Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Unknown Armies

Go To

  • Alternate Character Interpretation — Flat-out encouraged by the writers. Every faction and character is, to some extent, open to interpretation. The GM sections of the rulebook even gives you advice for running NPCs as High Road, Middle Road, and Low Road types.
  • Better Than It Sounds: If David Cronenberg, Tim Powers, Christopher Nolan, Thomas Pynchon and the late Robert Anton Wilson met at a role-playing convention, that's what they would play.
  • Friendly Fandoms: With Delta Green, as they share both themes and writers. John Tynes was the original mind behind the first Delta Green scenario Convergence and Greg Stolze would later write for the standalone version of Delta Green; while thematically they share a hidden occult world, gritty and grim ambiance, destructive magic and the new Sanity Meter of the 2016 standalone Delta Green can be seen as a straight-up adaptation from Unknown Armies.
  • Funny Moments:
    • In the corebook's description for Videomancers:
      Paddy Orleans has fetishized a number of shows, and he needs a lot of significant charges to fuel his habit of calling fictional characters to life for half-hour increments. Usually he does this for purposes of bizarre sexual gratification, but at least one guy who pissed him off is now in an asylum, convinced that Mr. Clean and the Pillsbury Doughboy are going to jump him again the next time he sleeps.
    • One Bibliomancy spell transfers all the information about a person's life into a book; if there's too much info for the book to hold, the font size decreases until it fits. A Bibliomancer tried this on the Comte St. Germain, and the pages turned black. He was arrested whilst attempting to steal an electron microscope.
  • Harsher in Hindsight
    • Fly To Heaven from the sourcebook One Shots; a rip roaring adventure about plowing a passenger jet into the Sears Tower in order to ascend to the archetype of The Terrorist played better in 1998. Hopefully, it is no longer considered "too soon". Lampshaded in the second edition, which was released after 9/11.
    • From 1st and 2nd ed: There are a lot of Transgender -related things that have aged badly. The Mystic Hermaphrodite and many of its real-life examples. The Freak. The end of that adventure with Amelia Erhart's Compass. The built-in cisgenderism inherent in Pornomancy.
  • Memetic Badass: In the game, Memetic Badass people can be channeled to mimic their badassery through ritual magic.
  • Memetic Mutation: COSMIC BUM FIGHTS! (The powers of one of the possible adepts are fueled by alcohol and you can fight on a cosmic level.)
  • Nightmare Fuel: The Freak is accompanied by the sound of rattling chains. These chains are strung right through its torso. It pulls them out if it needs a charge on the go.

Top