Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura: Difference between revisions

* [[Adventurer Archaeologist]]: Franklin Payne combines this with [[Gentleman Adventurer]].

* [[Alternative Calendar]]: Averted, oddly enough: the game begins on January 1, 1885 despite this being another world.

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

* [[And I Must Scream]]:

* [[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... 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.

* [[Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence]]:

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

** {{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 [[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}}.

* [[Awesome but Practical]]: The game features a bullet deflecting top-hat, a modified rifle that fires spears, and a staff that harnesses the power of SCIENCE! to shoot lightning. In fact, pretty much anything made by a technologist after the first couple of levels that isn't a gun.

* [[Baleful Polymorph]]: Turning opponents into sheep is one option for mages with spells from the Morph college.

* [[Ballistic Discount]]: It's quite easy to buy something that's ridiculously expensive, then promptly kill the guy you bought it from and get your money back. This applies to weapons, but also to (for example) a ship.

** 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.

* [[Better Than It Sounds Video Games]]

** 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.

* [[Bow and Sword in Accord]]: Characters can be built who switch between guns or bows and melee weapons, but carrying multiple weapons of your chosen type is also common because [[Breakable Weapons]] is in effect and swords are no good for breaking open stubborn chests.

* [[Cast from Hit Points]]: A variation. Using magic doesn't decrease your HP, but runs out your Fatigue meter. An unwise mage can exhaust themselves into unconsciousness.

* [[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.

* [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe]]: Part of the reason why magic and technology are in opposition of each other.

* [[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... 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.

** 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]].

** Merchants have chests which are tightly locked. Only a master mage or master lockpick can open them. Of course, they're always the simple way of beating the chests open... but then the merchants never restock because you've destroyed their inventory.

* [[Disadvantageous Disintegration]]: The Disintegrate spell handily destroys your enemy's loot, as well.

* [[Does This Remind You of Anything?]]:

** Elves and dwarves have traditionally gotten along fairly well: 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]]:

** 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}}.

* [[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... 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]].

** Subverted by the half-elves who are almost universally liked and admired (and tend to become diplomats, merchants and... trophy wives because of it), except for the almost universally ''disliked'' half-orcs, who loathe them.

* [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]]:

** 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.

* [[Fantasy Gun Control]]: Averted in a big way... 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.

* [[Feelies]]: The game was originally sold in two versions: standard and with a size L t-shirt with the box-art printed on it. The price difference between those two versions was almost non-existing, so those containing the t-shirt sold out pretty quick. Nowdays, the original shirts are a highly-valued collector item, especially those in mint condition (the print was high-quality, but of really low mechanical resistance).

* [[Great White Hunter]]: Franklin Payne.

* [[The Guards Must Be Crazy]]: Notably averted. Policeman [[NPC]]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.

** 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).

* [[Guile Hero]]/[[Magnetic Hero]]: Persuasion-based characters can get anyone to do pretty much anything they want, often without charge, and get a ''lot'' of companions (around six) to do your dirty work for you. It's even possible to have a decent combat build on top of this, but you won't be using any magic or tech.

* [[Magic From Technology]]/[[Clarke's Third Law]]: Technology in this setting is capable of doing things so fantastic that it's essentially indistinguishable from magic in many ways (though magic itself is still a separate, distinct thing). A healing salve that closes gashes and mends broken bones in literally seconds? A staff that fries your foes with pinpoint-accurate bolts of lightning? A ring that gives you limited [[Super Speed]] when wearing it? A chemical concoction that can ''bring people back from the dead''? All of this and more can be yours through the wonders of [[Steampunk|late 19th Century]] [[For Science!|SCIENCE!]]

* [[The Magic Goes Away]]/[[The Magic Comes Back]]: It's implied that because of the [[Magic Versus Science]] rules discussed below, Arcanum goes through cycles of a period of high technology, a period when magic and technology coexist in uneasy balance, a period of high magic, another period of coexistence, and so on. Bates' manufacture and marketing of steam engines to the humans is causing a new age of technology to begin and magic to wane. Certain in-game books and conversations imply that magic was once stronger than it is now, and some of the relics from Vendigroth and The Iron Clan hint at what technology might achieve in the future. Although the Vendigrothian relics suggests that it is quite possible for the periods of uneasy coexistence to have both magic and technology be what the 'present day' of the game would consider high.

** A hilarious and quickly-tiresome conversation occurs every time you try to buy a train ticket, basically boiling down to "Are you a wizard?", "Are you sure you're not a wizard?", "You might be a wizard, if-" and quickly turns out to be completely redundant, since the conductor has a device that detects hazardous levels of magic before letting you board a train anyway. Conversely, simply being inside a train station instantly lowers your magicka stat.

* [[Magikarp Power]]:

** Most schools of magic work this way. The first level of a spell tree is some weak utility spell, the second is stronger and likely has some use in combat, the third is hefty, and the fifth (which requires a lot of dedicated status-requirements) is super-powerful. On top of that, a truly powerful mage needs a full 100 rating, which requires putting points into several spell trees.

* [[More Dakka]]: The Repeater Rifle is a more subdued version of this; for players desirous of further [[Dakka]], there's the fully-automatic Mechanized Gun, which can dish out an absolutely terrifying amount of damage but chews through ammo at an astonishing rate.

* [[Multiple Endings]]: In the manner of ''[[Fallout]]''.

* [[Murder the Hypotenuse]]: Inverted by {{spoiler|Wrath, Sharpe and Ivory: [[My Death Is Just the Beginning|Wrath commits suicide with a glass of poisoned wine, in the hopes that Sharpe will take the blame for his murder]]}}, the [[Unwitting Pawn|Player Character can help it along if they don't explore the quest well]].

* [[Nice Hat]]: A bullet deflecting top hat.

* [[The Obi-Wan]]: Elder Joachim to Virgil.

* [[Omnicidal Maniac]]: {{spoiler|Kerghan}}.

* [[One Size Fits All]]: Averted. Body armor comes in three sizes: medium for humans, elves, orcs, half-elves and half-orcs, small for dwarves, gnomes and halflings, and large for ogres and half-ogres. Also, ogres cannot wield pistols or other small firearms because their hands are too big.

* [[Our Dwarves Are All the Same]]:

** Averted with city dwarves, who eschew the old clan customs, and are more proud of their city of origin than their dwarvishness. They still don't talk about their females.

** [[Invoked Trope|Attempted invocation]] by {{spoiler|Magnus, who's so ashamed to be a city dwarf, he makes every attempt to be More The Same like he imagines ''real'' dwarves should be. Even when he doesn't exactly know the customs he should be following, he'll make them up as he goes along}}.

** Also subverted by {{spoiler|Preston Radcliffe, the dying 'gnome' at the game's intro. He's actually a dwarf who shaved his beard to disguise himself. To the rest of his clan, this is an unthinkable disgrace only partly forgiven by the severity of the situation. The player, if a dwarf, can lampshade this by saying, "We dwarves would rather cut our throats then cut off our beards."}}

* [[Our Elves Are Better]]: The major elf groups can be ''colossal'' [[Jerkass|Jerk Asses]] to anyone who isn't an elf... up to the [[Knight Templar|Dark Elves]] who want to [[Fantastic Racism|bring all non-Elves under Elven domination, or else just kill them off]].

* [[Peninsula of Power Leveling]]: One early [[Sidequest]] involves the discovery and destruction of a one-way dimensional portal spawning an [[Alliteration|endless array of enemies]]. Destroying the portal allows you to complete the quest, but it's actually possible to just sit outside the portal and kill the not-quite-endless swarms until they simply run out. You'll jump about twenty to thirty levels for your trouble, in a game where the [[Character Level|Level]] [[Cap]] is only fifty.

* [[Physical God]]: Anyone of sufficient personal power is effectively a deity. Nasrudin and Arronax are even worshipped as such, {{spoiler|and they're hardly the most powerful beings in the setting. In the ending, you can declare yourself a god, and given that you just took Kerghan apart, it's really more of a [[Lampshade Hanging]] than anything}}.

* [[Selective Memory]]: Our hero was going from the second largest city on the continent to the largest one, but does not remember where these cities are located. All our hero has is a map which shows the major topographical features of the continent, but none of the settlements. The player character is supposedly from a different continent which makes their lack of geographical knowledge about Arcanum understandable.

* [[Serial Killer]]: {{spoiler|L'Anamelach}}.

* [[Shotguns Are Just Better]]: Averted. They're cheap, light and compact, but are still objectively one of the worst firearms in the game, with [[Short-Range Shotgun|terrible range]], [[Arbitrary Gun Power|poor damage]], no armor penetration and a slow fire rate.

* [[Shout-Out]]:

* [[Spot of Tea]]: Debating the merits of green tea over earl grey is required to recruit a certain [[Cultured Badass]] as a follower.

* [[Stealth Expert]]: You may play as one, which is of particular importance for [[Pacifist Run|pacifists]] and [[For Massive Damage|backstabbers]]. Why, you can hide in an open field if you're good enough!

** Most of the quests in this game have a third option that can be taken in lieu of the "correct" one. For example, one quests tasks you with retrieving a gem from a shrine, only to be told that making any noise (i.e. failing to Sneak) will summon a bunch of monsters to kill you. There's nothing to stop you from just walking up, murdering the hell out of the monsters when they appear, then taking the gem at your leisure. Quests only ever give you an objective, they never say it has to be completed a certain way. That said, quest-givers do occasionally reward you better if you do it according to their instructions.

* [[Talking the Monster to Death]]: Diplomacy is a good solution to several of the quests. In particular, the [[Final Boss]] will agree to debate philosophy with you, and submit to an assisted suicide if you can show him enough holes in his logic.

* [[Third Person Person]]: Ristezze in Shrouded Hills, the first town you come to.

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