So what is Unknown Armies? Unknown Armies is a modern-day urban horror roleplaying game. The characters might be mundane people drawn into a weird world hidden from the general public or they may be established wizards and supernaturally endowed people within the Occult Underground.
Mechanics
Unknown Armies uses a percentile system for attributes and skills. I generally loath percentile mechanics as I discussed last week. However Unknown Armies might be only percentile system I've seen that seems recognize the limits of the system.For those who don't know, percentile systems have you roll 2 ten sided dice (or the impractical 100 sided die) and if you roll under or equal to your Skill or Stat you succeed.
Unknown Armies acknowledges that the odds of success are low but then counters this with the idea that you will use these skills only in the worst circumstances. In other words, you would not roll Climbing when dealing with a rock wall but when you are scrambling up the side of alley while werewolves are chasing you. The system also offers a couple of ways to boost your odds of success.
The main ways are by invoking your Fear, Rage, or Noble Passion. These are behaviors or triggers that make your character work harder, run faster, or lash out with more force. For example, your character might be afraid of fires and when presented with a flame, they might invoke their fear in order to switch the numbers on a roll to get away from it. This means if you rolls a 71 you can change that to a 17 to succeed. Rage passions include things that make you angry and gives a boosts to actions to lash out. Noble passions are your higher calling and you can use the boost to pursue that goal.
Characters in Unknown Armies possess 4 Stats and a variable number of Skills. The Stats are Body, dealing with strength and fitness; Speed, which covers dexterity and finesse; Mind, dealing with mental toughness and smarts; and Soul, which covers emotional awareness, charisma, and magick. Stats typically range from 30 to 70 (tending to give you a 50% chance of success for starting characters).
As for Skills the system is fairly free form. You get some Skills for free but the others you are able to make up on your own. So one character might have Bladed Weapons as a Skill while another might have Slicing and Dicing. The skill levels are fairly low and limited by the Stat they are under, but you also get the bonus of having one skill as an Obsession Skill.
Your Obsession Skill is your character's focus and as such you can flip-flop the number you roll on percentile dice like with your Passions but you can do it with every roll. You also get other bonuses when rolling doubles with your skill.
There are a few more permutations of the system. Matched numbers (11, 22, and so forth ) are criticals, either a critical failure or success depending on whether the value is less than or greater than your skill. A 01 always succeeds regardless of skill or lack thereof. Also a 00 always fails. In general a higher result is better (if it succeeds) while a lower value for a failure is worse. I'm not sure if this attempt to increase the tension of roll (to match your skill) really works at all. Maybe if you had a cocked die to reroll.
Another core mechanic of the system are the Madness meters. I likes this method of measuring a character's insanity so much I incorporated it into my Hunter: the Vigil game. Basically there are five kinds of madness stresses: Violence, Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self. For each stress there varying levels of that stress called ranks. Killing someone might be a Rank 4 Violence stress while watching someone you love be tortured to death would be Rank 10, which is the highest level. As you succeed in checks against a certain stress (using your Mind Stat), your character eventually becomes hardened against it. If you have four hardened marks against violence, killing someone no longer bothers your character. Conversely if you fail, your character freaks out, either running away, freezing or blindingly attacking. Your character also becomes unbalanced, slowly sliding to true madness.
The choice of whether you flee, freeze or fight is really nice since it both emulates the behavior of normal people in scary situations and allows players to retain agency over their character. Does your character lash out at the approaching zombie horde or flee? Sometimes it is better just to freeze until the threat passes.
The other thing I like about the system because it allows for multiple axes of madness. Does Violence make you edgy or are you blase about being Helpless. You might fail a series of checks as the stress breaks your character’s sanity. Or you might just succeed each time and become a sociopath as violence and other stresses no longer matter to your character. After all, if you can watch a loved one be tortured to death without being bothered, how sane are you?
Finally combat is covered by the character's Skills and Stats. But the key thing to keep in mind is that it is dangerous. You only have your Body Stat in health and it takes substantial time to recover lost points. Have several fights and your character can easily be taken out. This fits with the general grim and gritty occult world the game presents.
Setting
The world of Unknown Armies is like our own except that there is a hidden world of occultists, insane wizards, and strange horrors behind the scenes. In this way it greatly resembles the somewhat more popular World of Darkness. The system even include a kind of Tier level of play similar to that was introduced (later) in Hunter: the Vigil. The three levels presented are Streets, Global and Cosmic.The Streets level campaign covers people with a little inkling of the weirdness in the world. This is the level of normal people who find themselves the targets of some sort of conspiracy, vigilantes trying to stop whatever it is that is eating homeless people, or a team of professional ghost hunters. The characters are not very powerful and not very knowledgeable about what is really going on.
A step up from that is the Global campaign makes you part of the Occult Underground. You now are part of this hidden world and enmeshed in its plans. You know about Magick and Archetypes. You might even be an Adept or Avatar and have mystical powers yourself.
Magick is one of the advanced Mechanics and lets you do impossible things. What those things are depend on your skill and what your source of magick is. There is Ritual magick, Adept magick and Avatar magick. Anyone can do ritual magic but it is hard to find a ritual that works, difficult to gain charges to make it work, and you generally can't make new rituals.
Adept magick basically takes an insane worldview and turns it into magick. Examples include Bibliomancy, that uses books are power; Dipsomancer, where getting drunk makes you more powerful, and Epideromancy or harming oneself for magical power. Each school of magic has its own taboos as well. For example, Bibliomancers must keep hold of rare physical books to empower themselves and Epideromancers can't heal themselves with magick. Your magick skill must be your obsession skill. It takes maniacal focus to use magick.
The final tier is the Cosmic level. Here you are working with the fundamental parts of the universe. For an Avatar it might mean trying usurp the position of the current archetype. Or perhaps you want to forge your own archetype and become part of the universe. Characters at this level can have lasting impacts on this world and the next one.
Overall the setting is alternatingly intriguing and amusing. It doesn't have the same toolbox feel of other games, where you are invited to pick and choose what is real and fake. but it does propose an interesting and original setting. It would be fairly easy to pick out the bits you like (archetypes for instance) and drop the rest (demons, the afterlife, and Mak Attax).
Gameplay
I've managed to play two one shots of the game so I have some sense of the gameplay.The first game I played involved a group of prisoners, hostages, and a little old man and his young wife in an isolated cabin during a storm. Called Jailbreak, the scenario was run by Joshua Clark and his co-GM John Castillo. It was intense and atmospheric game. We got to explore the combat and madness systems a fair bit dealing with weird clockwork people. Things got tense, then they got weird, and in the end there was a bloody battle with Something That Should Not Be. At the end of the day we were on a razors edge between victory and seeing everyone slaughtered. Only my mob hit man with a knife was left to win the fight.
The madness rules were only lightly touched but really worked with the scary scenario the two built. The combat system was quick and functional. I now suspect one of the PCs was an adept but he never really used those abilities.
The second game was called While Rome Burns and was run by Cassady Toles. It was also an excellent game. The plot was a bottle episode in the strange aftermath of a heist gone wrong. Our crooks, hired by a criminal mastermind going a little weird, were given odd codenames. The job had gone wrong and instead of the jewels we got some sort of cursed ruby. I thought there was great use of the madness rules as people were shot, encountered unnatural phenomena, and turned on each other. This time there were two characters who were Avatars, though only one seemed to use his powers.
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