Jul 16, 2026 8:03 pm
It goes a little something like this.
You're a clown working for a traveling circus. You like what you do, and you're good at it. You make people laugh and help them forget their troubles. Your wife is an animal trainer who also works for the circus. Not long ago, you and she welcomed a healthy baby boy into the world.
One day, you and your wife are having a cookout with some circus friends. You're eating at a picnic table on the campgrounds outside your camper. Your one-year old son is also there, seated in a high chair. Everything is going fine until your wife's face suddenly goes slack. She gets up, and... you ever see a bird walk on the ground? It hops and flaps its wings a bit. Well, your wife starts to bird-walk across the grass. She crouches down, bobs her head, tucks her hands into her armpits, and then flaps her arms like a chicken. The conversation dies and everyone stares in confusion and embarrassment. You don't say anything as you try to process what's happening.
That's when your wife grabs your child with her mouth, flaps her arms wildly, and quite literally FLIES up into the evening sky.
Everyone saw it. They were right there. Except sometimes you and the others don't remember it correctly. Sometimes you remember a large bird — maybe a California condor — flying into your camp and snatching your infant son. Sometimes you don't even remember that you've been married six years. At times, it even takes effort to remember that you're a father. The official word is that your wife abducted your child. The police search for her, but they never find her. And you never see either of them again.
You sink into a depression. You try to move on, but you can't. So you drink. They tell you the melancholy will subside with time. Yet for you, the sadness only seems to deepen as the years pass.
Then one night, at the tail end of a bender, you find yourself at the bar. You are teetering between blind stinking drunk and unconsciousness. That’s when you meet Boozehound Bill (or so you call him). He reeks of liquor and shit. Most patrons give him a wide berth. But not you. You collapse onto a nearby stool and start a conversation. The next thing you know, you drunkenly pour out your heart and soul to this stranger. You tell him about all your sorrows, and he listens quietly, without judgement.
When you finish your sad tale, Bill stares at you for a moment. He mutters something about possession and totemic animal spirits. Then he takes your hand and reveals to you "The Truth" (his Truth?) about the world. Your life is never the same afterwards.
The next few years are something of a blur. Bill takes you under his wing and teaches you magick. Not stage magic. No, the REAL stuff. The version spelled with a 'k'. Specifically, he introduces you to the special power that lies in being drunk. How walking the tightrope between inebriation and sobriety unlocks the means to conform reality to your will. How channeling that mellow buzz behind your eyes lets you work miracles, and how your magick grows with every shot.
You drink all the time, whether you intend to work magick or not, though you manage to remain somewhat functional. Nobody judges you for showing up to work drunk, so long as you can do your job. You even start adding a bit of the magick to your act; letting you do thing's that would kill anybody else. The crowd eats it up. But being a clown no longer brings you joy. It feels empty now. The louder the crowd cheers, the emptier you feel. Yet you keep doing it. You keep going through the motions, night after night, because it’s all you have left.
Then one night, you get attacked by a clown with a chainsaw. Not one of your colleagues from the circus, but rather, a clown you’ve never seen before. One moment, you’re performing your act in front of a packed tent. The next thing you know, you're being chased around the center of the big top. You're screaming for help, but nobody is listening. They're just laughing, even when the assailant takes a chunk out of your arm.
Reality snaps into focus for a second, and you realize that your attacker has magick of his own. There’s a glamour of sorts on the crowd, and nothing will break them of the perception that this is all a harmless comedy show. No help is coming; you’re on your own.
And so you struggle, but the other clown has you on the ropes. Your arm is useless, you’ve lost a lot of blood, and your head is swimming (blood loss and inebriation don’t mix well). Over the roar of the chainsaw, he’s rambling about thrones and archetypes and reality, and how it should be him and not you, and a bunch of other incoherent bullshit that seems pointless.
So you tell him. You tell him that you don’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about. That you carry on clowning in search of an escape from the sadness, but that in your heart of hearts, you know you can never escape it. Nothing matters to you anymore; nothing but the bottle. Your capacity to feel anything but crushing melancholy died with the disappearance of your wife and child. You go through the motions of living because you’re too much of a coward to do otherwise. That you keep drinking, not for the magick, but to keep the sadness from eating you alive. That the crowd’s validation means nothing in the end, because they’ll laugh at anything. Tears are streaming down your face as you shout your Truth at the assailant. It hurts letting it out.
In response, the other clown stops dead in his tracks. He drops the chainsaw and begins to laugh. It’s the bitter, humorless laughter of someone who has resigned himself to defeat. "Well played," he says.
You feel the glamour crumble around you. For the briefest of moments, everyone in the crowd sees what’s really happening. A corona of warm, white light suddenly envelopes you.
And you ascend to a new plane of existence. You are now a god.
In that moment, you proved to the cosmos that you met the requirements to become "The Sad Clown," one of the 333 universal archetypes that rule over reality. More than anyone else on Earth (or at least more than the clown with the chainsaw), you personify the paradoxical relationship between joy and suffering. Without intending to do so, you demonstrated that you embody the conflicting duality of the external and the internal. Pagliacci ain’t got shit on you.
By drunkenly stumbling onto the 229th throne, you see the world as it is. From your new home within the Statosphere, probability is yours to command. But you aren’t the only embodied archetype. Some of your fellows want to create a utopia. Others a dystopia. You have yet to decide if humanity is worth saving.
Confused yet? Good.
Welcome to Unknown Armies.
Unknown Armies Second Edition is an occult-themed role-playing game published by Atlas Games. The first edition came out in 1997, with the second and third editions being released in 2002 and 2017, respectively. It includes elements of psychological and surreal horror, action, urban fantasy, investigative/detective stories, neo-noir, dark humor, and general weirdness. Imagine if Pulp Fiction had a baby with a Clive Barker film.
I will be using the second edition of the game, which is still fully compatible with all first edition supplements.
System: Unknown Armies Second Edition (UA) uses a d100 percentile-based "roll under" system.
Number of Players: Four to five.
Posting Rate: A minimum of two or three meaningful posts a week.
Game Duration: Maybe a year, or however long people wish to continue playing.
Experience: No prior experience with UA is necessary. While not rules lite, the system is easy enough that you can learn it as we go.
Mature Content: This game has very mature content and themes. The UA setting deals with broken people living in a broken world, and relying on their obsession to work magick that exacts a significant personal price. If you're looking for a light-hearted RPG experience, then it's safe to say this isn't for you. The game may address delicate topics such as violence, substance abuse/alcoholism, poverty, religion, trauma, mental illness, self harm, and more. That said, I always try to err on the side of good taste.
Resources: I'll provide any needed resources.
The Setting
The game is set in our modern world, but one in which magick and the supernatural are real, existing largely unseen by the general public. The world is filled with secret societies, cults, and paramilitary groups that jockey and compete to influence reality. These cabals form a loose network collectively known as the Occult Underground. In Unknown Armies, you play an adept - a person who practices real magick.
There is no great secret to magick; you just have to believe hard enough to make it happen. And adepts believe very, very hard. Because magick is enabled through intense personal belief, that means only the most obsessive of individuals can use it. As one adept once put it, "a magician is just someone who lies so hard that they can fool reality." As a result, the various groups and individuals that comprise the Occult Underground tend to be, in one way of another, unhinged outcasts. Think of the Underground as an eccentric collection of weirdos, conspiracy theorists, counterculturalists, lunatics, cultists, and visionaries operating at the fringes of society.
Unknown Armies asks the question, "What are you willing to risk to change the world?" One of the running themes of the game is that magick exacts a steep personal price from those who dare to use it. Being able to work miracles requires sacrifice, and sometimes those sacrifices can be life-destroying. For each adept, their obsession often comes at the cost of their health, money, personal relationships, or sanity. The tagline for UA is "a game of power and consequences," and it doesn't take much magickal power for there to be some very nasty consequences.
Much like a battery, the adept must build up a magickal "charge" in order to cast spells. Each adept follows a magickal school. Your school determines the ritual actions that you must undertake to build a charge, as well as the toll that your magick takes on you. For instance, dipsomancers generate charges by getting drunk, but they also inevitably become raging alcoholics. Entropomancers generate charges by taking unnecessary and often dangerous risks. Not surprisingly, they tend to die in avoidable accidents. Plutomancers build their charges by acquiring money, but they may never spend it. Thus, they might be fabulously wealthy but must live like paupers. Etcetera, etcetera. Unknown Armies has dozens of magickal schools to choose from, but there are also rules for creating your own school from scratch.
Magick schools are based on an inherent contradiction or central irony (in occultism, this is known as the Law of Symbolic Tension). To use Dipsomancy as an example, this school uses drinking as its paradox. Getting drunk gives you freedom (from your inhibitions and worries) but also enslaves you (via addiction). It makes you more yourself and less yourself. Booze binges are full of drunken "moments of truth," but such revelations fade like smoke during the next day's hangover. For a dipsomancer, drunkenness provides magick, while sobriety saps away one's charges. This means many dipsomancers maintain a near-constant state of inebriation to keep ahold of their power, and such a lifestyle eventually leads them to ruin.
But adepts aren't the only one's with magick. Alternately, one could choose to play an avatar. These are individuals who elect to become a living archetype. Archetypes are primal social roles that inhabit the human collective consciousness. Examples include the Warrior, the Scholar, the Hunter, the Mother, and the Martyr, just to name a few. An avatar adopts the lifestyle and behavior of a specific archetype. By following in its footsteps, he gains magickal powers associated with that role. Eventually, a single avatar comes to embody that particular archetype better than anyone else on Earth. When that happens, the avatar ascends to a higher plane of pure energy called the Statosphere. Within the Statosphere, the probabilities that govern human existence can be directly manipulated.
Collectively, such ascended humans are known as the Invisible Clergy, and they are not unlike gods. They are the hidden, incorporeal beings that watch the world and influence its trends and progress at the highest levels. Their power is undetectable... almost. It's so thoroughly baked into the fabric of reality that it looks like physics or mass psychology or good ol' coincidence. Yet sometimes their hand can be discerned from dreams, from visions, or from sudden outbreaks of order when events ought to be chaotic. This is especially the case when members of the Clergy have differing agendas and compete to influence the same person or event. When that happens, things can get interesting.
There are a maximum of 333 archetypes in the Clergy. Some roles have been filled, while others remain vacant. In the Occult Underground, there are many who endeavor to rise to the Statosphere, either by filling a vacant throne or by challenging one of the ascended clergy for their spot.
The System
Unknown Armies uses a d100 percentile-bases "roll under" system. In terms of complexity, the mechanics are very middle-of-the-road. They're not particularly lite but not especially crunchy, either. Here is a brief overview of the rules:
All characters have four Stats: Body, Mind, Soul, and Speed. These are expressed as percentiles.
Skills are also expressed as percentiles. There is no comprehensive Skill list. Instead, Skills are approached in a freeform way, meaning that you define the Skills that you want for your character. Each Skill is governed by one of the Stats, and a Skill cannot be higher than its associated Stat.
In Unknown Armies, the idea is to roll high but not too high. Typically, you need to roll equal to or under the target percentile to succeed. Rolling above the target percentile means failure. The higher you roll without exceeding your percentile, the better. Some difficult Skill rolls may even require you to beat a target number but without rolling above your Skill percentile (for example, you might need to beat 30% but also stay below 60%).
On a natural roll of 01, you succeed spectacularly (this is called a Crit). On a natural roll of 100, you fail spectacularly (this is called Fumble). These rolls are always considered a success/failure, regardless of modifiers.
Additionally, you can get exceptional results through matches. A match is when both percentile dice come up with the same number (e.g., 11, 44, 55, 66, etc.). On a success, a match means an exceptionally good result. On a failure, an exceptionally bad one.
In some situations, the result of a roll can be flip-flopped. This means switching the tens and ones die. For instance, a 91 could turned into a 19, which would make a likely failure into a success.
One of the most interesting and unique mechanics in Unknown Armies are the Madness Meters. These serve to determine how stress affects your character. They are five gauges that measure how resilient or susceptible you are to different mental traumas. The meters are an abstract way of tracking your character's mental state. They are Violence, The Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self.
When you experience a particular trigger, you roll your Mind Stat. This is called a Stress Challenge. If you fail the challenge, then you add a point to the appropriate meter. For example, witnessing a friend get stabbed would trigger a Stress Challenge for Violence. Upon failing the roll, you'd add a point to your Violence Meter.
As you acquire points in a particular meter, you become increasingly callous and desensitized. Callousness means that you are more resistant to future stress triggers, but it also means potentially gaining short term and long term psychological conditions. Additionally, extreme levels of callousness closes you off to your emotions, which makes magick more difficult to use.
Last edited July 16, 2026 8:15 pm
