Pyramid Pick

Unknown Armies

Published by Atlas Games

Designed by Greg Stolze and John Tynes

$25.00

Picture a world built of the magical illumination of Tim Powers and the gritty, brutal action of James Ellroy. Picture it filmed by an alchemical blend of John Woo and Quentin Tarantino. Add a hard-charging Steve Earle/Nick Cave soundtrack, and watch the movie in the rattiest, creepiest theater you can think of in the baddest part of town. Multiply all that by eleven, and you'll be close to Unknown Armies.

Billed as "a roleplaying game of transcendental horror and furious action," Unknown Armies covers those four bases and more. The world runs from street action -- rousting some Saint-Germain cultist peon for a lead on a Hand of Glory -- to the ultimate Ascension as one of the 333 archetypes whose natures and personalities guide the cosmic struggle between order and entropy. Around the edges of the world lurk the unexplained and the unnatural, from spontaneous human combustion-causing bacteria to astral parasites, but people are the front and center of the world. Some of these people are pretty fearsome -- the fleshwarping Freak and the enigmatic billionaire Alex Abel. Some of them are pitiful -- folks caught up in the occult underground and slowly eroded by astral politics and criminal neglect. Some of them are you -- the player characters.

Characters are the soul of Unknown Armies; the game pays only lip service to physical realism -- hence the "furious action" -- but . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: January 29, 1999

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