Four factions. Two cabals. One 600-pound head.

In 2003, the universe got rewritten and the Comte de Saint-Germain — arguably the most important human to ever exist, the Once and Future Eschaton of the Invisible Clergy — got his brain scrambled. Now the race is on to retrieve the huge stone religious bust in which some of his memories are locked up.

That head was dug up and stuck in a museum in Québec, but now there are at least two different groups looking to steal it, another looking to steal it from whoever steals it first, and a fourth that would rather the head stay right where it is.

Can the players steal it? Defend it? Steal it back again? It’s all up to them.

Bring Me the Head of the Comte de Saint-Germain is a three-part mini-campaign for Unknown Armies by Greg Stolze. It reveals (and revels in) some of the deepest secrets of the setting and has several really cool features:

• It’s designed to be either seamlessly slipped into an ongoing campaign or picked up and run with zero prep using the deliciously well-developed pregenerated characters.
• The players actually swap roles between the protagonists and antagonists.
• There’s a really fantastic, full-featured heist scenario that kicks everything off.
• Multiple, flexible finales give the GM support no matter which way the players torque the adventure.

As the producer, I basically had nothing to do with any of this. It was a pleasure to just step back and let Stolze work his magic, while I focused on facilitating the presentation and design of the final book to maximize its utility and present Stolze’s work in the best light possible.

But if you take a peek at the credits page, you will notice that I do have an “Additional Writing” credit. This is for one very specific addition to the text, and like the extra in a Broadway play who walks through the background of a rainy scene and tells his parents the show is about a man with an umbrella, that’s what I’m going to be talking about today.

ON EXHIBIT

As I mentioned above, the opening hook and adventure for Bring Me the Head is a heist. Specifically, the PCs are stealing a huge stone head from Le Museé de la Civilisation Américaine in Québec. This was fully developed by Stolze:

• Blueprints (including a diagram of security cameras)
• Fully detailed security measures
• Detailed breakdown of entrances, locations, etc.
• Guidelines for handling likely methods of moving a 600-pound stone head

And so forth.

This is where my one addition comes in: I wrote up exhibit lists for each of the exhibit halls in the museum.

For example, here’s the one from the Autochtones des Plaines (First Peoples of Canada) exhibit:

• A stuffed bison
• Rifles used by Ojibwe and Dakota hunters
• TV playing videos of Ojibwe, Dakota, and Cree people, both contemporary scholars and interviews from the early 20^th century
• A child’s jacket with embroidered Dakota floral patterns
• Beaded bandolier bags
• Nooshkaachi-naagan (Ojibwe winnowing tray) for separating grain from chaff
• A turtle-style cekpa ozuha (umbilical cord pouch) which served as a child’s first toy and a lifetime charm against death

I even ended up doing one for the souvenir shop (with some tie-ins to the various exhibit lists):

• Tiny replicas of Augusta Savage’s busts
• Plastic Mixtec jewelry
• A poster facsimile of the Canadian constitution
• Commemorative coffee cups
• Stuffed bison and caribou toys
• T-shirt that reads “Je suis venu au Québec et je n’ai reçu que ce t-shirt français”

Unknown Armies uses a sidebar reference system, so these lists are positioned in the sidebars where they won’t clutter up the primary text, but are readily available to the GM while running the scenario.

I felt having these lists in the book was important because, based on playtests, it seemed that these specific details were:

1. Difficult for GMs to improvise on the spot (often resulting in generic responses like “there’s a lot of modern art in this gallery” instead of specific details); and
2. High-value in terms of improving play.

First, the specific details tended to make the museum feel more “real” to the players. It also provided some meaningful color to flesh out onsite surveillance ops and some well-defined, “Oh shit! The exhibits!” moments if/when fighting broke out during the heist.

Second, this kind of specificity can serve as a launchpad for player improvisation. I don’t know exactly what the players might cook up with the hodge-podge of stuff in the souvenir shop, for example, but it will be interesting find out.

Third, expensive items can provide temptation to PCs who might want to snag something extra during the heist. This actually pivots off a suggestion that Stolze had already made in the adventure:

How honest are your PCs? If the answer is “not very,” they might take the opportunity to steal secondary stuff, either to distract from the stone head, or to resell, or just because it seems nice. Anything of great value escalates the pursuit considerably. Stat up a private detective with no occult knowledge but lots of resources to dog the PCs’ tail.

(The text is in bold there because guidance for the private detective is also given as a sidebar reference.)

Having specific potential targets in the various exhibits makes it more likely that one of them will catch the eye of a PC (or otherwise become featured in their plans).

Ultimately, this adheres to the Principles of Smart Prep: Identifying high-value material that’s difficult or impossible to duplicate through improvisation.

And that’s basically it. It’s a small detail, but particularly when multiplied across the hundreds or thousands of GMs who will run these adventures, I think it can make a big difference.

PDF – Print

The first sanity mechanics appear in Call of Cthulhu in 1981 and, in many ways, it remains the definitive mechanical model: The character is confronted by something unnatural, stressful, or terrifying. They make a check using their Sanity attribute. If the check succeeds, everything is fine. If the check fails, they take damage to their Sanity attribute based on the severity of the event that triggered the check. If the damage is sufficiently large (either immediately or in aggregate), they suffer some form of temporary or indefinite insanity. These insanities often force a particular action on the character (fainting, fleeing in panic, physical hysterics, etc.).

We can identify three distinct elements in these mechanics:

• The trigger which requires a sanity check.
• The check to see if the trigger causes harm to the character’s sanity.
• The reaction of the character to the trigger (usually due to a failed check).

This is a fortune at the beginning mechanic: You make the sanity check and THEN determine what your character does based on the outcome of the check. It is also a reactive mechanic, by which we mean that it is used in response to a triggering circumstance rather than resolving a statement of intention.

(Thought experiment: What would a non-reactive sanity check look like? It would probably be part of a wider array of personality mechanics which the player could use to interrogate their character’s state of a mind; a very non-traditional form of player expertise activating character expertise, with the player essentially “asking” their character whether they’re scared or aroused by Lady Chatworth or tempted by the devil’s offer. But I digress.)

RESOLUTION SEQUENCE

In my experience, most GMs resolve sanity checks in the same sequence listed above: they describe the trigger, make the check, and then determine the reaction.

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! Make a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I failed!

GM: You take (rolls dice) 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

In this, they are usually mirroring how the mechanic is described in the rulebook: this is what this rule is for (the trigger), here is how the mechanic works (the check), and here is the outcome of the mechanic (the reaction).

This all makes sense.

But in my experience, it’s not the most effective way to run sanity checks. Instead, you usually want to invert the check and trigger, like so:

Player: Bertram very carefully turns the handle and eases open the closet door.

GM: You peer into the closet… There’s… Yes! There’s something moving in there! Give me a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I fail!

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! You take 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

It’s a subtle distinction. What difference does it make?

First, the mechanical resolution now functions as foreshadowing: While the check is being made, tension builds at the table as the players anticipate whatever horrific thing might be triggering the check. (What’s in the closet?!)

Second, by resolving the check before describing the trigger, you allow the players to have an immediate, immersive response to your description of the trigger.

Which makes sense, right? When Bertram sees the tentacular thing he immediately wants to scream and run in terror. He doesn’t want to wait a minute while dice are being rolled.

So, in short, you heighten the emotional engagement of the moment both coming and going.

In my experience, the exception to this is when the trigger for the sanity check is generated by a different mechanical interaction. (For example, watching your friend’s brains get sprayed across the wall by a sniper’s bullet.) This is more a matter of practicality than effectiveness (unlike the tentacular horror slithering out of the closet, the GM doesn’t know whether or not the bullet will hit their friend until it does, and the whole table often learns that simultaneously), but does serve as a reminder that the “proper” ruling in an RPG is rarely a simple black-and-white affair.

TRAIL OF CTHULHU – LIMITS OF SANITY

In Call of Cthulhu, PCs start with a fairly large amount of Sanity and usually lose fairly small quantities in each session of play. There’s generally no way to recover lost Sanity, so over the course of a campaign, their Sanity is slowly eroded away by the horrors which they’ve seen, until finally the last few points are taken away and they are left permanently mad and broken by their experiences.

This is very effective at evoking the slow, inexorable destruction of Lovecraftian fiction. But, like hit points in D&D, you generally don’t feel actual risk until near the end of the process. There are some mitigating factors, but this can easily have the effect of reducing the impact of Sanity losses.

In Trail of Cthulhu, Kenneth Hite does a very clever tweak on this system by splitting it into two separate tracks: Sanity and Stability.

As in Call of Cthulhu, Sanity generally can’t be restored once lost. However, you also don’t lose it directly. Instead, you usually only lose Sanity as a result of your Stability meter hitting 0.

The Stability meter CAN be restored when depleted, but it’s limited enough that it can easily be wiped out in a single session (which would result in Sanity getting hit).

This allows the system to create a mechanical sense of risk that builds over the course of each session (as Stability is depleted), while ALSO capturing the long, slow, inexorable, and irreversible destruction of a character’s psyche (as Sanity is depleted). It allows characters to brush up against madness without being permanently broken.

If you’re a Call of Cthulhu GM coming to Trail of Cthulhu for the first time, you’ll want to consider how the hard limits in each system are different. This will affect both scenario design and the pacing of individual sessions. In some ways Trail of Cthulhu is more forgiving (because Sanity is “shielded” behind Stability), but in other ways it is considerably less forgiving (because it’s relatively easy to completely blast through Stability in a single session).

The game is fairly well-tuned so that in a typical scenario some or all of the PCs are likely to feel the risk of running out of Stability, but it won’t actually happen in every single session. (Which is also good, because if it’s getting hammered so hard that it IS happening like clockwork every single session, that also deflates tension.) But this is something you’ll want to monitor and adjust in your scenario design and rulings: If their Stability is rarely or never at risk of running out, check to see if you’re not calling for Stability tests as often as you should. If their Stability is being sand-blasted away, see what you can tweak to get a more balanced result.

UNKNOWN ARMIES – A MULTITUDE OF MADNESS

Unknown Armies by John Tynes and Greg Stolze has several more features in its sanity system (which, in the first edition, was called the madness meter and was resolved using stress checks).

First, instead of having a single track, the system has five separate meters, one for each type of psychological stress the character might experience:

• Helplessness (unable to take action you feel is necessary)
• Isolation (when you’re cut off from society or loved ones)
• Violence (pain, injury, death)
• Unnatural (challenges to your perception of reality)
• Self (violations of your deepest beliefs)

This paints a more evocative picture of a character’s psychological state. It also allows the game to track separate effects for each type of trauma, while still measuring overall psychological stability across all the meters.

Having these separate meters also allows Unknown Armies characters to become hardened: Each stress check adds a hardened notch to the associated meter. Each trigger is rated by its severity, and if a character has a number of hardened notches in a meter equal to or higher than the rating of the trigger, then they don’t need to make the stress check. (They’ve seen so much Violence, for example, that someone being punched in the face no longer has a psychological impact on them.)

Systems that harden you against tests can suffer from a “plateau effect” where you reach a certain level equivalent to whatever style of play you prefer and then stop rolling checks (see Katanas & Trenchcoats). This also happens in Unknown Armies, but it sidesteps the problem by having the five different meters: You can plateau in one, but the character will remain vulnerable in the other meters (and realistically can’t plateau in all of them because there are cumulative psychological consequences based on the total number of hardened notches the character has).

Unknown Armies also does something interesting with the reaction phase of the resolution: If the PC fails a stress check, they have to choose fight, flight, or freeze – in other words, is the character’s reaction to furiously attack the source of psychological stress, flee from it in a panic, or simply lock-up in indecision, terror, or a “deer-in-headlights” effect.

The cool thing about this mechanic is that, although the failed check constrains the available options, the player still remains in control of their character. Conversely, even succeeding on the check gives a roleplaying cue (because becoming psychologically hardened is meaningful) that the player can pick up and run with.

SANITY CHECKS FOR NPCs

Something which many games with sanity mechanics miss (and which, in my experience, many GMs ignore even in the games which do include support for it) is to also make sanity checks for the NPCs.

If you aren’t already doing this, it’s well worth exploring. It can really push the narrative in cool and unexpected directions.

It can also emphasize how dangerous and unusual the PCs’ lives are (and, therefore, how extraordinary and meaningful their actions are). It can also remind them why they need to be the ones to solve the problem and that it may be a very, very bad idea to call in people who aren’t prepared to deal with it.

On that note, remember that NPCs will generally only have a fraction of the screen time that the PCs do, and, therefore, will only have a fraction of the opportunities to make sanity checks. Don’t load ‘em all up with the default maximum Sanity ratings for starting PCs. Seed in a broad range of Sanity ratings, from those who are fairly robust (at least to begin with) to those who are already psychologically unsound.

A DIGRESSION ON MYTHOS MADNESS

So it turns out that there are aliens. And some of them have visited Earth. Maybe they’ve even been involved in genetically engineering human beings.

… why is this driving me insane again?

As Unknown Armies demonstrates, sanity mechanics are not ineluctably linked to the Mythos. But they did originate there, and so pervasive is the influence of Call of Cthulhu that any Mythos-based game seems almost incomplete without them. So this feels like an appropriate time for a brief digression on why Mythos-inspired madness exists.

Partly this is just cultural dissonance: At the time Lovecraft was writing, these things were not part of pop culture, so it was possible to believe that people would find their existence unsettling to their settled views of the way the world worked. The understanding of how insanity worked was also different in some key ways. And, of course, Lovecraft was a huge racist and had a plethora of mental issues himself, so there is some projection of his own preexisting mental infirmities into the mental state of his characters.

So, to a certain extent, it’s like wondering why women faint all the time in Victorian literature.

On the other hand, there’s a bit more to it in terms of the time when the “Stars Are Right,” which suggests a fundamental reordering of the laws of the physical universe. The creatures of the Mythos literally belong to a universe incompatible with the universe we think we live in. To put it another way: We live in a little tiny pocket of abnormality which uniquely makes it possible for human life and consciousness to exist and/or prosper. The idea that at some point the Earth will leave our zone of grace, the stars will right themselves, and our little epoch of abnormality will come to an end can be rather unsettling in a way that “there are aliens” isn’t.

But more than that: The creatures of the Mythos are a living connection to the way the universe is supposed to work… and the way the universe is supposed to work is inimical to humanity. At extreme levels it can be like trying to run COBOL programming through a C++ compiler. At lower levels it’s more like trying to run a program through a buggy emulator. It’s not just “that monster is kind of creepy,” it’s “that monster has connected my brain to a place where my brain doesn’t work right.” (This idea also works in reverse: Mythos creatures are operating in a semi-insane state within this period of abnormality. That’s why Cthulhu is lying in an induced coma below R’lyeh… he’s trying to minimize the damage.)

But even more than that: The damage being done to your mind is actually a direct result of the mind desperately trying to rewrite itself to cope with the true nature of reality. Mythos-induced insanity? That’s not the mind breaking. That’s the mind trying to fix itself. It just looks like insanity to us because we’re all broken.

Back to the Art of Rulings – NEXT: Traps

This article originally appeared in Pyramid Magazine on May 12th, 2000.

Unknown Armies, the new title from Atlas Games designed by Greg Stolze and John Tynes, features a unique system of magick. Magick is practiced by adepts, each of which subscribes to a specific school of magick. Based on what school the adept belongs to he builds up “charges” in various ways – members of the school of Pornomancy, for example, build up charges by engaging in ritualized sexual acts; members of the school of Dipsomancy, on the other hand, build up charges by being drunk. These charges (which can be classified as minor, significant, or major based on what the adept did to gain them) can then be expended to create magickal effects.

Magick is, above all, effected by three laws. First, the Law of Symbolic Tension demands that all magick be based on some form an underlying paradox. Hence the adepts of pornomancy gain charges by engaging in sexual acts, but can’t gain pleasure in those acts. Adepts of dipsomancy, in contrast, surrender control over their bodies (by getting drunk) in order to gain control over the universe (in the form of magick).

Second, the Law of Transaction says that you can’t get more out of magick than what you put in. Therefore you get minor effects from minor charges and major effects from major charges.

Third, the Law of Obedience states that adepts can only subscribe to a single school of magick. The schools are mutually exclusive, despite all being based on the same underlying truth, because they each involved interpreting that truth in different ways.

Each school is possessed of standardized rituals which can be cast fairly automatically and also random, improvised magick – which is more difficult and less powerful. All magick cast within a specific school, however, must be based on the principles of the school.

This article details a new school of magick for Unknown Armies: Emotiomancy. It uses the same format as the schools described in the core rulebook.

EMOTIOMANCY
(EMOTION-BASED MAGICK)

Emotions are the primal essence of humanity. Thoughts may define us, but it is emotions which make us what we are. They are a window into the soul and a way by which people may be manipulated and controlled. But emotions are also tools which may be used for good, they are – after all – the source of happiness and love and joy.

This is the domain of the emotiomancer, an expert at the unnatural control of man’s emotions. By creating and harnessing emotions in others the emotiomancer uses those emotions to create and manipulate others.

The advantage to this for many is that the emotiomancer possesses an immense understanding of human thought, emotion, and interaction. This type of emotiomancer is usually extremely popular with others and capable of getting almost anything they want. The drawback, however, is that the emotiomancer slowly ends up distancing themselves from others. Having to manipulate others in order to gain power which allows them to manipulate others, the emotiomancer slowly finds himself valuing others less. They run the risk of either disconnecting so completely with other people that they lose their ability to create charges, or to succumbing to dark impulses.

Other emotiomancers simply begin with dark impulses. They excel at creating fear and hatred; at controlling and creating the darker emotions. They indulge in their alienation from humanity. The emotiomancers who embrace the brighter side of life generally despise these “dark emotiomancers” for the bad reputation they give to their school of magick. Dark emotiomancers do have the advantage of being able to perform some forms of magick which other emotiomancers cannot.

Emotiomancy Blast Style: Only dark emotiomancy charges (see below) can be used to generate a blast effect, taking the form of an intense pain which rips through the victim’s mind. Like the pornomantic blast the damage which it does cannot be explained by medical science, but unlike the pornomantic blast the emotiomantic blast is always possessed of some secondary physical effect – some form of stereotyped emotional reaction taken to the extreme. Examples would be flushes which are strong enough to burst blood vessles or nosebleeds for lust.

STATS

Generate a Minor Charge: Emotiomancers can generate two types of charges – one from generating positive emotions, the other from generating negative emotions. In most cases these emotions can be used interchangeably, but in some cases powers are only available to those who have generated dark charges. To generate a minor charge the adept must create a situation which creates an emotional reaction in someone they do not know. The emotion must be the result of actions specifically planned by the adept in order to create the charge (so you can’t make someone laugh at an impromptu joke and get a charge from it, although planning an elaborate situation in which to tell the joke would do it) and can’t be beneficial to the adept (so you can’t seduce someone and then have sex with them, although you could seduce them and then leave). This isn’t really all that difficult (helping someone across the street or buying them flowers can often generate a positive emotion and a minor charge), but the fact that the emotion must be coldly and manipulatively created makes it difficult from the standpoint of the adept.

Generate a Significant Charge:  Significant positive charges are formed by creating extremely positive emotional reactions in people who you do not know, following the same restrictions as those for minor charges. Significant negative charges, on the other hand, are made by creating extremely negative emotional reactions in people who are close to you and in such a way that they know you are responsible for them feeling that way (nor are they allowed to know that it is merely in the interests of generating a charge for you, that “taints” the emotion through selflessness – unless of course that makes them feel even worse about it).

Generate a Major Charge: Generating a major charge requires the character to create an emotional situation of a severity which will be remembered by the person effected for the rest of their lives. The adept himself will be forced to remember the event for the rest of their lives, as well. As with significant charges, positive charges must be generated with strangers while negative charges must be created by effecting those close to the adept.

Taboo: While it is generally easier for emotiomancers to gain charges than other schools, it is also easier for them to lose them: Emotiomancers can lose their existing charges if they do anything to ruin an “emotional moment”. Specifically if they interrupt a positive emotional moment (talking during the end of a romantic film or telling people to “get a room”) they lose their negative charges. If they interrupt a negative emotion (by cheering somebody up or even saving someone from torture) they lose their positive charges. As a result of this dichotomy emotiomancers often find themselves treading a dangerous line – people who are generally nice can create positive charges fairly easily, but will lose them if they stop other people from feeling bad; people who are nasty can generate negative charges easily, but they can never do anything even marginally positive.

Random Magick Domain:  Emotiomancers control peoples emotions and, through them, their thoughts. They are the masters of manipulation. Their skills lie entirely within the realm of effecting how others think and feel.

Starting Charges:  Newly created emotiomancers start with four minor charges.

EMOTIOMANCY MINOR FORMULA SPELLS

CHARM
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Using this spell allows the emotiomancer to subtly play upon another person’s emotions, binding them to him. If a positive charge is used, whoever they are and whatever their normal reactions towards the emotiomancer would be they will feel as if he were their best friend in the world. If a negative charge is used the spell makes them act in zombie-like obedience to the character (the advantage is that they are willing to do more; the drawback is that they won’t be capable of much intelligent, complicated, or conceptually difficult action). The spell only lasts for a number of minutes equal to the emotiomancer’s skill in magick. Afterwards the victim will remember everything which has transpired, although they may be unsure of the reason why it happened (members of the Occult Underground, of course, will immediately suspect magickal influences of some sort).

MINOR SUGGESTION
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This spell allows the emotiomancer to make a single suggestion to another person. The other person will be extremely receptive to the suggestion made by the emotiomancer and will act on it unless it is completely contrary to their normal behavior (loyal security guards won’t abandon their posts, but might be willing to give someone a security tape even though it was against regulations). The victim cannot leave the presence of the emotiomancer or the spell will be broken. Afterwards the character won’t remember the suggestion or the action taken.

CONFUSE
Cost: 1 or 2 minor charges
Effect: With a single charge cast of Confuse the emotiomancer can target a single person and batter them with conflicting emotions. The character will still be able to take actions, but will do so at a slower rate of speed (in combat conditions this translates to halving successful initiative checks and only allowing characters to take actions on every other turn). Using two charges allows the emotiomancer to target a group of up to five people. The spell lasts until the effected person or persons makes a successful Soul check at -15% (one check can be made every turn of combat or once every minute).

OVERWHELM
Cost: 2 minor positive charges or 1 minor negative charge
Effect: Overwhelm has a similar effect as Confuse, forcing emotions upon its victim. In this case only a single emotion – one of the emotiomancer’s choosing (but consistent with the type of charge used) – is forced, and that one completely overwhelms the person’s ability to take any action which isn’t ordained by that emotion. This reaction will not always be what the emotiomancer may have expected or even wanted, but can be resisted with a successful Soul check at the time of casting. If the check fails the spell’s effects will last about fifteen minutes.

Example: Jeffrey, an emotiomancer, has been confronted in a darkened alley by his arch-nemesis, Chameleon. Jeffrey uses two positive charges and casts Overwhelm on Chameleon, choosing to strike her with lust. She immediately drops the gun and goes off looking for a piece of ass. Jeffrey, on the other hand, is more than a little insulted that she didn’t like his looks.

EMPATHY
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: With this spell the emotiomancer can read the emotions of another person at the time of casting. With a successful Soul check the emotiomancer can also get a vague impression of what caused or is causing the emotion.

NUMB
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This spell will numb the emotions and feelings of anyone, including the emotiomancer himself. For the duration of the spell – equal in minutes to the emotiomancer’s skill – the recipient will feel nothing, including physical pain (although the physical damage will still occur).

AFFECT MIND
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: This temporarily effects a person’s mental abilities – either raising or lowering it by an amount equal to half of the emotiomancer’s magickal skill. The effect lasts for about ten minutes and isn’t capable of granting knowledge which the recipient didn’t possess before, only of improving the character’s mental aptitude. The emotiomancer cannot use this spell on himself.

EMOTIOMANCY SIGNIFICANT FORMULA SPELLS

CONTROL
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: Control allows the emotiomancer to, effectively, completely enslave the target of the spell for a number of minutes equal to his Soul plus his magickal skill (although the victim can make a Soul check at -20% every five minutes). As with Minor Suggestion the person will still resist any commands completely repellent to his nature (so you can’t have him kill his friend), but can follow multiple commands during the duration of the spell and can even leave the emotiomancer’s presence to carry out the orders.

SIGNIFICANT SUGGESTION
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Like Control, Significant Suggestion is a more powerful version of Minor Suggestion (as the name implies). Like Minor Suggestion, Significant Suggestion is only able to give a single suggestion to another person and that person must remain in the presence of the emotiomancer while carrying it out. However, a Significant Suggestion completely overrides a person’s inhibitions – with it the emotiomancer can convince the person to do anything. If the action is contrary to the person’s belief systems (i.e., something which wouldn’t pass as a minor suggestion) the person gets a chance to resist, making a Soul check. If it’s a particularly serious transgression (such as killing their own mother) the GM may modify this check in the victim’s favor as he sees fit.

WARP
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: With Warp the emotiomancer temporarily simulates the effects of the House of Renunciation, absolutely switching the most important elements of the victim’s personality to its polar opposite (so that a cruel person becomes kind, a person with a vendetta instead finds ways to help her former target). When the spell is first cast the person gets to make a Soul check to see if they are effected by the spell. If that fails the person can make an additional check every hour at -50% until they throw off the effect of the spell.

PHOBIA
Cost: 1 significant negative charge
Effect: With this spell the emotiomancer instills a great fear of a specific item, animal, individual, or situation in his target – an intense phobia. Whenever the victim encounters the stimulus from that point forward they will suffer a paralyzing fear until the stimulus has passed. Whenever this phobia inflicts itself the victim can make a Soul check at -20% as they attempt to resist what they subconsciously realize is an unnatural impulse. If they are successful, the phobia will no longer effect them.

FIXATION
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: In many ways the exact opposite of the emotiomancer’s Phobia spell, Fixation allows him to specify a goal which the victim must attempt to fulfill. If the goal is something which is theoretically achievable (anything from “eat a hot dog” to “steal the Mona Lisa” would be acceptable) then there is no way for the victim to remove the spell’s effects (without other unnatural influences) unless they succeed at achieving their goal. If the goal is something which is impossible (“eat all the hot dogs in the world” or “steal the Eiffel Tower”) then the victim can make a Soul check at -20% once a day to overthrow the effects of the fixation (although they must attempt to fulfill their fixation up until that point). The fixation cannot be something which would be immediately deadly to the character (“throw yourself off a cliff” or “shoot yourself in the head”) or completely alien to their belief system (you couldn’t convince a nun to sleep with someone), but other than that things are wide open. Finally, the degree of intensity for the fixation depends on its complexity. If the fixation was to “eat a hot dog” then the person would probably immediately drop what they were doing and go out to find a hot dog. If, on the other hand, the fixation was to “steal the Mona Lisa” they wouldn’t just walk into the Louvre and try to pick it up – they would be allowed to research and concoct a plan before proceeding. All of this is at the GM’s discretion.

EMPATHIC CONNECTION
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: With this spell the emotiomancer can create an empathic connection between any two minds (not necessarily including his own). By expending minor charges he can add additional people to the link (one charge per person, up to a total of six). Anyone who is a member of the link will feel the emotions of the other people through the link, identifying who the emotion actually belongs to). Typically the nature of the link allows the recipient to distance themselves from the emotions of others, but for particularly intense feelings (such as the pain of being tortured or the heartache of seeing a loved one leave you) other members of the link must make a Soul check or be overwhelmed. At no point in time do other members of the link know what caused the emotion – only the emotion itself. The link lasts for twenty-four hours, but can be extended for another twenty-four hours if the emotiomancer expends a minor charge for every member of the link. This can be continued indefinitely.

MIND LINK
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: A more powerful version of the Empathic Connection, the Mind Link allows the emotiomancer to connect the minds of up to six individuals (using the same procedures as for Empathic Connection, with each additional person in the link above two costing a single minor charge). In this case, however, the members of the link will be able to see, feel, and hear everything which the other members of the link experience by focusing on that individual. However, a person can only focus one such set of sensory inputs at once – so if you’re focused on someone else, you don’t know what’s happening to you. The emotiomancer, through his magickal training, can attempt to process multiple “feeds” at once – including his own. To do so he makes a Mind check with a -10% penalty for every additional link above two he attempts to process (so he would have a -10% penalty for three links at once (including his own) and a penalty of -40% if he attempted to process all six members of a link at once). If succeeds he successfully processes the multiple feed for a single combat round or for a minute, having to make the check again every minute or combat round after that point. If he fails he is paralyzed for five combat rounds or minutes from mental overload.

EMOTIOMANCY MAJOR EFFECTS

When you create a major emotiomancy effect you are toying with the basic elements of human existence as if they were mere whims. Emotiomancers are capable of driving men beyond the brink of insanity; causing massive, permanent shifts in personality; enslaving entire populations to their will (although the larger the population the less likely it will be a permanent effect); or even fundamentally altering the emotional responses of people (instead of just polarizing their compulsions, for example, you could have people hate those they have always loved and loved those they have always hated). In short the emotions and thoughts of man are your playthings and you are capable of doing anything with them you wish.

Original Art by Robert Nemeth, coloured by Philip Reed.

I feel a great sense of satisfaction with this article. Looking back on my earliest professional work, I realize that it actually represents a significant shift for me: It was the first time I wrote something for publication and found that the words were simply… flowing. I wasn’t agonizing over every turn of phrase and trying to perfect every sentence. I was simply letting the idea express itself simply and cleanly, without ostentation or ornamentation. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that my success rate radically increased after this point.

Tagline: Best game of the year.

The opening paragraphs of this review launched a subtle salvo against what can only be described as the insanely bad reviews for UA which were getting posted to RPGNet at the time. These were reviews which, for example, were excoriating the game for not being as complex as GURPS. Or claiming that the game was completely unacceptable because its systems for magick were not practiced by real people in the real world. Seriously mind-numbingly bad reviewers.

Unsurprisingly, this salvo was not warmly welcomed by some.

I wish the original discussions had survived. They were… lively.

Reviewers should always keep in mind the creator’s goals.

It doesn’t matter what you’re reviewing – whether its a novel, a play, a movie, or a roleplaying game – the first thing you should ask yourself is: What was the creator trying to create? The reason you ask yourself this is because it is as pointless to judge Independence Day as a serious attempt to comment on the burdens of the presidency as it would be to judge Hamlet as a children’s story. Often you will hear a negative review of something not because it failed to accomplish what it set out to do, but because the reviewer didn’t like what was being attempted. Such a review is useless. Because it attempts to judge the creation as something which it is not it is as useless as a review of poker which explains why the game fails terribly at being the Great American novel.

Figuring out what was being attempted isn’t always easy. Sometimes you’re forced to ask yourself whose creative impulses you should honor. For example, if you’re reviewing a production of a Shakespearean play should you judge it based on how well it accomplished the director’s goals or how well it accomplished Shakespeare’s? (Personally I feel the director’s goal should be to fulfill the playwright’s goals – otherwise he should be doing a different play; hence I would go with the latter.) At other times it is necessary to call into question the surface goal itself and dive beneath the surface – for example an artist might fully intend to create a giant pink phallic symbol in Times Square, but you have to ask whether or not this is a good idea based on the underlying goals of art and the function Times Square. Nor is it always easy to figure out what a particular person’s goals were in creating something. More often than not you must rely on intuition to ordain what was intended.

Sometimes, though, you get lucky. Something in the work will clearly state was being attempted. You know that GURPS was designed to be a generic, universal system not only from the title, but because the designers included a short explanation of what was being attempted and what they hoped the game would accomplish.

The reason I bring all of this up is because after taking a look at the varied extant reviews of Unknown Armies I think it is necessary to explain where this review is coming from. Knowing where Unknown Armies is coming from is easy: Greg Stolze and John Tynes tell you specifically what their design goals were in the conveniently titled section “Design Goals” on pages four and five. Despite this several reviewers have flown in the face of commonsense and judged intentional decisions as “mistakes” or “flaws”.

So, just to be perfectly clear: If you don’t like simple systems, you won’t like Unknown Armies. (“Pages and pages of rules for ballistics-based damage and a complete flowchart-governed sub-system for picking locks are just some of the realism-focused rules you won’t find in UA.”) The fact that there is a detailed tracking system for character personality in this game is intentional, not a mistake or an anachronism. (“If your character occasionally kills someone, it’ll be up to you to justify why this is okay – and if you can’t, the game’s rules will penalize your character by hardening him against the notion of murder.”) If you don’t like roleplaying settings which attempt to be completely original (I’m not kidding – I actually saw someone complain because the game setting was too creative), then Unknown Armies isn’t a game you want to be playing.

“It’s time to stop playing games.”

OVERVIEW

Atlas Games has become a pretty impressive company. The 1990s have seen the origination of a couple of trends in RPGs: One, the World of Darkness and the host of games which have been inspired by it. Two, the simple, cinematic rule systems packed full of action-potential (usually with an anime or John Woo/Jackie Chan/Hong Kong influence). Atlas Games now owns the two games which providing the lightning rod to these two trends (Ars Magica and Feng Shui), and with the production of Unknown Armies they may very well have created the game which provides the perfect merger between them.

Let’s cut to the chase: I love this game.

UA is, I’ll be the first to admit, possessed of some flaws – but it bubbles with such creativity, originality, potential, and brilliance that it overwhelms those flaws. There are games which fail because of their flaws; their are games which are tolerable in spite of their flaws; their are games which suffer slightly from their flaws; and then there are games where the flaws are beside the point. UA is the last of these.

More on this in a bit.

THE SETTING

Unknown Armies is the Illuminatus Trilogy.

This is an analogy which I have not seen broached before, but the tone of the Trilogy resonates throughout the game. I don’t mean that this is a setting inspired by the World of Darkness with elements of the Trilogy incorporated into it – for that game you should take a look at the disjointed Immortal. I mean that when you first enter the world of UA it feels very much the way it does when you first enter the world of the Trilogy: All the half-crazed conspiracies and crack-pot theories and urban legends you’ve ever heard are true at one level or another, but in a way completely alien to anything you might have expected. For the first hour you keep thinking you’ve got it figured out, only to have the rug ripped out from under you. Even by the time you’ve finished exploring the place you’ll still find things hidden in the corners that’ll make you doubletake (or run screaming in terror).

The basics concept is this: Magick is real and the world is a much more unnatural place than your common mortal ever imagines. The only people who know this are known as the “Occult Underground”, sharing only the common trait that they all know “the truth” (or at least parts of the truth).

The Big Truth is this: Karma and Reincarnation exist, but only at a universal level. When the world comes to an end it is reborn in a way consistent with its karma – we get the world which we deserve. The mechanism by which this takes place is the Invisible Clergy, who unite into the Godhead as the universe is reborn, guiding its creation. Humans “ascend” to the Clergy by fulfilling the role of an “archetype”. Each archetype represents some primal element of human society; these archetypes are not set in stone, but are rather mutable from one incarnation of the world to the next. To make things more interesting humans still on earth can follow in the footsteps of ascended archetypes, gaining powers through the association. Sometimes an archetype can be replaced, but that’s a story for another time. There are other big truths out there (such as the conflict between Entropy and Order which drives all of this), but that’s the barebones of what’s going on.

There are three other important elements: The Unnatural, the Unexplained, and Magick (technically you could consider Magick part of the Unnatural, but its important enough we’ll spin it off by itself). The Unnatural are those things caused by otherworldly forces. The Unexplained are things which, at first glance, may appear to be unnatural, but in truth have rational explanations (these are fun because they’re red herrings which keep you from being completely comfortable – you can’t just dismiss anything unknown as being mystical).

Magick is one of the areas where UA really shines. It is based on three Laws: Symbolic Tension, Transaction, and Obedience. Symbolic Tension means that all magick is “based on some form of paradox” – a central irony or contradiction. For example, entropomancy (where you have to injure yourself to create a magical effect) has a paradox in that to gain control (power) over the universe you have to surrender control over yourself.

The Law of Transaction is the magical equivalent of Newton’s third law: Magick doesn’t let you get something for nothing; what you get out is equal to what you put in.

The Law of Obedience means that no one can follow more than one magickal path. This makes logical sense in the game setting because magick is driven by your personal convictions about how the universe functions – being able to follow more than one magickal path would mean that you were simultaneously holding two incompatible convictions about how the universe functions. It’s like believing totally and completely in both creationism and evolution; it can’t be done (you can fake it – but faking magickal discipline gets you nothing but fake magick).

Those may seem familiar to you, but trust me when I say that magick in UA is about as unique as you can get. Each school of magick requires some form of sacrifice to build up a charge and then you can use these charges to cast magick. The schools themselves are the unique part though – pornomancy, for example, requires to engage in very specific sexual acts (but not to take pleasure in them); plutomancy requires you to earn money (but not spend it); etc.

(A brief side note: Some have raised complaints about the magick system because an adept (one who can practice magick) can attempt to do anything. It has been insinuated that this means that those with experience are no better than those who are newcomers. Anyone who has actually bothered to read the rules, though, would realize a couple of things: First, the game assumes anyone playing an adept is just that – adept in the use of magick; if you want to play someone who isn’t optional rules are provided. Second, those with a higher skill in magick are capable of succeeding at more difficult magickal tasks and doing more with them – saying that they are “both the same” is like saying that AD&D possesses no differentiation between 1st and 20th level wizards because they are both capable of casting damaging spells, despite the fact that 1st level mages cause 1d6 damage and 20th level mages cause 20d6.)

THE RULES

The basic rules for UA are dead simple. But unlike many other simple systems on the market they don’t require GM fudging to fill in the gaps – these are a solid set of rules. Here’s the breakdown of the page and a half of core game mechanics – the shortest chapter in the book.

1. Roll percentile dice.

2. A roll of 01 is an extremely great success.

3. A roll of 00 is a complete failure.

4. If result is equal to or less than your skill you succeed. The higher the role, the better the success. Some tasks will need a minimum roll to succeed (so, for example, you’d need to roll higher than 30, but under your skill).

5. If the result is less than your skill you fail.

6. Matched numbers are exceptional results – either extremely good if it was a success or extremely bad if you fail.

7. In some cases (such as you “obsession skill” – the skill you specialize in essentially) you can “flip-flop” a bad roll to make it good (turning a 91 to a 19, for example).

8. The GM may apply “shifts” to your roll – changing the number you rolled. (A -10% shift, for example, would turn a roll of 50 into a roll of 40.)

Combat, as usual, adds a few extras. Most importantly damage is handled by adding the two dice together from your skill roll (if you rolled a 43 and succeeded you would do 4+3=7 points of damage). Firearms are a special case in which your damage is equal to your skill roll within a certain range (so that if you succeeded with a 43 you would do 43 points of damage, unless the weapon’s maximum was 40 or its minimum was 50) – hence a shotgun can do a lot more damage than a .22, but not always.

Character creation embraces the same standard as the core rules – simple, but complete (with a noticeable exception, see the note below). It breaks down into the following steps:

1. General Brainstorming.

2. Personality.

3. Obsession: What your character is very good at – the skill which defines who your character is.

4. Passions: There are three passions – Fear, Rage, and Noble. You create your own passions, each passion causing the appropriate reaction in your character when it is encountered (unless, of course, you can give good reason otherwise). Hence your character might be frightened of spiders, enraged at the sight of a child in pain, and committed to saving the environment. In addition to being able to flip-flop your obsession skill, you can flip-flop any skill when it is being employed in regards to one of your passions.

5. Attributes: There are four attributes – Body, Speed, Mind, and Soul. You split up 220 points between them.

6. Skills: The skill system is almost entirely freeform (see note below). Essentially you can take as many points in Body skills as you assigned points to your Body stat.

7. Obsession Skill: Pick a skill which is related to your obsession and make it your obsession skill. If you want to practice magick your magick skill must be your obsession (because unless you are devoted to magick you won’t be able to make it work).

8. Cherries: Cherries are “special effects” which are attached to the matched double results of combat and magic skills. This has caused some complaints, but when you realize that violence and magick (the unnatural) are the focus of the game it makes sense that these are the skills which are given particular attention. Nothing stops you from assigning cherries to other skills, per se – especially since the cherries are designed in a freeform manner.

9. Your Wound Points equal your Body score.

(Another side note: Several reviews have taken exception to the fact that the skill system is almost completely freeform – a handful of “freebie” skills are detailed and a list of suggestions is given, but nothing is laid down in a concrete fashion. Some have claimed this to be a weakness, but actually it gives a huge amount of power to the player in terms of finely tuned control over their character. Since everything is veto-able by the GM it can’t have any drawbacks except that you actually have to think about and personalize your character. Even new players find this type of system easier, in my experience, then attempting to pick and choose from a list of skills they don’t fully understand. I wouldn’t want to try it with a detailed, complicated system; but for a simple system like this it’s the perfect fit. As for the whacko who complained about overlapping skills – what drugs are you on?)

There’s one other important mechanic to consider: The Madness Meter. The situations you encounter as a member of the Occult Underground are fully capable of driving your average person beyond the bounds of sanity. A character’s Madness Meter keeps track of five distinct areas – Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self. Each area has ten “hardened” slots and five “failure” slots attached to it. When a character encounters an abnormal situation (such as someone’s head being blown off in front of them or their first encounter with magic or being held captive or losing all your friends or being forced to take actions which you previously believed you would never be capable of) they make a check – if they succeed they become hardened to that type of event; if they fail they react either with “panic, paralysis, or frenzy” (at the player’s discretion) and gains a failure slot. The more hardened you become the more extreme situations have to be to cause a check, but the negative drawback is that you become less connected with the world (and this has a very real game impact). If you max out any of your failure bars you go psychopathic – which is not to be confuse with riproaring insanity or any such stereotype. This is a subtle and evocative game, not a slaughterfest.

I like the Madness Meter mechanic because it never forces a character action, it merely provides a guideline. Like the rest of the game it is simple, but powerful and effective at reinforcing its designers intents.

ANALYSIS

Every so often I come across a game which is so amazing that it makes me sit up and take notice of who was responsible for designing it. Jonathon Tweet for Ars Magica, Robin D. Laws for Feng Shui, the team of Dream Pod 9 for Heavy Gear — these are a few of the games and designers which immediately earned my respect and appreciation. They are the designers from whom I would pick up a new porduct simply on the basis of their name being on the cover.

With Unknown Armies Greg Stolze and John Tynes join that list. Not only the simple, powerful masterpiece which the engine of the game is. Nor for the rich and original world which they have created. No, what really raises this game to the next level is the immense expertise and masterful understanding of the foundations of roleplaying design which they demonstrate.

Stolze and Tynes are masters. I knew I had something in my hand which had been designed in brilliance when I read the Definitions of Roleplaying which are included in the introduction (one from each designer). Tynes’ definition — improvisational radio theater — particularly struck me. I had gotten the “improvisational theatre” part down, but the “radio” bit was the simple label which had escaped me for distinguishing between the table-top structure and the live action structure (and, sure, you might be able to say “that’s obvious”, but you didn’t say anything before, did you?). They then proceeded to confirm my impression by laying down in very precise terms what their design goals for the game were – something far more designers should take advantage of.

And it just didn’t stop. Throughout the entire product Stolze and Tynes expertly provided guidance without falling into the trap which Rein*Hagen did in designing Vampire — formalizing their suggestions and guidance into rules. When Stolze and Tynes provide a set of personality guidelines based on the signs of the zodiac they put them aside into an optional box – a convenient shorthand for NPCs, a potentially useful tool for new players. Rein*Hagen institutionalized it into a set of necessary labels.

Indeed the entire character creation system is an excellent example of this – by subtly encouraging character creation with killing the creative process through formalization — but this isn’t the only place it happens. The chapter on Campaign Creation, for example, does the same thing for the GM’s creative process – encouraging, guiding, but never “mandating”. The chapter on “Running the Game” is actually a useful summary of rules which are gathered together in one place along with concrete examples of how to handle common play situations, not a hodgepodge of questionably vague advice.

Finally the layout is great – with information clearly laid out an important information emphasized and isolated for easy reference during gameplay. Although the artwork is occasionally less than perfect it is expertly crafted and placed. The whole product is rounded out by what I consider to be the the most brilliant introductory scenario I’ve ever seen.

And all of this brings me, regrettably, to the weaknesses in UA: First, several key concepts lack an explanation. Specifically the concept of “synchronicity”, the astral plane, and the age of hermeticism are all mentioned in relation to other things several times in the text, but never given a description of their own.

Second, the flip-flop mechanic (discussed above) becomes less and less effective once a skill has gone beyond 50. This is odd for a mechanic which is meant to reflect a character’s intense devotion to a particular skill or cause.

Third, the index is lacking, although this ameliorated slightly by a detailed Table of Contents.

Finally, a set of very simple core rules is marred in a couple of places by unnecessary complication.

None of these weaknesses are particularly serious (especially if you’ve read the Illuminati Trilogy for the discussion of synchronicity, played any pseudo-mystical RPG including AD&D for the astral plane, or taken a gander at Ars Magica or the World of Darkness for the general feel of what the age of hermeticism must refer to) – even the flip-flop mechanic is little more than a slight annoyance which crops up only occasionally and is still generally intuitive.

CONCLUSION

Unknown Armies is the best game of the year. If all goes well it will be remembered as one of the best games ever. If you don’t put down the $25.00 for this treasure trove then you don’t deserve to call yourself a roleplayer.

‘Nuff said.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Title: Unknown Armies: A Roleplaying Game of Transcendental Horror and Furious Action
Writers: Greg Stolze and John Tynes
Publisher: Atlas Games
Price: $25.00
Page Count: 225
ISBN: 1-887801-70-7

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

In retrospect, was Unknown Armies really the best game of 1999?

Yup.

As I mentioned in “UA-Style Rumours for D&D“, the fact that Unknown Armies didn’t catch on the way it deserved to remains one of the great mysteries of the roleplaying industry. But when you look at all of the other games which have pilfered its pockets in the last decade, its importance and its quality becomes very clear. If you’ve never seen it, then you should really, really take the time to check it out.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Unknown Armies is a great little RPG. As I once wrote in a review, “UA is, I’ll be the first to admit, possessed of some flaws — but it bubbles with such creativity, originality, potential, and brilliance that it overwhelms those flaws.” Unfortunately, it never caught on in the way it probably deserved to. (And it probably never will: Too many other games have stepped in and stolen its stuff over the past decade.)

One of the (many) great things about Unknown Armies, however, was the “What You Hear” section. In the world of Unknown Armies all the half-crazed conspiracies and crack-pot theories and urban legends you’ve ever heard are true at one level or another, but in a way completely alien to anything you might have expected. “What You Hear” was basically a rapid-fire conglomeration of one- or two-sentence rumors that peeled back the mundanities of the world and revealed them to be something horribly different. They were a distorted lens through which the world could be viewed and used.

The great thing about them was that they could be used in any number of ways: Disinformation. Intriguing background detail. Full-fledged adventure seed. Idle chit-chat from a nervous underworld contact. All kinds of stuff. And all of it mysterious and enigmatic and awesome.

Circa 2004, a guy named RemyBuron started a thread on RPGNet for people to post UA-style rumors. Here a couple examples:

There is no state of Wyoming. I mean, have you ever met anyone from there?

If you had been crucified would you ever want to see a cross ever again? The common symbol of a crucifix actually wards off the power of Christ rather than invoking it. That most people believe differently is one of Satan’s greatest successes, just above killing a carpenter by nailing him to a wooden structure.

A few months later I started a thread for UA-Style Rumors: Dungeons & Dragons. Recent free-associating resulted in memories of the thread surfacing out of the deep murk of my brain, and I thought it would be fun to track the thread down and loot the stuff I had posted in it. When I did, I was pleasantly pleased to discover that the thread has been periodically revived over the past several years — with the most recent spurt of activity coming just a few weeks ago (and including someone describing it as the “best thread ever“).

Without further ado, here are my UA-style rumors for D&D (including a couple of new ones that never appeared in the thread). Check out the original thread for lots of good stuff from other people.

Mages were all born centuries ago. In fact, they’re not even human. No, seriously, think about it: Have you ever known a kid who grew up to be a mage? Nope. All the mages you’ve ever known are already adults, and most of them are old. Apprentices? Most of them are duped slaves. The few who can actually cast spells are actually archmages. They’re just putting on an act to keep up appearances.

Dragons aren’t really that impressive. In fact, even the biggest of ’em don’t grow any bigger than a large dog. The rest are just bullshit spun by would-be heroes trying to look important.

Why are there are only nine towns in Ten Towns?

You ever notice how the king is never seen without the queen? That’s because he’s really a living mannequin. The real king died years ago. If you watch closely, you can see the queen’s fingers twitching the invisible strings.

Underdark? There’s no such thing. The dark elves just live on the other side of the planet. (Although it’s true that you can get there through the dungeons — some of them go deep enough, although you have to watch out for the gravity shift.) And they’re not evil. That’s just racist elven propaganda. They don’t like anybody without pointy ears and alabaster skin. They think we’re all orcs.

All those monsters who prowl the wilderness? They were put there by the king. The court wizard makes ’em, and most of them are mutated from prisoners. You can see the lights in the wizard’s tower every night from the rituals. Why does he do it? To keep us commonfolk stuck in the cities and the villages. If we were able to travel safely and talk to each other we’d be free of him soon enough.

The gods are a sham. A couple hundred years ago some powerful elven spellcasters set themselves up as “gods”. Now the elves effectively rule the world, and their duped priests don’t even know they’re doing it. The dragons know the truth. That’s why they’re hunted.

Somewhere in the Duchy of Colbane there’s a village. Everybody there is a mind-slave controlled completely by a lich. Everybody.

Bags of Devouring don’t actually destroy anything. They just transport it to another bag. The most powerful person in the whole multiverse is the guy who owns the bag all the Bags of Devouring empty into. I only know this because a friend of mine told me. I’ve never seen him again.

Look, you’ve gotta stop casting fireballs. They’re dangerous. No, seriously, stop laughing. I mean they’re dangerous. There’s this dungeon you can’t go to any more. It’s full of fire. All the time. Some wizard cast three fireballs in quick succession and they all kind of… collapsed into each other. Ripped open a vortice to the Plane of Fire. I used to go delving with a wizard who was scrying on them at the time. He told me that if it had happened on the surface it would have wiped out the whole world. Seriously.

Liches? Not really undead. In fact, most of them aren’t even that powerful. They’re posers. I heard that a bunch of apprentices who couldn’t master more than basic weavings cooked up the whole “lich” thing as a secret society. They used a couple of simple illusion spells to wow a couple of hick villages and build a rep. Some adventurers managed to take out a couple and, hyped up on their own egos, built up the rep of the Liches even more. But now things are changing: The group is attracting more powerful members. And my friend Jacob heard some nasty rumors about that coup in Covartain last year. Something about “lich-ghouls”…

Have you ever noticed how there are always exactly 6 members in every adventuring party? That’s the number of the Beast. Think about it.

Tell me about it. My friend got hooked on those things. This would have been back before I lost my eye. It got to the point where he couldn’t get through a day without drinking one. Then it got worse. He had to use more and more powerful cure wounds potions to get the same kick. He was downing two or three potions every hour. And then they stopped working altogether. That’s when he switched to inflict wounds. Gods, that’s an ugly way to die…

I find designing these rumors for D&D particularly interesting: With UA you can just look a the world around you and add a spice of oddness or magic. But D&D is innately strange and magical. You can’t just say, “There’s a dungeon with weird stuff in it.” Dungeons are supposed to be filled with weird stuff. Shapeshifters and covens and illusions are all part of the package. In order to get that full UA-style punch, therefore, you need to look a the typical expectations of a D&D campaign and then deliberately invert those expectations. Force ’em to look twice and re-evaluate their preconceptions.

Got an idea for your own UA-style rumor? Hit the comment button.