Unknown Armies 3 has one of my favorite RPG battle systems ever. I'm not talking about the page of ways to avoid a fight, I'm talking about what happens after that when you inevitably ignore it. The weapon and spell rules collide with the coercion and sanity systems and the real fight takes place in the psychic terrain of the mind as much as the physical battlefield. Weapons and spells can kill you instantly but most of the time the fight is decided when someone breaks and runs away, or comes up with a novel way to disable the enemy with a spell that you'd never think to use in combat.
Adepts are the most mechanically dense caster type in UA3. They each get several pages of spells and often their own unique subsystems governing how they deploy them. Adepts are lifestyle magick users and would know their own spell lists by heart, but I don't. Sometimes it's worth pausing the game to pore over the spell list in search of the optimal play for a character who would, realistically, know exactly what to do. Sometimes it's better to just make something up and call it random magick. Especially if the NPC is powerful enough that they have charges to burn, like the Plutomancer and Agrimancer from The Colonel's Table. They got multiple sigs a day from their mundane business activities, they could just throw out random magick that fits their schools thematically and pay the premium for going outside the formula spells.
But I would like to color inside the lines of the game system whenever possible, because having restraints forces magick users to be more creative and stops them completely taking over the game. Unknown Armies is not a Pathfinder style game of tactical combat but I really appreciate how those designers gave NPC spellcasters with lengthy spell lists their own "tactics" section explaining what they did in a fight. Default behavior and a couple if/thens to account for the most likely outcomes of a battle. So I wrote this for Unknown Armies 3e.
These are spells for a street fight, where the caster wants to either disable their attackers or escape the situation. They don't encompass all the things Adepts can do outside of combat to ruin someone's life, which are typically more dangerous because the target doesn't know they're happening and can't fight back. When the NPCs do that, you've got the time to look in the spell list and pick things that fit their master plan and hit the players where they're vulnerable. This list is for what the NPCs do right the fuck now, in the middle of a fight.
Adepts have the ability to store spells in magick artifacts for later use. This is something you should decide beforehand based on the character's power level (checker, charger, big named faction NPC, global or cosmic NPC, etc), whether they use their charges often or save them up, and whether their caster school allows them to cheaply charge on a daily basis. The artifact creation process can create something from nothing, giving you more uses of a spell than the charges you put into it. Some schools become a lot more dangerous if they can carry an item around that lets them fire off a powerful spell over and over even after tabooing.
For now we'll cover the first nine spell schools in the UA3 core set, books 1 through 5, going alphabetically.
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