Pages

Friday, April 1, 2016

Unknown Armies, Third Edition Kickstarter

IT LIVES.

It went live Wednesday and funded within two and a half hours.  As of this writing, it's tripled its goal, and they're still talking about additional stretch goals — mostly extra ebooks of content.

Currently, I'm reading the playtest documents (primarily Book Three: Reveal — the book of story hooks and such), and I'm not sure I love it.  Then again, I didn't expect to love it again — Stolze and Tynes already made the perfect game in 1998 and 2002.  Just looking at the story details, they pulled back the curtain.  A lot.  (A lot of things that were just intriguing rumors buried across sourcebooks now get a whole section explaining them.)  They changed some stuff that was supposed to represent the setting's cosmological constants.  (Which is a good way to shake things up, I suppose.  Even if the new metaplot stuff comes across as an obligatory The Lost Room pastiche.  With shades of The Booth at the End.)  The Slender Man gets stats.  So does Kuchisake-onna.

Basically, it looks like what you would expect after a decade's worth of age and a distinct lack of John Tynes' dream-like haze over everything.  It's a bit less on the high-concept and a bit more on the gutter magick and weird horror.  (And like a lot of reboots, it sounds like a pastiche of the thing originally described.)

So I don't love it, but I didn't expect to love it.  I expected a solid modern horror game with a lot of cool, creepy plot hooks, and it appears to deliver.  I don't know anything about the system yet, but a lot of the plot hooks are solid, and get me excited to drop them in some future game.  (Whenever that happens.)

You've got about a month left, but check out that Kickstarter so this thing can get bigger and crazier.

Addendum (4/2/2016): I do know at least one rad thing about the rules, though.  Character creation now looks like this:

Ripped from Greg Stolze's Twitter
And this:

Also ripped from Greg Stolze's Twitter

No comments:

Post a Comment

Print Friendly