2004: Arcana Unearthed

It began, as I recall, with the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. I had just started the school which I, for simplicity, will refer to as high school, and entered a conversation with a man that I, for simplicity, will refer to as Drake. We were talking about Douglas Adams' book, but somehow the conversation wormed and wriggled, as conversations are prone to, and eventually came onto the subject of role-playing games. To my great surprise, Drake was already familiar with them – which was a bit of a surprise to me, as prior to this encounter, virtually all my friends had been introduced to the hobby by me.

Enthusiastically, we decided to start up a group; no, more formally, to start up a club. It would be the school's RPG club, and its official language would be English; something which, for the first time, would allow me to circumvent the linguistic hopscotch which is trying to play an English-language game in Swedish. Teeming with excitement about all these new things and all the changes, I suggested another change – let's not play Dungeons & Dragons, I said. Let's instead play this strange little game I bought a while back called Arcana Unearthed.

I had unsuccessfully tried to play Arcana Unearthed with my previous group, but somehow they hadn't caught on – we'd run one small, unsuccessful game whose only identifying characteristic was my brothers' bizarre Sibeccai with a badger that could drive a soapbox car, but nobody really liked it. Now, however, was an ideal time to give the game a second chance. I started digging back home for my notes on the game I'd ran with my old group six months earlier, and recovered them – they were decent, a plot about an Iron Witch causing mayhem in a small village in the north. There were some suitable enemies – goblins, bandits, the witch herself. I liked the setting, too; a mysterious forest in the far north, isolated from all sides, accessible only if you had a horse or cart, or were prepared to trek for a long while through dark, dangerous forests. It even had some useful NPCs that I could salvage. But, somehow, I felt that something was missing. This new group was clearly so much more invested in the game – there was a whole lot of creative force here, force that I didn't want to see go to waste. I needed something beyond the usual hack-and-slash adventure. Some element was missing. So I started digging deeper, and found the in-character diary of my old cleric, from four years back – mentioning a strangely scented tea. Recalling a discussion I had with Drake a while back regarding tea as a magical potion, I thought, why the hell not? So I took a blank sheet, and wrote “Plot: Our tale begins when a trader arrives carrying with him mysteriously scented vanilla tea...”

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Before I can move on to the plot, there is the discussion of the who, and almost more importantly, the where. I don't think there is one reader of my blog who has not at least seen that tiny room, with its coffee machine, picture of an old Chinese man, and self-adhering Darin poster. We were initially meaning to call it something with suitable geeky weight – something like “the Dungeon” or “the Fortress” or “the Lair” but, it appears, Fate named it something else. I don't know who first mouthed the term, but one day the name was just there; one day, the room ceased to be a room, and became the Hole. There's not much more to say about it, because I couldn't possibly capture its essence in words - but I will drink a toast in Blood of the Living to its memory.

The game had moved to a new location, and it had also moved into the minds of completely new people. The initial Arcana Unearthed group had five players, and five characters – none of whom I had even known just a few weeks ago, and only one who I had ever met. From the years above me, there was Solomon and Alastair, and from my own year Drake, Kennedy, and Bob. I had known Bob by reputation because we had previously attended the same school, but I had never really spoken to him; all the other people were entirely new to me. In part because they were entirely new to me, I made sure we spent a lot of time preparing for the game. The characters of Arcana Evolved were not just rolled up and fired off; rather, they developed over time, in discussion on buses, in classrooms, and over lunch breaks. In the beginning, there was Beo, the unwilling mohj. Then there was Ling, the paranoid faen. Shortly, the wild man Nasef (alternatively spelled Naseef, I was never really sure) and the Dynamic Duo Sibzo and Euvortacian, a.k.a Vortoc, were finished too, and only then were we ready to begin. Now, where was I? Ah, yes... I remember.

Our tale begins when a trader arrives carrying with him mysteriously scented vanilla tea...

What followed was an adventure that slowly unfolded, blossoming from an evil witch plaguing the north, to the most insanely epic tale I have ever ran, where the fate of the entire Universe hangs in the balance. When we return to the Arcana Unearthed game, it has become Arcana Evolved, and while the first year was based more on “What is the self?”, the finale of the game would expand radically in scope. The Arcana Evolved game would come to incorporate almost every topic I studied during my two years of an IB Philosophy course, ranging from ethics to epistemology to the fundamental question, “What is a human being?”

But of course, there are still two years to go. For now, the five heroes are simply trying to deal with the wicked witch, with the corrupt sheriff she controls, and with the mysterious and inexplicable memory loss that Ling is suffering. Yet, something beautiful has begun – something I couldn't even begin to guess at when I first sat down in the Hole to draw the map of the region. I had no idea then what would happen – that the story would spread a pair of beautiful wings and fly away beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

Wait a minute – how can something that exists only in imagination go beyond what I imagined? The answer is simple.

I didn't imagine it. We did.


Notable Characters:
Beo, the Badger-Killer and Master Planner.
Nasef, the Vampire (nom nom).
Ling Tem'Enneth, the Zero Hit Point Energy Field Manipulator.
Euvortacian, the Womanizing Axeman.
Sibzo, the “Hero”.

Notable Characters (for real this time):
Beo, the Dragon's Prison.
Nasef, the Man Who Should Be Dead.
Ree Kaspathodex, the God of Paradoxes.
Euvortacian, the Idiot Savant.
Sibzo, the “Hero”.

Crowning Moments of Awesome:
Naseef died in the middle of the chronicle. His heart stopped. Beo brought him back, and for a moment, his power to screw with Fate made itself apparent – something I hadn't actually planned for. Beo spent a hero point, hero points achieve the extraordinary. But it became impressive foreshadowing for the rest of the game.

Ling also died, and was reborn as Ree Kaspathodex, the God of Paradoxes. His return as the King of Kaspathodexia took everyone by surprise, I should think.

Next Up:
2005: Survival In Moscow, in which I take the task to lead a Vampire game, and various other games. Three new players are introduced, and I will also take a moment to discuss small games played across all my three high school years – including Parallel Fandango and its sequel, Trigonometry Fandango.