Unknown Armies
Third EditionCore Mechanic
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.
Best For
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
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
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.
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