Home Campaigns

Currently I am not running or playing an Arcanis home game. I did run a short 2 episode home game a year ago. Also, when I was a harvester, I was running a monthly Arcanis game at the local game store. We brought in some new folks now and again but it was generally the same core 3-4 people. They were also folks I game with on a regular basis, so we didn’t want to have 2 game systems the same in a home game and a monthly open game.

Right now, I’m in 2 gaming groups with 1-2 people who overlap between the two. We are currently playing several times a week and alternate game systems. Right now, we are playing Pathfinder, Numenera, The One Ring, Savage Worlds: Deadlands, and 13th Age. As each game mini-campaign comes to an end, we start another one. We enjoy playing different systems and my hope is to get an Arcanis game going in one of those slots sometime soon. Our Numenera Game is ending soon, so perhaps that is an opportunity I can look into.

John

Hello Josh,

You do realize that each of the campaign adventures have monsters and pregenerated bad guys that you can either lift whole sale or modify? I haven’t counted, but I would presume there to be dozens or such available for free.

So if I understand Cody and Josh correctly, the living campaign itself is an impediment or a discouragement from running Home Campaigns?

What if there wasn’t a living campaign? Would you just stop playing Arcanis or would you start up your own game?

OH oh! dont I know about all of the created monsters in the mods! Lol, they are there but they are hard to use and remember / index. I’ve even created a bunch of my own on the fly when I need to challenge the group I was running in a hybrid home / official campaign. Many times the monsters in the mods are difficult to understand how to play well because their tricks are not as obvious as the could be.

the monster creation rules are … convoluted and not easy to use, but that can be said about many aspect of this system.

the “Arcanis Story” is why I’m coming to the game in the first place, AARPG is an interesting system and well designed for the kind of story that Arcanis is trying to tell, but its very specific, everything about the system is very specific to the arcanis world and hard to adapt to other things.

But my home campaign uses hybrid 2e rules because thats the kind of story im trying to tell ( a hybridized version of the 2E red steel rules, dragons, ancient magic, and packing for survival) we are using something like arcanis weapon speeds (and 2e spell speeds but not strain) because that makes the 2e clock work a bit better and it meshs well with 2e rules, and I’m certainly lifting ideas from some of the 3rd ed arcanis adjacent books (unveiled masters is going to be a huge boon to me in the latter part of the campaign)

The Problem I see with running arcanis as a home game is because a large part of the fun of arcanis are the Secrets that are held and discovered and traded like jealous tidbits among the players, and that translates so poorly to a 100% home game. An interesting alternative is the “guided home game” where a smaller set of GMs are sworn to secrecy and let in a bit on some of the secrets for a small area and then run their home groups through that. That is something I would jump at the opportunity to participate in as a judge or a player. (look at the Shaintar model of play)