RPGs day nine: UA
May. 28th, 2020 11:54 amVia James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day nine: Unknown Armies.
I picked up the Unknown Armies corebook on a lark, because the back copy looked interesting and because it was published by Atlas, who also did Over the Edge. UA had a bunch of neat mechanical ideas: skills cap at your related stat, only four stats and design-your-own skills, percentile dice but if it's your 'obsession' skill you can flip the ones and tens. Combat was pretty dangerous: to take one example, knives always do a little bit of damage, even on a miss. ("You're wearing your best suit and I have a magic marker. Take the marker away from me without getting your suit messed up.")
More than the mechanics, though I loved UA for its atmosphere. Tynes and Stolze had as their explicit guiding principle "humans did it." No immortal vampires pulling strings, no shadowy cabal of mages: matter of fact, since magic in UA is a function of obsession, mages are more likely to be messed-up human beings incapable of controlling anything. John Constantine, not Stephen Strange.
In one of the later sourcebooks, they had what they called scenario seeds: a couple of pages describing the high points of a short campaign episode and how it might play out. I remember reading those and thinking "yes! Perfect! This is exactly the amount of detail I need to run a scenario."
I spent several years hanging out on the UA mailing list, which was pretty cool. People posted campaign stories ("one of my PCs is a fleshworker who got his hand cut off... but he retrieved it and did a major working, and now it's an artifact that responds to his commands") and weird things they encountered, and the designers got into the conversations as well. That was where I got into Warren Zevon (the first sourcebook was named "Lawyers, Guns & Money"), and where I met Gareth Hanranan, now a fantasy author and a game designer extraordinaire for Pelgrane.
Sadly UA, like OTE before it, fell victim to Emily's hatred of naming her own skills. I did get to run a couple of short scenarios, but never found a group who'd really get into the whole low-power street-magick vibe. One of these days, maybe.
I picked up the Unknown Armies corebook on a lark, because the back copy looked interesting and because it was published by Atlas, who also did Over the Edge. UA had a bunch of neat mechanical ideas: skills cap at your related stat, only four stats and design-your-own skills, percentile dice but if it's your 'obsession' skill you can flip the ones and tens. Combat was pretty dangerous: to take one example, knives always do a little bit of damage, even on a miss. ("You're wearing your best suit and I have a magic marker. Take the marker away from me without getting your suit messed up.")
More than the mechanics, though I loved UA for its atmosphere. Tynes and Stolze had as their explicit guiding principle "humans did it." No immortal vampires pulling strings, no shadowy cabal of mages: matter of fact, since magic in UA is a function of obsession, mages are more likely to be messed-up human beings incapable of controlling anything. John Constantine, not Stephen Strange.
In one of the later sourcebooks, they had what they called scenario seeds: a couple of pages describing the high points of a short campaign episode and how it might play out. I remember reading those and thinking "yes! Perfect! This is exactly the amount of detail I need to run a scenario."
I spent several years hanging out on the UA mailing list, which was pretty cool. People posted campaign stories ("one of my PCs is a fleshworker who got his hand cut off... but he retrieved it and did a major working, and now it's an artifact that responds to his commands") and weird things they encountered, and the designers got into the conversations as well. That was where I got into Warren Zevon (the first sourcebook was named "Lawyers, Guns & Money"), and where I met Gareth Hanranan, now a fantasy author and a game designer extraordinaire for Pelgrane.
Sadly UA, like OTE before it, fell victim to Emily's hatred of naming her own skills. I did get to run a couple of short scenarios, but never found a group who'd really get into the whole low-power street-magick vibe. One of these days, maybe.