In The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game, you play a member of an investigative team researching reports of supernatural activity. For 200 years, the Magnus Institute has quietly collected statements from people of all walks of life, detailing their personal experiences with the supernatural, and you're part of that organization or one very much like it.
Your records are filled with disparate statements of bizarre occurrences, usually with a very chilling edge. Statements discuss people (or creatures?) such as an odd figure that beckons drunken pubgoers into an alleyway - never to be seen again; items like a meat grinder that somehow compels its users to merrily feed it their own limbs; events like a late-night subway trip in which the train burrowed itself into the earth, all but crushing its lone occupant.
And books with extraordinary power, such as The Boneturner's Tale, which seems to give one who reads it the grisly power to rearrange the bones of others. An astonishing number of these books seem to trace back to a particular private library, owned by the enigmatic Jurgen Leitner.
A game with such a rich background evokes characters equally vibrant and deep. These character portfolios, which are typically around 24 pages, do the job of a character sheet, but also give you room for notes, sketches, and details. You can keep a campaign journal, make maps and location notes, jot down details about people and creatures you encounter, or flesh out your character's backstory and relationships.
Your organization is dedicated to cataloging and researching these incidents-not fighting or confronting the supernatural. But it's becoming clear these events aren't as disparate as they first appear. There are connections between them - connections that suggest existential dangers to the world as we know it.
How will you combat them, when simply coming to understand these dark forces threatens to bring you under their influence?
