I saw the new Unknown Armies edition in a Comic shop last week and flipped through it. Loved the graphic design and layout of the book, but didn't have time to read much of it. I own the previous edition but never read much of it.

Anyone here own the 3 new core books and if so what do you think of it? Is it a traditional RPG or does it lean to more of a Story Game? What about it's setting? Do you like it or is it to weird for your liking?

I'm not super thrilled w/ the setup - where the players decide on the threats, locations, etc. of the setting, then set goals and work to achieve them. You're allowed input, kind of. I don't really dig that part and wouldn't implement it that way. I could be wrong - just my impression from the book.

Smells a lil' Story Gamey.

The mechanics are pretty great except for that, so I'd definitely recommend buying it. Cam (writer) said that he went with the "let the players come up with things they want to do / exist in their world" because most people had no idea what to *do* in an Unknown Armies game, but he told me it would work fine without that stuff.

Quote from: Gwarh;1011487Smells a lil' Story Gamey.

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Quote from: PencilBoy99;1011497The mechanics are pretty great except for that, so I'd definitely recommend buying it. Cam (writer) said that he went with the "let the players come up with things they want to do / exist in their world" because most people had no idea what to *do* in an Unknown Armies game, but he told me it would work fine without that stuff.

Well, 1st and 2nd edition were very much about the players determining their own goals in the world, which I realize is  a problem for some groups.

I don't know that the new goal mechanic really solves the issue. A group that couldn't come up with a group goal in 2nd edition is going to be just as blank and useless when asked to set a goal with the new edition. The only difference is during play, achieving your goal feels a lot more like "bucket-filling", to use a computer game term.

I'm not sure how I feel about skills being tied to the Shock Gauge. I thought the base idea was pretty cool when Stolze used it in A Dirty World. It's just that adding the same mechanic to UA makes it feel almost more like a different game with the same setting than a new edition.

I'm not a fan of Cam Banks designs, so I am disappointed that he had so much influence on the final product. It's got his crunchy fingerprints all over it. One of UA's signatures was its looseness, yet this game feels bound up in systems for everything.

At least Arc Dream let us have a good new Stolze design in the form of Delta Green.

I'm going to see how it plays though. Even if I don't like the whole thing, I can see it having some good parts to steal for 2E.

I don't really get the criticism of previous editions being that "most people had no idea what to *do* in an Unknown Armies game" when it had a whole bunch of really good scenarios written for it. Indeed, for all the advice given about how to design scenarios and playable groups, the biggest single criticism I have is that there is not one single scenario provided in all five UA books so far. If you want people to know how to play a game, write cool scenarios for it. Don't write essay after essay lecturing about it.

Unknown Armies, in it's previous editions has a mixed relationship for me. It's first edition was the original 'RPG.net darling' with an excessive hype about the game. People would write things like "this isn't the rantings of some frothing fanboy" before going off on a rant, like a frothing fanboy, about it being the most amazing gaming experience anyone could ever have and everyone must buy it immediately. Other fans used to enthusiastically suggest it on forum questions about 'can you suggest a system for xxxx' on literally any genre imaginable, and invariably shout down any criticism made thereof. Them were the days....

For my part, this was initially off-putting, as was the case that there had been several previous occult-themed games that had come out in the 1990s where this sort of thing was trendy. I had personally played an ongoing Mage: The Ascension campaign for several years, so in this sense, having yet another game about post-modern magic(K) was getting a little same-ey for me. However, once you settled into it, you did notice that a) it was written with a very fluid and entertaining style and, b) there were lots of good little ideas peppered throughout the book that served as good seeds useful for any (post-)modern-day weird rpg setting. Along with the aforementioned high quality scenarios (something that Mage: The Ascension, notably, didn't have), it won my respect.

The broad setting backstory is basically Moorcockian (as it admits in a side bar), Avatars of Law being represented by Jungian-esque Archetypes (eg. The Mother, The Masterless Man, The Warrior, etc) and the Adepts of Chaos being a variety of Magickal Schools which focus on ironic aspects or paradoxes of reality to generate magical charges that power spells (such as Dispsomancy that observes how drunks appear to gain a sense of control, the more they lose control or Videomancy that uses videos to connect, whilst becoming increasingly isolated in relationships, etc). Each Archetype or Adept gets a bunch of progressively learned effects, and taboos, which tends to explain their own bizarre behaviour in the context of an 'occult underground' which has it's own personalities and power groups competing over some form of magical ascension brought about when 333 Archetypes have been established, and reality reinvents itself. The setting became more organised and fleshed out in the 2nd edition, and continues in the 3rd edition too.

I will stress, however, that the general back story and magical theories within are analogous to a Guy Ritchie London gangster movie, insofar that while it may be entertaining in a pantomime sense, it bears little resemblance to real world occult practices or theories in the same way Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is nothing like real street level criminality. As such, it's open to charges of being a little pretentious if taken as some sort of treatise on actual post-modern magic(k) (like Chaos magick for example).  But then, you all know that..... don't you?
 
The third edition tries too hard, in my opinion. Yes, it's got all the bells and whistles of an intense roleplaying/storytelling experience but there is a lot to juggle for a GM. The simplicity found in the first two editions is now somewhat convoluted. One of my favourite Unknown Armies books was One Shots, a relatively slim collection of easy-to-run but brilliantly executed scenarios. It was so easy to run, I felt that I could actually run them without needing to refer to the rulebooks. In several cases, indeed, I have actually run them off-the-cuff with other games. The problem I had with the third edition is it's much more difficult to do this.

The developments themselves, seem interesting and themed, but it prefers to do everything in a deep collaborative way. Our group tried the quick-play method (for character generation) and got quickly tangled up in what the various gauge points meant, how to use the Relationships, what the parameters of the Identities were, etc. The quick-play advice is to allow to set the various psychological gauges (two-tailed meters that establish basic skills as well a personal profile) wherever the players want - which they did, only to find out in play that this essentially meant all the players had accidentally designed sociopaths from the offset. It was just a bit too loose and vague for our needs, and difficult to run. All the advice given, and there is lots of it, exacerbated this.

As with previous editions, I may have missed something, and others may find it more inspiring. It might be a slow burner for me, as I read through it more. It all looks very pretty. However, at this point, I'd prefer to play Delta Green, Kult or my personal favourite Mage: The Ascension. I've nothing against Cam Banks, who is listed as a contributor but not lead writer (that would still be Greg Stolze). I liked Feng Shui 2 and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.

I quite liked the earlier editions. I haven't read the current one. From what I'm hearing, I suspect I wouldn't much like it.