Unknown Armies Third Edition Roleplaying Game

There's a Kickstarter out for a new edition of Unknown Armies . It's a modern-day occult/horror RPG and the original edition was one of my favorite games (though sadly, I never got to play much of it).

As a backer, I've already been reading through the "gamma draft" of the manuscript and I'm completely sold on the game from the writing alone. The text really conveys "dodgy magical practitioners scraping by to make ends meet". The underlying mechanics are solid and completely support the game's premise.

I particularly like that you main skill is called your Identity. So if you've got an Identity as "Cowboy" you can roll your cowboy skill every time you can say "Of course I can [blank], I'm a Cowboy!" -- which remains a wonderfully intuitive and efficient mechanic. This time around, it's supported by a few mechanical tweaks to better lay out the parameters of those identities.

The other really great mechanic is the Madness Meter. Your sanity can be attacked in five different arenas and failures are bad (as you'd expect) but successes mean you get "hardened" notches which make you immune to that level of stress in the future. Basically, if you didn't lose your cool when the dog started talking to you in your dead grandmother's voice, only something freakier than that will cause you to test again. There are some long-term downsides to having a lot of hardened notches, but I like how you can adapt to crap and shrug off low-level stuff.

Anyway, it's got a few days to go and has been smashing stretch goals so you'll get a lot for your money even if you only get the pdfs. Well worth checking out.




https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atlasgames/unknown-armies-third-edition-roleplaying-game/