Thoughts on Unknown Armies 3rd Edition - Play

I've known about Unknown Armies for awhile, mostly due to the efforts of Amaranth M on Bluesky and formerly, Cohost.  From the bits I've heard it sounded intriguing, but I finally took a look at the first book of the edition, Play.  The other two core books are Run and Reveal, with Expose and Mine looking more like supplements?  Maybe they're all supplements.  This is the type of game that makes me hate how I look at games though.  I can write about rules and try to break them down but the vibes of this game are really great and I'm not going to do it justice, which sucks.  

UA is a game made by Atlas Games, who also made Ars Magica.  The game is billed as an urban horror game, taking place in our world, right now, but with some key differences.  Magick is real, and is the best/worst kept secret of the world.  People ascend to a sort of godhood by being the Most of an aspect of life.  The Avatar of like... fuckin' Rock and Roll would be THE image people imagine when told to imagine a Rock and Roll star.  There are only, at maximum, 333 Avatars, and once that number is hit, they end up being the building blocks of the new world that gets reborn out of calamity.  

Neat stuff at the high end of the power scale.

I wanted to sort of set up the big end of the cosmology here to give a taste of the flavor I've read so far.  Sure we could talk about Adepts, but I don't think it's as evocative as the Avatars, you know?  It's time to talk about you, the characters.  Looking at some of the other reviews I've written, this one feels like it really needs your players to be bought and locked in.  Given some of the text I've read, that tracks.  This game outright states that if you don't pick good objectives or interesting characters who want to get into or deal with messes that you won't have fun and it won't be the game's fault.  Truthfully, yeah, no game can really survive players who don't want to Play The Game.  

You, the player, should want to engage with the weirdness of the world.  You are the person in a horror movie who sees a light in the forest and goes to investigate.  They don't make movies about someone who just drives past it, clocking it as just some reflection of the moon.  I also love this line from the introductory paragraph of the Character's Chapter

If you’re completely selfish, consider that GMs hesitate to cavalierly slaughter characters who make their job easy and are fun to watch. The boring, safe, too-cool-to-care-about-anything character? A good GM has no compunction about letting that guy perish to show how this week’s monster works.

Asidebar: The book's formatting is a little irksome at times.  Imagine the page broken up into 4 quadrants, ABC and D.  Normally, with two columns, you'd read in ACBD order, but sometimes the page gets split and you read AB/CD as separate sections.  I've read a section at the bottom of the page then scrolled to the top to continue, only to find that the sentence no longer makes sense.  Something to keep in mind.

What makes a character though, mechanically speaking?  In Unknown Armies, your character is built out of what you want (objectives), what you are (Identity) and what you've seen.  The what you've seen exists on a sliding scale.  Well, 5 sliding scales.  Your Shock Gauges correspond to 5 different types of stress: Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self.  Each gauge has 9 pips, with 20-60 on them, increasing in increments of 5.  These are the numbers you need to roll under when making a check with that stat.

Though that tells only half the story, because simultaneously while it goes from 20-60, it's also going from 60-20 on the underside.  The notches in the gauge indicate how Hardened you are to that particular stress.  The more it's filled, the more checks you can straight up ignore.  If you are faced with a Violence (3) check as the initiator, you would need to roll under your rating, based on how many pips you have.  If you only had 2, you would need to roll under a 25 to succeed, but if you had 4, well, no need to roll, you're already prepared for that level of stress that enacting that violence would require.  As you succeed checks, your gauge fills, making you more Hardened, which makes checks easier.  Some of them, anyways.

Remember how I listed the numbers in reverse order?  Well, some checks require you to lean on the un-hardened skills, your Upbeat skills.  These are based on how many open pips you have.  So if we look at Violence again, the Hardened notches help with Struggle, while the open notches help with Connect, you're ability to understand and reach out to people.  As you become more callous and willing to do harm to others, your ability to extend them sympathy and understanding decreases.  

Success is measured in tiers. 00/100 (depends on how you like to read your d100), is a Fumble, a plausible disaster.  01?  The ultimate success, a Critical.  If you're under or equal to the target number, regular old Success, but if you're under it with doubles, that's a Matched Success.  Above the number? Failure or Matched Failure.  

You can also manipulate the dice via a Flip Flop.  Once per session, you can reverse the numbers.  So if you rolled a 53, and failed your 40% threshold, you could flip it to a 35.  There's an exception to the above rule though.  If you're rolling your Identity instead of one of the skills, and the check is related to your Obsession, you can Flip Flop the roll, even if you've done it before.  This is basically a free swap if it's like... critically important to your character.  If you're obsessed with finding some secret organization, and you're a librarian, you could Flip Flop the dice if your check relies on your Librarian Abilities and it's about looking for the specific organization you're obsessed with.

This is pretty interesting.  I love the dual track nature of the Shock Gauges.  And them being capped means you always have a shot at a check, even if it's only 20%.  You're going outside your comfort zone and expertise to take a chance.  It's cool.  Flip Flops are a neat way to manipulate the dice, and I didn't even mention Hunches, which are given by the GM to let you pre-roll a check, and then knowing the result you can choose how to approach your next check to guarantee a success, since it's used on the next check.  That's also Really Cool!  Sometimes your hunches are off base and get you into trouble because you're making assumptions that are just wrong.  

Asidebar: The book has a page of tables showing what a check at each level could look like, and the result of a failure of that level check, for each of the Shock Gauges.  It also has an example of what a character with that many Hardened marks would behave like.  Very cool.

When you fail a check, you end up in one of the normal fear responses, well a variant of them: Panic, Paralysis, and Frenzy.  Again, this game REQUIRES player buy in and honesty and good faith play.  The example they give of a Frenzied player picks a fight with someone who could kick their ass.  You MUST follow through with it.  It undercuts so much tension and consequence if you go "Well fuck I'm getting out of here, I could get hurt!" when you're supposed to be out of control.  And yes, games always require good faith from the players, yes, that comes with the territory.  Hopefully though, this book repeatedly hammering that point helps reinforce that you need to be in on the fiction.  

The next major point that makes you Who You Are is your Identity, well, Identities.  Like all of the other stats, these are represented by a %, and can be used to make checks in place of other things.  You have 120% to distribute between 2+ Identities, so you could have "Hot Shot Driver 60%" and "Concert Pianist 60%", and that shows that you're a pretty competent driver and can work as part of a symphony fairly effectively.  While that paints an interesting dual life, you could do something like "Virtuoso 15%" and it can be a sign of a delusion or a goal you want to work towards.  As you fail at those checks, you can gain experience to improve it.  Then you could end up with say, 5 checks ranging from OK to Good instead of 2 that just start at fairly good and are hard to improve.  

Asidebar: Reminder, this is a Roll Under system so a higher number gives you more room to hit.

Really like this as a Identity system.  I like the flexibility it gives to choose how you decide to define yourself, and your skills and self-perceptions.  Also, a sneaky interesting part about this is that it's actually not that straightforward to add new Identities once the game starts proper.  You have to treat it like it's own quest, with it's own meter to fill to 100%, and once it's filled, you get the new Identity at 15%.  This gives you an interesting character creation choice, start off competent and spend table time just to improve *your* ability.  The party has to agree to take this little side trip to help your self-improvement.  I'm guessing you can have it apply to more people but it should make the task more difficult or longer to fill.  Incredible.  Love it.  It's so good.  

The book lays out a good example of how/when you can use your Identity, and it's pretty similar to how you would describe a character in Numenera: Of course I can ______, I'm ________.  You'll also pick, for each Identity, which of your Shock Gauge it can be substituting and then two Features, which are like... little add ons that enhance the Identity.  If your Identity is like... Perfume Sommolier 50%, Substitutes for Self, and then the Features "Therapeutic" and ""Evaluate a Meter (Self)", means that I can use my character's knowledge of scents and perfumes to help people relax, helping repair damage (Therapeutic) or learn more about a person's sense of Self, through some like... scent based personality test.  I know that you would smell good with citrus scents, it tells me that you're a bit of a weary soul.  There are several more Features you can select, each with their own quirks.  Some will have specific things happen on success or failure, while others are just enablers for certain types of action.  

Shifting a bit to combat, one major change is that the GM tracks player damage.  This is a great way to keep the horror tone, because a player should never know how much damage they've taken, and should only really know if they've hit the halfway threshold to their damage threshold.  This is when they start to get visibly worn down even in a fight, with the adrenaline still pumping.  If they hit 90% of their damage threshold, they are knocked unconscious.  Very, very cool.  I love this, though I can see how it would rub people the wrong way.  Given how I like to do descriptive combats though, I could have a lot of fun with this toying with information and verbiage to the players to show how hurt they are.  

There are a surprising amount of rules for damage and conflicts and such, and it kind of makes sense.  There's a lot of situations where you want to avoid a conflict by disarming someone or winging them or so on, so it covers different possibilities for fumbles, matched failures/successes, and regular failure/success.  Neat, but there's A Lot of These, so be prepared for that.  I can see some groups not needing many of these if their urban fantasy horror doesn't touch on firearms.  

Charts in this section for various forms of conflict (even a trial!) have some fun headings and table titles.  Car crash?  Table titled "Hot Car on Car Action".  Good shit.  

Various rules for healing, but the one I like is the Golden Hour rule, where if you can apply some first aid or treatment within the first hour of some injury occurring, you can fix up some of the problem.  After that hour, the blood starts to dry, the adrenaline is off, and they need either serious rest or medical attention.  

I lied, Adepts are funny as hell.  Gonna just quote a section from page 124 "Adepts care about the same things as everyone else, often much more so, but wrongly."  Adepts can do magick, but they do it by generating charges and invoking weird paradoxes in the world.   An example from the book uses "food" as a potential school of magic as the like, core obsession that the Adept is focused on.  Food is a vital part of life, and an Adept may view it as a prison, something they have to do (the book explicitly calls this out as anorexia, and draw power for their magick by denying themselves food, and losing their charged up magick when they finally succumb to eating.  Another Food mage might instead focus strictly on the flavor instead of the nourishing value of the food, and would lose their charges after having a strictly utilitarian meal.  

By leaning into the various parodoxes of the world, they can create charges of energy that can be used to cast spells.  They come in three varieties: Minor, Significant, and Major.  Minor charges can be generated by doing smaller things, such as picking the more expensive, full flavor version of a candy bar over the standard one, while a significant charge might require you to blow through a large portion of your monthly income on a single bottle of wine.  Major charges though, those are heavy risky investments.  These are like... Sidequest type prep things.  This is a "I hired 7 world class chefs to prepare a meal just for me, spending enough money to fund a food kitchen for a year" type shit.  

The universe is transactional.  You gain, but someone pays.  That's one of the three rules of magick.  The others are All Magick is based on some Paradox, and To Be an Adept is to put magick front and center.  Some real "You may have no other gods before me" type shit.  You're gonna be WEIRD if you're an adept.  

Fuck man, you can be a Vestimancer, and get your power through the process of making clothes or being naked.  Sensational.  Great example of the type of shit you could make up in this game.

There's a whole list of general effects magick can do and there's a feature GMs can use to sort of balance how many charges a spell can require, denoted by Ω. This can nudge the cost up or down by up to 2 points, to a minimum of 1.  Weaker effects or stricter requirements to either generate or lose charges can drop the cost of things, while stronger effects and easier to abide rules or easier means of gaining charges increases the cost.  

So much of this game is really interesting and fun to play in.  I wish I could talk more about the various Phenomena you can put in to keep players on edge or signal something is weird, and can range from stuff like a cell phone ringing with a no number caller, or someone slipping out of time for an hour, or fuck man, wanna play some Jumanji?.  If they're more permanent oddities, like an owl that flies by at exactly 1:22 AM every night, or a part of a rickety house you found that has a built in feature for a haunted house that you don't have to prep, you may be able to work those to your advantage, or at least set your watch by them.  

I am so mad at myself because there's so much cool and weird shit (and this is just the first book on how to play the game!), and I am so bad at relaying that information.  The tone and details they give you are really cool and evocative.  I cannot do this justice, but I feel like I want to run this more than World of Darkness again.  Horror isn't a space I normally play in, but this gives my brain enough to latch on to do something weird in.  Fuck man, I want to make a world that one of the Avatars making up this world was like, a fuckin' jazz musician so Ska is weirdly overrepresented on all top 50 pop charts, just because!

Despite my earlier layout complaint, everything flows nicely.  If this is the advice and information they're giving the player facing book, I'm incredibly curious what Book 2: Run is going to contain because goddamn, that's gotta have some choice advice for setting up mysteries, the collaborative world building, and, well, I think it does contain the character creation rules, so that too.  Strongly considering picking up more books just to find out more.