# Unknown Armies Tags: #game/rpg/unknown-armies ![[Unknown Armies (cover).png]] **Unknown Armies** is what happens when your occult roleplaying game decides ordinary postmodern life is more disturbing than any Great Old One could ever be. Written by John Scott Tynes and Greg Stolze and published by Atlas Games, it's a game about a secret occult underground where reality isn't governed by gods so much as by the **Invisible Clergy** — 333 people, each the living embodiment of a particular "archetype" or human truth, whose mere existence shapes what the world is allowed to be. Magic works through **personal obsession and belief**; being a successful magician is less about chanting in robes and more about being so pathologically fixated on something that you've become dangerous. It's a game where the conspiracy isn't lizard people running the government so much as it is everyone agreeing to forget that the weird stuff is real. And it has, hand to god, one of the best sanity systems ever put on a character sheet. We'll get to that in a minute. It's the whole reason this note exists. ## Core Resolution Mechanics The mechanical spine is a deceptively simple **percentile (d100) roll-under** system where characters build their own skills and abilities around their obsessions. - **The Roll:** two ten-sided dice, roll **under** your target; **01 is a critical success**, **00 (100) is a critical failure**. Elegant, flexible, and it never once pretends your skill list was handed down from on high. - **Obsessions** drive everything — your big skills are shaped by the things that give your character life and purpose, which ties your dice pool directly to who you are as a person. In the Third Edition that crystallizes into **Identities**, three or four broad career/hobby/job aspects, each carrying qualities, standing in for the old attribute-and-skill scaffolding. But the reason you'll pick this book up and the reason I keep coming back to it is the mind. ## Sanity: The Madness/Sanity "Meters" There is **no single sanity stat** — and that's the first thing that makes Unknown Armies special. Instead of one pool you watch drain toward zero, your mental health lives across **five independent gauges**, each measuring your stability against a *specific kind* of stress: 1. **Violence** — physical aggression and brutality, directed or witnessed. 2. **The Unnatural** — things that should not be: altered reality, the occult made flesh. 3. **Helplessness** — being powerless while terrible things happen. 4. **Isolation** — being cut off from other human beings. 5. **Self** — your own impulses, conscience, and identity. Every source of trauma is rated by *type* and *intensity* on a **1–10 scale** (getting a weapon aimed at you might be Violence 2–4; deliberately killing a helpless, unresisting target is Violence 7). And on each gauge you mark two very different kinds of notches: - **Hardened notches** — you resisted and *adapted* to that stress. - **Failed notches** — it got the better of you. **The Stress Check:** when you're exposed to a stress, make a check (classically a **Mind roll**). **Succeed** → mark a **Hardened** notch. **Fail** → mark a **Failed** notch *and* suffer an immediate freak-out, choosing one of three instinctive reactions: **Panic, Paralysis, or Frenzy**. The fight/flight/freeze response, made literal and immediate — you never pause play to shave a point off a distant tally. **Hardening is desensitization.** Once your Hardened notches in a gauge reach or exceed an event's rank, you don't even roll — you're numb to that level of that kind of stress. But numbness is not health. Too many Hardened notches and you slide toward **sociopathy**; max out a gauge and you're effectively *inhuman* — the Violence-maxed investigator can watch their own family tortured to death without shedding a tear. High hardening also gates you out of Ascension. It's not resilience you're buying; it's a slow, comfortable loss of self. **Failing is madness.** Each Failed notch drives you toward instability. At **5 Failed notches** in a gauge you're permanently, structurally broken — you **auto-fail** any further stress check of that type (unless your Hardening voids it) and you acquire a lasting **mental disorder**: paranoia, addiction, a phobia, whatever fits the gauge. Max out a Failed gauge and you've gone mad. But here's the twist that makes Unknown Armies transcendent: **going mad is playable.** There's no "your character is now an NPC" mercy-mechanic. You can be a high-functioning lunatic, and in fact — to become an Adept, to level up as a magician — *you have to*. The central genius is that **both ends of every gauge are bad.** Too many Failed notches and you're crazy; too many Hardened notches and you're a monster. It's not a healthy-to-broken binary but a spectrum where both poles wound you, and each gauge is independent — hardening to Violence buys you nothing against the Unnatural. The system *celebrates* niche trauma: a callous, Violence-hardened killer can still be a trembling wreck at the first hint of the supernatural, or vice versa. ## Editions and Changes - **First Edition (1998):** the core system and the postmodern-occult setting — and the Madness Meters. - **Second Edition (2002):** a refinement, tightening the mechanics and adding content; the edition that made the Madness Meter famous. - **Third Edition (2017):** a major overhaul. Introduces **Identities** in place of attributes and skills, and reworks the gauges into **Shock Gauges**, each tied to **two associated abilities** — as you harden to a category, one ability rises and the other falls (harden to Violence and your capacity for violence climbs while your empathy drains). Hardening now costs you *stat*, not just personality. The price of numbness made literal on the sheet. ## References - [Atlas Games — Unknown Armies](https://www.atlas-games.com/unknownarmies/) - [Wikipedia — Unknown Armies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_Armies) - [On Armies Unknown — official fan site & references](https://www.onarmiesunknown.com/) - [DriveThruRPG — Unknown Armies 3e (Book One: Play)](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/207965/unknown-armies-third-edition-book-one-play-digital) > [!note] Editor's Note > > I'm going to be straight up with you. The price that they're asking for **Unknown Armies** at this point is balls to the wall insane, and there's no way that you should shell out $40 for a corebook in PDF. Just don't do it. Have more self-respect than that. > > That said — do not let the shakedown pricing talk you out of the *system*. The Madness Meters are worth stealing wholesale for any investigation-horror game you care to run, and they are the reason this note exists. Read what they do, and if you ever see a used hardcopy for a sane price, grab it.