Unknown Armies Third Edition Book One: Play is a role playing game supplement published by Atlas Games. This is one of the core books for Unknown Armies Third Edition.
The supplement is available in digital form from DriveThruRPG for $14.95 but was purchased at a reduced price due to a special offer. It is also available in printed form from sites such as Amazon. The digital book comes in three different versions; PDF, epub and mobi. The PDF will be referenced for the review and has 190 pages, with one being the front cover, two the front matter, one the Table of Contents, six being the Kickstarter Backers and two the Index.
1: Go starts by explaining that this is an occult game about broken people conspiring to fix the world, the equivalent of the real world. Instead of trying to stop the cultists, killing the beast or protect the status quo, characters are the cultists, the beasts, the threat. A sidebar explains that the bulk of this book has suggestions for players and GMs and what Books Two and Three contain. The game uses two ten-sided dice.
This chapter explains that the game is about characters and they have objectives, which can be completed. Objectives change the setting in some way, which can be positive or negative and are completed once they reach 100%. Characters get shocked by what they see, with five meters called shock meters; Helplessness, Isolation, Violence, Unnatural and Self. Each meter has space for five failed notches, which are bad. They also have eight open notches. As these become hardened, they protect the meter from further shocks; both open and hardened notches have advantages and disadvantages.
It then moves onto abilities, with different abilities for open and hardened notches. Open notch abilities are Connect, Fitness, Knowledge, Notice and Status; hardened notch abilities are Dodge, Lie, Pursuit, Secrecy and Struggle. Characters are drive by passions and obsessions; they have three passions and one obsession. Adepts, described later, must have an obsession that relates to what they are an adept in. The identity is the last part and is something you are, such as a police detective, house painter or pilot. The identity can be used in exchange for an ability, if the identity would naturally be able to do something connected to it.
The World explains that the world looks like modern reality, with normal physical laws that are accepted and people don’t believe in magic. But your character believes in magick. Nor are your characters the only ones, and some are crazy, scary, dangerous or a combination of them. These people know each other and they will know your character. The world is influenced by beings known as the Invisible Clergy, once-human beings called archetypes that filled a necessary social role so completely they became something else. Avatars imitate these beings and gains power from doing so. The best avatar becomes a godwalker, and they can replace the archetype under the right circumstances.
Adepts are obsessed with something, and claim everyone else does it wrong. They can make the world do what they want. Sometimes. Gutter magick is an alternative to both adepts and avatars, but not as powerful or reliable, and easier to learn than rituals. Avatars and adepts can use gutter magick, but as they can use more powerful magick, they fail to see the point.
The general rules of the game then follow. Unknown Armies uses percentile dice and these are rolling against something when used. There are automatic successes and failures, and variants in-between. You can also swap the dice around to alter the result, but not every time, and magick is the most common and most unreliable.
Finally in this section is a trigger warning. Quite a long one, but it’s conversational and explains that this is a horror game with, well, horrifying stuff in it.
2: Character starts out with the shock gauge. There are five categories of mental stress and each has two types of notches, Hardened, which are beaten stress checks, and Failed, which are ones that were failed. The different types of mental stress are then covered, with sample checks for each type of stress and the effects of failed and hardened notches for each. Five failed notches on a meter results in the character going crazy; 25 hardened notches results in them being burned out. The effects of this, and attempting to manage madness with drugs or alcohol, is covered, as well as madness that is missing due to inaccurate perceptions that the book doesn’t want to reinforce, followed by what happens when a character is burned out.
Abilities, which are derived from hardened and open notches on the shock gauge, are divided into two types; upbeat and downbeat. Each type has five different abilities and each ability has uses. Their use, including fumbling, failing and successes of all types are covered.
Relationships are how the character interacts with others. Sometimes these can be used in a positive way; sometimes they are negative. Each character begins with five archetypal connections, which may normally be individuals, but can also be with organisations. Each of these relationships fulfils a specific role. Relationships can be gained and lost in game, and these can cause stress checks all of their own.
Identities are more focused than abilities. Everyone has abilities; some are just better than others. They can also change in time, for better or worse. Identities are more versatile, and have traits and skills that get better. The general role of identities is in the statement “Of course I can [do something], I’m [a something.]”, though there is a bit on why it can be fun to be bad at something. Identities have two features, abilities that can be used in different situations. There are a limited number of these, but one of the is called Unique, which covers anything a player can convince their GM is a viable feature.
3: Conflict contains the rules for when risks are undertaken, whether they be emotional, physical or something else, and how the inertia of the world resists being changed. Coercion is getting people to do what you want through non-violent, but probably threatening, means. Coercion rolls work by using the shock gauge. It’s not guaranteed to work, and many can shrug off attempts, but it’s also low risk. When and how coercion can be used to attack the Helplessness, Isolation, Self, Violence and Unnatural meters is covered.
Combat is the more violent type of conflict. It starts with ways a fight might be stopped before going into the mechanics of combat itself. It then looks at the combat round, which is an abstracted period of time a few seconds long. Attacking may require drawing a weapon and using such as firearms requires an appropriate identity. Character can try to avoid getting hit and various types of armour provide a defence. Only the GM keeps track of damage, to add uncertainty. As well as guns, there are physical attacks and melee weapons; melee weapons follow slightly different rules. It then looks at guns, divided into broad categories, and their effects. There are other tactics that can be used, partly because of the use of firearms, which allow things like going fully automatic with appropriate weapons. There’s also a combat subsystem for grappling.
Assorted Hassles covers things such as chases as well as other hazards, from car crashes to electricity to getting sick. Medicine looks at immediate treatment, then hospital stays and convalescing. Therapy is similar, but for the mind. All told, combat is a potentially dangerous situation; it looks like this is a deadlier system than some.
4: Weirdness explains that in this game, the unnatural, the hidden and the magickal all exist. It starts by considering the cosmology of the game, the Invisible Clergy, archetypes created by people believing in an idea, and when the realm of archetypes, the Statosphere, contains 333 of them, reality collapses and the archetypes fuse into a demiurge that creates a new universe. This also looks at the problems with both atheism and theism, in the setting, and what this may mean in game terms.
Unnatural Phenomena are the strange things that can happen, and there is a list of minor, insignificant and major phenomena that can provide a brief distraction or be used as potential adventure seeds, and how to exploit the phenomena. Artefacts are the items that are imbued to perform unnatural functions. They can form naturally, through strange events, but adepts can construct them too. There are examples of different artefacts that can be found in the world, of varying powers, with their name, power, description and effect given. Cults sometimes form around artefacts. How artefacts can be exploited is also covered.
5: Avatars and Archetypes starts with the archetypes, the conscious embodiments of a specific aspect of human existence. Together, these are called the Invisible Clergy and when all 333 positions are filled, the universe ceases to exist, as do the archetypes who then become the new reality. Avatars are those people who align themselves with a specific archetype. Starting out to become an avatar is easy; succeeding is significantly harder and, eventually, an avatar can ascend and become an archetype, replacing the existing one, if there is one. Much of the chapter is taken up describing 16 archetypes, which gives plenty of room for expansion. Each archetype follows the same pattern; the archetype has attributes, taboos, symbols, suspected historical avatars, masks and channels. Finally, it looks at how to exploit archetypes.
6: Adepts explains these users of magick. They are ordinary humans who are obsessed with something. They do the thing they are obsessed with in a way that the rest of the world considers wrong. Adepts buy their obsession as an identity. Following this are the three laws of magick, which bind all the schools. The schools of magick all work in a similar way, which is then explained, as well as appropriate effects from the minor, significant and major spells. Following this are the different schools of magick. Each is given a description, how to generate charges, minor, significant and major, the taboo that causes problems and random magick domain, and the different spells, minor and significant, with descriptions and charge costs, with major being more a general guideline, given the sort of things this can do and the sort of things that need to be done to get a major charge. There are eight schools, covering a range of obsessions, and other schools can always be created.
Constructed Artefacts are different to natural artefacts in some ways and are made by adepts and can be minor or significant and duplicate an adept effect of that type; major constructed artefacts might be possible, but they’re indistinguishable from natural and require a major charge. Constructed artefacts can be single-use, limited-use and eternal.
Ritual magick is another way of performing magick. They don’t always work but can have minor and significant effects. The best way of discovering a ritual that works is from a demon. This is also the worst way, as demons have no real incentive to tell the truth and plenty of reasons to lie. Some minor and significant example rituals are provided. Gutter magick is essentially improv magick and made up on the fly, with various common categories of effects that it could achieve. There are some rules for six common categories of mechanical effects created by gutter magick, rolling for success and how to use rituals.
Unknown Armies Third Edition Book One: Play in Review
The PDF is bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. The Table of Contents only covers the major sections and is hyperlinked. The Index is more thorough but lacks links. Navigation is okay. The book primarily follows a two-column format and appeared to be mostly free of errors. There are a variety of colour illustrations, up to full page in size, most of which appear to be stock photos, many of them manipulated in some way.
This supplement isn’t enough to play Unknown Armies on its own; Book Two: Run and Book Three: Reveal are really needed as well, as they have details this one lacks. The further books after those add more options, but it’s books 1-3 that are needed. This book is essentially the players’ book; it contains the information needed to create a character and the game mechanics. There is not a huge amount of setting background in this book, though there are some parts to it as well as bits taken from stories. It is set in the real world, albeit a magickal real world, so the broad overview will be the same; it’s just the weirdness that is different.
The book is at times written in a conversational style, which may take some getting used to, and may put off readers who don’t enjoy such a style at all. The system itself only uses a single type of dice, the d10, and is percentile based. Having said that, it’s perhaps a bit different from other percentile games and it is certainly very different from games that lack such a base. It will take a bit of getting used to, not so much the dice rolling as the other parts of the system, in particular the shock gauges, which are rather different from mechanics used in other systems. It doesn’t look to be an enormously complicated system, but it is one that’s different. To fully judge the system and the setting, though, will require the other books in the series. Unknown Armies Third Edition Book One: Play can be found by clicking here.
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