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INTRODUCTION

After falling in love with the first edition of WitchCraft, I was even more delighted to see the arrival of the first edition of its sister/sequel game, Armageddon. It was WitchCraft taken to the next level: the secret struggles against supernatural evil spilling out into a world war, with beings of vast power fighting openly on both sides.

Unfortunately, that first edition was plagued by typos, omissions, poor organization, and, ultimately, lack of support.

So after Eden Studios picked up, revamped, and fully supported WitchCraft, I was on pins and needles waiting to see if a new edition of Armageddon would follow. Now, after a few delays due to some chick named Buffy, the End Times are here again at last.

CONTENT

Chapter One: A Taste of Doomsday

This, the ubiquitous Eden book orientation chapter, is noteworthy in two respects. First, it features a competent piece of fiction that introduces both the facts and feel of the setting (available here on the Eden web site). And second, it contains a sidebar explaining what distinguishes this game from WitchCraft. As to the latter, where WitchCraft is a struggle in the shadows, Armageddon is open warfare. In WitchCraft, the average Joe would be stunned to encounter Grandma’s ghost. In Armageddon, angels in all their glory fly into battle alongside formations of stealth fighters.

Chapter Two: Setting

The year is 2016. A being of enormous power known as the Dark Apostle and his Church of Revelations are waging World War 3 on both mundane and supernatural fronts on behalf of Leviathan, one of the Mad Gods from outside all of Creation bent on corrupting reality itself. Humans with supernatural abilities and inhuman creatures serve openly with the mundane armies of the world to combat the threat, but most of Europe and South America have fallen, as have much of the Middle East and Asia. The Pope has been executed, the angelic army sent to his rescue destroyed. The United States endures, but with the Dark Apostle’s Army of Revelations pounding at its southern border and with chaos and paranoia turning parts of its cities and countryside into Escape from New York and Road Warrior, respectively.

This chapter goes into detail not only about this status quo, but also about the events leading up to it from the WitchCraft era – complete with a nearly 40-year timeline – and the general cosmology behind it. The latter touches on the relationships between angels, pagan gods, and the Creator that make pretty much every belief system other than atheism at least partly accurate in the WitchCraft/Armageddon setting.

I could feel my excitement about the game building as I read this chapter, which is always a good sign. (This, even after having read the corresponding chapter in the first edition years ago.)

Chapter Three: Roles

The primary difference between this character creation chapter and the corresponding chapters in other Unisystem games is the greater emphasis placed on the four campaign power levels of Pre-Heroic, Heroic, Legendary, and Mythic – in Armageddon, certain character types are suitable only at certain levels. And this is a wise move, as it prevents one-size-fits-all game balance concerns from crippling powerful entities. (For a perfect example of a game guilty of the latter, see my Everlasting: Book of the Fantastical review.)

On a related note, the chapter offers a nice spread of archetypes across the power levels up to Legendary, from a humble front-line grunt on up to the daughter of a death god. Some tempting options like Special Forces Soldier and Immortal Stuntman round out the selection.

Aside from the Qualities and Drawbacks common to all standard Unisystem games and those for the various supernatural races introduced in this book, two new and interesting entries drew my notice. The first is the Beholden Drawback, which lets a powerful supernatural entity see through the PC’s eyes at the lower level and take him over at the higher level. And the second is the Enlightened Quality, which takes Gifted status to the next level for seers and magicians. Such characters can spend any amount of their Essence instantly in the manner of the Inspired, without the need to Channel. Regrettably, the player in my game who was to play an Enlightened character had to back out, but it looks as though these characters are powerful enough to keep up with the most powerful of the inhuman types.

One rules tweak I appreciated was the ability of supernaturals to spend Metaphysics Points on increasing attributes.

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Playtest: This turned out to be something of a necessity, since certain types of creatures seemed to run out of reasonable power purchases – or, in some cases, any powers to purchase at all. This happened with the Immortal Shetarri Warrior in the group, who, lacking access even to most Immortal powers, had to settle for pumped-up attributes. As a result, he ended up being the most physically powerful member of the group.

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Chapter Four: Rules

The rules are identical to those in WitchCraft, but with some shiny new cinematic options that move the game a few steps closer to Buffy's "Unisystem Lite" – NPC stats as target numbers to keep the GM from rolling the dice, for example, and using points of Luck to remove damage like Buffy's Drama Points. There's also a bit of Enter the Zombie added in the form of two-gun shooting and guns-blazing running dodges.

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Playtest: I switched over to the fixed target numbers when one of our larger skirmishes bogged down. This speeded things up to the general satisfaction of everyone. Still, I went back to standard Unisystem attack rolls for the goon NPCs after a while, just to give them a chance to open-end and get a lucky shot. The difference in competence between the PCs and the "goon" NPCs was much greater than in the typical Buffy game, and having the NPCs blazing away round after round with basically no chance to hit got old.

In combat, my Legendary-level PCs proved capable of dishing out extraordinary amounts of damage – in some cases, putting them on par with heavy artillery. Taking damage, however, was a different issue altogether. As I said in my WitchCraft review, offense can suddenly and unexpectedly outstrip defense in Unisystem. Here, though, I discovered that my non-human PCs were as remarkably durable as advertised – the demon PC shrugged off a direct hit from an anti-tank missile with barely a scratch, for example. This proved to be a bit of a problem for the one human PC in the group, who, while spirit bonded and extremely deadly in combat, lacked any special defensive or recuperative powers – imagine a lone infantryman walking along with a group of tanks, and having to endure firepower designed to destroy tanks.

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Up to this point, the book has shown steady improvement over the first edition. Here, it leaves its predecessor in the dust.

As might be expected from a game set during wartime, the equipment lists focus heavily on weaponry. Well, okay, they focus exclusively on weaponry. That specificity pays off, however, with the chapter covering everything from pocketknives to fuel-air explosive bombs. (No nukes, though, but that's not a problem – for unknown reasons, they haven't worked since the war began anyway.)

Included are some nifty examples of near-future tech, like the HAR-19 heavy assault rifle with ramjet-propelled rounds and a computer sight that projects its image on the visor of the formidable U.S. Combat Armor, allowing soldiers to shoot around corners. Low tech isn't neglected, however: for the anachronistic, broadswords, maces, bows, crossbows, and plate mail are all there.

Better still, this edition fills a huge gap in the first in the form of military vehicle stats: tanks, armored personnel carriers, and jet fighters from both sides, as well as the ever-popular Hummer. I think a helicopter would have been nice as well, since the typical PC group is far more likely to encounter and/or use one of those than they are a jet. Still, given the lack of any military vehicles at all in the first edition, I'm not complaining too loudly about the omission.

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Playtest: Speaking of omissions, the lack of non-military vehicles got in the way a bit when one player wanted his character to have a pickup truck. For that, I had to refer to my copy of All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

I also wish that the equipment lists had included prices for the military weapons. Yes, I understand that they're not for sale through legitimate channels, but having some idea of what they'd cost on the black market would have been nice. As it is, the Resources Quality is of limited use in the highly likely event that your PCs are members of a group that can provide military hardware, given that arms and armor are the only products available for purchase. Several of my players didn't see much point in providing their own civilian rifles, for example, in lieu of just requisitioning them from the higher ups.

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The organizations in Armageddon cleave a little more closely to individual character types than do those in WitchCraft. These include groups primarily for angels (the haughty ones of Heaven, the nefarious fallen ones of Hell, and the Watchers, their human-loving, Nephilim-spawning exiled counterparts), pagan gods, and Atlantean Immortals. (All of the organizations in WitchCraft are likewise available but aren’t described here – a fairly trivial matter, since WitchCraft is available for free download now.)

However, the true stroke of genius in terms of both setting and game mechanics is the Alliance, a union of supernatural organizations dedicated to the defeat of Leviathan. With its governmental contacts and provision for dual group membership, the Alliance is the perfect story motivator and group unifier. Like all organizations in the setting, it includes a small game mechanics perk for members; however, those with dual membership can choose which group’s perk they want, symbolizing where their strongest loyalties lie. And even if certain characters want no affiliation with the Alliance at all, their organization might nevertheless send them on joint missions with the Alliance.

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Playtest: My group, for example, included a Nephilim, an Infernal Seraph, an Immortal, and two Primals – all of whom might well be at each other's throats, were it not for the unifying influence of the Alliance. Sure, we could have come up with a way to unite the diverse group anyway, but the Alliance provided a quick and plausible solution.

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(And then there’s the fact that the Alliance founders are the Norse god Odin, the self-exiled archangel Michele – a.k.a. Michael, when she’s in a masculine mood – and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. I just find that triumvirate really entertaining.)

My only complaint about the organizations is the lack of the sort of clout ratings found in Eden’s Angel RPG.

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Playtest: I didn’t have the foggiest idea how many goodies the Alliance would shell out for my group’s team, for example. Their requests were surprisingly low-key, so it wasn’t much of an issue. But if they'd requested full combat armor, or a crate of grenades, or a rocket launcher, I'd have been at something of a loss.

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Chapter Seven: Metaphysics

There's nothing new here, but a lot that's compiled: All of the Metaphysics from WitchCraft – including Necromancy, which didn't appear in the first edition of Armageddon – the Greater Invocations from the Mystery Codex, and the Call Ethereal miracle and spirit patrons from the Abomination Codex. The only skimping comes off of the spirit patron rules, which include only the most general boons.

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Playtest: The player of the spirit-bonded PC in our game wanted the patron to be a wolf spirit, but the lack of flavorful boon options drove us to the Abomination Codex's more detailed spirit bonding rules.

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That's deep into quibble territory, however. There are loads of good options here, and we haven't even gotten to the best part yet…

Chapter Eight: Inhumans

Aside from the overall setting concept, this chapter is, I believe, the game’s #1 selling point.

Celestials

The main categories of Celestial are Seraphim, Kerubim, and Nephilim, with the first two having both Divine and Infernal versions.

• Seraphim are the classic angels and demons: in their Divine/Infernal forms, winged entities of incredible beauty and power. They come in Lesser, Common, and Greater power levels, the main difference being the levels of their Primary and Secondary Attributes. All of them can manipulate Celestial/Infernal fires to create blasts, blades, and shields or armor, spend Essence to heal themselves instantly, and alter probabilities in ways at once reminiscent of Marvel Comics' Scarlet Witch and the Drama Points of the Buffy RPG.

  In addition, all Seraphs have one or more special powers to aid them in their particular missions. These are pretty heavy-duty, including the ability to heal basically anything, teleport anywhere the angel's seen, or erase a being right out of existence, history and all. However, Seraphim can become Exiles by force or by choice. This traps them in human form and robs them of most of their flashy abilities; however, they keep their superhuman attributes, and gain the advantage of no longer being the equivalent of supernatural signal flares to their enemies.

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  Playtest: The Infernal Seraph in my group definitely served as the big gun. As previously mentioned, she was able to withstand a direct hit with an anti-tank missile thanks to her Hellfire shield, and her Hellfire blasts tipped the balance of the fight in the PCs favor several times. What’s more, she regained Essence at a truly terrifying rate, allowing her to throw around high-powered Hellfire bolts with near impunity.

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• Kerubim, unlike Seraphim, are deceased humans, and hence better able to deal with humanity. They are less powerful overall than the Seraphim, lacking wings and Celestial Fire, but nonetheless get some of their own special abilities.
• Nephilim are the offspring of humans and Seraphim. They have superhuman attributes across the board, albeit nothing compared to their fully angelic kin. However, not only can they recover from any injury short of total immolation – including decapitation – but they are also completely immune to supernatural powers, whether powered by Essence (the building blocks of Creation) or Taint (the anti-Essence of the Mad Gods and their warped realities). Leviathan itself could unleash a nuke-level blast of pure Taint on a Nephilim and not leave a scratch. While obviously handy, this ability makes supernatural types really uncomfortable, which in turn makes Nephilim really big targets for extermination by most angels and demons as well as by Leviathan’s minions.

  For the GM, the downside here is that any villain plots strongly dependent upon the supernatural will in all likelihood be trumped by a Nephilim: illusions won’t fool them, mystic barriers won’t stop them, psychics won’t control them, and magical attacks certainly won’t harm them.

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  Playtest: Despite her recuperative abilities and magic immunity, our group’s Nephilim played things relatively safe. This may have been a combination of her lack of powerful offensive abilities combined with the knowledge that eventual regeneration doesn’t do much good if your enemies can blow you to pieces and dump the scraps into an incinerator.

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Primals

Here’s where Armageddon truly sealed the deal for me.

Primals – the pagan gods of the setting and their offspring – come in three playable types:

• Inheritors, the immortal offspring of gods and humans.
• Avatars, humans whose spirits the gods have shaped toward their own image. This gives such humans even greater power than the Inheritors, but with extended longevity rather than immortality and with the god able to observe and influence the avatar to some degree.
• Incarnates, full-blown gods. Lesser gods, perhaps, but gods nonetheless, and hence suitable only for high-powered games.

While the pagan gods in the first edition got a rather limited range of abilities, their counterparts in Eden’s version get what is for all intents and purposes a low-powered supers system. It works on a wonderfully clever three-step system. First, you determine what your Primal is the god of – his Aspect, or realm of influence. This, in turn, tells you the Primal Powers to which such a god would have access. Finally, each Primal Power has a list of specific abilities from which to choose. The end result provides loads of room for customization, the only real limitation – other than character creation points, of course – being that certain realms of influence have prerequisites in terms of Qualities and/or Drawbacks.

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Playtest: For example, one player wanted to create an Avatar of Mahes, the vengeful Egyptian lion god personifying summer heat. Easy enough. We gave him the Aspects of Beast (Lion), giving him access to the Primal Powers of Awe, Beast Powers, Life, and Might; the Aspect of Sun, giving him access to the Primal Powers of Awe, Primal Fire, Life, Light, and Magic; and the Aspect of Vengeance, giving him access to the Primal Powers of Awe, Battle Rage, Judgment, and Torment.

From this selection, in turn, he took Flame Incarnate from Primal Fire; Animal Shape (Lion) from Beast Power; Bounding Leap and Enhanced Strength from Might; Radiance, Call Upon the Sun, and Blinding Light from Light; and Discover the Guilty from Judgment.

Starting with specific powers in mind can be a little confusing with this system, forcing the player to work backwards from the powers in question through the Primal Powers and then to Aspects. But it works perfectly well in the more thematic method of starting with general godly domains and working toward the specifics.

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Mind you, this system isn’t flawless. Those Quality and Drawback requirements mildly annoyed me, for example, since they may force players to do an unexpected reshuffling of points very late in the character creation process.

And the shapechanging powers seem awfully weak, since they provide only the extra physical abilities of the new shape – including flight, claws, and the drawbacks of small size, but not the benefits of large size – without changing the character’s attributes. And given the lack of animal stats in the book, any of those physical abilities beyond the most obvious and general will require the GM to make them up whole cloth.

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Playtest: Changing into a lion, for example, did basically nothing for the Avatar of Mahes given the rules provided. I was, at least, able to borrow stats for his claws in this form from the bestiary in Terra Primate. Now, if he’d been the avatar of a bird god, I could have given him the ability to fly, albeit without guidelines in the book for his flying speed. But if he’d been the avatar of an elephant god, his elephant shape would have been no stronger or tougher than that of his human form. That just doesn’t seem right to me.

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The only thing that truly irked me about this system, however, is the fact that some – but not all – of the powers require the Primal Skill for use. This is a problem because the total cost of individual powers can skyrocket depending upon how much use the character's getting out of the Primal Skill – especially since, like Martial Arts, it's a “special” skill that costs double the usual amount.

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Playtest: For example, another player created an Inheritor – the son of Hermes, to be specific. All of the powers he chose did not require the Primal Skill. He toyed with the idea of giving his character one that did… but that would have made the power in question outrageously expensive as compared to his other powers, since he'd have had to pay the cost of the Primal Skill just to use that one power in addition to the cost of the power itself.

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The section concludes with a small sampling of pantheons with their gods and Aspects, thereby speeding character creation if the player has a specific listed god in mind.

Spirits

A quick overview of spirits in the setting imported from the WitchCraft corebook, including a sample stat block for generic elementals.

The Servant Races

A discussion of the Ethereals and Fiends first detailed in the Abomination Codex, with sample stats for the basic Angelic Ethereal and Fiend.

True Immortals

These are the same Highlander-like reincarnated Atlanteans featured in the Abomination Codex, so I'll refer you to my review of that supplement for their general description. However, in my Armageddon review playtest, I had the chance to see an Immortal PC in action. And not just any Immortal, either, but a Shetarri warrior – a breed of Immortal created for combat, lacking access to all but a handful of special Immortal powers but more than making up for this with huge attribute bonuses, increased Life Points, and natural armor.

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Playtest: Due to the lack of powers on which to spend Metaphysics, the Shetarri warrior's player ended up maxing out his attributes, then stocking up on Atlantean Arcana (the Immortal-created weird science also described in the Abomination Codex). The end result was a super-strong, super-resilient killing machine decked out in adamantium armor and packing an adamantium sword – in purely physical terms, easily the toughest PC in the group. This surprised me, since Immortals – even Shetarri warriors – would seem to be relatively low on the supernatural totem pole.

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Armageddon turns the Dark Apostle and his forces into a completely believable threat within the context of the setting, fleshing out the strategies and tactics of both the Army and the Church of Revelations. Life in the occupied territories gets a particularly close and disturbing look, examining the plight of "infidels" and answering the question of how a force bent on reshaping reality itself accomplishes that task while keeping the locals pacified. I particularly like the subtleties involved at the early stages of occupation, with "rights" seemingly maintained, the monsters tucked away in the background, and converted news anchors dripping propaganda like poisoned honey.

The various branches of the military and police forces also get their own subsections, including the integration of the supernatural in both and the internal rifts this can cause. (Even the human servants of the Church aren’t always pleased to mingle with monsters and zombies, it seems.) All of this contributes to a foe far more frighteningly real than a pulp army of supernatural Nazis.

The chapter concludes with a decent sampling of Leviathan's minions. Along with standard Army of Revelations soldiers and agents, these include the following:

• The Adepts are the warrior priests of Leviathan and are ranked by Circles, with each Circle giving the Adept more powers and Taint deformities. Among these powers are Taint blasts, Taint-powered Invocations, increased attributes, and the ability to create Arisen and summon Lesser and Greater Shaitan at increasingly scary rates. At higher levels, Adepts are a match for even the most powerful supernatural creatures. (The chapter lists benefits gained at Circles 1-6, with higher Circles being the stuff of fearful rumor.)

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  Playtest: In my playtest adventure, the group encountered two Adepts: one of the First Circle and one of the Fourth. The former was just a nasty but minor surprise – a teenage girl who suddenly started throwing Taint bolts around. The latter, however, managed to go head-to-head with the entire group for several rounds. And that’s not counting the Arisen he created and the Greater Shaitan he called for backup. In truth, if I’d wanted to be mean, I could have had him create a whole lot more Arisen than I did to wear down the group.

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• The Arisen are the goon zombies the Army of Revelations uses as shock troops – bright enough to use a gun, but not much else. On the other hand, their numbers can grow wildly under the right circumstances (see above).

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  Playtest: In effect, these are clumsy humans with abnormally high Life Points. Given the amount of damage my Legendary-level PCs could dish out, they didn’t fare much better than humans, either. Using them with the optional Buffy-style no-rolling combat scores proved pretty boring, since they’d only get in a hit if the PCs really fouled up a roll.

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• The Sheol are also undead, but a whole lot more intelligent and powerful – think in terms of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees with Special Forces training, Taint mutations, and access to the best military hardware on the planet. What's worse, many of them are resurrected Nazis, including Third Reich hero Otto Skorzeny. In other words: high-tech undead mutant Cthulhu Nazis. (That’s just plain fun to say.)
• The Shaitan are Taint spirits that, when summoned, possess, mutate, and enlarge to human or greater size the bodies of any convenient lower life form – insects, vermin, bacteria, etc. They come in Lesser and Greater varieties, both of which do not take the standard double damage for any slashing/stabbing damage that gets past their armor. Other than that, their powers can vary. (The sample Greater Shaitan, for example, can produce an unnatural song that terrifies its listeners.) Lesser Shaitan are tough enough to give Legendary PCs a good fight with only a slight numeric adavantage, and a single Greater Shaitan can threaten even the most powerful characters.

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  Playtest: Strangely, the Lesser Shaitan in my game seemed to the players to be more of a threat than they really were. This was simply because the creatures could soak up what seemed to the players to be ridiculous amounts of damage, but in truth, they could only stand up to the PCs’ punishment for 2-3 rounds. On the flipside, the creatures really weren’t doing all that much damage to the PCs. If anything, the biggest threat they posed was in the form of boredom – the adventure I used called for a swarm of two dozen of the bastards, and moping them up would have taken an awfully long time if the PCs hadn’t decided to retreat.

  The Greater Shaitan I threw at the PCs, by contrast, posed a much more serious threat, shrugging off all manner of attacks and coming quite close to snipping the Avatar of Mahes in two with one of its mighty lobster-like claws. This is rather important to keep in mind, since even Third Circle Adepts can summon one of these monstrosities in a mere ten minutes and for a like amount of Taint. For this reason, I’d say that there are no minor encounters involving mid- to upper-level Adepts who’ve had any time at all to prepare.

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As if these weren’t enough for players to worry about, a sidebar explains how Taint can power the abilities of Gifted humans and supernatural creatures who fall under the sway of Leviathan. I’m very grateful for this addition, since it’s hard to imagine why a creature of Essence would work for the corruption of reality without being corrupted itself. This way, all of the beings in this book and in WitchCraft and its supplements may be friend or foe in the war against the Dark Apostle.

Unlike in the wide-open setting of its sister game WitchCraft, what to do in Armageddon might seem fairly straightforward: stop Leviathan at all costs. Nevertheless, this chapter explores the possibilities of the setting from several intriguing angles. There are the front lines of the war, of course, but the book suggests adventure ideas both on the home front and in occupied territory as well – some of which could involve foes unrelated to Leviathan. Three adventure seeds appear as well: a desperate search for a prophetic Seer before the Church of Revelations assassins find him first, a mystery involving a mass supernatural death in America’s heartland disturbingly like that from the Dark Apostle’s first appearance in Germany, and a meeting of supernatural allies plagued by dissention and Church of Revelations sabotage.

What’s missing is an actual introductory adventure. Given the general meatiness of the book, I’m not going to complain too loudly about that. And besides, the quick-start rules (available for free download here) include an adventure quite good enough to serve this function. I used it for this review, in fact.

STYLE

Armageddon is a nicely portable 7.25" x 9.25" hardcover with a rather arresting color cover (viewable here) and a black and white interior. The art maintains a high standard throughout, although I do regret that many of the large images from the first edition had to be reduced to a fraction of their original size to fit the current format. It's also too bad that Tim Bradstreet's art from the first edition wasn't included for whatever reason, although the new work makes up for the loss.

In terms of layout and organization, the book is light years beyond its predecessor and generally up to Eden standards. (The index alone is a huge improvement.) The one step backwards is this edition’s scattering of the first edition’s more detailed version of the cosmology into relevant chapters of the book. While this does make some sense organizationally, figuring out the precise (pre-)historical relationships between angels, pagan gods, immortals, and the like now takes some page flipping to piece together, the decent overview in Chapter Two notwithstanding.

The writing's clear and engaging, despite more than a few typos carried straight over from the first edition. The fiction beginning each chapter sets the mood well and highlights the many possibilities of the setting.

CONCLUSION

Before its publication, I read this book described as the ultimate incarnation of standard Unisystem. I'd have to agree. The whole All Flesh Must Be Eaten line may cover a broader array of subjects, but none of the other Unisystem books covers as much in one pop as does Armageddon. Only the availability of WitchCraft as a free download keeps me from calling this a "must-buy" for Unisystem fans, since that game covers a decent chunk of the same territory; however, with all of the military and metaphysical goodies unique to this book, I can call it a "really, really should-buy" without the slightest hesitation.