Invisible Sun vs Unknown Armies
Compare Invisible Sun and Unknown Armies side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Invisible Sun | Unknown Armies | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Atmospheric, Character-Driven, Crunchy, Worldbuilding, Lore-Heavy, Mana Points, Narrative, Roleplay-Heavy, Weird | Urban Fantasy, Weird, Noir, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Character-Driven, Sandbox, Worldbuilding, Freeform Magic, Strong GM Support, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | Subtract your venture (skills, spent bene from stat pools, situational modifiers) from the GM's challenge to find the number you must meet or beat on a d10. If venture meets the challenge, no roll is needed. Spending bene from the Sorcery pool casts spells and adds extra dice to magical actions (succeed if any die meets the target), but a flux result on a magic die triggers magical flux, an unintended side effect. The Sooth Deck of 60 cards plays along the Path of Suns board, and each new card shifts which colors of magic strengthen or weaken at the table. | 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 | d100 |
| Complexity | Very High | High |
| Availability | Paid | Free quickstart |
| Runnability | 4 of 5 book tools | 5 of 5 book tools |
| License | Proprietary | All Rights Reserved |
| Third-Party Publishing | Not yet researched | Noncommercial only — Atlas Games Fair Use policy |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Publisher | Monte Cook Games | Atlas Games |
| Year | 2018 | 2017 |
| Languages | English | English, Spanish |
| Best For | Groups who want long-form magical roleplaying in a surreal setting where character arcs and spellcasting matter as much as combat. Particularly suited to tables willing to invest in deep character creation and the elaborate physical components (card decks and the Path of Suns play board) that the system uses. | 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 | Four distinct magic orders each use different rules: Vance sorcerers prepare and cast spells learned from books, Makers craft lasting magical items through the Maker's Matrix, Weavers improvise spells by combining aggregates, and Goetics summon and bind demons. The Sooth Deck of 60 cards plays along a Path of Suns board to shift which colors of magic strengthen or weaken in real time. Character arcs are the primary advancement engine: players pursue personal goals to earn Acumen and Crux points, with arcs ranging from short stories to entire campaigns. Between-session 'side-scenes' let characters take significant actions in writing without taking up table time. | 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 | The full game uses an extensive physical-component library (Sooth Deck, multiple spell and ephemera decks, the Path of Suns board, character tomes, and stat pool sheets), all integral to play. Character creation runs eight steps across multiple chapters and typically occupies a full session before play begins. The Satyrine setting and its dream-logic surrealism are built into the rules; adapting Invisible Sun to a more conventional fantasy world requires reworking the magic registers, currency, and order structure. The Black Cube boxed set's premium pricing creates a higher barrier to entry than typical RPGs. | 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. |