Unknown Armies: Weep from Atlas Games
by Rick Neal, James Palmer, Greg Stolze, John Tynes, and Chad Underkoffler
176 pages / $22.95
From an academic standpoint, the position of roleplaying games is somewhat vague. The big question is: Are they worth “studying?” Fiction certainly is. Movies too. Poetry, political writings, and even comic books warrant a “yes” on the question. But RPG’s? They’re media. They’re in book form. They have a good deal of fictional elements and can, as some of my prior columns have attempted to point out, be filled with interesting ideological stances. But they’re games. In that respect, they sit on roughly the same level as Super Mario Bros. Add to this the fact that roleplaying games are, in the greater scheme of things, a niche product, and you’ve got something the world at large finds pretty easy to ignore.
As is probably obvious, I don’t agree with the popular assessment of our hobby. But it can be a difficult, uphill battle. For the most part, RPG’s do a good job of furthering their own trivial image. Dungeons & Dragons is silly fantasy. RIFTS is one or two steps below Rob Schneider on the intellectual ladder. White Wolf’s World of Darkness has become a self parody.
But then there’s Unknown Armies.
In much the same way Jared Sorensen’s Schism does it to super heroes, UA takes the modern occult genre and nails it so perfectly and with so much originality, that it effectively kills off the possibility of further work in the field. However, in the case of UA, I would argue that it goes an additional step and almost does the same to roleplaying games as a whole. Greg Stolze and John Tynes wrote the best RPG on the market today. It would be easy to label it the Best RPG Ever. UA displays intelligence, grace, thoughtfulness, and attention to detail far beyond nearly everything else it shares shelf space with.
It does this by getting to that fragile core of roleplaying: the fictional representation of the human in as much realism and awareness as possible. In the end, UA is not about the occult. It isn’t about magic or weird powers or secretive organizations. It is about humanity. It is about obsession and madness and the fine line that separates the two. It is about reality in the same way Grant Morrison’s Invisibles is: it takes the extremes and makes them so omnipresent as to reshape our means of perception. One comes away from UA noticing things.
What is truly amazing, though, is that, as they expand the product line, Atlas Games has kept a level of consistent quality that rarely (if ever) drops below the level set by the core rulebook. Weep is no exception. The front cover bills it as “six scenarios of woe and ruin,” but that’s a little misleading. Three of the six aren’t really adventures; they’re more like mini-sourcebooks, filled with wacky stuff to throw at players. I’m not going to go into too many details, however. To do so would ruin the surprise entirely, and UA is so much about surprise, about the unexpected, that I would be doing a huge disservice to both players and GM’s.
I will hit on one aspect of the book that stands out for me in particular. The first adventure, written by Tynes, brings together the best Unknown Armies has to offer. Without giving too much away, it deals with events that aren’t ever given an explanation. Instead, they are given meaning. I was discussing the scenario, called “A Few of My Favorite Things,” with a friend at a coffee house yesterday. She thought it sounded neat but wanted to know if the players ever figured out what was going on. The answer is no, but we came to the conclusion that that’s not the point. What matters is that, after the adventure is done and the dice are put away, the players are left with something to think about. Tynes has written the RPG equivalent of a fantastic short story. He built a complex metaphor about the state of America and let us play around in it. He has a message, a point to make, and that’s what’s important. I know that a lot of RPG players out there would have serious problems with such a setup. I know that I’d have to get a very specific group of people together to play it or else deal with constant griping about continuity and not having anything to do. This is not an adventure for “adventure gamers.”
But you know what? Screw ‘em.
Unknown Armies is to roleplaying games what Dave Sim’s Cerebus is to comics. (Though it definitely isn’t plagued by the silly misogyny Sim seems to dwell on so much.) UA is brilliant. It is intense and powerful and worthwhile. But it has to compete for space with peers that are everything but. Most RPG’s are embarrassing. Seriously.
Unknown Armies is a game we, the gaming community, can be proud of.
And Weep takes its rightful place in swelling that pride.
