Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

In early May, Sierra invited the gaming press to the Magic Castle in Hollywood to take an early look at Arcanum. Prepped in formal dress and surrounded by the trappings of an old private restaurant and magic club, we knew that the ambiance was clearly intended to set a unique mood, to take us outside the realm of ordinary expectations. It was an appropriate setting. For Arcanum will be strongly set apart from the pack for the simple reason that it takes an uncommon tack in the RPG world, focusing on open-ended reactive storytelling and grafting turn-of-the-century technology onto a standard fantasy setting.

Arcanum's developer certainly isn't a stranger to innovative RPG concepts. In April 1998 Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson of the Fallout development team left Interplay to start their own design house, Troika Games. 1997's Fallout was a huge success because of its unconventional role-playing: the ability to stray outside the main story arc, to do evil and unanticipated things, and generally, to play in a very new interactive environment. There have been relatively few computer role-playing games to give you the opportunity to play in a nonfantasy world. In pen-and-paper role-playing games there are many futuristic, real-world, and alternate universe settings to choose from. But outside the postapocalyptic classic wasteland, there have been few nonfantasy RPGs for the PC. In Arcanum we have a look that's a mixture of moody 19th-century Victorian with Tolkienesque fantasy, which has been dubbed "steampunk."

The game begins as the zeppelin you were taking to a vacation destination crashes to the ground. A follower of a local sect eyes you carefully and takes you as his promised messiah, who it is written will appear in a fiery descent. So starts a story rife with conflicts within a society traditionally dominated by magic that has suddenly been brought into an industrial revolution, with all the awe-inspiring technology that entails.