Arium cover art by Andreas Rocha
CREATE THE WORLD AND SEEDS OF YOUR STORY TOGETHER.
PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
Best Aid/Accessory – Non – Digital
Best Supplement
Arium: Create contains our refreshing and intuitive system for creating your own Arium, and you’ll do it in one or two hours! The Arium you create will be unique to your group, and we promise everyone will be in love.
The system’s collaborative method doesn’t put the burden of worldbuilding on any individual and ensures every voice is heard!
Create encourages folks to err on the side of awesome when collaborating to build their Arium, and the result is often surprising, but never disappointing! With a little time, you can take your resulting Arium and use it with any game system, or we’ve built in a seamless transition to our roleplaying rules found in Arium: Discover.
Arium: Create Reviews
Daniel Yocom Guild Master Gaming
“…everyone at the gaming table has a vested interest in the setting they are creating.
I’m excited to put Arium: Create into greater use…”
Anthony G.
“This game made session 0 feel like game night instead of spreadsheets. 10/10…”
@colinomicon
“Arium provides a toolset for collaborative world-building and open-ended character creation that is unparalleled among tabletop roleplaying games. Long before they roll the first the die, the players will be fully bought-in to the world because they had a hand in every aspect of its creation. This is cooperative storytelling at its finest.”
@balrog1911
“For collaborative world-building and crafting of a setting, Arium provides a truly open and group-driven approach that allows for almost anything to be brought into existence. A superb way to ensure that everyone has a say, everyone is heard, and everyone feels like the game belongs to the group as a whole. It’s also incredibly versatile and can be used to enhance and customize the setting of just about any existing system.”
DISCOVER YOUR GROUP’S BEST IDEAS THROUGH ROLEPLAYING.
Arium: Discover will work with any world. Take your favorite TV series, your homebrew setting, or a movie/novel and quickly adapt to run it with Discover. Even better, build an Arium together using Arium: Create as a basis for your game. Arium: Discover builds on your universe by letting players take ownership of characters, items, and locations.
Then, it’s off to tell the story! Adventure, horror, and comedy are all on the table. Sci-fi, fantasy, and intrigue also possibilities! The streamlined d6-based system is familiar yet flexible. Additionally, the system of Boons and Banes encourages play that explores the important and meaningful by focusing on the relevant thematic elements of your Arium.
Arium: Discover Reviews
David, DriveThruRPG User
“It’s a simple system that makes roleplay really easy. When combined with Arium Create, I was easily able to make a special world with new and older TTRPG players and have them instantly hooked on the world.“
Josh Walles, Angel’s Citadel
“I highly recommend picking these two up to both look at and add to your collection”
Check out aruim gameplay!
Gameplay SHeets & online tools
- Arium – The Path of Abandoned Campaigns
The Arium RPG is live on Kickstarter through September 18, 2020. Create worlds. Discover the stories within them.
The Path of Abandoned Campaigns is paved with gaming groups who settle. Settling on playing a system they’re not 100% interested in. Settling on creating a character limited by a GM’s vision and restrictions. Settling on a story not focused on the characters’ achievements, motives, and backstory plot hooks. Settling on being railroaded into the GM telling the story they’ve worked so hard to write. It’s a dangerous path. Once your group has found their way down it, coming back is nigh impossible. Simply stated, a gaming group lacking total player investment will inevitably arrive at this fork in the road. How it’s handled will determine if your group follows The Path of Abandoned Campaigns or, as all gaming groups hope for, The Path of Long-Remembered and Fondly-Recalled Tales.
This was a problem we eventually (and accidentally) solved while Arium was taking its initial shape. We ran a couple of workshops with what was then called Lean Worldbuilding. The results were eerily similar and led to our understanding of the potential our idea possessed. We leaned into that potential and presented Arium to numerous playtests at cons and gaming groups. Every playtest provided the same feedback – “I want to play a game in the Arium we just created. How do I play a game in this setting now?” Playtesters loved bringing ideas they were excited about into the process. As a counterpoint, they were able to soften or eliminate things casting shadows across their enjoyment. The result is a unanimously exciting setting waiting to be experienced.
How can everyone in the group be so engaged with so many different voices lending brilliant contributions at every stage? There are two answers. First, those in the gaming community are a creative, collaborative lot. We feed off of each other’s excitement and ideas. Brainstorming fuels player investment, and damn near every single time we end up with a significantly more interesting finished product – one everyone is excited for. The second answer? Simple. It’s the magic of Arium.
The Arium: Create experience allows the entire group, players and GM alike, to create new forks in the road. It enables each player’s voice to shine, diminishing the darkness awaiting what could have been an ill-fated campaign. We’ve seen, time and time again, Arium giving voice to even the meekest of players. The collaborative process creates buy-in from all, promoting a deeper level of participation.
We’ve all trudged down The Path of Abandoned Campaigns. For some, it has only been once, and the fear of that dreary, tortuous path has helped us to remember to take the other fork in the road. For others, we feel caught in a labyrinthine phenomenon of deja vu where every campaign reboot feels like it’s doomed to wander the same cursed path. I’m genuinely proud to say Arium gives each player a torch to bear, allowing their light to shine on a new world built out of collaboration. Whether your group is just searching for a way to get all players invested in the story you are collaborating on, or you’re also looking for a streamlined system bridging between rules-light and super crunchy, Arium will guide you there.
Drew Gerken is one of the writers of Arium, the forthcoming worldbuilding toolkit and roleplaying game by Adept Icarus.
Check out Arium on Kickstarter!
- Arium – Almost No Limits
Arium is a tabletop roleplaying game and world-building toolkit. It is currently funded and unlocking stretch goals on Kickstarter.
If I had to pick a phrase to describe what sets Arium apart from the crowd, it would be this: The only limits are your group’s imagination, and what the dice allow. I could say this about many TTRPGs, but I have yet to play a game that embodies this statement as fully as Arium: Create and Arium: Discover.
Create is an incredible tool for building a world that the entire table is fully invested in and pushing the boundaries on genres. As a genre-masher in my writing, this immediately appealed to me. Do I want to play in a post-apocalyptic Viking boat tribe, where the ocean churns with unspoken terrors? Absolutely, yes. That’s my kind of high adventure.
Do I also want to GM a monster-hunting romcom where Olympians and Atlantians must find their life partners before the gods meddle in their love lives?
Also a hard yes. This game has range.
The beauty of Arium is that you can literally build ANYTHING in a cooperative effort, and the minimalistic rules can be applied to whatever setting you’ve imagined. Let’s dive into the two parts that make this game!
Arium Create: Cooperative world building is streamlined into several steps that let your crew brain-dump on the table, then compile and sort what the group wants to play. It’s possibly my favorite part. A meeting of the minds, different passions and genres hammered out and forged into a shining new world that leaves everyone burning to play.
You all made it. From the land (or lack thereof) that you stand on, to the people who decorate the worldscape, the game inherently allows your players to buy into the NPCs and what is happening in this world.
Arium Discover: Now that your world is fleshed out, the PCs’ characters are built, it’s time to adventure. But guess what! Player influence of the world isn’t over! Each player has a certain number of Discovery Tokens, which allow you to adjust successes, or even add some kind of effect or condition to the world.
Would your character have made that grab when an NPC slipped from the edge? Discovery Token.
Are you threatened by a big monster, and maybe something larger on the food chain would chase it off? Discovery Token.
As I said before, the simple rules allow you to apply them to whatever incredible world you’ve created. Primary Attributes combine to naturally flow into Secondary Attributes, which are generalized. Any roll you want to make fits under one of these options, and you roll a pool of D6s.
When you roll, you look for ‘hits.’ Hits are face values of a 5 or 6. However many hits you have, equals if you succeeded or not! This is determined by a DC set by the GM. Two hits for a moderate difficulty, three for major, and so on. Simple and effective, and your character can have ‘boons’ or ‘banes’ that feed into your chances for success… or failure.
As both a player and a GM, I have experienced the full expanse of this game. It’s a joy to Create and a pleasure to Discover the lengths of the world you and your friends have built together. Arium has given me and my friends many hours of fun and memories. If playing outside of the box is your jam, then I would highly recommend this game.
Emily Earhart (Anthrama from Of Dice & Dames) is an Arium GM, live streamer, and writer.
Check out Arium on Kickstarter!
- Arium – A Writer’s Lens
A long time ago, in a conference room filled with whiteboards, a group of writers came together to perform an experiment. They sat around a long, smudgy table – sundry treats, wrappers, and half-drunk beverages scattered across its length. Numerous stacks of neon sticky notes lay about like cairns marking the first waypoints in the journey to discovering an amazing collaborative world-building tool. At first, it was called Lean Worldbuilding. Then, StickyNote RPG. Now, we lovingly call it Arium.
With Arium’s Kickstarter on the horizon, and its focus as a roleplaying game, I wanted to take a minute to write about the core of the game, the seed in which this phenomenal game germinated. At first, it was a collaborative world-building exercise for writers. As a speculative fiction and gaming writer, my lens is predominantly focused on science-fiction and fantasy genres. I’d wager that most authors writing in these realms have either played an RPG or actively play RPGs. If this is you, then Arium should be a no-brainer. Bring it to your gaming group or, better yet, bring it to your writing group and play through Arium: Create. I promise you’ll love it. If you don’t write in one of the spec-fic realms, Arium still offers a ton of potential.
Arium: Create is a multifunctional tool for world-building, group collaboration, creative inspiration, and myriad other awesome things. It is its very own RPG system as well, but that’s for a different article. However, it started as an exercise for our writing group to create a unique, shared world in which we could tell stories. There was no intent to write these stories for publication. Rather, it was a way to practice creating a vibrant, fleshed-out world complete with histories, mythologies, places, events, characters, and whatever else tickled our fancy. It was a wonderful time.
Typically, our writing groups focus solely on critiquing and pushing through chapter after chapter (or story after story) to the detriment of creativity. Output is a wonderful thing, creation is how we writers make our way after all, but every writer needs a reliable way to refill the well. We have to step away from the work and allow new thoughts, characters, and story arcs to percolate. Arium has consistently proven to be an incredible exercise for doing just that. Collaboration, bouncing ideas off one another, and engaging in the creation of a whole new world are all acts that inspire. Inspiration leads to production.
Sometimes, as Stephen King says in On Writing, the best ideas come from two apparently disparate thoughts colliding together. During every stage of Arium: Create the group must make choices and vote on the content produced during ideating. This is your collaboration. Do we choose a predominantly underwater technological civilization or a subterranean world of mole people? Did the world die due to the nuclear holocaust, or did Mother Nature finally get fed up with our mistreatment of her domain and enact revenge? Is Uncle Istvan a crazy old hermit living in a remote hut, or is he a seer of The Lost Goddess? The possibilities are infinite, and every Arium you create will truly be a unique world filled with inspiration.
Drew Gerken is one of the writers of Arium, the forthcoming worldbuilding toolkit and roleplaying game by Adept Icarus.
Check out Arium on Kickstarter!