Let's Play Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura! Demiboy vs. Backlog, Game #15

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura is a peculiar title. It was in some ways the last of a dying breed, occupying a similar historical niche to other isometric, choice-driven RPGs like Planescape: Torment: rich, complex, highly replayable, and yet commercially unsuccessful, doomed to a sort of long-tail cult status. It didn't help that Arcanum had terrible, outdated visuals, its animation and color palette ugly even by the standards of games five years its senior.

Thankfully, I am not one to insist on beauty. I've many times attempted to play through Arcanum, and not once have the graphics been a factor in my bailing out. Rather, it's got the typical downfalls of massive open-world games: so many side quests it's easy to get overwhelmed, common tasks necessary for crafting and advancement quickly becoming tedious (hunting through trash cans for tech materials...), and occasional poor signposting for the main plot. The furthest I ever got, I stalled out because I hadn't held on to some trivial sell-for-cash item that turned out to be a key ingredient in a mandatory recipe.

And yet now it rolls to the top of my randomized queue, so for the sake of this blog--and nostalgia!--I will give it one more go. My plan is to use a loose "Let's Play" format, unfolding my progress over several posts, explaining what I can of the game's most interesting mechanics and design choices. I'm not obsessive, so you won't find "optimal" strategies or a comprehensive accounting of secrets here, but I hope it'll be informative and entertaining!

First off, if you intend to play this game yourself, you'll likely need to follow this tutorial to get it to run cleanly on modern systems. When I tried to run it using the stock game from GOG.com, not only was the resolution tiny, but it had awful FPS drops and screen shearing issues. Props to the folks who work thankless hours to keep these games playable, 15 years later!

When winding up to play this game, I put out a call for character build suggestions, particularly summoning the knowledge of inestimable game player and designer Caelyn Sandel, who introduced me to Arcanum in college. Her thoughts went thus:

Half-orc technologist. Miracle operation background. starting disciplines in therapeutics and exolosives.

Hers was the most detailed suggestion I got, and it sounds fun, so I'm going with it! Let's start up the game. You have the option of picking from several pregenerated characters if you don't want to think too hard, but the creation process is quite fun, so I'm going the DIY route following Caelyn's advice.

Your first set of decisions are gender, race, and background. There are no "character classes" in Arcanum; the "what you do" part of character creation is a fine-grained skill system. Being a Half-Orc gives me improved Strength and combat skills at the expense of social and mental attributes. I can be a lady, so I do (I'm a demiboy, I take what chances to "be a girl" I can get!). This has a minor statistical effect, minus Strength and plus Constitution, because you can't make a game with a Victoriana flavor without regressive gender essentialism, I suppose. The biggest thing here, though, is the background: Miracle Operation, pictured. Being a wealthy but until-recently-disabled child almost completely inverts the expected stat spread of being a Half-Orc--no longer a physical powerhouse, young Amaira is instead a sharp-eyed and bright-minded waif. There are many other backgrounds available, from "Professional Knife Thrower" to "Beat with an Ugly Stick," covering a wide range of mechanical effects. Miracle Operation is one of the most extreme.

Next we get five "points" to customize our build. There's a lot to unpack here, so let me extract a few highlights:

• You can add to attributes, but you can't sell them down. This limits the minmaxing you can do at character creation, in a way I find pretty slick--if you want to dump a stat to improve something else, you need to pick a Background that does what you want, with no finer tuning possible.
• You have four categories of things to spend on: attributes, skills, technologies, and spells. (You can also buy up Health and Fatigue, but I'm pretty sure that's never worthwhile.) Attributes run a bunch of derived stats and act as prerequisites for the other three categories. Skills drive success chance on various tasks, from fighting with different weapon types to gambling. Technologies unlock crafting recipes and let you use schematics to learn more. Spells are tiered magickal effects.
• The meter at the right side is crucial: it's your Magickal and Technological Aptitude scale. The more magickal you are, from spending on spells and old-worldsy skills, the stronger your magic is and the less reliable technology is in your hands. The more technological you are, from learning tech crafts and buying up sciency skills like Firearms and Repair, the more likely spells you use or are targeted by will fizzle.
• ...I don't know why I'm only 15 years old. That's a little squiggy.

Following Caelyn's advice, I buy two ranks in the Herbology tech college and one rank in Explosives. The former lets me make piles and piles of Health and Fatigue restoring items, good both for their consumable properties and as sale goods. The latter lets me make Molotovs, a brutal early-game thrown weapon. I also bump Dexterity from 5 to 6 so I can take a skill rank in Throwing.

Lastly, we get to buy some equipment. The dress comes free; heading out naked would be disastrous! I grab a boomerang for my Thrown skill (thrown items might as well be magickal, given how reliably they return. No ammo management!), a set of boots for some cheap armor protection, and a nice steel dagger as an emergency melee weapon. Ready for adventure!

Next time, our airship crashes, a gnome dies, and we befriend a cultist. Until then, check out the SteemGC tag for more gaming content!

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