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''Arcanum'' is an expansive and very open-ended [[Role Playing Game]] where Tolkienian [[High Fantasy]] meets Vernian [[Steampunk]], courtesy of the designers behind the first two ''[[Fallout]]'' games.
 
Much of ''Arcanum'' deals with [[Item Crafting]] and character building -- almostbuilding—almost everything the player finds can be customized, and [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything]]. It contains a very detailed setting and a well-designed scenario, as well as ''vast'' amounts of political backstory in the game's libraries, newspapers and legends. The game retains a cult following similar to its cousin ''[[Fallout]]'', and is additionally often very favorably compared to ''[[Baldurs Gate II]]'' and ''[[Planescape: Torment]]'', although ''Arcanum'''s detail focuses more on its setting's history and mechanisms than on its playable characters.
 
The ''[[Zeppelins from Another World|IFS Zephyr]]'' has just begun her maiden voyage, a marvelous, high-society venture through the clouds. Aboard, the cream of high society enjoys the flight, playing chess, sipping fine wine, etc. Sadly, nothing gold can last forever -- andforever—and, out of the blue, the airship is attacked by a group of ogres on fighter planes. Within moments, the vessel goes down in flames.
 
There's only one survivor, the player character -- andcharacter—and, as they crawl out of the wreckage, a dying gnome begs them to take [[MacGuffin|his ring]] to "the boy". The player character soon meets a man named Virgil, who claims to have found the reincarnation of a long lost prophet... and that's where the story properly takes off.
 
The player can join up with a large amount of playable characters. Although their personalities are often not as well-defined as those of some non-playable characters in the game, many of them are (very nicely) voiced, and they all contribute to the plot and interact with each other. Many of them are hidden, and many of them require very specific aligment, charisma stats and dialogue from the player before they even suggest joining the party. Similarly, the player often needs to meet very specific aptitude requirements before certain quests are even mentioned, meaning that no two playthroughs are the same and that each new player character will have a unique experience.
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Remarkably, the game is still being tested and patched by a squadron of devoted fans today. A new release by [[Good Old Games]] is [http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/arcanum_of_steamworks_and_magick_obscura now available], with the notorious bugs fixed and the game adapted to modern systems.
 
A sequel -- titledsequel—titled ''Journey to the Centre of Arcanum'' and using ''[[Half Life]]'''s Source engine -- [[What Could Have Been|was in its initial planning stages]], but Sierra and Valve had disagreements, and Troika's dissolution sealed the game's fate.
 
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* [[Absurdly Low Level Cap]]: The level cap of 50 can be reached before you've even finished half the game, quite easily at that.
* [[Adventurer Archaeologist]]: Franklin Payne combines this with [[Gentleman Adventurer]].
* [[Alternative Calendar]]: Averted, oddly enough--theenough—the game begins on January 1, 1885, despite this being another world.
* [[An Aesop]]: Near endgame {{spoiler|Nasrudin}} summarizes the moral of the story to Virgil: "Blind faith is bad, question everything". This holds true with the {{spoiler|Panarii religion run by the agents of its devil-figure}}, and {{spoiler|the deceptions of Min'Gorad which Loghaire admits that he should've been more suspicious of}}, and even {{spoiler|the Gnome Ogre-breeding conspiracy which only functions as long as not too many people question the mysterious increase in the Half-Ogre species}}.
** Though as with most RPGs, the aesop could just as easily be "no scheme is safe from a band of adventurers and their dog".
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* [[Anti-Villain]]: For most of the game, {{spoiler|Kerghan}} kills, tortures, and generally acts in an indisputably evil way. But when you are told his motivations for doing so, {{spoiler|particularly when Virgil confirms what he has to say}}, you can easily understand his point of view. {{spoiler|Which is kind of disturbing given that he's an [[Omnicidal Maniac]].}}
* [[Antiquated Linguistics]]: The manual is written like this. Mostly in an in-universe style.
* [[Apocalyptic Log]]: In Vendigroth you can find newspapers reporting about an elven wizard who threatened them and how they told him to screw himself. Vendigroth is now a giant lifeless wasteland -- guesswasteland—guess who's responsible for that.
* [[Arbitrary Gun Power]]
* [[Artifact of Doom]]: The Bangellian Scourge, at least story-wise ([[Gameplay and Story Segregation|in game terms, it just slashes your alignment a bit]]).
* [[Artificial Brilliance]]: The AI's capable of some pretty complex interactions. If you kill a man in the street while no guards are watching, you might think you're off scot free -- butfree—but you'd better drag the body into an alley, because if a guard on patrol spots you standing next to a corpse he'll figure out you're the killer. Also, unlike in most RPGs, if you take off your clothes and go running through the streets NPCs will actually react to your obscene behaviour.
** [[Artificial Stupidity]]: You can use the AI's proactive behavior against it, though. If an NPC spots a piece of equipment sitting around unattended, they might pick it up for themselves... and if it looks better than what they're currently using, they might equip it. Even if it's actually a cursed chainmail shirt that continually poisons its wearer. There is also a guard captain whose patrol route occasionally takes him right through a campfire. Left to his own devices, he'll walk through that fire until his platemail melts right off his back.
*** There is still no justification for picking up large, massive objects that greatly encumber the character. Like big boulders.
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* [[Death by Irony]]: {{spoiler|Kerghan's goal is to create a technological portal that will exploit [[Magic Versus Science|the fragile balance between magic and technology]] and free him from [[Sealed Evil in a Can|the void.]] The game encourages you to destroy him with the Vendigroth Device, a technological weapon which utilises the same principle to turn his own magic against him.}}
* [[Deconstruction]]: The game see-saws randomly back and forth between deconstructing and [[Reconstruction|reconstructing]] [[Heroic Fantasy]] tropes.
* [[Deconstructor Fleet]]: For the [[Steampunk]] genre. The game takes pains to [[Shown Their Work|point out the more unpleasant side]] of the Victorian era, including hideously unsafe factory working conditions, strikers being gunned down, classism, racism (try playing the game as an half-orc), eugenics -- thereeugenics—there's a ''very' uncomfortable book that talks about a way of solving the Orcish Question via use of a breeding program and removal of a 'malignant gland'. Not to mention the Half-Ogre breeding project, which has some distinctly unnerving parallels with antisemitic conspiracy theories of the time.
* [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything]]: Every voice-acted NPC has extra dialogue depending on your status. This isn't merely limited to whether your character is retarded or talking to the NPC's ghost, but also includes invisible, transformed, shrunken, and whether they're dressed as a Barbarian or completely naked.
** This also extends to the ''numerous'' ways you can solve any problem. For example, early on, you need to get a local merchant to identify who made a ring you're trying to identify. You can simply roll with his request for an item from the nearby haunted mine, hand over a rare camera in trade, butter him up with social skills, or steal his key and look through his documents in the back. If all else fails, you can even use Black Necromancy to interrogate him (or any other quest-giver related to the main plot) ''after he's dead.'' Even Virgil can be questioned this way. Talk about [[Video Game Cruelty Potential]].
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* [[Dump Stat]]: Beauty. It only really helps to keep people from being hostile on sight and resolving a ''small'' few situations without combat. You can get by with a 2 (and even maximize your Charisma).
* [[Elves Versus Dwarves]]: [[Playing with a Trope|Played with.]]
** Elves and dwarves have traditionally gotten along fairly well -- thewell—the recent industrial revolution has, in fact, caused both civilizations to dislike humans far more than each other, though elves are still a bit bitter about the dwarves letting Gilbert Bates get his hands on the steam engine. {{spoiler|However, a faction of racial supremacist elves manipulates the dwarven king by threatening war between elves and dwarves unless he banishes one of his own clans as punishment for elevating humans. Years later, the king realizes that it was not, in fact, the elves' doing.}}
** King Thunderstone points out that the two races don't get along (but are civil about it) because [[Blue and Orange Morality|their moral and ethical philosophies differ too much]] for them to understand each other properly. Ironically, if you consider the philosophies, they are actually very similar.
* [[Even Evil Has Standards]]:
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** Archery is another exception. Archers lack any high-end weapon and the skill has no particularly special use.
* [[Fantastic Racism]]:
** Everyone looks down on orcs. Elves and dwarves simply hate them; humans and gnomes use them for slave labor in a [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|direct allegory]] of black slavery. The book series "The Orcish Question", found in the Tarant library, goes into a lot of detail about both sides of the debate, including some contributions by Orcs themselves. There are many almost-explicit comparisons to Africans and to Jews in the discourse, which neatly lampshades the trope: unlike in real world racism, Orcs ''actually'' tend to have lower intelligence and a more violent nature than the authors. Odd thing, though -- ifthough—if you play a ''half''-orc they have the same base intelligence stat, and a lot of the orcs you can talk to don't really seem stupid or violent at all, just uneducated and underprivileged. [[Blatant Lies|As for the manual entry...]]
** Elves and dwarves don't especially like humans, though this is justified by the fact that humans have been making a mess of things recently. Gnomes, for some reason, are not nearly as disliked by either. Everyone likes halflings, more or less, and racism towards half-ogres is limited by the fact that it's [[Too Dumb to Live|a bad idea to tick off something that big and strong.]]
*** Racism against half-ogres is usually too subtle for them to notice. The one you meet on the Island of Despair (who was unusually intelligent, as well) didn't realize he was a factory slave until years afterwards, when he'd gotten an education and time to think about it.
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** The Unified Kingdom, [[Subverted Trope|which actually has no monarch]] and is run by a cabal of gnomish capitalists, is obviously modelled on late [[Victorian Britain]]. The fantasy races are mostly Tolkienian stereotypes.
** Before the release of the game, the official site carried several front pages for a fictional newspaper from the gameworld. One article had an amusing account of a fantasy version of the historical controversy concerning Darwinism. The gist of it was that the Elves consider themselves the oldest race on Arcanum, and are rather irritated at recent discoveries that seem to indicate that the humans and dwarves evolved first and that elves and some other races branched off from them the due to the influence of magic.
*** Talking about that, one of the in-game texts was a journal of local Archaeological Society. It turns out they are very unhappy about "heroes" [[Dungeon Crawl|raiding ancient tombs and ruined temples for magical treasures and ancient lore]], without any reverence for scientific methodology. It could be a [[Shout-Out]] to Heinrich Schliemann's methods -- butmethods—but it's a fantasy role-playing game, and we all know what the characters in every fantasy role-playing game ever excel at.
* [[Fantasy Gun Control]]: Averted in a big way--andway—and arguably played straight at the same time. Guns are considered technology, and therefore magic interferes with them. Thus, the archetypal mage cannot use a gun without it exploding in his hands.
* [[Final Boss Preview]]:
** After you visit the Isle of Despair, but before you reach the Wheel Clan, {{spoiler|Kerghan posing as}} Arronax appears before you as a phantom, taunts you and uses a spell which knocks you and all your followers unconscious.
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* [[Government Conspiracy]]: {{spoiler|The Industrial Council}} is running one of these.
* [[Great White Hunter]]: Franklin Payne.
* [[The Guards Must Be Crazy]]: Notably averted. Policeman [[NPC|NPCs]]s notice and react to bodies, as well as the presence of armed characters in the vicinity of those bodies, and may attack the player if they happen to walk in while you're standing over a fresh kill with your sword drawn.
* [[Guide Dang It]]: Recruiting the dog can be quite the hassle unless you know ''exactly'' what you're doing. Then again, it's equally possible to just stumble upon the dog by accident, since recruiting him is time-sensitive upon arrival.
** The blessing from the All-Father. You have to make blessings at the alters in a certain order, some of which have to be repeated at least once, then find the final alter buried in Vendigroth. Oh, and if you're a technologist, you better have one of your followers carry a tech-based resurrect. The All-Father kills you in the process of blessing you, then casts Resurrect to bring you back... except a 100 tech-aligned character will block the spell, thus leaving you dead if your party can't bring you back. The game does give you a book and a vague diagram which can allow you to reasonably figure it out, and trial and error allows you to realize you messed up (other gods will curse you if you do it wrong).
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* [[Hollywood Silencer]]: Although, since semi-automatic pistols have yet to be invented and normal revolvers can't be silenced, [[Reality Ensues|it can only be used on a certain custom-built firearm]].
* [[Hoist by His Own Petard]]: {{spoiler|The Vendigroth device}} exploits the unstable relationship between magick and technology to turn a mage's powers against them.
* [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters]]: Dwarven technology in human hands has propelled Arcanum into an industrial revolution, which has led to the destruction of Morbihan Forest and rendered Tarant the world's most polluted city. Dwarves in particular invoke this trope, and attempt to justify it; humans, being so short-lived compared to the non-human races, must be motivated by the fear of impending death (in other words, they want their life to mean something), driving them to greater and greater heights of progress. They rarely live long enough to see the destructive consequences of their actions.
* [[100% Heroism Rating]]: The PC gets better reaction from other characters (including shopkeepers who give them discounts) if he or she helped the inhabitants of a given settlement. Additionally, characters sometimes mention specific deeds of the PC and act accordingly. Of course, evil deeds get attention and respect of shady characters (including party members who base their decision to join the PC on his or her karma meter).
* [[I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin]]: Slightly subverted. {{spoiler|You'd expect the ring given by the dying "gnome" to be either magical or at least the key to unlocking some ancient horror. However, the signet ring is merely a clue to figuring out the identity of "the boy", and it's fully possible to identify, locate him and acquire his aid even if you let the ring be stolen within 5 minutes of obtaining it. Keeping it only allows you to sell it back to the owner for a small sum.}}
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* [[Vagueness Is Coming]]: The dying gnome at the start of the game helpfully informs you that "unimaginable evil" is coming to "destroy everyone and everything".
* [[Video Game Cruelty Potential]]:
** Use [[Charm Person|Charm Beast]] to befriend a wild animal, like a wolf or bear. Walk to the nearest town. Have your animal friend enter an occupied house while you wait outside. Magelock the door shut. Then dispel Charm Beast. (You might want to magically seal the windows, too -- youtoo—you don't want anyone to escape the wrath of [[Everything's Worse with Bears|Mr. Disoriented Grizzly.]]) Is also an effective means to assassinate someone without the guards finding out it was you (whereas if a cop NPC walks into a room and you're standing over a bloody corpse with a sword in your hand, they'll usually put two and two together and attack you).
** There's also the fact that there exists only 1 NPC in the game who can't be killed {{spoiler|(The Silver Lady)}}. Every major character can be murdered, then have their ghost summoned and interrogated. A true villain may kill the dwarf leader of the Isle of Despair, then raise his spirit just to tell him that you're going to travel to his home clan and kill everyone - oh, and that you'll drag the corpses into the daylight just to add insult to injury (sadly, you can't actually drag the corpses outside). There's almost no limit to how much cruelty you can inflict upon the populace of Arcanum.
* [[Video Game Cruelty Punishment]]:
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* [[We Buy Anything]]: Played with; vendors will only buy things related to their stock (smithy shops only buy armor and weapons, for example), except for the junk vendors, who will buy anything short of destroyed items. Get mastery in Haggle, though, and they will not only buy anything, they'll sell you the clothes off their backs.
* [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]]: {{spoiler|Kerghan wants to [[Omnicidal Maniac|kill everyone]] because he believes that the afterlife is better and more peaceful than life}}. Interestingly, that particular theory is somewhat confirmed in-game, since one of your party members {{spoiler|who dies and is resurrected}} agrees with him but still thinks that people should be allowed to choose their own fate.
* [[When All You Have Is a Hammer]]: Virtually any problem can be solved with the right application of force. Locked door? Beat it down. Guy holding an item you like? Kill him. Interdimensional portal releasing demon hoards upon the land? Whack it closed. Note that while this method may work, it is not exactly the most ''subtle'' way of doing things. Also, some of the [[Golden Ending|Golden Endings]]s for various places require that you be skilled in Persuasion, such as taking a diplomatic solution to the matter of {{spoiler|Donn Throgg}}.
* [[Wizards Live Longer]]: Played with; elves are both the most magically talented race in Arcanum, and have the longest lifespans (up to a millenium), and humans with a talent for magick live slightly longer than those without, [[All There in the Manual|according to the manual]]. On the other hand, dwarves and gnomes have respectable lifespans (600 years) despite having no natural affinity for magick, and orcs and halflings, thought to have been mutated by exposure to large amounts of magick, have shorter lifespans than the races they evolved from (40 years and 400 years, respectively).
* [[Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds]]: The writing in this game deserves credit considering that the {{spoiler|completely sane Kerghan whose primary goal is to kill absolutely ''everything'' isn't a [[Complete Monster]] in any way, but this instead. He's decided that because being alive is painful, summoned spirits suffer terribly from the experience, and the final afterlife is perfect bliss, then the logical solution is end all life. He reasons that if living is unpleasant and death peaceful, then having to live must be a terrible crime to force upon a soul and one that must be permanently removed. Remarkably if the player can explain the flaws in his philosophy he'll willingly abandon his genocidal agenda and submit to having his soul banished forever. He even shows some slight regret that he never learned how to enjoy life himself: "Perhaps some souls are destined for death; they never know how to live"}}
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