Image by Piyang Flores, Brandon Brown
ARCANA | Shape new realities through the science of spellcraft✨
You are Arcanists, developing your unique approach to spellcraft, navigating a world where your studies may be the only solutions to complex problems.
TYPE
SYSTEM
LANGUAGE
EXPERIENCE
AGE
Free
Details
Bi-weekly / Sunday - 9:30 PM UTC
Session Duration / 3–4 hours
2 / 5 Seats Filled
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Schedule
Meet your party members
2/5
About the adventure
🔮🧙♂️FREE Session Zero and 1st Game Session🧝♀️🪄 Arcana is a TTRPG focused on in-depth spellcrafting and adventures that can be overcome through curiosity, creativity, and cleverness alone. Players are spellcasters, developing their unique approach to spellcraft while navigating a world where their studies may be the only solutions to complex problems or dangerous quests. If you enjoy thought experiments, creative problem solving, and a sense of discovery at the gaming table, Arcana will appeal greatly, rewarding player curiosity, creativity, and cleverness. As a player, you begin your academic career with a few basic components to craft spells with. Throughout your studies, experiments, and expeditions, your repertoire will expand and evolve into a singular—perfectly unique—book of spells that illustrates your journey. The kinds of spells you create have no limit other than your imagination. Adventures in Arcana are similar in feeling to media like Frieren, Witch Hat Atelier, A Wizard of Earthsea, Mushi-Shi, Babel (by R.F. Kuang), and the Emily Wilde series. Stories focus on magical academia, where players explore a world of magic and mystery, study the arcane, and use their knowledge to craft new spells that expand the world's understanding of magic and allow them to venture further into the unknown. You can expect to have to do more creative thinking in Arcana than in typical TTRPG's. You'll create your own spells from scratch, have the opportunity to create your own character race, and the more forethought you put into your character's backstory and goals, the more fulfilling the game will be!
Game style
Roleplay Heavy
Rules as Written (RaW)
Rule of Cool (RoC)
Game themes
Meet the Game Master
Less than a year on StartPlaying
About me
I've been making up fun stuff to do with friends for as long as I can remember, but I didn't start with TTRPGs until I squeezed into my friend's D&D 3.5 campaign in 2014. Once I got a taste, I had to start running the game as quickly as I could. Before I understood what a cantrip was, or a single concept about party composition, or what "edition" even meant in the context of D&D, I started running the game. I ran the game with a chess board for a battle map and dice or guitar picks as miniatures. I "did my own research" and put together a campaign that took place in a cleric's college called Pantheon, completely—blissfully—ignorant of the monstrosity of rules and lore cobbled together from disparate aspects of various editions of D&D, Pathfinder, or anything else that looked like it might work. We had a blast. To create a game experience from scratch? It was liberating on every level. Eventually, I started figuring out how the game was "supposed" to work. I bought the core books and read them cover to cover. Yes, I actually did that, it was a hyper-fixation like no other. I wanted to master every tool a dungeon master could. After multiple campaigns—and with Matt Mercer as my guiding star—I felt like I could do anything. In 2016 I was confident enough to take what homebrew I cooked up for my campaigns and put it out into the world. I put my design for Automaton NPCs on DMsGuild.com (where it's still the #1 search result for automatons) and when it did well, it fed my desire to make games just as much as running them for my friends in person. There were quality-of-life needs and gaps in the core rules that WoTC had left for players to figure out, so that's what I did. Since then, I've released 8 products on DM's Guild, 6 of which have best-seller awards. To this day, Level Zero has sold well over 5,000 copies of various D&D supplements with zero marketing effort. Over those few years, I became the D&D guy in all my social circles. I was running three games a week, I printed out massive battlemaps at the sign shop where I worked, I even became a DM for hire on Craigslist and made a lifelong friend doing it! Now, a decade later, I've expanded my horizons past the landscape of D&D and into other games, even designing a TTRPG of my own, Arcana. https://bento.me/arcana-ttrpg ⚔️💥💣
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
We start with a Session Zero (free of charge) where we develop characters with strong backstories, goals, and deep ties to each other in the party.
What to expect
Preparing for the session
▪ You can expect to have to do more creative thinking in Arcana than in typical TTRPG's. You'll create your own spells from scratch, have the opportunity to create your own character race, and the more forethought you put into your character's backstory and goals, the more fulfilling the game will be! ▪ Roll20 and Discord accounts are required. ▪ Microphone required, webcam encouraged. ▪ We'll write our character sheets as a group, but feel free to come with any character ideas you've dreamed up! ▪ No physical items are required; dice and minis are handled in Roll20 and digital character sheets are available.
What Brandon Lee Brown brings to the table
▪ A compelling homebrew high-fantasy TTRPG developed and playtested over the past 2+ years. ▪ A lived-in setting developed through a history of gameplay 10 years in the making. ▪ We'll use Discord for voice chat and Roll20 as a VTT. Every great campaign setting has a great soundtrack! You will need to have a paid Spotify account for the full experience, though. ▪ All combat takes place on hand-drawn battle maps (no AI). Player tokens use your preferred artwork converted to a beautifully framed circular icon. ▪ I consider myself a Neutral Good GM—following rules as written, but happily making exceptions based on in-game context and other factors. Arcana is in the late stages of playtesting, so some bumps in rulings may occur, but my experience as a designer and long-time game master will help to keep the game running smoothly and meet high expectations of gameplay.
Homebrew rules
We'll start the game running everything Rules As Written, but any homebrew rules that we decide to make official will be recorded, and we'll stick to them.
Equipment needed to play
Computer
Microphone
Platforms used
Safety
How Brandon Lee Brown creates a safe table
All safety tools are 100% confidential and anonymous, even to fellow players if preferred.
Content warnings
Safety tools used