Hi, I'm working on a d20 arcanum campaign and I was wondering if anyone currently visiting this site had tried anything similar before.
I did, but it sort of unraveled and became Advanced D&D with electric lightbulbs. It's probably because noone had the drive to maintain an Arcanum setting in my group. You might have better luck, though. One thing we did was use the points normally reserved for feats as technology and magical disciplines; so instead of having say, ten ranks of swimming or jumping, we had a doctorate in Herbology or all five ranks of Dark Necomancy, depending on class and background.
I have a great steampunk source book called steam & sorcery that I'm adapting for the game. I won't be attempting to rewrite the magic or feat systems though. What I'm currently trying to do is figure out the best way to replicate the magic-technology conflict. I'm thinking of making every levels of technology dependant skills or class increase levels of magic resistance and spell failure. Likewise, magic related skills and classes will increase malfunction chance.
Ah...that might've helped in my case. All I had was Arcanum and its instruction manual to form a campaign and hope it worked out. It started ok, and we actually played Arcanum with dice rolls for a few weeks. Then, it just got too hard for us to find new things to do in Arcanum, because I had already beaten the game (on my PC) about four times and the world got pretty limited.
For all who found this thread: We have another one for this topic ^^ http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=14454