Unknown Armies:Character Creation

Who you are

You are a person who is turning away from the everyday to scratch deeper. You believe there are secrets that are worth learning. You are determined to discover them.

You are not boring. You are an obsessed, passionate individual with a distinctive personality.

What you can do

You rate yourself with four stats: Body, Speed, Mind, and Soul. Each stat is a number from 1-100, the higher the better. From 30-70 is the typical range of adult human ability, so if you want a stat higher or lower than that range, you'd better have a good reason to feed the GM.

The number of points you have to divide among your stats depends on the kind of campaign you are creating a character for:

• Street-level points: 220
• Global-level points: 240
• Cosmic-level points: 260

With your stats in place, you pick skills: natural, learned, or unnatural abilities like Driving, Shooting Guns, Lying, or Seeing Auras. Each skill is assigned to a single stat. You use your stat levels as points to set your skills, and a given skill can't be higher than the stat that governs it. The more points you put into a stat, the more points you have available for the skills linked to that stat. It's a co-dependant relationship.

How you change

Only the dead are static. You are a dynamic, living person. Who isn't content to sit around doing nothing. You're going to get out into the occult underground and make waves. As you do, you're goign to make a rep for yourself. But you're also going to get better at the things you do.

Instant Improvement

If you roll a matched success or failure on a major skill check, the skill you rolled against goes up 1% immediately. A given skill can only be improved this way once per session, but multiple skills can each improve once. Stats do not improve this way, only skills, and this does not apply to minor or significant skill checks.

Gaining Experience Points

When you take action, the GM can grant you experience points (XP). These are points you can spend to improve your stats and skills at the end of the session, or you can hang on to them to spend them later.

Just for playing a session, you get 1 XP. Thanks for showing up.

If you're present at the climax of a plotline, your GM gives you 1-2 XP. Even if you didn't save the day, even if you got your butt kicked, you still get at least 1 XP for having been there in the clinch.

Each time you do something clever, your GM gives you 1 XP. Figured out a clue? Planned a good ambush? Made things exciting, entertaining, and unpredictable? That's good thinking and merits you a reward.

Finally, at the end of the session everybody but the GM votes on who did the best job. (Each person decides what "best job" means to him or her.) You can't vote for yourself. The GM breaks ties. Whoever wins the vote gets 1-2 XP, GM's call.

You can look forward to 1-8 XP per session. Don't whine if your GM seems stingy with the points—granting XP is one way a GM can pace the campaign. If the GM wants to play in a high-power style, you may get a lot of experience points so you can turn into hardcore bad-asses really fast. If she wants a gritty realism tone, she'll probably keep the point load low and make you work for 'em.

Spending Experience Points

Raising a skill by 1 costs 1 XP. Raising a stat by 1 costs 2 XP. However you can't spend more than 3 XP on a single skill or more than 2 XP on a single stat in a single session. You can improve multiple skills and stats, however.

The only exception to this is new skills. Buying a new skill costs ten experience points. It starts out at 10%. Your GM may decide that you need a teacher or special training to gain a new skill. If you want to fly a helicopter, for example, you need to take lessons.

Something to think about

Character Creation

First and foremost, Unknown Armies is about making a good story. You're not playing it against the GM and you're not playing against the other players. You're playing it against the fictions your GM is creating to oppose you.

Now this may sound real artsy-fartsy and abstract, but in the end it's simple: the best story is the one that keeps getting told. So all the point-stacking in the world isn't going to save a boring character.

What makes a character boring? Safety is the biggest thing. This game (like most roleplaying games) is all about risk, danger, adventure, and intrigue. Since you signed on to play, you have to accept the fact that bad things are likely to happen to your character, including madness, maiming, and death.

If you try to build a character who is immune to all those things, not only will you fail, but your character will be built around avoiding conflict (or at best, surviving it) instead of resolving it. Sure, you want your character to be competent, and the rules are tools to do that. But he should be just as competent at starting things as finishing them.

If you want your character to survive in UA, it's easy: ratchet up your accounting skill and play a guy who works for a bank. Of course, you won't be doing anything while everyone else is doing everything—but you'll survive! (Bleah.)

If you want to do more than survive, you'll need an interesting character. Lucky for you, the rules are designed to help you develop one.