Notices by Tinstargames (tinstargames@dice.camp)

Unknown Armies is a well designed game, especially 3E, but I have some big beef with it in a few key ways, one personal and one structural. The personal one is that the game is about stories I don’t really connect to much, and the best example of that has always been these paragraphs. I cannot think of any part of those setting more interesting or exciting than being the tiger.

What’s more, I think the tiger are the good guys. And the kinds of RPGs I run are about good tigers. Unknown Armies is fundamentally uninterested in good, sensible, compassionate people. I put them at the centre of my GMing. It is not boring. The whole point of Warhammer I think is the world is a terrible place where literally everyone is an asshole EXCEPT the PCs. That’s also where I tend to pitch my Cthulhu and Buffy games. Nobody cares except You.

Now this is where we get into structural issues. Until recently I knew almost nothing about the World of Darkness games but I’ve now realised that UA has a lot in common with them. Vampire and Werewolf particularly - though they refuse to explain this directly - are about being a terrible person but being surrounded by people who are way worse and being forced to intrude your version of asshole to try to stop things getting worse. As such they tend to be heavily driven by NPCs…

No political discussion can happen without agreeing that this is true, that significant slices of the population can and do kill people for fun.