Pen & Paper Arcanum

Greetings my fellow gamers, I have come today with a proposal. You see, after playing this lovely game for a while, succeeding on addicting several of my mates as well, and us having the custom of gathering to role some dice and become possessed by the personalities of strange characters of whom stats are inscribed on sheets of paper, it has ocured to us that Arcanum -being a consistently complete fantastical world that combines magic and steampunk in interesting manners- would make a quite interesting choice for a world in wich we could base a series of said gatherings.

But first, being new to this digital grounds -and having used the Search function in vain- I come to this great house of role playing tonight to ask for advice, and if anyone has already made an attempt to convert the world of Arcanum into a set of rules simple enough to be used at a role playing session.

You have my gratitude just for reading this small rant, have a good day.

 

I have used Arcanum many times in my PnP sessions, but I have never converted the system; I have always used other systems. Rustbelt, for example, is a very good system and can be used or multiple scenarios.

 

And one winter, when all my electronics broke, I made a table top Arcanum using the 3rd Ed Shadowrun rules.

 

Interesting indeed..

We are thinking of a tad more ambicious project, maing a whole system, tho it won't neccesairly reflect Arcanum as a paper mirror, it should preserve it's spirit as much as possible.

Also a lot of rebalancing will probably have to be made.. Else everyone's gonna want to be an Elf mage..

 

My new hobby.

 

I love you guys.

 

I am also working on a similar project, and was just wondering how things had been progressing for you so far? How many people do you have working on the project? Do you have anything in mind for a system yet?

 

necessarily

 

Shucks...

 

Still early stages, actually a bit on hold because of the holydays and other stuff..
As for die systems.. The majority votes for d6, but I'm rooting for d10.

 

Hmmm. Were you thinking of making a dicepool based system or a single-die system more like Dungeons and Dragons?

 

Ever played L5R? I was considering adapting something like that, but I think we'll end up using something simpler and standard, like D&D or StarWars (lol)

 

I am familiar with L5R, but have never played it. I've been working on developing my own gaming system for Arcanum from the ground up. Currently I am at 35,584 words so almost to 150 pages now. If things go really well, I've got a small hope of even trying to get it published for Arcanum's 10 year anniversary. With luck, it might even happen!

 

150 pages!?

Best of lucks with it then!

 

Thank you! I've actually still got a long way to go, but I'm hoping to finish by February and then try and sell it or find a publisher.

 

I've looked int the forum a little and found this
http://www.terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/view ... a3b0b29938

does anyone know what happened of this project ?

Besides, is there any possibility to get a preview of your project, LordWinter?
I'd love to see how the thing is coming along and maybe you'd like some additional input.

Anyway, if you get it prublished i'd be interested since i'm trying to get Arcanum adapted using a mix of WoW RPG (D20 version) and GURPS

 

I cannot for the life of me imagine what that would look like! Mixing d20 and GURPs would be quite the challenge in and of itself, but adding in WoW? How does it work?

As for a preview, I'm not sure I have an easily manageable chunk to provide. If my plans for the weekend go well, I might be able to type the Character Creation chapter this weekend (I've got it in note format, but not yet written on the computer) and could potentially put that up.

The game uses a d6 dicepool mechanic where a result of 4,5 or 6 provides a success, but a result of 1 subtracts a success. This allows for the wide margin of success and failure we see in Arcanum, with higher skill dramatically reducing the odds of a critical failure. On average, characters will have a range of 3 to 7 dice for most dicepools though pools of 16 or higher are certainly possible.

Currently the core races are all present, and it is fairly easy to create mundane, magickal or technological characters. I've been trying to balance out magick and technology a bit more than in the game and provide a compelling reason to play techological characters. As soon as I've got something tangible to show, I'll post it here!

 

What's giving me the biggest trouble about creating the Character Sheet, is that, there are way too many spell and tech branches! I thought of a simple way of making it, but it'd stil be at least 4 pages..

 

The Arcanum Project

So while I really did endeavor to get this out sooner, I now have my first draft of Chapter I: Character Creation. I hope this proves interesting to read over -- it presents how to create characters, the mechanic used for rolling dice and resolving actions and the process for gaining levels. I would love some initial feedback and thoughts on what has been presented thus far. The .pdf file can be found at the following link from GoogleDocs:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1INC_YO7Tz3ZDI3NjY5Y2ItZjI0My00Y2FkLWIzMGEtMTllNzE4ODU1NzE2&hl=en

If there is anything that immediately jumps out as in need of revision, please don't hesitate to let me know!

 

Looks good, well done.

It's clear enough, I think, and sounds like fun.