Adventures In The Unknown

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

Fight Nazis And Make The World A Better Place

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 AitU 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 (also abbreviated as AitU) is a rules light role-playing game for quick and easy gaming. AitU was inspired by, and is an homage to, an old school Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying game. This is a game of heroic pulp role-playing set in a modern-day world, where players play characters who are larger than life, and fight to make a better world. AitU is called a “Cheerfully Adventurous” game as an homage to that earlier game, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be a humorous game all the time. Like the original “frightfully cheerful” game (and the movie that inspired it), AitU games can mix humor and seriousness in equal measures.

Humor can be an important element for games of Adventures In The Unknown because your characters are inevitably going to be fighting against people who want to harm them, or people who look like them. When faced with the atrocities that the forces of evil are willing to commit, humor can sometimes be the last defense that keeps a person focused on the larger fight. Humor can be irreverent, and it can be tasteless, but sometimes it is something that can keep a person from falling apart under the pressures of fighting the good fight. Not everyone likes gallows humor, but for some it is a coping mechanism. Each group has to decide for itself what kinds of humor are “okay” for their groups, and this can all be rolled into the lines and veils for a group (see below for more). 

This game uses a pool of six-sided dice for everything. You roll the dice in your pool and count successes to determine if your characters actions are successful or not. While this game is an homage to an older game about busting ghosts, there have been some updates and alterations to the rules in this game in order to further streamline character creation and game play. There are two kinds of people who play Adventures In The Unknown: The Players who create and play the main characters of the story, and the Game Master (GM) who is in charge of portraying and describing the world, as well as acting out the parts of any Non-Player Characters (NPC) that the Player Characters (PC) may encounter during the game.

What is heroic pulp role-playing? The heroic pulps were a precursor to our super-hero comics and movies of today, published during the 1920s and 1930s. 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. 

AitU 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 AitU 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 AitU 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.

A print version will be in the works (most likely from Lulu) once the document is in a stable form, so keep an eye open for that.

I am thinking of adding more setting material to the PDF, and perhaps tightening up the page layout a bit. The file will be updated for free, and previous buyers will be notified should anything in the PDF ever change.