Describe Your Obsession

Other than to “keep it short and sweet,” there’s surprisingly little in Unknown Armies 3 to guide players on choosing or defining an obsession. Most advice comes in Book 1: Play (p9):

The characters’ obsessions are boundlessly fascinating to them, they’re the lenses through which they regard the world and the bedrock upon which their assumptions rest. An obsession may scare them or anger them sometimes, it may lure them away from their better natures, but in the end they can’t leave it alone. More than any other passion, it is who they are.

An obsession is the impulse that drives a characters behaviours and actions. If their rage, fear and noble passions spin their moral compass, their obsession points to their magnetic north, and compels them towards it.

Mechanical Constraints

There are very few rules to restrict obsessions.

Each character will eventually link their obsession to one identity.

• This provides the mechanical hook for exploiting obsessions during play, which is to be able to always flip-flop related checks.
• All  adepts must relate their obsession to their magickal tradition (their adept identity).  Other characters (including avatars) are not restricted in this way.

Shock meter abilities (such as Dodge or Knowledge) cannot directly be obsessions.

• However, an obsession will always be tied to an identity
• For mundane identities at least, this will always mean they substitute for an ability.

For example, a character with an obsession for romance may have a Bookworm identity, which could substitute for Connect.

Other Considerations

Obsessions are not Objectives

A character’s obsession isn’t necessarily tied to the cabal objective. Objectives will be met (or abandoned) and changed, but the fundamental driver behind a character’s behaviour is much less fluid and much more persistent.  Individual obsessions transcend collective goals.

A character could link their obsession to the cabal’s first objective, but it is better to have an objective that doesn’t skew the scenario towards a single character at the expense of the others.

As a campaign progresses, objectives may well become connected more directly to the development goals of an individual character. For example, a cabal objective may be to find a new relationship for a character, or help them acquire magickal skills, or a more mundane new identity.

That said, an obsession should probably also not be completely opposed to the cabal’s objective. There still needs to be some reason why the character would have a stake in it. Their motivation still needs to be credible.

There is a middle ground.  An obsession that is neither fully aligned nor opposed to the cabal objective can work well. It gives the GM some friction to play with and to create interesting tensions.

Avoid Personal Obsessions

My recommendation for setting a person-related obsession follows the guidance for setting person-related objectives (Run p14).

Avoid obsessing over an individual person.

If you must, make the obsession about what it is that person represents, that can help to fulfil your character instead.

Note that in Unknown Armies this kind of philia is catered for as a form of madness, rather than mere obsession (Play, p28 | p27 pdf). The object of the obsession becomes sort of saviour figure, or messiah, for the character.

Obsession Shapes Madness

A character’s obsession and passions will shape any permanent madness – not just a philia – they may eventually succumb to (if one of the their shock meter accumulates five failed notches) – see Play, p27 | p26 pdf.

While Unknown Armies is about broken people, you don’t need to start off this far gone.

Lacks and Anchors

Here’s one way to think of your character’s obsession.

The principle, value or ideal that becomes a character’s obsession may be either:

• a lack: something they feel they need or strive for, but haven’t yet attained, or
• an anchor: something they have and feel they need to hold on to.

In this way, their obsession becomes a dynamic force that influences their core motivations. Whether it’s to find what’s missing in their life or world, or to preserve and maintain it, they aren’t statically obsessed.

In either case, a character’s obsession is crucial to their fulfilment, sense of self and motivation.

Sample Obsessions

Examples in UA3 are simply and broadly expressed – ‘Knowing it All’ or ‘Physical Perfection’ or ‘Religion’.  It’s easy to lose sight of the context for the obsession, the nuance that applies to it for a given character, if it is only described as an identity headline.

However, there are some really good examples of obsessions in earlier versions of Unknown Armies. They didn’t make it into the third edition but they do give players some helpful suggestions for describing both mundane and adept obsessions. The fillable character sheet gives space for a bit more description, which can help GMs to tailor obstacles and distractions that hit the mark.

The quickstart character concepts include persona types and identities that could form the basis of a character’s obsession. TV Tropes has a great collection of Obsession Tropes including The Only Righteous Index of Fanatics.

Normal, not Obsessed

Characters in Unknown Armies shouldn’t be “cool and disinterested” (Play p9). They need some kind of impulse to want to change the world (whether that’s to fix or break it). Otherwise the game will be a very dull affair. 

However, that doesn’t mean they can’t be pre-occupied with some sort of obsessive normalcy. Especially in a street-level campaign, a pursuit of some kind of social compliance can be incredibly powerful to drive cabal and character narrative. That may manifest in denial of the unnatural and the occult underground. 

A character may also not regard their obsession as an obsession – it’s just something they do. They’ve either trained themselves to pursue it, or they have become conditioned into a sort of routine that barely registers as their mission. It’s ‘just’ who they are and what they do.

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Reference: UA3 Play, p9 | p8 pdf. UA3 Run, p27 | p26 pdf