Unknown Armies Attack Free RPG Day!

Explore creepy places, meet bizarre people, and get one hell of an education when you join the ranks of Unknown Armies with Atlas' contribution to this year's Free RPG Day!

In Maria in Three Parts, you're part of a cabal looking for someone essential to keeping the peace in your part of the occult underground. It's the job of your fellow broken souls to help Maria pull it together to keep the fragile order of things from shattering.

This Free RPG Day game book includes everything you need to encounter Unknown Armies for the first time, or explore another intriguing side story as a veteran UA gamer. Rules, characters, and an intriguing scenario set players up to dive deep into the weirdness of the world.

WE WANT YOU to join the ranks of Unknown Armies! Ask your Friendly Local Gaming Store if they're participating in Free RPG Day on Saturday, June 16, 2018, then plan to get there early for your copy of Maria in Three Parts. You can see a full list of games and participating locations on the Free RPG Day website.

Grokking the Difference: Jonathan Tweet on Unknown Armies vs. Over the Edge

In the final post in our Grokking the Difference series, we talk to Jonathan Tweet, designer of Over the Edge and Clades. Jonathan has also had a hand in the development of other classic games like Ars Magica, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, and 13th Age. Here are a few of his insights into the things that distinguish Over the Edge from Unknown Armies.

There are a number of differences I can see between Over the Edge and Unknown Armies. First, Unknown Armies has a cool backstory that the characters can plug into. Over the Edge is more about the story that players bring, while the backstory is chaotic and self-contradictory.

Second, Unknown Armies says there is a secret order to things. Over the Edge says it's chaos, not order, that runs the world. A lot of it lands right in the characters' laps. If you walk down a street in the Edge, the chaos jumps out at you. You might see baboons patrolling the streets as cheap security; public shrines from undocumented and bloody spiritual traditions; or a heavy metal band ruling a poor neighborhood with high-decibel concerts and street violence. Ultimately, a lot of the flavor of Over the Edge just comes from horrible people being themselves or exploitative systems doing their thing.

Unknown Armies is serious. Over the Edge is serious, but with generous side helpings of hyperbole, satire, and farce. Over the Edge is relentlessly urban, while Unknown Armies embraces the rural American side of life, too.

As far as game systems go, Over the Edge is more freeform in terms of dice-rolling and mechanics, compared to Unknown Armies. There is, for example no mechanical magic system to use that represents secret knowledge in the game world. Players define their characters' paranormal abilities, if any, in a loosely structured way.

Unknown Armies 3 has streamlined mechanics, and so did the original Over the Edge. The new edition of Over the Edge that will be coming out takes streamlining to another level. A single throw of the dice can resolve an entire scene, such as what results when a character breaks into an apartment looking for clues. Bypassing security, finding a way in, staying quiet enough to avoid attention from neighbors, not getting bitten by vipers serving as guards, and finding important clues (or not) can on a single throw of the dice. 

Grokking the Difference: Greg Stolze on Unknown Armies vs Over the Edge

In our effort to untangle the differences and similarities of our classic roleplaying games Unknown Armies and Over the Edge, we asked each game's designer to weigh in with their perspective. Unknown Armies author Greg Stolze has looked at the question with new eyes, coming off the successful third edition of his game. Even now, we're rolling out the UA3 Campaign Starter Kits at your favorite digital marketplaces. Here are his thoughts on the two games:

It's not hard to see similarities between the two games. Over the Edge came out first and was a strong inspiration for Unknown Armies, particularly in the area of 'Players get to define what their characters can do instead of picking off a limited list of skills.' They're both deliberately weird, subverting expectations of what reality is, built around the sometimes-unspoken idea that the game's primary duty is to be compelling, 'fair.'

But the differences are crucial.

     1) Unknown Armies is about people. Over the Edge is about setting.
In UA, every character has a set of gauges that register the traumas they've experienced. Those meters, in turn, show how they relate to others, how they interact with the world around them, and how they respond to further challenges. The spotlight of the story is on the characters, and the mechanics orbit their personalities. OTE, on the other hand, is about the mysterious, baffling, frustrating island of Al Amarja and its myriad bizarre inhabitants. The characters inevitably bring their own agendas, secrets, and mysteries, but those are at best co-equal ingredients in a thick, crowded, and flavorful stew.

     2) In Over the Edge, you explore. In Unknown Armies, you pursue.

If you're a GM who likes getting a giant pile of sinister agendas and then assembling them into a maze for the characters to scurry through, ratlike, in pursuit of the cheese of a little power or just an explanation and also, the maze is on fire, then OTE is the game for you. The city of The Edge, the typical setting for an OTE game, gives you all the pieces you could ever need to provide mysteries for players to gnaw and worry at. UA, on the other hand, puts the players in the position of driving the game forward, off on a tangent, or right off a cliff. UA characters are driven and obsessed to accomplish some particular goal, decided on by the players, in a setting collaboratively developed. OTE characters are curious and canny, usually explorers instead of revolutionaries.

     3) The rules are very different.
UA has rules that help generate story. OTE has rules that get out of the way. UA is an intricate percentile-based system with a lot of interconnectedness, by design. It's meant to make every experience or decision weighty and lasting, whether the blowback from bad choices is physical or psychological. OTE runs off a short d6 pool with a few intuitive tweaks to influence outcomes. It's designed for transparency and simplicity, so you can learn the rules in ten minutes and make a character in five.

New Game Master Month

Atlas Games has partnered with Monte Cook Games and Pelgrane Press to help anyone who's always wanted to run tabletop roleplaying games gather the confidence and the resources to actually do it. We know that this hobby can't grow without folks stepping up to become GMs, but it can seem overwhelming and intimidating to take that first step.

This month, we're here to help with a series of step-by-step guides for learning how to run our games that are custom-designed for three RPGs, including Unknown Armies. You can start in January and be running your first game by February. Follow this link for details!

Unknown Armies awarded a Silver ENnie for Best Production Values at Gen Con!

Our UA3 production team is extraordinarily grateful to the fans of Unknown Armies for voting for us in this year's ENnie Awards. We came away with the Silver ENnie for Best Production Values, which we believe recognizes the hard work and effort of our crew: art director Aaron Acevedo, graphic designer Thomas Deeny, editor (and postcard crafter!) Colleen Riley, cover artist Jason Engle, interior photographic artists Benôit Felten, Lassi Seppälä, Thomas Shook, and Jeannine Acevedo, and of course designer and co-postcard-maker Greg Stolze.

Congratulations to the Chaosium for their Gold ENnie and to all of our colleagues and friends in the publishing business for their well-deserved recognitions and nominations!

Opening the Statosphere!

In Unknown Armies, the Statosphere is the realm of pure ideas, a place that those who truly embody a principle or archetype can ascend to, to join the Invisible Clergy that shall ultimately become as one in the form of the demiurge. Or at least that's the running theory.

For the rest of us, though, the Statosphere is the name for Atlas Games' new partnership with OneBookShelf to create a place that fans of Unknown Armies can share their own creative ideas for the game. If you've always wanted to publish that adventure idea, or that creepy game master character, or that new adept school of magick, the Statosphere is here for you to do so and earn a little income in the process.

We've already seeded the Statosphere with two products from UA3 writers Tim Dedopulos and WJ MacGuffin, as well as a handy template package (Word and InDesign) to get you started. Follow the link above for all of the details and a list of content guidelines.

We look forward to seeing you ascend!

Unknown Armies Deluxe Set Photos

One of the best things about publishing is seeing all of the hard work of designers, writers, editors, artists, graphic engineers, and printers come together in the form of an actual physical product. Regent of China shipped us a single copy of the Unknown Armies 3 Deluxe Set to review before full scale production and shipment happens, and we took a few photos.

This is the exterior of the Deluxe Set with slipcase, shrinkwrapped, and all three volumes included in hardback.

The slipcase unfolds to become a landscape oriented game master screen, with all the charts and tables you need during play. It turns back into a slipcase with ease (and a magnetic clasp).

Players can enjoy the gorgeous cover artwork of Jason Engle and Aaron Acevedo. Incidentally, when you take all three books and line them up in a triangle, the art forms a triptych image!

Finally, the books themselves are high quality, sturdy, and gorgeous full-bleed photo-illustrated casebound volumes. Thanks to the layout skills of Thomas Deeny, the table of contents, chapter splash pages, and trade dress all works together.

We can't wait for the thousands of Kickstarter backers to get their own print copies in April. Retail stores should see orders filled at the end of April and early May. If you can't wait, and you didn't back the books last year, our pre-orders are still open!

The Sound of the Unknown Part 3: Creating the Music

To celebrate the release of our three suites of Musick for Unknown Armies, composer James Semple wrote three blog posts about commissioning, collaborating on, and creating music for roleplaying games. This is the third post in the series.

Often when starting a new project I will try and define my palette, the range of instruments and sounds that will be used for the music. Sometimes this will be definitive but often it will just be the core sounds. With Unknown Armies I didn’t really do this. Instead, I defined the kind of sounds I’d gravitate towards but I’d begin my template afresh on each track. This definitely ended up being more work but I feel that it kept the tracks sounding more original and unique.

There are a whole lot of influences on the Unknown Armies music but it never really sits comfortably in a single, definable genre. For instance there are orchestral and choral sounds in there, but they're usually mixed with synthesizers or strange abstract noises, and often contemporary drums or bass. Even the alternative rock tracks include soundscape elements and unusual production tricks.

Most of the music was realised within a computer and honestly I used an enormous number of different virtual instruments to create the three suites. I also used a fair amount of live guitar, sometimes overtly and often as an effect in the background. I played acoustic, clean electric, distorted electric, slide guitar, reversed guitar — pretty much anything I could think of, really. It all went in there. I also used the wonderful cellist Deryn Cullen on the track "Lament for the Incorrectly Processed." The cello was so exposed and sensitive that I knew I needed a live player and her sublime performance truly lifted that track.

One reason I love working on RPG music is the chance to help define a genre and put a stamp on an original setting. The setting here was so original that I had a massive amount of freedom to come up with something new and I’d like to think that now Unknown Armies has its own musical identity.

If you haven't already, check out The Sound of the Unknown Part 1: Commissioning Music and The Sound of the Unknown Part 2: The Collaboration Process, the first and second posts in this series.

Rejected Schools of Magick in Unknown Armies

Of all the elements that make Unknown Armies stand out from other roleplaying games, it's probably its strange, postmodern take on magick. Imaginative, engaging, even hilarious schools of magick make kewl powerz that are actually cool. There are dozens of fan-created schools, each of them a singular vision of a certain type of character who has the specific obsession that gives rise to their magick.

This got us thinking: Is there anything that can't be a compelling Unknown Armies school of magick? We gave it our best shot to come up with schools too goofy, too weird, or too dull to be interesting. But actively trying not to be awesome was harder than it seemed! Did we succeed at failing, or do these still sound like interesting schools of magick?

Pagotomancy—The magick of ice cream. Minor charges involve creating new flavors of sweet, cold confections. Of course, the blast involves really bad brain freeze. Like, actual, literal freezing of brains. A secret war rages between the Gelati and the Soft Serve.

Esorouchurgy—The magick of underwear. Acquiring the underwear of the famous and powerful could be a source of charges, but so can acquiring the underwear worn at historic events like Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. Spells include things like "Down on Skid Row," "Four Days Good," and "Hyperwedgie." But would esourochurges be required to go commando themselves?

Videofelimancy—The magick of cat videos. Their hypnotic quality and unfailing ability to improve people's moods must surely come from a form of magick. For a significant charge, track down the original video file of the first Internet cat video. The annual cult meeting takes place in Saint Paul, Minnesota at the International CatVidFest.

Ozomancy—The magic of terrible smells. Naturally, high schools are great places to acquire minor charges, from the concentrated stink of a locker room to the weaponized scent of cheap body spray. The paradox is, of course, that the ozomancer must be meticulously clean and devoid of any scent whatsoever. If they acquire any of the scents they work with, good or bad, they must immediately clean up to avoid the taboo.

What can you come up with? Remember, the Statosphere is coming. Unknown Armies 3rd Edition has and always will thrive on the creativity of its audience.

The Sound of the Unknown Part 2: The Collaboration Process

To celebrate the release of our three suites of Musick for Unknown Armies, composer James Semple wrote three blog posts about commissioning, collaborating on, and creating music for roleplaying games. This is the second post in the series.

One issue that you may have as a games designer when commissioning music is how to tell the composer exactly what you want. Unless you are also a musician, you may find it difficult to definitively describe your vision. So many words mean different things to different people. For some, "epic" means a grandiose piece that tells a story. To others it means really loud drums.

There are many ways to get around this problem. Reference tracks are a useful way of explaining what you like. Also, conversations with the composer can help really narrow down what you like about the reference tracks you've chosen. For Unknown Armies, we started with conversations about the kinds of feelings the music should evoke and from these discussions surfaced a manifesto where we defined terms that we felt applied to the music. While these terms can never be perfect, they did give a baseline theme to keep me on track while writing the music. Each piece of music was of course signed off by the creative team at Atlas Games.


One of the great aspects of this project for me was how much freedom I was given to experiment and explore when writing the music. I could spend time searching for new unusual sounds or work with challenging harmonic ideas without the sense of being limited by existing genre expectations. Unknown Armies is a very original game and that gave me the room to write some of my most original and personal music to date.

If you haven't already, check out the first and third posts in this series, The Sound of the Unknown Part 1: Commissioning Music and The Sound of the Unknown Part 3: Creating the Music.

Americana and Unknown Armies

It's been said that Unknown Armies is distinctly American in its outlook. Perhaps some will find Third Edition less so—not because the approach to its cosmology is so different, but because the lens with which we view 2016 is so different than the one through which Unknown Armies designer John Tynes saw the world in 1996. With every passing day, the borders among global powers become blurrier, and Unknown Armies has always thrived on fuzzy logic. Mak Attax is an international phenomenon, after all.

Unknown Armies finds a lot of both love and fear about the American landscape. And why not? Our characters in other games have been to the scary old house in England, the moldering castle in the Carpathians, or the ancient ruins in the Yucatan. In the context of roleplaying games, we think of distance as equivalent to exoticism, but the mundane and familiar where we live is less explored. What about the burger joint we all known and love, or the back of our local post office? Unknown Armies plays upon the past, but it's the recent past of abandoned Blockbusters and Radio Shacks. It finds ample fuel in the tabloids, the strip malls, the pawn shops, and throughout the rotting carcass of the Midwestern Rust Belt. That gothic church over there might be creepy, but more so than the truck stop off I-94?

Unknown Armies' seediness owes much to film noir and the writings of folks like James Ellroy. But these aren't unique to America. Noir films in general, while an American genre, were deeply influenced by German Expressionism and the sensibilities of displaced European filmmakers emigrating to the US during or after World War II. These artists' profound ambivalence about the human condition contrasted starkly with the traditional Hollywood "happy ending." For example, designer Greg Stolze cites the more recent Spanish film Intacto as a near-perfect Unknown Armies story.

There's a grottiness to Unknown Armies, like an old VHS copy of Basket Case that's been viewed ten too many times. But you can find manifestations of that aesthetic all around the world, both in native forms and as an American export.

The Sound of the Unknown Part 1: Commissioning Music

To celebrate the release of our three suites of Musick for Unknown Armies, composer James Semple wrote three blog posts about commissioning, collaborating on, and creating music for roleplaying games. This is the first post in the series.

Having recently completed 45 minutes of music for the Unknown Armies suites, I thought it was worth taking a moment to reflect on why a game creator might want to commission music for their RPG or board game.

I’ll be honest and say I think there’s a sense of prestige associated with your game having its own musical theme, but also, it’s useful from the point of view of brand awareness. You now have identifiable music you can play for promotional videos or at live events. It can help to reinforce the mood of the game by calling on evocative musical touchstones that subliminally (or even explicitly) suggest eras, regions, or genres.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider how you'll use the music when you commission it. Is it simply for listening pleasure or inspiration? Do you have a specific utility in mind? While it’s exciting to define short catchy themes for elements of your game, usually the most useful type of music for players is long and ambient. Music that sets a mood but isn’t interesting enough to distract from the session in play. Often this is little more than long drones and abstract sounds but it can use melodic ideas as well. While this is very useful during games it can get a little dull as a listening experience in itself and doesn’t really "sell" the music. In the long run I usually find I’m asked for a mix of themes and ambient music perhaps with some other elements such as short three- to five-second "stings," or maybe loopable action music.

In the end it all comes down to a good working relationship with the composer, setting out your goals and together creating something unique and inspiring for your game. With Unknown Armies I had the distinct pleasure of working with very original source material and some amazing creative people who helped me discover their sound. I think together we’ve come up with something quite unique that I called Americanoir. I hope it does justice to their vision.

If you haven't already, check out the second and third posts in this series, The Sound of the Unknown Part 2: The Collaboration Process and The Sound of the Unknown Part 3: Creating the Music.

Unknown Armies: A Little History

In 1996, John Tynes came up with an idea he called "The New Inquisition." It was a new agey, humanocentric urban fantasy about folks entangled in a postmodern occult underground. Originally the background for a series of short stories he was writing, it then became a proposal for a limited-run comic series that never materialized (but which you can read about here).

In 1997, Tynes still hadn't shaken the concept. Knowing that John Nephew, patriarch of Atlas Games, was looking for a new roleplaying game to publish, Tynes approached Greg Stolze about co-authoring a game based on "The New Inquisition," which became Unknown Armies.

In 1998, Unknown Armies 1st Edition was a provocative, grindhouse version of Call of Cthulhu, with its dingy murder-victim-on-a-card-table cover, madness meters, and magick based on the worst of human urges. But it was more than that. While other urban fantasy and horror roleplaying games were busy trivializing humanity—from both the perspectives of the humans (Call of Cthulhu) and the monsters (Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, etc.)—Unknown Armies posited something different: that humans were the only thing that mattered. In the words of co-designer Greg Stolze, "Maybe...you matter too much."

Unknown Armies made a profound impact on the roleplaying landscape, but Tynes and Stolze had only scratched the surface of their modern occult mythology. Over the next couple years, a half dozen sourcebooks like Statosphere and Postmodern Magick appeared. In 2002, Unknown Armies 2nd Edition debuted as a revised and expanded update. It was followed by one sourcebook, Break Today, and the epic campaign adventure To Go, but after that slipped away...not quite into obscurity, but a quiet hiatus.

Now it's 2016, and Unknown Armies is back. The breathtaking Third Edition is a three-volume set that reveals the purpose of its sabbatical. Designer Greg Stolze has synthesized more than a decade of RPG evolution to create a new game that is exactly what you remember and not at all what you expect. The psyche of the player characters is the primary focus without taking away any of the game master's ability to shock or surprise. The setting is reimagined to reflect a 21st century that's already taking shape.

Unknown Armies 3rd Edition will be available soon in a pristine Digital Edition that includes PDF, ePub, and MOBI versions of all three rulebooks. Preorder them now at BackerKit and have them the moment they're released! Or you can preorder the deluxe hardcover volumes, expected to be available in the spring of 2017.

Unknown Armies 3 Custom Dice - Limited Availability

While the Unknown Armies 3 books are just going to press (and on track for the April 2017 release date target), the custom dice have arrived in our warehouse and been packaged for shipping to all of the backers who ordered them. After today's mail pick-up, the only ones that remain to send are exceptions where either there was an address verification error that we need to correct, or the backer hasn't yet filled out their BackerKit survey.

We did manufacture extra dice. The high manufacturing cost and lack of retail packaging mean it's not viable for us to sell these through the usual distribution channels to local stores. However, while supplies last, we will sell them direct by mail, at conventions, etc. The price per set of dice is $10, with shipping cost of $3 (US), $9.50 (Canada) or $13.50 (anywhere else).

We've set up this button to take orders directly through PayPal:

UA3 Dice Set (6 dice) - Select Destination

Ship to USA $13.00 USD Ship to Canada $19.50 USD Ship Anywhere Else $23.50 USD

If you're looking for a unique Christmas gift for the gamer in your life, don't miss the chance to grab a set of these while supplies last!

Unknown Armies: Understanding the Backer Levels

As we approach the final hours of the Unknown Armies Third Edition Kickstarter, I thought we might use this occasion to summarize what folks are going to actually get with their pledges, since so much content has been unlocked.

The Ponies

The Pony levels occupy the lower third of the tier ladder. These levels give you PDF and EPUB versions of Book One: Play, with variations. If we unlock the Godwalker novel from Greg Stolze, all the Ponies get that, too.

• Digital Sparkle Pony adds Book Two: Run, Book Three: Reveal, Book Four: Expose, and Book Five: Mine all as PDF and EPUB, and all the Campaign Starter Kits and the PDF Reference Companion.
• Super Digital Pony adds the two Crazy Packs to all of that content.
• Real Live Pony and Real Live Random Pony don’t include all of that additional stuff, but they do include a print copy of Book One: Play, and Real Live Random Pony includes dice.

The Checkers

The Checker levels start with a base reward of all three print books (loose, no slip case) and all the digital books (Book One thru Book Five, the Campaign Starter Kits, the PDF Reference Companion) plus the UA soundtrack cycles from James Semple.

• Stacked levels means they include Crazy Packs.
• Stones levels means they include dice.

The Chargers

The Charger levels start with a base reward of a Deluxe Set (that’s the three hardcovers with a GM screen slipcase) and all the digital books (Book One thru Five, the Campaign Starter Kits, the PDF Reference Companion) plus the UA soundtrack cycles.

• Stacked levels means they include Crazy Packs.
• Stones levels means they include dice.
• The Adept level takes all of the above and adds a handmade postcard.
• The Avatar level takes all of the above and includes your photo or a photo of an object you like or a place you like in the game, somewhere.
• The Patron is the Avatar level but it switches out the postcard for being a patron of content in Book Five.

The Merchants

The Merchant levels are only for retailers who can verify that they are actually retail sellers. The baseline is two sets of loose hardcover books and extra copies of Book One, with the Charged Merchant including Deluxe Sets instead of loose hardcovers and the Ascended Merchant being all of that plus your store’s logo or photo in the game somewhere.

The Medium Well Done Level

This is the $999 level that throws in a ton of print and PDF content and bonus goodies and doesn’t require any additional shopping costs, plus one of two unique predictive boards handmade by Greg.

Add-Ons

If you want to custom-build your own reward, you can use a combo of any of the above reward tiers and one or more add-ons, which include more print copies, more dice, and so on. You can increase your pledge within Kickstarter to cover the cost of the add-on, but there’s no button to push or place to list which add-ons you want until we get around to migrating everything over to BackerKit.

So there you have it! Probably the best deal if you’re just wanting to go digital or you don’t want to pay for much shipping is the $55 Super Digital Sparkle Pony. Otherwise, we think the best deal for print is the $160 Stacked Charger with Stones, but even the $125 Charger level gets you all the printed stuff and all the digital stuff, so that’s a pretty nice place to park your pledge.

Unknown Armies: Illustrating the Occult Underground

This is the latest in our series of guest blogs by Unknown Armies collaborators and contributors. Today's blog is by UA3 contributing photographer and artist Benoît Felten.

When I first heard that UA3 would be partially illustrated with photographic material, I got really excited and started experimenting with some ideas. Reading the books, particularly book 3, I'd have all these cool ideas, but not all of them were practical to set up. Still, there were a number of things I wanted to try. One was to illustrate some freaky stuff, the other was to illustrate obsession. I first focused on the latter, and one of the first photos I came up with was this one:

I thought this was a good illustration of, in Greg Stolze's words, "doing it wrong."

I really like photography, and I think I'm quite good at it, but I'm not a graphic artist and my photoshop skills are pedestrian at best. So I tried to experiment with things I could get a good grasp on, and played around with tools that are not designed to do what I used them for. I did a series of portrait shots specifically for UA and I was trying to find a way of making them look creepy. For this next shot I used the tool that is so decried in photoshop because it's used to slim down models on magazine covers. As you can see that's not exactly what I did with it.

Finally, I tried to think of outdoor scenes that might look atmospheric and would work for the game. Things that would evoke the underside of urban life. I went through my photos in various places in the world and this one of Bangkok seemed perfect. It's one of those shots that seems to tell a story, but not one you can readily figure out. A great analogy for what Unknown Armies does best, I think.

Unknown Armies: Dead Presidents

This is another of our series of guest blogs about Unknown Armies to celebrate our ongoing Kickstarter for Unknown Armies Third Edition. Today's post is by award-winning game designer and writer Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan.

U(S)A

I’m sure it’s possible to run an Unknown Armies game that isn’t set in America, but I know I never will. The game is quintessentially about America to me, violent and trashy and rootless and crazy and always about to drunkenly stumble into apocalypse. (Disclaimer: America is also full of lovely people and nice things.) Apparently, I passed that attitude onto my players when I asked them to brainstorm some suggestions for an UA campaign, because they came up with two absolutely brilliant ideas that only work in an American contest.

One of them, the one about a team of cursed Gulf War veterans who turn into terrorists at night – or, to be precise, everyone perceives them as terrorists by night – could have been really interesting to explore, but we were all binge-watching the West Wing back then, so we went with the other concept, and it led to one of the most entertaining campaigns I’ve ever had the pleasure of running.

Dead Presidents

The player characters were all ex-Presidents of the United States of America, on the run from the sinister shadow government/cult that resurrected them. George Washington, Herbert Hoover, John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George W Bush (he choked on that pretzel and was replaced by a magical doppleganger) marauding across the Occult Underground, like the A-Team filtered through a PBS biography series. Oh my word, it was fun. All the player characters racked up magical powers pretty quickly – Washington, for example could command anyone who’d ever served in uniform under the flag of the United States. JFK found Excalibur (because Camelot). Nixon, after an encounter with Ben Franklin’s electric ghost, ended up able to throw lightning bolts.

Obviously, the campaign went to bizarre places. Washington spent a lot of the game stuck in the body of a teddy bear toy after mouthing off to Immortal Teddy Roosevelt (who found the fountain of youth during one of his expeditions). The cryogenic head of Walt Disney tried to marry JFK to Snow White in order to complete the alchemical marriage of spiritual and temporal power in America. The Mystic Campaign Bus got trashed by the Lincoln Memorial golem that secretly guards DC.

Here's Looking At You (photo by Peter Griffin)

It all sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But here’s the wonderful thing about Unknown Armies – it takes the absurd, and treats it so f*cking seriously that you don’t have a choice but to run with the crazy.

Look at the funny drunk guy. Look at the funny drunk guy, who’ll only drink from one old Styrofoam cup that he carries with him everywhere, because he claims that it comes from Jonestown and makes everything taste of Kool-Aid. Look at the funny drunk guy, and shudder because he means it all. He’s crazier than you are, and that makes him stronger.

Look at the funny drunk guy as he telekinetically peels your eyeballs like grapes.

In the end, the Dead Presidents saved the world. They crept into the White House by sneaking through a secret time-crossing entrance that went through August 24th, 1812, and liberated the country from the grip of the cult. And by the end of the campaign, what had started out as a pop-culture spoof had become something deadly serious, with real emotion and desperation.

Unknown Armies isn’t the moment when you stop laughing at the absurdity. It’s the moment when you realize you stopped laughing twenty minutes ago, and didn’t notice because you were busy trying to murder Goofy with a shiv made from broken glass.

Unknown Armies Thread Necromancy

Today's guest blog is by Atlas Games President and carpentry advocate John Nephew, who makes diving into the archives of gaming his obsession identity.

One of the things I love about Unknown Armies is how it seems to compel fans to create and share fantastic ideas.  I was reminded of this by Eric Brennan's recent thread on RPG.net's forums, outlining a cabal and campaign focused on the fringes of Hollywood stardom and the occult underground.

If you're looking for a taste of what makes Unknown Armies special, or inspiration for putting together your own game, here are links to some fan creations that may interest you.

• News From The Occult Underground, a website that John Tynes maintained for a long time as a repository for fan-created content, is loaded with unnatural goodness.
• The "Unknown Armies plot-in-a-line thread," from back in 2004 on RPG.net.
• An actual play thread for a game called "Shadows of Chicago" also on RPG.net.
• An Occult Underground-themed Fiasco playset add-in.
• The Sunshine Cab Company (and related RPG.net forum thread).
• "Twenty-Six Plots for Unknown Armies Based on Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'."
• "Unknown Armies — Plots and Conspiracies," six seed plots for your UA campaign.
• "Using Unknown Armies for a Zombie Survival Game," some house rules (for UA2, but easily tweaked for UA3) and story seeds for playing Walking Dead–style Z-horror.
• UA3 contributor Ryan Macklin's archive of UA articles, including using UA passions to create depth, and new schools of magick.

Undermined Expectation

This is another in our series of guest blogs, this time by award-winning game designer and part-time exercise enthusiast Jeff Tidball.

My favorite kinds of Unknown Armies stories tend toward the prosaic. That isn't to say that they come across as normal, per se. Rather, they come across as relatively normal with respect to what I imagine people who are doing Unknown Armies more correctly than I am do in their games.

My favorite Unknown Armies mini-campaign of my own devising was directly inspired by the original edition's sourcebook about The New Inquisition, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and further, by the lyrics of the eponymous song. Here's the snippet of text the players got, each time I ran it, before we sat down to create characters:

Here's How It Is

The shit has hit the fan. Drop everything, come to Tucson. Meet me at Jimmy’s, on West Cortaro Road. Tomorrow night, 3am.   — Pierce

You got that yesterday, in an e-mail. Pierce Stoker is a guy you used to know; you haven’t heard from him in a while. One time, you got into some serious shit with him, and you owe him.

It’s just after midnight. You’re almost in Tucson.

Unknown Armies: Jailbreak

This is another of our series of guest blogs by creative talents connected to Unknown Armies. Today, we've got a short anecdote by Atlas Games' very own Michelle Nephew.

My first time playing Unknown Armies was pretty mind blowing. It was a game at Gen Con, run by co-creator Greg Stolze himself. If that wasn't enough, it was his weirdly compelling "Jailbreak" scenario from One Shots, wherein a group of escaped convicts and their hostages uncover an unnatural secret at a nearby farmhouse.

I was playing the farmer's wife, and by the end of the session I'd killed him and then myself, to a standing ovation by the rest of the players at the table, who all agreed it was an entirely satisfying ending for us. 

Yep, that's Unknown Armies for you.

You can download the "Jailbreak" scenario or purchase the One Shots PDF by following the links above. One Shots is also included in Crazy Pack 1, part of the selection of add-ons at the Unknown Armies Third Edition Kickstarter.