In October 2024 we presented the all-new Unknown Armies 3E Bundle featuring Unknown Armies, the 2016 Third Edition of the acclaimed Atlas Games RPG about broken people risking everything to change the world. Reality as we know it is shaped by a group of 333 people so dedicated to certain attributes that they become the archetypes of the Invisible Clergy, who are locked in an eternal struggle for power. Your characters are pawns in this power struggle – and you’re hoping to join the ranks of the Invisible Clergy itself. You might struggle against the New Inquisition, the Sect of the Naked Goddess, or your own deteriorating sanity. You might face vampires, godwalkers, or fellow practitioners of magick. Against unrelenting opposition, will you win through?
Created by Greg Stolze and John Tynes, Unknown Armies is a game of postmodern occult intrigue, transcendental horror, and furious action. It’s about driven characters who gain the power to alter reality until it aligns with their fevered desires – about obsession and identity – about revealing the horrible truth we don’t want to see, and claiming that truth for yourself. It’s about being relentlessly, hopelessly human.
The Unknown Armies cosmology, though disturbing and often horrific, is entirely human. There’s no Elder Gods of the Mythos, just us. We – specifically, the Invisible Clergy – shape our own reality. Likewise, players in UA Third Edition collaboratively shape the setting and campaign goals before play begins. As you define your characters and their relationships, you also establish the campaign’s people, places, and community. UA 3E is an authentic sandbox experience uncommon in investigative games about supernatural mysteries.
A January 2019 post on the Refereeing and Reflection blog analyzed the strengths of the new edition’s approach: “The players give a strong signal at game start of the sort of territory they want to explore as a result of the places, groups, and people they invent in setting generation. As they take on and advance objectives, they proactively prompt changes in that setting. The referee has opportunities to be creative in turn, and is encouraged to include plenty of blowback from the bridges they burn and the noses they tweak. But the direction of the campaign hinges on the objectives the players decide to go for, and when they decide to abandon them because they collectively decided something was more important. […] I would definitely want to use this edition of the game for the sort of sandbox horror it presents – because there are precious few other games which attempt to do such a thing.”
Your character has passions, an obsession (that involves ascending to join the Clergy), and maybe magick of some weird postmodern self-destructive kind. Third Edition replaces the 2E skill rules with a system of ten basic percentile-based skills and catchall identities (Academic, Burnt Out, Beat Cop, Server, Addict, etc.) that loosely demarcate additional abilities: “If you have the identity House Painter 35%, you have a 35% chance of doing anything a house painter reasonably might in the course of painting houses while under stress.” Your skills increase or decrease according to your current sanity, conditioned by five categories of mental stress (Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self) measured on your shock meters. (UA 2E called them “Madness Meters.”) Over time, your ranks on each meter may become “hardened” or “failed,” and your personality changes accordingly. But though your character may – probably will, and in some sense certainly will – grow paranoid or delusional or addicted, that’s not like Sanity 0 in Call of Cthulhu; you’ll stay in the game.
“Those meters also happen to be the source of your skills,” Cynthia Hornbeck wrote in a September 2017 Shut Up & Sit Down review of Unknown Armies 3E. “The fewer notches you have filled in on them, the better you are at connecting with people, being physically fit, or noticing what’s in plain sight. More notches make you better at things like telling lies, perceiving secrets, and physically fighting. The better you get at lying and sneaking, the worse your status, fitness, and ability to connect. This is what I meant about no one staying ‘normal.’ Your character may start off healthy and down-to-earth, but they’ll inevitably become a citizen of the occult. Maybe a political heavyweight with dirty hands, maybe a well-intentioned serial murderer, maybe just the unwashed person no one wants to sit near on the bus.”
Hornbeck concludes, “[Unknown Armies 3E] offers more freedom than Trail of Cthulhu, a longer arc than Ten Candles, and more psychology than Numenera or Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a solid next move after any of those.” And the Referees and Reflections blog deems UA 3E “a very rare example of a new edition of an RPG which is good enough to be worth making, but at the same time does not render the previous core books redundant, because it’s going for something a bit different now than it did back then.”
This all-new Unknown Armies 3E Bundle presented almost the entire 3E line for an unbeatable bargain price. There were five titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $35) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the first rulebook (Book 1: Play) with all the rules for players, plus the introductory scenario Maria in Three Parts and three six-track sets of atmospheric background music (retail $5 each) by composer James Semple: Upsetting Anomalies, Unnatural Artistry, andUncanny Acuity.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price ascended to our Complete Collection with twelve more titles worth an additional $64, including four additional UA 3E rulebooks – Book 2: Run, Book 3: Reveal, Book 4: Expose, Book 5: Mine – plus the full-length adventure Bring Me the Head of the Comte de Saint-Germain and seven “Campaign Starter Kits”: Derby Girls Destroy DC, Heroin Highway, Karmic Ties and Fifth Wheels, Raiders of the Lost Mart, Sacred Pharma, Violence Inherent in the System, and Young Practicals.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) for this Unknown Armies offer went to the charity designated by Atlas Games co-owner John Nephew, the American Red Cross, which worked to bring relief to western North Carolina after the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
