Way-Out Wednesday: Unknown Armies

In a glorious return to Way-Out Wednesday, I'm going to be looking at a game I like so much that I can't help but grin like a madman when I hold it in my hands--Unknown Armies. See?

Atlas Games' Unknown Armies isn't as indie as most of the games featured in this space before (it's made by Atlas Games, after all), but it's so off-the-wall and in the indie spirit that it certainly warrants being here. The work of the inimitable Greg Stolze and John Tynes, Unknown Armies has a big following and praises are sung universally--it is the fourth highest-rated game of all time on the Rpg.net Game Index--again, completely warranted. It's really something special.

It's a horror game, at its core. A modern-day occult horror game where just about everything is sinister, bizarre, and just... neat. The two main kinds of characters are Adepts, magick-users who belong to bizarre modern-day schools of thought, and Avatars, people who align their entire lives to a universal archetype, thus gaining powers associated with that archetype.

The kinds of Adepts include Dipsomancers (who gain power by drinking and can only use magick while drunk, and can take the idea of the drunk getting away with anything and thereby cheat the rules of reality itself), Videomancers (who gain power by watching specific TV shows, lose it when they miss their shows, and bring TV program tropes into existence), Cliomancers (who harvest energy from famous locations and affect history and memory), Epideromancers (who gain power from hurting themselves and can then control the flesh of other people), Bibliomancers (who gain power by collecting books and play around with information and knowledge), Mechanomancers (who give up their memories to fuel their clockwork creations)--the list goes on, and on, each more intriguing than the last. (I haven't even mentioned the Pornomancers.)

Avatar archetypes include The Mother, The Savage, The MVP, The True King, The Messenger, The Mystic Hermaphrodite, The Woman That Everybody Can Have (Everybody But You), and just about anything else you can think of.

What's more, there are hundreds of fan-made Adept schools and Avatar Paths at the fantastic Unknown-Armies.com.

Even without going into the bizarre ways to do magic outside of schools, the multi-faceted setting with metaplot characters who are actually interesting, the fantastic passion and obsession-focused character creation, the cabal of magick-users working at McDonalds who infect their customers' food with magic that manifests to them later, the nifty dice mechanics, the Madness Meters that are known to be the best sanity/insanity system in the world of RPGs (outdoing even Call of Cthulhu), and the mind-blowingly good in-game fiction that can find its peer only in Nobilis--even without going into all of that, Unknown Armies seems pretty cool, right?

If you like modern-day settings, horror, off-the-wallness (to the extent that seeing the new car commercial with the sumo wrestlers washing a car in slow motion prompted my friend to say "this is SO Unknown Armies"), game fiction good enough to read for pleasure before bedtime, and maybe even a game that will change the way you see the world forever after you read it like all good art should, Unknown Armies is your game.

P.S. Hot gay action on page 23, accompanied by overnight body-changing and a god who looks like a seahorse.
P.P.S. PDF preview of the first 40 or so pages available here.