SM Fantasy

Opening Curtain for the Theater of the Mind
The formative game of the role-playing world was Dungeons and Dragons. First published in 1974, by a company called Tactical Studies Rules, it was an attempt to put a task resolution system to the tool of abstract visualization. We take our hats off to Gary Gygax for starting an era that gripped the imagination, inspiring us to run through college tunnels and slay imaginary trolls. And we're not even kidding.

This gave us a rule book for casting fireballs, but the real magic was that it took us into the story, opening people to spinning narrative in ways only writers had done before. It opened the door to becoming writers ourselves through the games we played. As our heroes faced impossible odds, it also helped us wonder: what are the odds we could actually survive?

D&D's own history came from history: recreating medieval battles for table-top wargames. From drawing lines in the dirt of a battlefield, military leaders were the first to game through a scenario. As amateur strategists picked up the torch, somebody got the idea to lean on Tolkien, replacing cannons with wizards – and the rest is history.

Speculative Fantasy
Speculation was originally conceived for modern, high-speed adventures, but the system is naturally suited to historical or fantasy settings. The campaign or scenario can use the default rules for task and conflict resolution, they just use historical gear to do it.

Here, a group can stretch their alt-history legs and play through being a Musketeer of the Guard in 1625 France... or a 15th century ninja or jaguar warrior, an 8th century assassin, or a Roman centurion in the service of Julius Caesar. Speculation can recreate history or explore histories that never were.

Adding the fantasy element brings in a new set of variables: magic. The sandbox for incorporating magic is fantastically flexible and incomprehensibly huge. It's also so open to interpretation that we had serious homework to create parameters that were internally consistent, much less harmonious with natural laws (at least the ones we observe in everyday life).

More than sifting through what has already been done, we had to decode the potential physics of magic. We did a little of the lab work for our system in another framework, the venerable d20/5e methods, and found it was fun but overpowered for those low-magic systems. This became another challenge as we incorporated the potential power of magic versus the state of magic we see in the world today: as far as we can tell, we don't see any magic.

How do we reverse engineer that disparity?

The Arcane System answers that question and gives a flexible rule set for creating low, medium and high-magic worlds including metaphysics, economy, character item production and so on.

The Arcane System

 * ARCSYS is the science and system of harnessing arcane phenomena.

The Bestiary

 * We can't tell you where to find fantastic creatures, but we will gave some examples of how the greats from mythology would be represented in the Speculation system.