Fixing my big (mechanical) problems with Unknown Armies 3e

 

Unknown Armies 3e has a couple rules that are cool thematically but don't work in play. They're out of alignment with the players' obvious commonsense understanding of how the world works. You can teach the players the rules, and the players can bend their characters' actions to those rules, but the disconnect will always be unsatisfying. UA is about the collision of characters who treat insane and arbitrary magickal rules as physics with an otherwise realistic world and normal society. It's fine to put weird things in the game but the backdrop of the "normal world" needs to make sense.

 

These problems and fixes are based on six years of running and playing UA3 with both new and experienced players. 

 

2026 All Hallows Jam Feedback

The Unknown Armies 2026 All Hallows Jam wrapped at the end of October. Let's see how we did. 

I'll Take New York: Playtest Part 2

Demagogue Claudine Vega and Two Fisted Exorcist Barry Vredenberg stacked the door of Dr Piter Ataturk's apartment in the Upper East Side. He was the one who summoned the demon that possessed Nico Ambrosio's daughter Art, which was why the mob had helped find the Doctor's apartment and sent greaseballs Troy Gottardi and Slow Eddie as muscle. They also had the demon, imprisoned in a manakin borrowed from the aging videomancers of George Gets Fired.

 

Claudine knocked on the door while everyone else stayed out of sight. The Doctor opened it. He was tall, bald and had a sunken torso. She said she had something of his. The demon swore at him from its plastic prison. The mobsters freaked out and ran away from the talking manakin. Dr Ataturk was excited to see a new demon containment system and invited the Pioneers to bring it inside.

 

2026 All Hallows Jam Playtest

Anagram Gematriasts Thomas "The Suit" Fatts and Abagail "The Clown" Rodriguez had been ripped off. They bought a World card from the 1933 run of the Lombardy Zeroth tarot, hoping to use the incredibly powerful and dangerous artifact for a sex change ritual. The ritual was a dud and they were going to get their money back. The Merchant's name was DANI SMALLS and the cabal used ANIMAL DSL to track her to a house in the Capitol Forest outside Olympia.

 

2026 All Hallows Jam: Blind or Crippled, Sharp or Dull

Borges

 

A failed superhero team from the golden age of The New Inquisition is invited to one last dance in the red rain by their old rivals. Stop their terrorist attack, cover it up, or just survive.

Monsters & Test Drive: The Stone Head

The Marble Cliffs above the sweltering Rubberlands are no natural formation, but an ancient battlefield scarred by a mass petrification weapon. Quarrymen and miners and orchardists cutting terraces for alligator pears unearth things from past ages who resisted stoning. The disaster at Tontes sent half the cliffs tumbling down the cataracts and exposed The Head.

Unknown Armies: Pregens Again

 

A third batch of pregen cabals for Unknown Armies 3e.

 

The Punishing Rangers, a failed superhero team created by The New Inquisition back in the good old days. Unable to quit the costumed life, no matter how bad they are at it or how bad it is for them.

 

I don't need tricks to kill, a well-armed cabal of maladjusted murder machines. If your scenario requires serious firepower, or especially if it doesn't, unleash these guys on it.

 

Body Paragraph, a PREGENERATED CABAL of Anagram Gematriasts on the ANAL DREG CREEP BEAT, ready to lay A PERT GRENADE CABLE and PEG A NERD, BE A CARTEL. 

Unkown Armies Unnatural Entity: New Cop

STOP, OR I’LL SH-

It fired before it finished the sentence. The muzzle flash lit it up. Blue and featureless and shiny. It fired again and anything it said after that was swallowed by the gunshot in the confined space. 

His Majesty The Worm: Day of the Newts Masterpost

 

A traveling magic show. A kidnapped actor. Webbed footprints leading into a cave. Churning lava. Sadistic salamanders. A fresh spin on the dungeon crawling genre. All this and more in Day of the Newts

 

Gencon 2026 Recap: Board and Card Games

 

I rarely play card or board games but I played a little of both at Gencon at the behest of friends who brought them. Here's what I thought of both.

 

Delta Green: The Tenth Region of the Night

 

A cornfield drowning in heat haze. A shotgun exploding in the dark. Seasonal flooding and the buttered metal reek of synthetic opioids. Lapping water in a place where light cannot exist. 

 

Gencon 2026 Recap: Pickup Games

 

I ran two pickup games at Gencon with my friends and played a couple games. My friends wanted to play His Majesty The Worm so I brought some spare character sheets to the convention and ran them through the same scenario from the ticketed event. Later we painted some Delta Green Agents using a Wargames Atlantic sprue I brought to the con, and I ran them through a Delta Green adventure at the airport.

 

Gencon 2026 Recap: Scheduled Games

Special thanks to the free painting table and to my friends for painting with me
 

I ran two ticketed events at Gencon 2026. All the players did a great job and we finished both sessions early, a little over two hours in a three hour slot.