TEXT: The Gambler
  new avatar
  Attributes: The Gambler walks the line 
  between certainty and chaos, and as he passes, 
  events are resolved into one category or the 
  other. Risking armies, tossing dice, pitching 
  pennies, floating IPOs . . . as long as there’s a 
  big risk for a big return, it’s meat and drink for 
  the Gambler. This archetype is also sometimes 
  called “the daredevil.”
   
  Confidence is the essence of the Gambler. 
  Other people are content to submit to fate and 
  hope they can just get through life’s unpredict-
  able times. The Gambler thinks (rightly or 
  wrongly) that he can beat fate, buck the odds, 
  and come out ahead. Sometimes he’s even right.
   
  The Gambler accepts that there’s luck and 
  uncertainty, but believes he can overcome it 
  with skill and nerve and moxie. The odds insist 
  that the test pilot is asking for it, but if that 
  pilot’s a daredevil, he’s betting his skills are 
  sufficient to overcome the random factors. He’s 
  betting his life.
   
  Lesser Gamblers bet lesser stakes, but 
  they’re always trying to come out ahead. 
  They’re betting that they know when to put 
  the dice down, betting that they can track the 
  face cards in the shoe, betting that they can 
  beat you at darts, or that they can predict the 
  vagaries of the stock market. 
   
  Essentially, then, Gamblers place them-
  selves in uncertain situations hoping that they 
  can take control of them for personal gain. 
  “Uncertain” does not mean random: A chess 
  match is uncertain until the king is in check-
  mate, but there is no element of randomness to 
  it. Similarly, “gain” does not necessarily mean 
  money. Military men often gamble with lives 
  and nations in hope of victory. Some daredevils 
  are simply after the thrill.
   
  At her best, the Gambler is daring, bold, 
  vital and unpredictable. But the downside of 
  the Gambler comes out when she misjudges her 
  own capabilities, overestimates her ability to 
  control the situation, or simply doesn’t know 
  when to fold ‘em.
  Taboos: The daredevil is the master of the 
  calculated risk. Therefore, taking risks that 
  Written by Greg Stolze. ©2003 Atlas Games. This 
  Adobe Acrobat document is made available for 
  personal use only.
  
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  are wholly random is taboo unless there’s no 
  other reasonable choice. (This also means that 
  gaining an entropomantic charge violates the 
  Gambler taboo.) 
  Symbols: Dice, playing cards, slot machines, 
  racing forms, poker chips and roulette wheels 
  are all fairly obvious symbols. Less obvious 
  symbols include revolvers and derringers, crash 
  helmets, and the Mandelbrot set.
  Suspected Avatars in History: Evel Knievel, 
  Christopher Columbus, Carlos Mortenson, and 
  a whole lot of test pilots.
  Masks: Coyote (Navajo), Glooskap (Algon-
  quian), Hermes (Greek), Maui (Oceana), Eshu 
  (Yoruba), Loki (Norse)
  Channels:
  1-50%: Whenever the Gambler know-
  ingly chooses to enter a risky situation, he can 
  make a skill roll. If the roll succeeds, he can 
  get a hunch about his next roll. If he’s involved 
  in a formal gambling situation, he can make 
  this attempt before every hand in a card game, 
  every roll of the dice, or every spin of the rou-
  lette wheel. 
  51-70%: The Gambler’s hunches have 
  improved to the point that she may make a 
  hunch roll without making the skill roll. This 
  only applies to efforts she’s aware she’s going 
  to make, however. In a fi ght, for example, the 
  player has to decide whether she’s dodging or 
  shooting before she rolls. However, she can 
  roll and then decide which target she’s aiming 
  at, or whether she’s going to try any kind of 
  trick shot. Similarly, someone who enters a 
  car race can roll her Drive skill in advance and 
  get an idea of how her luck is tending. But if a 
  sniper is laying in wait for a Gambler, his target 
  can’t use her Gambler skill on the Notice roll 
  because she couldn’t anticipate making it. 
  If you have this channel, you can never 
  simply roll two dice and say “I’ll use those for 
  my next skill check.” You have to know which 
  skill you’re using before you can hunch the roll. 
  71-90%: In the same way that powerful 
  merchant avatars can facilitate the exchange 
  of intangible qualities like health, ability or 
  lifespan, Gambler avatars can enable willing 
  participants to literally bet their lives. (The 
  Gambler does not have to be a player in the 
  game: She just has to set it up.) Everyone 
  involved in the bet must agree beforehand on 
  the stakes, and each participant must shake 
  hands with the Gambler. Furthermore, no one 
  can bet anything he does not have. (“I bet the 
  president’s life on it!”) Welshing on a bet of 
  this sort — deliberately or accidentally — robs 
  a character of its free will. Every second of that 
  person’s life must now be dedicated to making 
  good on its debt, until he either succeeds or 
  dies trying. (Some people have even returned 
  from the grave as demons, but this is rather 
  rare.) In the hypothetical case of the president’s 
  life, if that person lost he would have to try 
  his hardest to assassinate the president. (Note 
  to all Unknown Armies players. Don’t try to 
  assassinate the president.) 
  As GM, there’s a couple stylistic ways you 
  can handle this: The subtle and the symbolic. 
  If you do it subtly, a given individual simply 
  states what he’s risking, or writes it down on 
  a notecard and puts that in the pot. Not very 
  fl ashy, but fairly true to the UA idea of how 
  magick looks. 
  If your tastes are a little glitzier, when an indi-
  vidual bets something intangible, a symbolic rep-
  resentation of the wager emerges from her mouth 
  and can be placed on the table, lightly coated 
  with saliva. Someone betting a dipsomancy skill, 
  for example, mought pull a shot glass out of 
  his mouth. Betting your General Athletics skill? 
  Could be a miniature tennis racket. When the 
  winner gathers the pot together, the little fi gurines 
  dissolve into nothing in his hands. 
  91+%: Whenever someone successfully 
  attacks the daredevil with a skill that is lower 
  than the Gambler’s avatar skill, there’s a fl at 
  50% chance that the attack fails. This protec-
  tion extends only to attacks that could kill or 
  physically harm. Psychological or social attacks 
  don’t count. Blast spells, and stuff like Warp-
  ing, can be countered, but spells that confuse, 
  inhibit or alter emotions are not affected. 
  
  NEW AVATAR: THE GAMBLER
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  Daredevils and Chaos Mages
  It may be instructive to compare Gamblers 
  with entropomancers. Superfi cially, they’re 
  quite similar. They both take risks, and they’re 
  both fascinated with the unpredictable ele-
  ments of life. Entropomancy, however, is 
  predicated on a steady state model of chance. 
  If I accept X bad luck now (by taking a dumb 
  risk to charge up) I can rely on X good luck in 
  the future (when I spend the charge to change 
  an event from random to determined). It’s 
  almost mathematical, for bodybags. Power is 
  a positive number that must be balanced by a 
  negative number. Good luck + bad luck = 0. 
  Certainty + Risk = 0. It must be thus, or entro-
  pomancy falls apart.
  Gambler avatars can’t gain entropomancer 
  charges without violating their Gambler taboo, 
  because they can’t take wholly random risks. 
  At the same time, someone who was both a 
  Gambler avatar and a chaos mage couldn’t 
  invite someone to gamble with him without 
  violating his entropomancy taboo. This is 
  because Gamblers always think they can win. 
  They think they have an edge. It could be 
  skill, guts, a psychological edge, the fact that 
  they have a plan — anything. But because he 
  believes he has an advantage, asking some-
  one to gamble with him is tantamount to 
  asking him to take a risk the Gambler himself 
  wouldn’t — the risk of playing against the 
  Gambler.
  This is not to say that Gamblers and 
  body bags hate one another. Not at all. They 
  disagree, but they have the same interests. 
  Gamblers tend to think chaos mages are easy 
  marks because they’re willing to bet big and 
  stupid (since they get a charge win or lose). 
  Chaos mages tend to think Gamblers are fools 
  for thinking they can get the better of chance. 
  But in general, they get along like fl ies and 
  shit.
  Strange Stakes
  With Gamblers, it’s possible — indeed, 
  common — for people to risk things that are 
  not, ordinarily, transferable. What happens 
  when someone without an appropriate obses-
  sion wins a bodybag’s skill at magick? What 
  happens to someone who achieved Avatar 
  attunement through luck, not effort? What are 
  the consequences of gambling away a year of 
  life — or all of it?
  First things fi rst: Skill that are won through 
  magickal gambling are still limited by the 
  governing stat. If you win Weight Lifting 60% 
  and your Body score is only 40, you’re going 
  to actually have Weight Lifting 40%. Sorry. It’s 
  kind of like winning ten pounds of gold and 
  only having a fi ve pound sack. 
  If you win a skill you already have, the new 
  skill gets added to your old skill total, up to 
  the limit of the governing stat. Two guys with 
  Athletics 15% can get into a game, and one 
  can emerge with Athletics 30%.
  If an adept wins another school of magick, 
  it’s blown-gasket time, as described on page xx 
  of Unknown Armies. If a non-adept picks up 
  a magician’s skill at entropomancy or por-
  nomancy or whatever, s/he faces signifi cant 
  Unnatural and Self checks — probably equal 
  to the tens place of the skill. (Win a 57% skill, 
  take a pair of rank 5 challenges.) Furthermore, 
  it’s probably not the individual’s obsession 
  skill, and without that kind of consuming 
  focus, the winner gradually loses that initial 
  understanding of What It’s All About. In game 
  terms, the skill degrades by 1 point every 
  couple days — so our sample 57% winner is 
  going to be back to zilch in six months or so.
  Avatar attunement is a bit better, unless the 
  winner is already an avatar. If that’s the case, 
  the new avatar skill — the spoils of the game 
  — supplants and supersedes her previous alle-
  giance. Again, a Self check roughly equivalent 
  to the tens place of one of the Avatar skills (the 
  highest one) are appropriate. 
  In any case, someone who just receives an 
  Avatar skill is unlikely to know the taboo struc-
  
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  ture and the reinforcing behaviors and motifs. 
  The skill is, in all likelihood, not long for this 
  world anyhow. But if the winner is crafty or a 
  quick study, there’s no natural fading effect (as 
  there are with magick schools). 
  If you bet a year off your life, you get a 
  year older, immediately. The winner gets a year 
  younger. Not too complicated, unless one of 
  you is close to puberty when all the massive 
  growth spurts happen. Someone who “fast 
  forwards” through puberty via Gambler (or 
  Merchant) channels may wind up with stunted 
  growth and incomplete physical development.
  Finally, what happens if you bet your life 
  and lose?
  Well you die, obviously. But the guy who 
  won now has two lives. Meaning, the next 
  time he dies, he returns to life, unharmed, after 
  about 24 hours.
  Neat, huh?
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Unknown Armies [multi]/Unknown Armies [1st & 2nd ed]/Unknown Armies Avatar - The Gambler.pdf