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In Unknown Armies, players take the roles of movers and shakers in the occult underground, fighting a battle for the ultimate prize: ascension to a higher plane and a hand in creating the next incarnation of reality. Loathsome monsters, bizarre supernatural forces, mind-bending magic, warring cults, and ten thousand bullets it's a pulp apocalypse, and the players have front-row seats for the steel-cage death match of all eternity.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A True Horror Game,
By "scottgcar" (Birmingham, AL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Unknown Armies (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)
Unknown Armies is great. If you are a fan of Tim Powers or Ken Hite, or even know who they are, then you want this book. The various levels the game can take (street, global, or cosmic) add a good twist. My players keep saying: We don't know what that is because you wont let us read ahead! For tone, setting, and over all feel this is a great RPG.The downside: Unless you have played Unknown Armies 1st Edition, this is a completly new system. The broad possibilites of skill sets are great, if you have people who like making those things up. My group is a mix and so we had some people who were not as happy about that. One of the biggest complaints so far is in the descriptors of levels for madness and skills. Especially the skills. The difference between a 40s Speed Stat (picking one at random here) and a 60s Speed stat is difficult to understand. Number wise its no problem, the descriptions could have been better. So far thats the main problem, but we are still learning the system. Overall the ideas are great, but some of the mechanics, at least in their descriptions, are a bit disappointing.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine modern horror RPG,
By
This review is from: Unknown Armies (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)
It isn't often that I can read an role-playing game cover to cover and find that the game is playable and it reads well. Unknown Armies, UA, is a fantastic game with ten gaming ideas for every paragraph.The system is a simple percentile system but the system is elegant, letting the player characters flip numbers under certain role-playing situations. It plays dramatic and fast. The combat chapter begins with ways to avoid a fight. Then it launches into the way combat works. Beautiful. Magick is brutal and extracts a price. The world is fun and has a captivating cosmology while still allowing the DM and the players to make some choices about how the world really works and the headlines of the paper are fine adventure fodder. I cannot stress enough how well written and fun this game is. I have both played and run it. Please pick it up and find out for yourself. The works of Tim Powers are where many of the metaphysical ideas of the game come from. Check out his novels if the game appeals to you.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very cool,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Unknown Armies (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)
If you're a roleplayer, and you're tired of the same-old stuff, give this a look. The first edition of Unknown Armies was good, but the 2nd edition is much improved--the elegant rules are somewhat simplified and easier to grasp now (and thereby more elegant). The book is organized more logically, and the writers provide much better information on how to run a campaign, giving this book a lot more direction.It's a very setting-specific game: It seems that the world we know is full of secrets, and when you start to learn of some of them, everything changes for you. That in itself isn't original, but the details often are. The "feel" of the game is that choices have consequences. The rules focus properly on role-playing over rolling dice. Character generation is fast and simple, with only 4 characteristics, and no definitive skill list (players can make up their own skills, subject to GM approval). Combat requires only two rolls per round: initiative and a single attack/damage roll--whether you hit and how much damage you do is resolved in the same roll. There are three different and fascinating systems of magic, all easy to use, believable within the context, and highly flexible. The "sanity" rules are an improvement over the already-good Call of Cthulhu rules. A comparison to Call of Cthulhu is apt--both Tynes and Stolze have written quite a lot of Call of Cthulhu material in the past, and it seems almost a cliche now that so many people who read this book immediately start to think of how to incorporate Call of Cthulhu into it. But while there are many correspondances, at their hearts, Unknown Armies and Call of Cthulhu are opposites, and merging them is a difficult (but worthy) task. CoC is about a nihilistic spiral into madness and death; Unkown Armies is about desire, hope, and what you'll do to get them--and the consequences of your actions. As dark as it can be, Unknown Armies is set in a human-centered world; CoC is set in an alien-centered world, in which human hopes are utterly irrelevant. Both are wonderful games.
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