Unknown Armies and Planetary

This week, we bid goodbye to the Lord of the Rings, and move on with Unknown Armies to another link in the chain: Planetary. It’s a strange world -let’s make it stranger still!

As always, copious spoilers are to be found within.

Planetary and Unknown Armies might not appear to have much in common – at least, not on the surface. But dig a little deeper, and the parallels start to emerge. Both settings are ultimately about the Archetypal forms that populate our culture, and the desire for Transcendence at any cost.

The Century Babies of Planetary come across a lot like Godwalkers for their respective Archetypes. Perhaps they are destined to be Godwalkers – which must leave not a few pissed off followers of those Archetypes in their wake. It seems unlikely that very many of them ever ascend and take over the roles in the Invisible Clergy, but it’s possible. Elijah Snow in particular seems to be on target for his own Ascension, one of these days (when the fabled final issue of Planetary finally arrives on the stands, mayhap).

Randall Dowling, on the other hand, is someone who’s striven all their life to become a Godwalker, and sees himself as in competition with Elijah Snow for the role – foolishly, since it seems that he and Snow follow different Archetypes. Snow is the Godwalker of the Chronicler (and should he Ascend, the nature of that Archetype would change from merely recording and cataloguing to actually employing the knowledge). Dowling, on the other hand, is a would-be Godwalker of the Secret Master, and his true competition for the role is not Snow, but rather Anna Hark. (The Secret Master Archetype has been in her family for generations, but her father’s death had left the Godwalker slot vacant, with nether Hark nor Dowling able to claim it – although recent events have left Hark in a stronger position to make that claim.)

Although there’s little doubt that Alex Abel is playing his own game, it’s likely that the New Inquisition is very much an ally of the Four and their own corporate holdings – with Abel and Dowling each telling themselves that they’re letting the other one live because it’s amusing to them.

Among the other factions of the Unknown Armies world, it seems quite like that Infomancers everywhere have a certain reverence for the Drummer – and that he, in his own way, provides covert aid to the Mak Attax. The Sleepers are, more or less by default, allied to the Four, since both sides have the same goal.

And the Comte? Depending on your interpretation of him, he may either be blithely unconcerned about what is, after all, merely a turf war between two Godwalkers, or he may be on the side of those who want to keep the world strange…