Expectations
There is no Ultimate Truth to In Arcadia Ego. No well-structured cosmology, no detailed rules to determine what Arcadians can or cannot do, how to hurt them, trap them or heal them, or how magic interacts with technology. There is no canonical list of factions, artifacts, heroes and villains.
All these will need to emerge progressively from two things:
- the answers given by the players to the Player Document;
- whatever the characters do during the game.
Getting this world to emerge is a shared responsibility between the players and the GM. For instance, the Player Document gets the players to determine when and where the campaign starts. The first scene may just as well take place in Viking Lands during the 7th Century as on a refugee spaceship headed for Mars during year 125 of the Anti-Matter Age.
In the Viking Lands, the height of technology are typically metallurgy and ship-making. Good candidates for Arcadians would be the deities brought to these shores by the slaves, or the spirits the local Sejdkvinna talks to. Priests, wives or warriors all know of the super-natural and have a notion of how to deal with it, whether through offerings, traps or cold metal. An Arcadian intent on getting in touch with another one may need to provide a sacrifice.
In the Anti-Matter Age, technology will be omni-present. Good candidates for Arcadians would be technological marvels, including Artificial Intelligences, robots, energy sources themselves, rumours of alien presence, or emergent systems such as the Stock Market. The typical behavior towards many oddities might be to upgrade the system or install a Corrective Intelligence, which may or may not be harmful to Arcadians. By then, everybody may have access to the Shared Consciousness, and two Arcadians who wish to communicate may need to somehow physically dive into this Shared Consciousness to travel along its Mind Streams.
But don’t set all these rules all at once! Rather, start from the Viking Lands or the Anti-Matter Age spaceship. Eventually, the Player’s Arcadians will hear or suspect of another Arcadian. They will want to get in touch and they won’t know how to do so. As a GM, your role will be to prod them and get them to try something – anything, whether they wish to sacrifice a chicken, enter a ritual combat or a dream-like trance or hack through the layers of reality. At this stage, let the dice or cards decide how the attempt goes – and let the players decide whether the attempt worked [1]. Perhaps, in the Anti-Matter Age, sacrificing a chicken is the right way to send a message to an unfamiliar Arcadian. If the roll failed, though, the player and GM should agree on any negative consequence – perhaps that sacrifice will also systematically cause a critical power failure or sommon some kind of evil gremlins.
Thus are rules of the universe progressively set.
[1] This last sentence is based on the specific mechanism of Fate and N-Dimensional Tourists which decouples success from outcome – the player determines the success, i.e. whether what the character was trying worked, while the dice/cards determine the outcome, i.e. the consequences of the action, which may be disastrous even in case of success or positive even in case of failure.
