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Unknown Armies (UA) is an edgy role-playing game with a very different take on the whole “secret supernatural war waged beneath the notice of mundane humanity” bit. It’s got powerful magic, sure, and cabals and monsters and weird events that can really screw up the life of any normal person they touch, but the game’s unofficial motto—“You did it”—embodies the notion that however weird the world may be, it’s made that way by ordinary people. History is not in the hands of the supernatural sub-culture; it’s us. Even the demons are just people angry to be dead, and the gods, such as they are, are people who have lived closely enough to a basic archetype as to achieve apotheosis.

I said the game was edgy. While it could, technically, embrace the vast breadth of human experience, the product line focuses on how we screw ourselves over in our desire for power, sex, money, status, self-image, parental approval, whatever. There’s a price to pay for everything. A lot of NPCs have paid a horrible price for what they wanted, and the game invites PCs to do the same.

You did it.

In keeping with this principle, magic is not, by and large, an empowering thing. Magic is transgressive, paradoxical, and it demands a price, usually a price you can’t really afford to pay. This price takes two forms. First, magic is fuelled by charges, which an adept must earn by performing some basically self-destructive act in keeping with the magic’s symbolic tension. Adepts of body magic must wound themselves, symbolically destroying the human form in order to assert control over it. Adepts of luck magic must perform an act that places them at great personal risk, symbolically surrendering to luck in order to assert control over it. Second, any adept that breaks a taboo in keeping with his magic’s theme immediately loses all charges. Adepts of money magic break taboo if they spend more than a $100 at once, including rent, groceries, or medical bills. Adepts of hysterical exhaustion break taboo each time they sleep. An adept must be dangerously obsessed with his subject to keep up a lifestyle like this.

The basic rulebook comes with a half dozen or so schools of magic to try out, if you dare. An entire supplement is devoted to new schools, and a few more crop up here and there in other supplements. Clearly, there’s room for new schools, if you feel creative enough to make your own. Some players do, posting them for peer review in the UA newsgroup, or on the UA website. But players, being players, usually want their characters to be powerful. More often than not, magic schools designed by amateurs allow for huge personal power at minimal personal expense, with a trivial taboo (never run for public office) and trivial methods to generate charges (listen to records for four hours). Typically, designers of power trip magical schools just don’t get the ideas of symbolic tension, obsession, and the price of power fundamental to UA magic, so fans keep posting reminders of how necessary painful sacrifices are to the cool, edgy, dark themes that drew them to UA in the first place.

I rarely join these discussions. Players who want to play out power fantasies will play out power fantasies, no matter what the purists would prefer. And who’s to say they’re wrong? But occasionally, someone will offer a magical school of their own design with a frank admission that it feels too candy-coated, and solicit advice for how to shape it to fit the UA tone. Then I’ll offer my two cents.

I did so two days ago, and two posters chimed in with the sentiment: “This has to be one of the best write-ups I’ve seen of the idea of paradox in magic.” Ego strokes like that are terrific, and they’re coming more frequently, especially for things that I’ve tossed off in an hour or so. Apparently, these sort-of-daily journal entries are making me a better writer after all.