Unknown Armies FAQ

The following changes/additions to the First Edition of the UA rulebook are corrected in the second printing, and aren't applicable to the Second Edition of the game. We encourage GMs to look these over and decide whether or not to implement them in play. If you decide to use these errata, we suggest you show them to your players at the next opportunity so they know what to expect.

Credits

The following playtesters accidentally went uncredited in the first printing.

Keith Potter (GM)
Eric Chatterjee
David Eckstein
April Johnson
Chris Johnson
N. David Martin
Eric Smith

pp.42-43, skill revision

Hold Your Liquor. Normally, people take penalties for sucking down booze like a dissipated writer; some people with iron guts can imbibe like William Faulkner and show no appreciable effects. At that point where an unskilled drinker would start taking penalties, your GM rolls this skill for you. If the roll succeeds, you don't take the penalty. If it fails, you still do—but you don't know it until you try to make a roll on your own. You cannot negate the effects of more than four drinks within a six-hour period.

p. 87, Dipsomancy charge revisions

Generate a Minor Charge: Drink a beer, a glass of wine, or a shot of whiskey. You must suffer an impairment penalty (p. 137) from the drink to get a charge off it; no penalty, no charge.

Generate a Significant Charge: Have a drink of booze out of some kind of historically significant or potent vessel: the coffee cup JFK drank from during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the sacramental chalice of a Borgia pope, whatever. Unfortunately, this has to be your item; you can't voluntarily share it with another boozehound. If you give your vessel away, you can never get a significant charge from it again. If it's taken from you by force (or the threat of force) you can use it again if you recover it. Beginning players don't start out owning one of these beauties. (As with minor charges, you must take an impairment penalty from a given drink to get a charge off it.)

Generate a Major Charge: Drink a unique liquor: the remnants of the Cask of Amontillado from Poe's story (you think he made that up?), the archaeologically preserved honey mead used for Dionysian ceremonies in ancient Greece, the remnants from Elvis's last bottle. (No impairment penalty is needed to get this charge.)

pp. 134-135, new section: Exceptional Skills

Individuals with superhuman Speed or Body stats—including clockworks and unnatural entities—gain some special benefits.

Speed. A character with a Speed stat of 101% or higher gets one free combat action before anyone else, every round, and then takes their normal combat action. If more than one character in combat has a Speed stat of 101% or higher, the character with the higher Speed gets the first bonus action, followed by the other high-Speed character's bonus action, and then it's back to normal combat actions in order of Speed.

Body. A character with a Body stat of 101%-125% does an additional 3 wound points in hand-to-hand attacks. If the character's Body stat is 126% or higher, the hand-to-hand bonus is 6 wound points instead.

That's it! The second printing of Unknown Armies First Edition has many typos fixed, and about a half-dozen pieces of artwork have been replaced with new stuff (cf. A Humument, Tom Philips). The Second Edition is overhauled completely.