Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura: Difference between revisions

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 aligmentalignment, 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.

''Arcanum'' has a level cap of 50, which encourages players to specialize in very specific types of magic or technology. (Howeverhowever, a no-CD-patch combined with a level cap remover patch can quickly fix that.). Uniquely, knowledge of technology in ''Arcanum'' disables magical aptitude, and vice versa, so that the player will always have to choose between the two (or find a very, very careful balance) and (eventually) be shunned by the other branch.

* [[100% Heroism Rating]]: The PC[[Player Character]] 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[[Player Character]] 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[[Player Character]] on his or her karma meter).

* [[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"."

** The other [[Aesop]] is "even when life is suffering, it's still worth living"."

** {{spoiler|Arronax has spent the last 2000 years imprisoned in a magical shell, as punishment for attempting to destroy Kerghan when he was first banished to the void.}}.

* [[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]].}}.

* [[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—guess who's responsible for that.

* [[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.

** St. Mannox was believed to have done this. {{spoiler|He was actually murdered, making this a subversion.}}.

** {{spoiler|In some of the [[Multiple Endings]], the PC[[Player Character]] can do this.}}.

** {{spoiler|Virgil was a thief and gambling addict until his brother was killed to collect on his debts. He claims that he himself was "an evil man" when Virgil tells the PC[[Player Character]] this.}}.

** A bigger one is {{spoiler|Arronax, who can be recruited during the final part of the game, tells you about how much he regrets the horrible crimes he committed in his youth, and how having 2000 years to stand in a single spot and think about it has that effect on you.}}.

** {{spoiler|The Vendigroth Device is capable of killing a mage with no possibility of resurrection... except it only works if the mage has a certain ability which few are powerful enough to master, and that they typically only use when critically injured, so you have to go to the trouble of killing them normally first.}}.

* [[Beef Gate]]: The first town has a very literal [[Beef Gate]];... that is, a gate guarded by three [[Beef Gate]] characters. All but a very few character builds can get by them without abusing the system to make them incapable of fighting at full strength. Trying to go to the various cities out of order can potentially land you in random encounters well above your ability to handle, but this is hit and miss.

** Even extremely weak character builds can generally eliminate the initial [[Beef Gate]] gang with careful exploration -: the town is full of various items [[Kleptomaniac Hero|ripe for the taking]], including at least one bundle of dynamite and two stun grenades.

* [[Bomb Throwing Anarchist]]: Subverted. Donn Throgg's resistance movement resembles some of the more militant socialist movements from the mid-to-late 19th century, but Throgg isn't really a bad guy, and he saw violence as the only way to change the hideous working conditions in the factories of Tarant. He can be persuaded to pursue his goals in a peaceful manner. {{spoiler|This ends up with him becoming the future president of the Unified Kingdom, and judging from the art style on his posters, he's running a socialist platform.}}.

** The very first side quest that can be found involves a spirit stuck on the mortal plain, in pain every moment. {{spoiler|While said spirit very much deserves this fate, the fact that the mortal world is "painful" is the big bad's motivation.}}.

** There's also the humble Balanced Sword and Featherweight Axe, a pair of simple and easily-obtainable melee weapons that are easy to use, extremely powerful, light, and fast, and so will usually be a technological melee fighter's primary armament for most of the game.

* [[Breakable Weapons]]: A sword is not a proper tool for opening stubborn doors and chests. Neither are your fists, and it will hurt like hell to boot. Bring an ax. [[BFG|Or an elephant gun.]].

* [[The Chosen One]]: Almost from the moment the game begins you're told that you're the reincarnation of Nasrudin, a messianic figure. Later subverted when {{spoiler|you actually meet Nasrudin, who's still alive and living in seclusion}}. Or possibly played straight, since {{spoiler|the exact wording of the prophecy says that the ''spirit'' of Nasrudin will be reborn, rather than the guy himself. Since Nasrudin was a force of order and righter of wrongs in his time, and you can become one too, it could be argued that you revived that spirit alright.}}.

* [[Chronic Backstabbing Disorder]]: {{spoiler|The Master instructor of Backstabbing}} will stab you in the back, figuratively and literally.

* [[Cowboy Cop]]: Doc Roberts. Even though he isn't an actual cop. {{spoiler|He'll take the job from the useless sheriff if you save the town and help him stop the bank robbery, though.}}.

* [[Cryptic Conversation]]: Virtually everything the Silver Lady has to say. It takes at least a second playthrough to fully decipher her visions, which include not only advice on where to go next, but also tidbits of backstory as well as hints to the true nature of the villain. {{spoiler|Her mention of a lone figure floating above a plane of mirrored glass is worth remembering when listening to Kerghan's motivations}}.

* [[Cutscene Power to the Max]]: Well, [[Backstory]] power to the max, anyway, overlapping with [[Informed Ability]]. Arronax {{spoiler|single-handedly destroyed the largest and greatest ''technological'' city of the Age of Legends}}. In-game, he can't even use Disintegrate (which he actually does use in a cutscene). It mostly amounts to a game engine limitation. Since all characters run on the same type of build (that is to say, they function as you do), it's impossible for him to be as powerful as advertised. Still not a sufficient excuse, though, because there are other characters in the game who are legitimately more powerful than he is, so someone overlooked something with him.

* [[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.}}.

* [[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]].

* [[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.}}.

** Trellian, known as The First Assassin, severs an alliance between the assassins' guild he leads, The Molochean Hand, and the Derian-Ka, a cult of necromancers, when he learns of the atrocities committed by the cult's founder, Kerghan, and leads the Hand in a war to purge the Derian-Ka from existence. {{spoiler|In the present day, The Hand's current leader, Gideon Laiar, will do the same to the Dark Elves of T'Sen Ang if you tell him they want to bring back their leader-in-exile Arronax.}}.

** {{spoiler|Vollinger, a Hand assassin who you can recruit as a follower, supposedly gets sickened if you take him to a vivisection laboratory/factory farm which the gnomes of Tarant used to [[Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil|force-breed]] Half-Ogres.}}.

** 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.]].

*** 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.

** More of a "Final Mook Preview,", but one quest in Blackroot involves shutting down a portal {{spoiler|to the Void, the game's final dungeon}}. During it, you fight monsters normally not seen till the final dungeon. When you kill them, more spawn, changing to different monsters after you've dealt with enough of one type. Though they run out eventually, [[Peninsula of Power Leveling|leveling here is pretty quick]], enough to get you near the top in one go.

* [[Gay Option]]: Seducing a lonely widow is harder if you're also a woman, but it's certainly doable. Then there's the female [[The Dragon|Dragon]], who, when faced by a female hero, is actually more likely to be the one doing the seducing. Finally, there's an actual brothel in Tarrant, which isn't that discriminating about its clients. Or its [[Squick|employees]]. Near endgame, {{spoiler|if Raven is in your party, the player is human/half-elf/elf and said the right lines to her in before she joined}}, she will have sex with the PC[[Player Character]] regardless of gender. In fact, it appears the only straight option for females are two filthy gnomes (one being a prostitution job), and the orgy in you're invited to in Stillwater for finding the cult's statue (there are some dudes lying around in the aftermath, although you're not linked to anyone specifically).

* [[A God Am I]]: The player character may become this at the end of the patched game if {{spoiler|s/he sides with Kerghan until the very last moment and then declares godhood when he demands to know the reason for the betrayal}}.

* [[Half Human Hybrids]]: Now in three flavours: half-elves, half-orcs and half-ogres. Unusually for the genre, the writers have an in-game explanation for why halfbreeds are even biologically possible (Prepre-release marketing material in the form of a fake newspaper suggests that humans and elves are really just distantly related races rather than separate species, half-ogres {{spoiler|are a eugenics experiment that has gone though countless non-viable offspring until a breeding population was produced}} while Orcs are suggested to be {{spoiler|humans that have undergone some form of mutation or deformity}}, and why only those three variants exist.

* [[Hand Cannon]]: With a large enough bore to literally quality as a 'cannon'; in [[Real Life]], anyone attempting to wield it as a pistol would shatter their own arm. [[Rule of Cool|Not that anyone cares.]].

* [[Heroic Spirit]]/[[Heroic Willpower]]: {{spoiler|Raven}} is the first character where the evil strategy of 1) murder 2) cast Conjure Spirit -... doesn't seem to work. {{spoiler|Her}} ghost doesn't feel any pain from the summoning, and actively mocks the PC[[Player Character]]'s attempts at interrogation.

* [[He Who Fights Monsters]]: The Elven Council went around righting wrongs and doing hero stuff in the Age of Legends, but [[Can't Argue with Elves|their heads got pretty swollen from all of the heroic carnage]], until {{spoiler|Arronax finally went over the edge and nuked Vendigroth in the name of the Council}}.

* [[Hidden Elf Village]]: Two of them. And four dwarf ones {{spoiler|(only one's left, though)}}. Probably more, but they're just too well hidden to be in the game. And one for super-powerful [[Designated Hero|"good"]] wizards. And one for [[Lizard Folk]].

* [[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.}}.