’re not airborne or, even worse, in orbit. Leave planet Earth and your avatar skill is gone.

1-50%: The land shares itself with you. On a successful roll of your avatar skill you can sense the presence of intruders on your land, feel their footsteps as though they walked on your skin, and hear they voices in your own ears. The woodsmen of fairy tales always seemed to show up at the right place at the right time in their woods. There’s a reason for that.
51-70%: Blend in to the scenery. No longer do you merely sense your land’s changes, it wraps you in itself. While within your territory you may substitute your Avatar skill for any appropriate stealth or camouflage skill, allowing you to effortless blend in while on your land.
71-90%: The land does your bidding for brief periods. Temporary changes can be made. Need a chasm over there? A pond? Sure. But it won’t last more than a few minutes, so push people in quickly. Minor changes (plants growing, small changes in topography) are made permanently. The land loves you so much it’ll hurt itself. But don’t kick a dog too often, if you know what I mean.
91+%: The land provides for you as you need it, bringing to you whatever you find yourself wanting. Meanwhile, you can bring to it what it needs most: rain, sunshine, and all that. Or bad weather, if you’re like that. But remember about kicking dogs.

Owen | profile | Oct 02, 04 | 10:35 pm

Visitor Comments

Hi everybody, please take it easy on me, I'm rather new at this (er, this is my first one). Any advice, comments, etc. are much appreciated, and I apologize for it being anglo-centric, I'm not all that boned up on other cultures' agricultural myths. Many thanks to PD for his advice and input!

Owen | profile | Oct 02, 04 | 10:37 pm

Ok, some input: It's tricky, you try to squeeze in both a farmer and a hunter in the same avatar here, I think you should diversify. The hunter already exists, so make this a farmer, most of what's not so good about this stems from this confusion.

I also think it's a bit over powered. I like having the first level so subtle that the avatar doesn't notice it himself as anything more than "I'm good at this". So make the first channel the second, strike the second entirely (or make it the first, but I think it matches poorly with the "I'm basically a farmer"-theme of the avatar). The last two are basically the same (affect the land and the weather), so make them one and make it the final channel. Ok, so now we're down to two channels and we need two, one subtle and one less so. The first could be that you can live off the land, using only basic tools and hard work you can find or make food and shelter and sustain an excistence pretty much forever. (needs work to clean it up for either a farmer or a hunter, cant really have both. For a farmer it might be the the crops never fails. see, subtle, yet very powerful (in a mediveal kind of way, but it also makes for a steady income and probably makes you the richest farmer in the village)) The third one... No, you're gonna have to figure that one out yourself...

Mattias | profile | Oct 04, 04 | 4:19 am

Actually, I've met enough french, scottish and welsh farmers to know that this is good and works mainly.

also alot of pre-christian medievil european ideas about witches fit within this achetype as well.

it's more like an anti-social True King than as 'the farmer'.
and the first and last two channels are okay as they are IMHO. the thrid one is more like a less powerful version of the fourth, but there's nothing wrong with that really, a person with the fourth channel is making a bee-line for ascension anyway, more of the same shouldn't be something too bad for that sort of person who to get to that level is having to become more and more 'one with the land' as it were.

the second channel though... it needs to be a sort of bridge power between the subtlety of hte first channel and the brash unnaturalness of the third.

maybe a sort of naimate plant power, that give the avatar the ability to animate plants they pay real close attention to and care for especially.
these plants would be able to follow commands from the avatar but would generally just do their own thing when unattended, attacking anything that hasn't lived on the land for a month.

just think of a couple of adepts in a field of corn that starts trying to eat them while the lord of the land watches on smiling...

a 'talk with animals' power might be good too, but not necceasary really.

Miniature Wicker Zombu | profile | Oct 04, 04 | 9:23 am

The taboo, though appropriate, is pretty easy. Not hard to follow. In fact, you would have to go out of your way to break it.

BillionSix | profile | Oct 04, 04 | 5:05 pm

Perhaps the taboo could be:
"May not use any tool or device manufactured outside of the radius of the Home Range; the innate connection and respect of the land must be maintained in implied as well as direct support of the Farmkeeper. Those who dwell on his property had either best toe the line or make for high ground, so to speak.

Buying or using gasoline may break taboo, unless it is for a strictly agricultural machine (ie: tractor, the homestead's generator or threshing machine) as well as any use of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides produced through modern/unecologically-sound methods, unless they are natively produced products.

This makes the job of buying the 'correct supplies' even tougher, but the farmers of the world seem to thrive best when confronted with adversity.

Note: purchasing/using firearms of a non-automatic nature (ie: bolt-action, lever action or repeater-style) does not breach the taboo, but a fully-automatic weapon, as a general rule, does -- any weapon above the tech level of the surrounding, minus one hundred years, qualifies as 'too high-tech'.

Simplicity works, to summate easier.

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Personal note: mountain farmers rarely drive Cadillacs, BMWs, use Uzis or hang out with drug dealers -- this Archetype makes for a fine, fine villain/mysterious figure in the Boonies of the world. A network of these scattered across a good-sized country could make for an excellent storyline. Moreso if they were involved in growing some kind of vaguely innocuous plant which might have detrimental effects on the rest of the world.

The mere thought of five or six Appalachians-based Farmers making a full-sized crop of Mandragora, readying it for shipment into the next batch of Corn Puffs would be scary as Hell, honestly.

Mr Unlucky | profile | Oct 04, 04 | 6:18 pm

I like this a lot...not as a pc avatar but as an npc avatar.. this reminds me of no small number of poorly writen horror flicks were the bad guy seemed to always know where everyone was and could move accrost his land hidden. I think that in place of having him temprorarily change the land allow him to teleport around his land, or perhapse to not be hurt as easily on it...

vagina = fun! | profile | Oct 21, 04 | 10:52 pm