Unknown Armies

He did a Kickstarter.

It's kind of if people know Mage the Ascension or Unknown Armies.

It has that kind of vibe, also liminal horror and really interesting little game.

And also another friend, Maxim, who did Speed Heroes, which is a game more like a narrative system based on cars, like the vibe of old TV shows, like from the 80s and 90s, like Knight Rider.

And he said that the game of Cyberpunk, the role-playing game, became a significant part of the language of urban science fiction and fantasy.

It paved the way for things like nightlife and Vampire the Masquerade, Unknown Armies, and many more.

I still think that...

Shadowrun came first, but there is a massive influence on Shadowrun.

That's okay.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around Unknown Armies.

It's not that...

It, it's crazy.

Yes, that's another missing Starkey book.

And he's so great that he became a core figure in an Unknown Armies game that I ran a few years back set in Restoration London in 1666.

And obviously, he spent much of his life calling himself the Alchemist of Fire and using the Gahanical Fire as the way to get his cell Tartarus and his Alkahest.

And so the Gehenna fire became the MacGuffin that got the campaign kicked off and they had to find Starkey's notes and figure out, did he fake his own death? And oh, also they're going to drop the alchemical fire somewhere and start the fire of London.

Possibly.

Uh, Unknown Armies was another RPG that did a pretty interesting take on the way that individual choices and consequences were m- more impactful to the morality of the setting, rather than, like, your origin, or species, or even who you worked for necessarily.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, but that's, that's an older, that's definitely an older [laughs] example.

That's, that's one I barely remember, Unknown Armies.

Good grief.

[laughs] I'm not too familiar.

It moves it in directions I hadn't thought I was going to have to go sometimes, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

But am I familiar with this? What do I know about this? Some game systems, the current version of Unknown Armies, has a fairly generous penumbra of things you can do with a trait that aren't the trait itself.

I'm a firefighter.

Of course I can a large number of things, would be justified after that, and they encourage you.