Hunter: The Reckoning vs Unknown Armies

Compare Hunter: The Reckoning and Unknown Armies side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Hunter: The Reckoning	Unknown Armies
Genre	Horror, Modern	Horror, Modern
Tags	Investigation, Mystery, Character-Driven, Gritty, Deadly, Atmospheric, Social Combat, Strong GM Support, Lore-Heavy, Urban Fantasy	Urban Fantasy, Weird, Noir, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Character-Driven, Sandbox, Worldbuilding, Freeform Magic, Strong GM Support, Lore-Heavy
Core Mechanic	Roll a pool of d10s, usually an Attribute plus a Skill. Each 6 or higher is a success. Meeting the Storyteller's Difficulty wins. Each pair of 10s counts as four successes. On tests within their creed's Field, Hunters may choose to add Desperation Dice equal to the cell's shared Desperation rating. A 1 on any Desperation Die turns a win into a choice: keep it and raise the cell's Danger, or fail and enter Despair. A failed test with a Desperation 1 always causes Despair.	Roll percentile dice against an identity or ability rating and succeed on a result equal to or under it. Doubles make a matched success or matched failure, 01 is a critical success, and 00 is a fumble. Rolls with an identity tied to a character's obsession can be flip-flopped, swapping the two dice so that 54 reads as 45. Each relevant passion normally allows one more flip-flop per session.
Dice	d10 dice pool	d100
Complexity	Medium	High
Accessibility	Medium	High
Runnability	Very High	Very High
License	All Rights Reserved	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Commercial publishing allowed — Storytellers Vault	Noncommercial only — Atlas Games Fair Use policy
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$$	$$
Publisher	Renegade Game Studios	Atlas Games
Year	2022	2017
Languages	English, French, German, Italian, Spanish	English, Spanish
Best For	Groups who want investigation-heavy modern horror in which a cell of ordinary people researches, plans, and confronts a monster at real personal risk.	Groups who want occult horror in the present day, where each character's obsessions and trauma and the cabal's shared goal drive the campaign instead of a prepared plot. It suits tables comfortable with violence, madness, and transgressive magick, and with building their own local setting together in the first session.
Highlights	Desperation rises after the cell's setbacks, so mounting trouble adds both dice and risk to later Field tests. Overreach lets a player keep a win by raising the cell's Danger, which escalates the quarry's response against the whole cell. Monsters have weaknesses Hunters can discover, so research pays off as concrete advantages in the final confrontation.	In ordinary play, each hardened notch on the shock gauge moves five points from an upbeat ability such as Connect to its paired downbeat ability such as Struggle. Adepts charge their school of magick through its own obsessive behavior and lose all the charges they are holding when they break its taboo. The cabal pursues a player-chosen objective tracked in percentiles, and intense milestones earn bigger rolls toward it than petty ones.
Considerations	Desperation Dice apply only to tests within a Hunter's creed Field, so a character's signature boost sits idle outside that specialty. The book recommends ending most conflicts after about three turns, which leaves little room for extended tactical combat. The content warning covers themes such as sexual violence and torture, so groups should calibrate boundaries before play.	Violence, madness, abuse, and transgressive magick are core subject matter, so the group needs to agree on limits before play. Many firearms can kill a character with the default wound threshold of 50 in one hit. Twenty-five or more hardened notches normally burn a character out, which shuts off passion flip-flops and avatar identities until the character gets treatment.