Unknown Armies Book Five: Mine Playtest Manuscript for Backers 2017-01-03 <chap>Introduction <1>What is This? Book Five: Mine is a compilation of additional material for Unknown Armies, designed by a cabal of writers and prompted by backers of the wildly successful Unknown Armies Kickstarter in 2016. Herein you shall discover new and, in many cases, revised rules and background for a dizzying array of miscellanea, salvaged from past editions and conjured into existence by dedicated fans of the work of Greg Stolze and John Scott Tynes. The book is assembled simply into four separate chapters, in addition to this introduction. They are as follows: Adepts: Eight magickal schools, including some old favorites; a huge chunk of information about rituals; and a handful of artifacts. Avatars: Nine archetypes, updating several classics that were not included in Book One: Play. Places: Details on Otherspaces, as well as a new category of archetype, the Paragon Place. Faces: Antagonists and potential allies, including the Cult of the Cruel Ones. Just as with Book Four: Expose, the contents of this book are yours to accept, reject, twist, or turn as you desire. Nothing is canon unless it suits your own personal paradigm of Unknown Armies. But if you are ever looking to go beyond the core books and sample from that buffet of the unknown that is the Occult Underground and its many labyrinthine passages above and below, you may find what you most desire here. © & TM 2017 Trident Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games 1 Unknown Armies Book Five: Mine Playtest Manuscript for Backers 2017-01-03 <chap>Adepts There are as many new traditions in the 21st century as there are new hip-hop artists or new indie directors. Every minute another adept steps forward with an obsession and a set of taboos and a hunger for working her will. In addition to those that were included in Book One: Play, Book Three: Reveal, and Book Four: Expose, this chapter calls back to some of the popular schools of the 20th century and casts them anew from the forge of magickal inspiration. Fair warning: several of these schools may, at first blush, seem better served as the instrument of antagonists or rival adepts. Their secrets are at times profane and at other times preposterous. Of course, that never stopped a player before, did it? <1>Cryptomancy Knowledge is power. Even children know that much. But what people rarely admit is that power is easily diluted. Being one of twenty people who know the café that serves the best pie in the city, that’s one thing. Everyone in a fifty-mile radius knowing the location, that’s something else. Likewise, holding a disastrously embarrassing secret about the Mayor is bankable leverage. Once it’s on the front page, it’s just one more piece of tedious gossip. From there, the calculus is simple. The power in knowledge is strongest when it is kept concentrated. Facts become more precious as fewer people know them. So the sanctity of the factual is not to be squandered on the profane. In our brave new online world, knowledge is ripped apart, and scattered to the four winds like grain. Global businesses are devoted to the idea of increasing access to factual knowledge, of opening the world’s secrets to every person on Earth. There, it will be trampled, ground into dust, truly worthless. The wise understand the reckless folly of this impulse. The truth must be treated with the utmost respect and devotion. It is not something to be spread carelessly. Real devotion to knowledge means never sullying it, never allowing it to be communicated and weakened and rendered impotent. Instead, it must be lovingly hidden, venerated, allowed to flourish in the darkness away from the light of casual inquiry. There, its density provides the power to rewrite reality itself. At the heart of this dedication to knowledge lies a paradox that every cryptomancer must learn how to deal with. It is not possible to gather facts to protect without seeking them out and learning them — an act of precisely the sort of communication that diminishes the information. The cherishing of data, of gathering power from it, is rooted in its utmost disrespect. But then, what is more human than to do wrong in the pursuit of rightness? Given their secretive nature, cryptomancers are a thing of rumor and disinformation. Even that is far too well-known, so far as the school’s members are concerned. However, if they absolutely must be considered at all, they prefer to be thought of as “Secret-Keepers,” or “Cognoscenti.” Those who know of their existence tend to be less generous, and nicknames include “Windbags,” “Deviants,” “Weasels,” and, simply, “Liars.” <2>Stats Generate a Minor Charge: Learn a piece of private information that could cause tangible harm to someone if the knowledge were to be made publically accessible. © & TM 2017 Trident Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games 2 Unknown Armies Book Five: Mine Playtest Manuscript for Backers 2017-01-03 The rise of the Internet has been an incredible boon for cryptomancy as a discipline. Uncovering secrets used to be painstaking work involving stake-outs, stalking, burglary, research, and, if all else failed, putting in the weeks of work to gain a mark’s trust. Nowadays it’s not much harder than logging onto the darknet via TOR and downloading today’s leaked list of usernames with passwords, then checking Facebook to identify some of those users. If that’s too tech-savvy, try getting friendly with a magazine or website’s gossip columnist — or becoming one yourself. Alternatively, there’s always private detective work, or doing stuff with broad-ranging surveys, or just getting into any badly-regarded subculture and making friends. We’re drowning in information. Much of it is potentially damaging to the people it involves in our over-judgmental world, as a lot of risqué selfie-snappers have discovered. It’s only the sheer volume of it all that acts as any sort of protection. Note that ‘damaging’ here means that if the information was made available to the wrong person or people, the victim it concerns would suffer ongoing unpleasant social, financial, mental, physical, or emotional consequences. A cryptomancer with a steady source of compromising information can harvest up to a maximum of ten minor charges a day. If they’re a half-way skilled Internet user, that will only take a couple of hours. Information that is easily accessible public knowledge is no use for charging off, of course. The person it pertains to has to still consider it a secret. Generate a Significant Charge: Harm someone by releasing information about them. Holding secrets is a route to influence, but real power is gained through the use of those secrets. By actualizing the potential stored in the fact, its energy is maximized, its secrecy burned up in a blaze that leaves the cryptomancer stronger and more dangerous. To gain a significant charge from a secret, the cognoscente exposes it (in writing) to the person or people whom the subject really didn’t want the information getting to. When the secret concerns a normal person, that normally means sharing it with a spouse, parent, child, priest, colleague, boss, etc. If it refers to a public figure, then it needs to go to a newspaper, news program, Facebook fan group, and so on. If the cryptomancer is part of a gang robbing a bank, warning the police about the robbery would count. So would outing a friendly adept to a rival. For the charge to be generated, the secret has to be believed, and it has to harm the person it is about. Publication in a newspaper or large site usually lends enough credibility, but for more personal matters, proof may need to be provided. It may take a few hours to target sufficiently harmful recipients for any given already-known secret, and gather the proof required. Even so, a diligent adept can reliably manage a couple of charges a day without much effort. Most also keep a number of secrets ready to fire, for emergencies. Sometimes, the harm done by exposing a secret is profound indeed. Gaining a significant charge always has the potential to require a stress check if things go badly. Cryptomancers are rarely popular. Generate a Major Charge: Discover and publicize a secret that shakes the nation, one which unpleasant people would cheerfully kill to protect. Finding and releasing a fact that brought down the current government would be enough for a major charge. So would publicizing information that showed the pope was in fact a woman, or somehow proving beyond debate that the moon landings were faked. Taboo: Telling someone a truth that they did not know. © & TM 2017 Trident Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games 3 Unknown Armies Book Five: Mine Playtest Manuscript for Backers 2017-01-03 This is a long way from having to lie all the time. Being forced to lie in all interactions would be totally crippling. Any obligate liar would be unable to manage even the smallest social tasks. Imagine such a person faced with a shop assistant. “Can I help you?” “No.” “You’re pointing at cheese. Do you want cheese?” “No.” “Are you looking to get shot, fool?” “... Yes.” The taboo of this school is subtler, although still tough. The cryptomancer can reveal any fact which those hearing it either know or reasonably suspect to be true. The deviant walking around with a name-tag declaring “Hi, my name is Robin!” can freely answer to their name in public.