Unknown Armies 3e Canned Rules Tutorial

Here's the rules explainer I use when running one-off adventures for new players in Unknown Armies 3rd edition. It takes maybe half an hour at most. It's good to pause between paragraphs and give the players a chance to ask for clarification if they don't understand the basics. It's also okay to say "we'll cover that later" if they want a more in-depth exploration of individual subsystems.

This is a d100 roll under system. [if the players don't know what a d100 is explain the two d10s] When you roll dice you compare the result to the target number, which is either an ability or an identity, and try to get equal to or below the percentage rating. 

[make sure the players have their character sheets out for this part] There are five sources of psychological damage in Unknown Armies, and a stress meter for each. Characters have a level of hardening in each meter that determines their ability to shrug off stress. Your hardening in a meter also determines your character's core abilities. Each meter has an associated upbeat ability (on top) and downbeat ability (on the bottom). As you become more hardened, you get worse at the associated upbeat ability, better at the downbeat.

Your character has identities. Identities have a percentage rating, a set of of-course-I-cans that describe interesting things that identity can do, and a set of three features. The features can substitute for abilities, provide stress offense and defense, or do other useful things. Think of your identities like your trained skills in d20 fantasy, with the ability scores on the stress meter as the untrained ones [ax this if the players are completely new to rpgs or are allergic to d20 fantasy]

When you have to roll dice, first check your identities to see if you have something that substitutes for the ability the GM is asking for, or an of-course-I-can that sounds relevant in the given situation. If you have it, you can make the roll with the identity score as the target number. Otherwise, roll the base ability rating from the stress tracker on the relevant meter. 

Your character's ravenous madness gives them access to dice manipulation. This can turn failure into success, if you're willing to act 

• One of your identities has an asterisk next to it [star if the players don't know what an asterisk is]. When you roll this identity, you can transpose the ones and tens place to convert success into failure.
• You have three passions on your character sheet: rage, noble and fear. When you make act in a way that engages one of these passions, you can re-attempt a failed die roll.

I don't explain the full spread of dice manipulation with passions (rerolls, flipping once per session) because it just confuses people by virtue of being similar but not identical to the obsession. Passions reroll, obsession flips. Easy.

Combat, coercion and casting can all be explained when they become relevant. You should reinforce the basic rules tutorial by showing the players which part of the sheet to reference when they make their first die rolls. They'll probably need prompting to reference their identities or use passions for die manipulation, which is fine. You can pull back from coaching as the session goes on, or if they want to play more Unknown Armies after the session wraps.

If your pregenerated characters have magick powers then you need to include mechanical explainers for those on the character sheet. The most elaborate Avatars with all their channels don't take more than a page once you strip out all the examples in history and masks and so on. You can put all that on the reverse of the character sheet. Unique Supernaturals typically come in under a paragraph, some take only a sentence or two. I don't recommend Adepts for new players because they take pages and pages of text to explain.

Whatever you choose, you don't need to explain the entire magick school to the players. Just tell them their superpowers are explained on X sheet and let them read themselves. Not everyone is going to read them but at least one player will, and they'll set an example by using their powers or by suggesting uses for other players (especially if everyone has the same powers).