Unknown Armies

Occult, abusive behavior, and addiction...y'know, everything your parents warned you about.

Overall score:

I’ll cut to the chase and not bore you with the (sincere) applause I have for Unknown Armies before giving you the skinny. This game, while not involving devil worship per se, is essentially the embodiment of all the bad stereotypes that people have about gamers and role players. In feel, it is the Grand Theft Auto of roleplaying games. I now wake up daily and give a small prayer of thanks that they haven’t made it a LARP. Note to Atlas Games: This is not a suggestion.

The setting is the occult underground of the modern day. But instead of using religions like Wicca (which could just as easily offend Wiccans), it has magic function on one of three premises—and I should mention that they spell it “magick,” but I refuse to do that, because I am stubborn. The first type is the imitation of archetypal personalities or figures. The archetypes are real quasi-deities who you try to emulate. The problem comes in when they define some of those archetypes. Their most mentioned is the Naked Goddess. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess how you imitate this particular archetype.

The second type of magic is ritual. This is probably the most interesting, and it certainly makes the most of roleplaying. The players essentially invent a ritual. They tell you what objects and symbols they will use and what they’ll do with it (the examples are full of sexual, cannibalistic, and other unpleasant imagery, but if you ignore that you can see the variety of other possibilities). Then the GM adjucates how effective those elements are as far as their symbolic relation to what they want to accomplish. It would be fun just to create an entire system of magic using the UA rules for ritual (but with more palatable examples).

The last type of magic in Unknown Armies is “Adept” magic, and it is probably the most offensive for even relatively sensitive souls. It involves charging up with magical energy from what the creators refer to as paradox but what is, in practice, really unhealthy addiction or obsession. They involves getting power from getting drunk, re-enacting pornography, abusing new and creative drugs, cutting yourself up, and so forth. It’s conceivable that you could apply this sort of magic without doing something that involves shooting for sickening or reprehensible behavior, but if so, Atlas isn’t supporting it.

The archetypal magic and the adept magic is opposed, and it’s difficult to pursue both types, because, as I said, the adept magic involves obsessing over a type of abusive behavior, which leave little room for trying to follow an archetype. [editor's note: what if the archetype encourages unhealthy obsession? Like Cirrhosor, god of binge-drinking?]

And that’s it. You have different levels of campaigns based on the amount of knowledge that the characters have about the occult underground and the function of magic. This is inherently limiting, but the limit can be overcome. The limit, obviously, is that once you’ve had an extended campaign the players already know how it works. Of course, if you have good players, they may be willing to play down how much knowledge their characters actually have. The system also accommodates for changes easily—the details I’ve given you here are close to all the details they give. You can easily change what is real, what is just rumor, and give them a whole new setting to discover. Though the familiarity they already have will lead them to learn it quickly unless you deliberately try to stump them.

The mechanics itself are also interesting, mostly because of the interesting twists they throw in. The basic mechanic is trying to beat a percentage, which is rolled on your standard d100 against the percentage of your skill (adjusted for the situation’s influencing factors). Skills are general low numbers and slow to progress. Atlas Games likes slow progression, and it’s got a good feel to it as long as you’re willing to accept that. They are not for the Monty Haul campaigner. The closer you get to the target number the better. In other words, if you roll close to the target but fail, you don’t fail so bad. If you roll a 00, you’re basically screwed. If you roll your skill level exactly, great things happen.

The twists are in the random things that happen when you roll. A matched result (00, 11, 22, 33, etc) enhances the failure or success, depending on whether the actual result fails or succeeds. There are also times, like when dealing with your obsession skill, that you can “flip-flop,” ie, reverse the ones and tens digits to your favor (hey, it’s about magic working in vague ways, deal with it).

Basically, I liked the mechanics much better than I liked the setting. It’s simple to play and most of the magic revolves around making stuff up: the better you roleplay the better you do. Atlas Games has really hit on a strong combination of role playing with a dice mechanic. It’s not necessarily the most realistic, but it moves fast, it works, and it’s simple.

The setting is redeemable, but they’re really playing on the fascination with unhealthy behavior, which means that even the heroes are likely to be crack addicts or prostitutes. Don’t get me wrong, a good roleplayer can do well with unlikely heroes like that, but when there’s no other type of hero available the feeling becomes quite a bit creepier. To emphasize the feel, they focus on the unhealthiest behavior for their examples, and sprinkle the text with swearing.

So the book gets an “R” rating from SaintEhlers RPG Rating Assoc., and 3.5 clocks for inconsistency and trying too hard to be edgy. But it is a fun system and, if nothing I’ve said makes you hesitate, I think you’ll enjoy it.

Written by SaintEhlers on June 04th, 2003