Adventures In The Unknown

Adventures In The Unknown: A Cheerfully Adventurous Role-Playing Game

Fight Fascists And Punch Nazis And Make The World A Better Place

"Reading this game's book now...and it screams Antifascist Roleplaying." -- Scott Kelley Ernest

A couple of years ago a good friend challenged me to make a game about punching Nazis, because it seemed like we had forgotten that they were the bad guys. I started work on Adventures In The Unknown because of my being a fan of the heroic pulps of the 30s and 40s, and felt that they would be a useful medium for the message of fighting Nazis in our current world. The world of Adventures In The Unknown is a world of secrets that the characters can explore while finding ways to make the world a better place for themselves, as well as those targeted by fascist violence. This is a game about being heroes, regardless of who you are (except for fascists) and protecting those around you who cannot protect themselves.

Adventures In The Unknown is a fiction first role-playing game influenced by the heroic pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, brought into the world of today! Fight fascists and punch Nazis as you play larger than life characters who can make the world a better place! Inspired by the role-playing game of busting ghosts from the early 80s (and the first ever dice pool system in gaming), Adventures in the Unknown lets you make characters quickly and get into the action of your game fast! All you need are some six-sided dice, a story, and your friends!

Fight fascists like the paramilitary organization Fenris who want to not only conquer the world, but also stamp its malicious brand of mediocrity onto the world. Fenris wants the rest of the world to like the things they like, in the way that they like them, and to think about things in the way that they think. They want to homogenize the world and put an end to the strange and unusual, those things typified by your characters, the heroes of Adventures In The Unknown!

Be a part of groups like The Guardians or The Obscure Cartographers Society who want to explore our world, seek out the strange and hidden and then learn from it. Our world is a place of infinite diversity, and through embracing that diversity do we learn about ourselves, and our world. There are great secrets and great powers lurking in the shadows of our world, and while some of those are dangers that must be faced, many of them can be learned from, so we can make ourselves better.

What were the heroic pulps? These fiction magazines were a precursor to our super-hero comics and movies of today, published during the 1920s and 1940s. They featured stories about larger-than-life characters who fought against crime and corruption, and punched the occasional Nazi that crossed their paths. Heroic pulp characters like The Spider, The Shadow and Doc Savage would go on to inspire the creation of characters like Batman or Superman, and many other comic book characters, as well. Like their super-hero comic book counterparts, the characters of the heroic pulps would have (often low key) super powers, and advanced training, that would allow them to fight against the evils in their worlds.

The original era of the heroic pulps was a dark one. America was in the grips of a Great Depression, and the world was holding its breath and watching twin menaces rising to power in Europe and Eastern Europe. There was a lot of desperation in the world where the pulp heroes operated, but they rose up as larger-than-life figures to show that the dirt and grime of the world could be cleaned up, and if someone was willing to make the hard choice, they could face down the crime and corruption that plagued the world.  With some differences, this was a world chillingly similar to our own world of today.

Adventures In The Unknown is not a period role-playing game. It is set in today’s world, the very world that is outside of your window right now. You will play characters grounded in that world who are fighting against the crime and corruption of that world and trying to make it a better place. This also means that less setting information is required in these rules, because you can use the internet, or any other research tool, to come up with the basics of your game’s setting. The only real difference between the “real world” and the world of your Adventures In The Unknown games is that the world in your games is weirder and a lot more dangerous. Menaces lurk in the shadows, but there are also powerful people who have dedicated themselves to fighting those menaces. Those powerful people are your player characters, and they are there to make a difference in their world.

The worlds of the heroic pulps were weird places, full of strange menaces that only heroes could rise up and face down. Strange alien beings. Underground empires. Lost civilizations hidden away from prying eyes. One of the ideas behind Adventures In The Unknown is that anyone can be a hero, regardless of their ethnicity, sexual preference, gender identity or the mental or physical issues that they might deal with. Anyone can be a hero and fight to make their world into a better place. While these heroic pulps tried to push ideas of heroism, they were still mired in the -isms of their day: racism, sexism, and general ableist behaviors. This is a wrong that Adventures In The Unknown rights by having anyone able to be a hero. Be a hero in a wheelchair. Be a hero who is queer or nonbinary. You shouldn’t have to have permission to be a hero if you’re someone other than the square-jawed, straight, white man who was typically the hero of these pulp stories, but in case you think you don’t have those permissions…you do.

Despite the subtitle of being a "cheerfully adventurous" role-playing game, Adventures In The Unknown wasn't designed to be a humorous game. That doesn't mean that groups have to take their play of this game incredibly seriously all the time, and humor is always an important part of our lives. Humor helps us all to survive in the face of real-life darkness. But if you are expecting this to be an explicitly humorous game, it isn't that game.

A print version will likely happen eventually (probably via Lulu) so keep an eye open for that. Currently producing a print version of the game is a low priority, and will depend entirely on how well the PDF sales of the game progress. With only 80 pages of streamlined mechanics, the game is great for running off the PDF, and is optimized for use on a tablet (or your computer screen).

Adventures In The Unknown has an intentionally lo-fi and "old school" aesthetic to it, inspired in part by the game that influenced its creation. It was self-produced without crowdfunding and was created as a passion project by me. All of my self-published games will follow this aesthetic. No AI was used at any point in the making of this game.