Shifters vs Unknown Armies

Compare Shifters and Unknown Armies side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Shifters	Unknown Armies
Genre	Horror, Modern	Horror, Modern
Tags	Atmospheric, Character-Driven, Corruption, Deadly, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gritty, Superpowers, Survival, Urban Fantasy, Weird	Urban Fantasy, Weird, Noir, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Character-Driven, Sandbox, Worldbuilding, Freeform Magic, Strong GM Support, Lore-Heavy
Core Mechanic	Roll an attribute die and usually a skill die, each sized from d4 to d20 by the character's rating. Read each die separately: 5–9 gives one success, 10–14 two, 15–19 three, and 20 four. A 1 adds a complication even when the other die succeeds. Meet the Referee's required success count or beat an opponent's successes, with extra successes adding Harm or other effects. Each player gets one Nudge per session to shift a single die by one point after the roll.	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	d4–d20	d100
Complexity	Medium	High
Availability	Paid	Free quickstart
Runnability	2 of 5 book tools	5 of 5 book tools
License	All Rights Reserved	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	No verified route found	Noncommercial only — Atlas Games Fair Use policy
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	Late Gaming Company	Atlas Games
Year	2026	2017
Languages	English	English, Spanish
Best For	Groups who want modern occult horror where hunting haunted objects risks eroding their characters' identities.	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	Harm steps attribute dice down directly, so damage weakens the dice used for later actions. The otherworld called the Gloom drains an attribute step at each scene's start and end unless resisted through sacrifice, weakening the dice needed to escape. Haunted objects called Residues have destruction conditions tied to their emotional origins, turning hunts toward memorials or exposing abuse rather than combat alone.	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 core provides no advancement procedure, leaving the group to decide how skills or abilities improve over a campaign. The colossal beings called Infadha take no Harm from attacks, so ordinary combat cannot defeat them. Several sample Residues are built on suicide, child abuse, and domestic abuse, with safety guidance limited to brief advice during character creation.	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.