There’s just a few days left on the campaing! We’re funding, but there’s still stretch goals to be had. We’ve hit the one most important ones: digital generators to make it easy to adventures. And we continue to be on the cusp of getting a digital generator for PCs. But I’d like to add some more content to the Wizard’s Vault zines too! We’ve got 4 zines that are each 32 pages long so quite a bit of extra material if you’re wanting more to bring to the table. Anywho, I thought I’d share a bit about what makes Academia Arcana weird in all the right kind of ways. Inspiration for this post came from MattyBoomBatty’s review video, where he briefly mentions his son’s reaction at spotting a “machine gun” being included on the equipment table! Now, why would I ever put a thing like that there…

Well, the answer is simple: Planar travel. Students and faculty could come from a typical fantasy world just as easily as they could from our modern day. So adding a little modern, and a bit of sci-fi technology, to the equipment list seemed like a smart way to reinforce something that otherwise can go easily unnoticed. But this also is communicated through NPCs: one of the students is named Isaac Skye (like isekai) and is a mutant from the world of Terra A.D. (aka, Mutant Crawl Classics). But that’s not the only kind of weirdness that I included in the setting. 

I think the school’s attitude on demon summon and religious worship is also quite weird, but has a good sense of verisimilitude to it. Students certainly learn about demons and can learn how to summon animals and monsters, but outright classes on demon summoning are forbidden. It’s too much potential for trouble in the hands of students. But what teachers do in their own time is their business. And there’s so many adventures that we’ve all played that are filled with cults. Wizards have quite a disrespect for the deific figures of the many planes, preferring to bargain with patrons. So religious worship is banned. Join a cult on pain of death, or expulsion.

There’s also the concept of “living spells.” This is something akin to the original Vancian interpretation of spells. Random tables and spell misfire results occasionally mention spells escaping and becoming something like an elemental. And the patron included in the core book, the Phlogistonic Continuum, is something like a mass of living magic with a dose of Star Trek’s Q/ Bajoran Prophets/ Star War’s Force thrown in for good measure. 

Then we have some silliness. There’s a card game called delvers, which is vaguely implied to be only playable if you know magic to some extent. Feel free to depict that like whatever CCG is most popular among your game group. Lastly, my good editor, Jeff Scifert, encouraged me to write about other magical schools, which I’d only implied the existence of in the origin manuscript. So now there’s an overview of 10 other schools in the appendix. They range from hag covens, to mountain monasteries, to a school sat upon the precipice of hell which has a vampire for a headmaster.

So yes, Academia Arcana is a bit weird. I hope you like it that way.