What exactly is Arcana?

Arcana is a standalone tabletop RPG system with a complete ruleset focused on in-depth spellcrafting and adventures solvable primarily with magic. Unlike systems where spellcasters choose from pre-made spell lists, Arcana puts the creative power in players' hands, encouraging them to design custom spells that solve challenges in unexpected ways.

The game combines a robust spell creation system with traditional adventure elements like exploration, combat, and social interaction. Players take on the roles of individuals with innate and/or learned magical abilities, developing their unique approach to spellcraft while navigating a world where their magical studies may be the only solutions to complex problems or dangerous quests.

Characters in Arcana are not constrained by a class system. Typically, your only special abilities come from your spells and your style as a player in what powers you endeavor to attain and how you employ your magic.

In Arcana, no single solution is provided to any given task. The players must use their own ingenuity to ideate, develop, and execute solutions to problems as simple as crossing a rushing river or as perplexing as rescuing an archmage trapped in their own Time Stop spell.

While the system is setting-neutral to accommodate various worlds and stories, the core gameplay loop revolves around discovering arcane phenomena, experimenting with it to learn its properties, and applying your findings to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals.

Who is this game designed for?

If you enjoy thought experiments, creative problem solving, and a sense of discovery at the table, Arcana will appeal greatly.

It's a great fit for:

  • Fans of high fantasy who have unique ideas for spells.

  • Simulationist players who enjoy game mechanics that result in consistent, outcomes—grounded in reality and enhanced by fantasy.

  • Game designers and aspiring designers interested in inventing spell components with new mechanics and toying with fun ideas.

  • Min-maxers and mad scientists who love to push boundaries.

  • Indie TTRPG enthusiasts looking for a ruleset that encourages sandbox style play.

Whether you’re the kind of player who loves to improvise clever spells, or a GM who enjoys collaborating on a world built from first principles, Arcana rewards player curiosity, creativity, and cleverness.

What does a typical session of Arcana look like?

A typical Arcana session combines classic TTRPG elements with the game's unique spellcrafting system. Here's what players can expect:

A session might begin with the Game Master presenting a challenge or mystery that requires magical expertise. This might be investigating an arcane anomaly, retrieving a magical artifact, helping a community with a supernatural problem, or exploring locations with mystical properties.

As players navigate the adventure, they'll:

  • Investigate and gather information
    Speaking with NPCs, researching magical phenomena, and examining strange clues

  • Encounter and overcome obstacles
    Anything from environmental challenges, to hostile creatures, to tricky social situations

  • Craft custom spells
    As new challenges emerge, players design spells specifically suited to address them, drawing on their characters' knowledge and the magical components they've discovered

  • Make meaningful decisions
    Moral choices and strategic decisions that impact both the current scenario and future adventures

  • Grow their magical knowledge
    Discover new magical principles and components that expand their spellcrafting capabilities

For example, in one adventure, players were tasked by an archmage to learn more a mysterious stone with time-warping properties and locate its source to gather more of it. The journey involved crafting spells to overcome travel obstacles, investigating a mining village for clues, delving into a hidden laboratory, battling a magical guardian, and ultimately finding a wizard trapped in his own time-stopping experiment. The session concluded with players making critical decisions about the fate of the discovered magical materials and the wizard hoarding his arcane secrets.

What resolution mechanics does the game use?

Abilities

Arcana uses a dynamic dice pool system built around four core abilities that represent different aspects of a character's capabilities:

  • Physique - Physical strength and health

  • Intuition - Perceptiveness and instinctive learning ability

  • Memory - Learned knowledge and recall

  • Animus - Magical energy and willpower

Each ability is rated on a scale of 1-24, with players typically starting around 10 in each. What makes this system distinctive is that each ability has both a maximum value (representing your natural capability) and a current value that fluctuates based on exertion, damage, and magical enhancement.

Dice

As your ability scores change, so do your dice pools:

  • Different ability ranges use different dice pools: 2d12, 3d8, 4d6, 6d4 (and 12d2 for those who have surpassed what mere mortals can achieve!)

  • Higher ability scores grant more reliable dice pools bolstered by positive ability modifiers. This way, a deft rogue never stumbles.

  • Lower ability scores have less reliable dice pools, but still experience a fair bit of beginner's luck! Even with the best luck, negative ability modifiers prevent them from achieving unrealistic goals without using magic.

For skill checks, you roll the appropriate ability's dice pool, add its modifier, and if you're proficient in a skill that may be relevant to the task, any 1's or 2's rolled become 3's. Procificency is a boost that rewards specialization and becomes more effective at higher ability scores.

Encounters

Combat and other encounters use a three-phase round structure:

  1. Action Phase - Movement and standard actions (attack, use item, dash, etc.)

  2. Spell Phase - Casting spells and resolving magical effects

  3. Environmental Phase - Resolving ongoing effects and environment changes

This phased approach keeps players engaged throughout the round and allows for tactical depth without long waits between turns. Grid-based combat encourages tactical positioning and spell use, rewarding players who find innovative ways to combine their abilities and custom spells.

Recovery requires appropriate downtime activities—eating to restore Physique, sleeping to recover Animus, etc.—creating a natural rhythm between adventure and rest that reinforces the game's themes of balance and preparation.

What are the mechanics of crafting spells?

Spell creation is Arcana's defining feature. It puts you, the player, into the mindset of your character as you draw power from the universe based on designs you create yourself. This isn't simply picking from a list of premade spells—it's true magical crafting.

Spell Components

When creating spells, players combine components their characters know to determine the spell's mechanical effects and mana cost. There are 5 categories of components:

  • Operation Components function as the "verbs" of your spell

    • Shoot, create, transform, imbue, translocate, vipervine, etc.

  • Essence Components serve as the "nouns"

    • Water, rabbit, gravity, hydra, adrenaline, remorse, entrance, etc.

  • Form Components define shapes and structures

    • Sphere, wall, beam, helix, torus, pyramid, pillar, staircase, etc.

  • Trigger Components set conditions for activation

    • On touch, when in danger, at dawn, when afraid, etc.

  • Modifier Components adjust effects

    • Distant, dismissible, enormous, rapid, opposite, diminished, etc.

The core rulebook includes examples of:

  • 40+ Essences

  • 40+ non-Essence spell components

  • 50+ Essence Aspects to apply to newly discovered essences

  • 40+ Status Conditions that can apply to spell effects

Arcana empowers players to go beyond what's written in the book. Every spell mechanic in the book is intended to be an example of a mechanic players and GMs can expand on. Since every noun in the known universe has an essence that spellcasters can draw from, there is no limit to the source of your spell's power.

Discovering new essences is central to gameplay. Characters experiment and catalog new magical phenomena they encounter, and can apply any relevant Essence Aspects to give Essences they discover mechanical value in-game.

Crafting the Spell

Players can use as many spell components as they wish to design spells as simple or complex as they can imagine.

Simply fill out a spell card template! If you need more room for complex spells, there are half-page templates, and you can always use a blank journal to design spells more creatively. Your only in-game limitation is your character's knowledge of spell components and their mana capacity (5 times their maximum Animus score).

Here are some examples of spells you can create using components included in the book:

What do players actually do with the spells they create?

In Arcana, the spells you craft are your primary tools for interacting with the world and overcoming challenges. Players use their created spells to:

  1. Solve problems and overcome obstacles: Whether it's scaling a fortress wall, deciphering an ancient text, healing an injured ally, or confronting a dangerous adversary, your spells are your primary means of addressing challenges.

  2. Express character identity: Your spellcrafting choices reveal who your character is. As you play, your character develops a kind of magical signature. Components you favor, effects you prioritize, and even the visuals of your spells become as distinctive as your character's personality.

  3. Interact with the world in unique ways: The player's goals in Arcana aren't always going to be fetch quests or bounty hunts. In a world where magic can do virtually anything, the tasks you have the opportunity to take up could take any form. Your local librarian might pay you to enchant their bookshelves and make them sort themselves. An expeditioner might bring you to a strange, hostile environment to create a habitable shelter, or correct a gravitational anomaly. The system rewards thoughtful engagement with the world, allowing your character to solve problems and leave their mark through creative applications of magic that fit the scale and tone of your campaign.

It really depends on the type of story you want to tell.

If you want to play as a vagabond mystic, you'll likely use magic for everything from expeditious travel to efficient foraging to vicious combat against monsters in the wilderness.

Perhaps you want to explore the journey of a novice witch? You might write spells to have the pages of your textbooks read themselves aloud, enchant your things to speed up chores to make more free time, or imbue yourself with positive emotions to draw out confidence and banish homesickness.

Why not get more technical and test the limits of what you can design? Your adventure might follow that of an archmage engineer, tasked by city officials to connect distant cities with portals, or craft enchanted armor and weapons to help win a war against a dragon conclave.

Unlike games where magic simply deals damage or applies predetermined effects, Arcana's spellcrafting system lets you approach any situation with creative solutions limited only by your imagination and the game's consistent internal logic.

How does Arcana compare to Ars Magica and Mage: The Ascension?

Arcana shares ground with games like Ars Magica and Mage: The Ascension, particularly in its focus on magic as a personal and philosophical practice. If you're familiar with either of those systems, you’ll notice some overlap. However, there are noticeable differences in tone, scope, and mechanics.

Similar to Ars Magica: Arcana values deep magical study and experimentation. Both games treat magic as something that can be explored, understood, and developed over time, often in collaborative or scholarly contexts. However, Ars Magica is more structured, with strictly-defined magical rules based on medieval philosophies and setting. Arcana is more or less setting-agnostic, leans more into open-ended discovery and player-created spells, providing a much larger pool of spell components, with a bit more focus on curiosity and creativity.

Like Mage: The Ascension: Arcana explores the idea of magic being shaped by a realm of thought. Both games encourage players to define how their magic works and what it means to them. That said, Mage is rooted in modern, urban fantasy with an important metaplot and philosophical conflict at its core, while Arcana doesn't feature much metaplot and emphasizes a more introspective, sandbox-style journey of arcane academic growth.

Arcana isn’t trying to replace or outdo these games—it’s just approaching similar ideas from a different angle. In fact, I'd never heard of or researched either game until Arcana was nearly complete! If you enjoy games where magic is more than just a list of powers any of these games will appeal to you. If you're looking for a game where magic is something you study, shape, and write down in your own spellbook, you may find Arcana offers a uniquely creative space to explore those ideas. If you've been interested in Mage or Ars, but found their systems to be intimidating, you may find that Arcana's system is a bit easier to understand with considerably less jargon.

Is there a specific setting? How does the setting-neutral approach work?

Arcana is a setting-agnostic game, meaning it’s designed to work without being tied to a specific world, lore, or even genre. You can use Arcana’s spellcraft system in virtually any setting you like—whether that’s one you’ve created yourself or an existing world from another game or story.

That said, Arcana does have an original setting designed to show off its possibilities: the City of Caslon. This setting will be detailed in its own book, releasing after the Arcana Core Rulebook, but you won’t have to wait for that to start exploring it—tons of content and story hooks will be available on our website through the blog.

If you already have a world you love, Arcana adapts easily. It doesn’t ask you to rewrite your setting—it just changes how magic functions.

For example, if you want to run a campaign in Baldur’s Gate, the only adjustment you’d need to make is replacing D&D’s concept of “the Weave”.

What non-magical aspects of gameplay exist?

While Arcana is built around spellcraft, it’s still a complete tabletop RPG with non-magical systems to utilize.

The game includes full rules for non-magical combat and social encounters, so even if you run out of mana, you're not out of options. That being said, characters in Arcana are relatively fragile—more like real people than hardened adventurers—which makes using magic paramount to survival in dangerous situations.

Outside of spellcraft, characters can purchase and use items, develop relationships, pursue personal goals, and shape the world through their actions and choices.

Arcana also includes the Lineage system—a way to give each character a unique, innate trait or talent that doesn’t rely on casting spells. These can be subtle quirks, social advantages, or physical capabilities that make your character feel distinct even before they even start their spellbook.

How difficult is it to learn compared to D&D or other systems?

If you’ve played a TTRPG before, you’re already most of the way there. Arcana follows familiar core principles—character stats, skill checks, contested rolls—so the basics won’t feel foreign to most players. Like with any new system, your first session might have a few bumps, but by the end of it, most groups have a solid grasp of the resolution mechanics and spellcasting process.

The most unique part is spell creation. Your first spell or two might feel a little intimidating to build from scratch, but once you get into it, you’ll end up filling pages of your spellbook with creative spells you won’t find in any other game. You'll even be improvising spells on the fly in your first session.

The phased combat system—which breaks initiative into structured decision windows—can feel unusual if you’re used to traditional initiative orders like in D&D. It takes an encounter or two to click, but most groups find that once it does, turns move faster and feel more engaging, with less downtime between player actions.

What materials do you need to play?

To play Arcana, you’ll need just a few basics:

  • The Arcana Core Rulebook or Quickstart Guide

  • Dice: Arcana uses a dice pool system—generally, players will need 2d12, 3d8, 4d6, & 6d4

    If you enjoy throwing fistfuls of dice, get ready for a great time—if not, get ready for a great time with Arcana's Dice Tower, which makes rolling for ability checks almost too easy.

  • Character Sheet: You can use the official sheet (available in both printable and form-fillable PDF formats) or bring your own notebook or journal—many players enjoy creating a personalized spellbook-style record.

  • Map & Minis (Optional): If your campaign includes tactical combat, you’ll want miniatures and a grid, or a virtual tabletop (VTT) like Foundry or Roll20.

That’s it! Everything else you need to play—rules, spell design tools—comes with the Arcana Core Rulebook.

You Want More!?

Join us on Discord

What exactly is Arcana?

Arcana is a standalone tabletop RPG system with a complete ruleset focused on in-depth spellcrafting and adventures solvable primarily with magic. Unlike systems where spellcasters choose from pre-made spell lists, Arcana puts the creative power in players' hands, encouraging them to design custom spells that solve challenges in unexpected ways.

The game combines a robust spell creation system with traditional adventure elements like exploration, combat, and social interaction. Players take on the roles of individuals with innate and/or learned magical abilities, developing their unique approach to spellcraft while navigating a world where their magical studies may be the only solutions to complex problems or dangerous quests.

Characters in Arcana are not constrained by a class system. Typically, your only special abilities come from your spells and your style as a player in what powers you endeavor to attain and how you employ your magic.

In Arcana, no single solution is provided to any given task. The players must use their own ingenuity to ideate, develop, and execute solutions to problems as simple as crossing a rushing river or as perplexing as rescuing an archmage trapped in their own Time Stop spell.

While the system is setting-neutral to accommodate various worlds and stories, the core gameplay loop revolves around discovering arcane phenomena, experimenting with it to learn its properties, and applying your findings to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals.

Who is this game designed for?

If you enjoy thought experiments, creative problem solving, and a sense of discovery at the table, Arcana will appeal greatly.

It's a great fit for:

  • Fans of high fantasy who have unique ideas for spells.

  • Simulationist players who enjoy game mechanics that result in consistent, outcomes—grounded in reality and enhanced by fantasy.

  • Game designers and aspiring designers interested in inventing spell components with new mechanics and toying with fun ideas.

  • Min-maxers and mad scientists who love to push boundaries.

  • Indie TTRPG enthusiasts looking for a ruleset that encourages sandbox style play.

Whether you’re the kind of player who loves to improvise clever spells, or a GM who enjoys collaborating on a world built from first principles, Arcana rewards player curiosity, creativity, and cleverness.

What does a typical session of Arcana look like?

A typical Arcana session combines classic TTRPG elements with the game's unique spellcrafting system. Here's what players can expect:

A session might begin with the Game Master presenting a challenge or mystery that requires magical expertise. This might be investigating an arcane anomaly, retrieving a magical artifact, helping a community with a supernatural problem, or exploring locations with mystical properties.

As players navigate the adventure, they'll:

  • Investigate and gather information
    Speaking with NPCs, researching magical phenomena, and examining strange clues

  • Encounter and overcome obstacles
    Anything from environmental challenges, to hostile creatures, to tricky social situations

  • Craft custom spells
    As new challenges emerge, players design spells specifically suited to address them, drawing on their characters' knowledge and the magical components they've discovered

  • Make meaningful decisions
    Moral choices and strategic decisions that impact both the current scenario and future adventures

  • Grow their magical knowledge
    Discover new magical principles and components that expand their spellcrafting capabilities

For example, in one adventure, players were tasked by an archmage to learn more a mysterious stone with time-warping properties and locate its source to gather more of it. The journey involved crafting spells to overcome travel obstacles, investigating a mining village for clues, delving into a hidden laboratory, battling a magical guardian, and ultimately finding a wizard trapped in his own time-stopping experiment. The session concluded with players making critical decisions about the fate of the discovered magical materials and the wizard hoarding his arcane secrets.

What resolution mechanics does the game use?

Abilities

Arcana uses a dynamic dice pool system built around four core abilities that represent different aspects of a character's capabilities:

  • Physique - Physical strength and health

  • Intuition - Perceptiveness and instinctive learning ability

  • Memory - Learned knowledge and recall

  • Animus - Magical energy and willpower

Each ability is rated on a scale of 1-24, with players typically starting around 10 in each. What makes this system distinctive is that each ability has both a maximum value (representing your natural capability) and a current value that fluctuates based on exertion, damage, and magical enhancement.

Dice

As your ability scores change, so do your dice pools:

  • Different ability ranges use different dice pools: 2d12, 3d8, 4d6, 6d4 (and 12d2 for those who have surpassed what mere mortals can achieve!)

  • Higher ability scores grant more reliable dice pools bolstered by positive ability modifiers. This way, a deft rogue never stumbles.

  • Lower ability scores have less reliable dice pools, but still experience a fair bit of beginner's luck! Even with the best luck, negative ability modifiers prevent them from achieving unrealistic goals without using magic.

For skill checks, you roll the appropriate ability's dice pool, add its modifier, and if you're proficient in a skill that may be relevant to the task, any 1's or 2's rolled become 3's. Procificency is a boost that rewards specialization and becomes more effective at higher ability scores.

Encounters

Combat and other encounters use a three-phase round structure:

  1. Action Phase - Movement and standard actions (attack, use item, dash, etc.)

  2. Spell Phase - Casting spells and resolving magical effects

  3. Environmental Phase - Resolving ongoing effects and environment changes

This phased approach keeps players engaged throughout the round and allows for tactical depth without long waits between turns. Grid-based combat encourages tactical positioning and spell use, rewarding players who find innovative ways to combine their abilities and custom spells.

Recovery requires appropriate downtime activities—eating to restore Physique, sleeping to recover Animus, etc.—creating a natural rhythm between adventure and rest that reinforces the game's themes of balance and preparation.

What are the mechanics of crafting spells?

Spell creation is Arcana's defining feature. It puts you, the player, into the mindset of your character as you draw power from the universe based on designs you create yourself. This isn't simply picking from a list of premade spells—it's true magical crafting.

Spell Components

When creating spells, players combine components their characters know to determine the spell's mechanical effects and mana cost. There are 5 categories of components:

  • Operation Components function as the "verbs" of your spell

    • Shoot, create, transform, imbue, translocate, vipervine, etc.

  • Essence Components serve as the "nouns"

    • Water, rabbit, gravity, hydra, adrenaline, remorse, entrance, etc.

  • Form Components define shapes and structures

    • Sphere, wall, beam, helix, torus, pyramid, pillar, staircase, etc.

  • Trigger Components set conditions for activation

    • On touch, when in danger, at dawn, when afraid, etc.

  • Modifier Components adjust effects

    • Distant, dismissible, enormous, rapid, opposite, diminished, etc.

The core rulebook includes examples of:

  • 40+ Essences

  • 40+ non-Essence spell components

  • 50+ Essence Aspects to apply to newly discovered essences

  • 40+ Status Conditions that can apply to spell effects

Arcana empowers players to go beyond what's written in the book. Every spell mechanic in the book is intended to be an example of a mechanic players and GMs can expand on. Since every noun in the known universe has an essence that spellcasters can draw from, there is no limit to the source of your spell's power.

Discovering new essences is central to gameplay. Characters experiment and catalog new magical phenomena they encounter, and can apply any relevant Essence Aspects to give Essences they discover mechanical value in-game.

Crafting the Spell

Players can use as many spell components as they wish to design spells as simple or complex as they can imagine.

Simply fill out a spell card template! If you need more room for complex spells, there are half-page templates, and you can always use a blank journal to design spells more creatively. Your only in-game limitation is your character's knowledge of spell components and their mana capacity (5 times their maximum Animus score).

Here are some examples of spells you can create using components included in the book:

What do players actually do with the spells they create?

In Arcana, the spells you craft are your primary tools for interacting with the world and overcoming challenges. Players use their created spells to:

  1. Solve problems and overcome obstacles: Whether it's scaling a fortress wall, deciphering an ancient text, healing an injured ally, or confronting a dangerous adversary, your spells are your primary means of addressing challenges.

  2. Express character identity: Your spellcrafting choices reveal who your character is. As you play, your character develops a kind of magical signature. Components you favor, effects you prioritize, and even the visuals of your spells become as distinctive as your character's personality.

  3. Interact with the world in unique ways: The player's goals in Arcana aren't always going to be fetch quests or bounty hunts. In a world where magic can do virtually anything, the tasks you have the opportunity to take up could take any form. Your local librarian might pay you to enchant their bookshelves and make them sort themselves. An expeditioner might bring you to a strange, hostile environment to create a habitable shelter, or correct a gravitational anomaly. The system rewards thoughtful engagement with the world, allowing your character to solve problems and leave their mark through creative applications of magic that fit the scale and tone of your campaign.

It really depends on the type of story you want to tell.

If you want to play as a vagabond mystic, you'll likely use magic for everything from expeditious travel to efficient foraging to vicious combat against monsters in the wilderness.

Perhaps you want to explore the journey of a novice witch? You might write spells to have the pages of your textbooks read themselves aloud, enchant your things to speed up chores to make more free time, or imbue yourself with positive emotions to draw out confidence and banish homesickness.

Why not get more technical and test the limits of what you can design? Your adventure might follow that of an archmage engineer, tasked by city officials to connect distant cities with portals, or craft enchanted armor and weapons to help win a war against a dragon conclave.

Unlike games where magic simply deals damage or applies predetermined effects, Arcana's spellcrafting system lets you approach any situation with creative solutions limited only by your imagination and the game's consistent internal logic.

How does Arcana compare to Ars Magica and Mage: The Ascension?

Arcana shares ground with games like Ars Magica and Mage: The Ascension, particularly in its focus on magic as a personal and philosophical practice. If you're familiar with either of those systems, you’ll notice some overlap. However, there are noticeable differences in tone, scope, and mechanics.

Similar to Ars Magica: Arcana values deep magical study and experimentation. Both games treat magic as something that can be explored, understood, and developed over time, often in collaborative or scholarly contexts. However, Ars Magica is more structured, with strictly-defined magical rules based on medieval philosophies and setting. Arcana is more or less setting-agnostic, leans more into open-ended discovery and player-created spells, providing a much larger pool of spell components, with a bit more focus on curiosity and creativity.

Like Mage: The Ascension: Arcana explores the idea of magic being shaped by a realm of thought. Both games encourage players to define how their magic works and what it means to them. That said, Mage is rooted in modern, urban fantasy with an important metaplot and philosophical conflict at its core, while Arcana doesn't feature much metaplot and emphasizes a more introspective, sandbox-style journey of arcane academic growth.

Arcana isn’t trying to replace or outdo these games—it’s just approaching similar ideas from a different angle. In fact, I'd never heard of or researched either game until Arcana was nearly complete! If you enjoy games where magic is more than just a list of powers any of these games will appeal to you. If you're looking for a game where magic is something you study, shape, and write down in your own spellbook, you may find Arcana offers a uniquely creative space to explore those ideas. If you've been interested in Mage or Ars, but found their systems to be intimidating, you may find that Arcana's system is a bit easier to understand with considerably less jargon.

Is there a specific setting? How does the setting-neutral approach work?

Arcana is a setting-agnostic game, meaning it’s designed to work without being tied to a specific world, lore, or even genre. You can use Arcana’s spellcraft system in virtually any setting you like—whether that’s one you’ve created yourself or an existing world from another game or story.

That said, Arcana does have an original setting designed to show off its possibilities: the City of Caslon. This setting will be detailed in its own book, releasing after the Arcana Core Rulebook, but you won’t have to wait for that to start exploring it—tons of content and story hooks will be available on our website through the blog.

If you already have a world you love, Arcana adapts easily. It doesn’t ask you to rewrite your setting—it just changes how magic functions.

For example, if you want to run a campaign in Baldur’s Gate, the only adjustment you’d need to make is replacing D&D’s concept of “the Weave”.

What non-magical aspects of gameplay exist?

While Arcana is built around spellcraft, it’s still a complete tabletop RPG with non-magical systems to utilize.

The game includes full rules for non-magical combat and social encounters, so even if you run out of mana, you're not out of options. That being said, characters in Arcana are relatively fragile—more like real people than hardened adventurers—which makes using magic paramount to survival in dangerous situations.

Outside of spellcraft, characters can purchase and use items, develop relationships, pursue personal goals, and shape the world through their actions and choices.

Arcana also includes the Lineage system—a way to give each character a unique, innate trait or talent that doesn’t rely on casting spells. These can be subtle quirks, social advantages, or physical capabilities that make your character feel distinct even before they even start their spellbook.

How difficult is it to learn compared to D&D or other systems?

If you’ve played a TTRPG before, you’re already most of the way there. Arcana follows familiar core principles—character stats, skill checks, contested rolls—so the basics won’t feel foreign to most players. Like with any new system, your first session might have a few bumps, but by the end of it, most groups have a solid grasp of the resolution mechanics and spellcasting process.

The most unique part is spell creation. Your first spell or two might feel a little intimidating to build from scratch, but once you get into it, you’ll end up filling pages of your spellbook with creative spells you won’t find in any other game. You'll even be improvising spells on the fly in your first session.

The phased combat system—which breaks initiative into structured decision windows—can feel unusual if you’re used to traditional initiative orders like in D&D. It takes an encounter or two to click, but most groups find that once it does, turns move faster and feel more engaging, with less downtime between player actions.

What materials do you need to play?

To play Arcana, you’ll need just a few basics:

  • The Arcana Core Rulebook or Quickstart Guide

  • Dice: Arcana uses a dice pool system—generally, players will need 2d12, 3d8, 4d6, & 6d4

    If you enjoy throwing fistfuls of dice, get ready for a great time—if not, get ready for a great time with Arcana's Dice Tower, which makes rolling for ability checks almost too easy.

  • Character Sheet: You can use the official sheet (available in both printable and form-fillable PDF formats) or bring your own notebook or journal—many players enjoy creating a personalized spellbook-style record.

  • Map & Minis (Optional): If your campaign includes tactical combat, you’ll want miniatures and a grid, or a virtual tabletop (VTT) like Foundry or Roll20.

That’s it! Everything else you need to play—rules, spell design tools—comes with the Arcana Core Rulebook.

You Want More!?

Join us on Discord