2020 Geek-A-Long: Rogue

This post is super long, but with everyone on pandemic lock-down, it seemed like a good time to ignore blogger rules about post length. All of us need all the distractions we can get right now. I hope you are okay and have the things you physically and mentally need. I’ll be back again later this week to talk about mental health during lock-down, and to revive book club. [[Virtual hugs from six feet away.]]

Rogues do it from behind.

Rogues do it with advantage.

Or if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it, -and- that enemy isn’t incapacitated, -and- you don’t have disadvantage on the attack roll.

As long as I’ve been playing, Rogues have been the basic bitches of D&D. Rogues definitely love fall and pumpkin spice lattes, which they obviously unironically call PSLs. They also love Ugg and/or Doc Marten boots, leggings-as-pants, flannel shirts, crime, and holding systematically biased systems accountable. But you know what? I also love all of those things. So from one Basic-Player-Character-Bitch to another, let’s celebrate Rogues. 

Rogues are my second favorite class after Bards. Most of my “story worthy” characters have been Bards; I think that class comes naturally to adult me. But way back when, as a new player, I almost always chose Rogue. I think I liked that they could do a lot of damage without having to be a tank. Also, it would be unfair of me to not note that I really like the trope of playing a Robin Hood-esque antihero, and you can’t find a more perfect class than Rogue for that. 

I’ve been thinking all year about the post I want to write about Living Arcanis by Paradigm Games. Living Arcanis (LA) was my first real campaign. I’d dabbled in one-offs, but I didn’t have much access to D&D before college. During my Freshman year at Purdue, I met my ex and he introduced me to Arcanis. I’ve talked about that relationship occasionally here before, and I’m not going to waste today’s post on unpleasant memories of him. He introduced me to “serious” RPGs and for that I’m grateful. I played all four years of the original Living Arcanis Campaign and it changed my life for the better. It’s worth noting that I have not played any of the newer content, so I can’t speak on that. I’m going to write about the original version. It was played in D&D 3.5, and even though I love 5th edition as much as I hated 4th edition, 3.5 is still my misty water-colored memories of playing D&D at it’s peak of perfection.

The mechanics of LA are a little different from those of straight Wizards of the Coast (WotC) Dungeons & Dragons, so I’ll start there. NOTE: for the rest of the post, when I say “D&D” I mean the WotC version. WotC D&D is really the Kleenex or Xerox of RPGs. It’s the brand that defines the item.

• Arcanis is played in “real time” (i.e. you play it in a specific order and the plot takes place over a specific period of time). The campaign was released in terms of Campaign Years. So, there are Year 1 adventures, and Year 2 adventures, etc… Basically, the first LA campaign told a four-year story. 
• It’s not designed for home-brewed story lines. That doesn’t mean you can’t make your own custom Arcanis campaign, but that’s not really how it was meant to be used. The creators of the game wrote adventures (mods) and those are played in the same general order by everyone playing at home. There are hard-point and soft-point mods. The hard-points are required adventures that everyone playing is supposed to complete. They contain major plot advancements. The soft-points are optional side quests, and frankly I tended to enjoy them the most, but you won’t be “missing” major information by skipping them. 
  • I actually really like mods. They are a spectacular way to run a campaign without having to spend hours and hours prepping an adventure. You buy the mod, the DM (should) read it in advance, and then you play. It’s the RPG equivalent of a move-in-ready house. DMs and groups will add their own flavor to it, no two tables will play through a mod in exactly the same way, but it does take a lot of the prep work out. 
  • Standard D&D has mods available as well, but for LA they are the beating heart of the game. 
• Convention play was not exactly mandatory, but for all intents and purposes, it was. You had mods that you played at your home game, and mods that were released at conventions. Convention mods were hard-points, and while you could play them at home later, there was a general zeitgeist of that not being what you were supposed to do. LA is very community based, so people would be on forums and whatnot talking about it when they weren’t playing it.
  • The forums are a double edged sword. On the one hand, it was a really cool way for a community of people who all love the same stuff to go online and talk about it. Not unlike Ravelry, really. On the other hand, it was not always a welcoming space. I don’t want that to detract from my overall assertion that LA is fun and was an incredible part of my life, but looking back on it, the Venn Diagram of Onara Online and, say… 4chan, has a decent amount of crossover. If you are hearing of 4chan for the first time here, don’t google it. Just enjoy not knowing, I wish I didn’t. 
  • The forums had a way of contributing to gatekeeping within the Arcanis community. There was a notable line between the “serious” players who would eat, sleep, and breathe LA, and those that were just looking for a fun game. I think this is one of the things that has been changed. It’s my understanding that the game is more accessible to more casual gamers now. 
• Certs. [Please insert a long dramatic sigh here]. I hate certs. I hated them when I was playing LA, and I still get annoyed thinking about them now. The creator of LA, Henry Lopez, did not invent certs, but he leaned into them hard. Certs are physical printed sheets that describe what mods you’ve played and what loot you have. They only “count” if a sanctioned DM has signed them. Without them, your XP and items won’t be recognized at a convention. They make (some) sense to me when you talk about tournament play, like for cash prizes or something. That’s a real thing for some games, like Magic the Gathering. But in terms of an RPG that is meant to be played mostly in a home setting, it’s just dumb gate-keeping bullshit. There’s really no sugar-coating certs. 
  • You had to bring a binder of your in-game accomplishments with you if you wanted to play one of those not-officially-mandatory but definitely-actually-mandatory convention games. And the convention games were amazeballs. Seriously fun! Being in a room of 20-30 tables of people all playing through the same adventure is one of my favorite memories of that time of my life. I felt a part of something. But to get in, you had to slap your LA dick on the table to be measured. I did it, but the longer I played the more I hated it. Why not let someone who is wandering into the room and has never played LA before play? Who actually gives any fucks if they don’t have the backstory? I certain didn’t care. 
  • I think a lot of the players felt empowered by certs. I get that to a degree. It’s basically a certificate of completion, like a less expensive but equally useful undergraduate degree. For me though, it always felt like a way of excluding people. Also, I don’t want to carry all that crap around at a convention. By year three, that binder was heavy!

So, let’s talk about the actual campaign.

LA was set in a custom world, Onara. Religion was enormously important to the plot line, and the two special races that I loved the most were Vals, which were essentially humans with some Angelic ancestry, and Dark-Kin, which were humans with some demonic ancestry. I played a Val-Rogue. Each Val family is the descendant of a specific deity, and mine was the goddess of luck. I had so much fun playing Pricilla Val’Sheen. She was sexy and outgoing and confident, and basically a laundry list of things that 21-year-old me was not. Priscilla had an awesome crossbow that she shot with extreme accuracy. She could see in the dark and was a run-away noble that had left her gilded cage for the excitement of an adventurer’s life. She was an accomplished thief, but tended to see the world through the lens of nobility. She was admittedly two-dimensional, but as a new player, she was a great archetype to let me try on new personality traits that I wouldn’t have been bold enough for in real life. 

Arcanis is a decidedly Roman system, and I think that definitely contributed to its popularity in the Midwest. It felt very accessible when you are an outcast gamer living in the Bible Belt to play in a system that was based on warring religious factions. Despite the tendency towards the gate-keeping mentioned above, I felt very accepted at the table I played at and at conventions. Convention play regularly included a LARP (Live Action Role Play), and you’d make a costume and go in full character. These were always political role-play mods, there was little to no stage fighting, and I will always remember my first one. It was a dinner party with major plot points. I overheard two people talking, and later found out it was two of the writers talking out of character. This was information I wasn’t meant to have! I thought they were Player-Characters talking in game, who totally spoiled a major plot point. Everyone was cool about it. We all had fun and it was one of the first times I legitimately felt open and comfortable in a room full of strangers. 

Arcanis isn’t necessarily what I would recommend to a brand new gamer, the exception being if the DM was experienced and had maybe played in the original game. Honestly, writing this post makes me want to run it. Mr. Llama plays in a few streamed games on Welcome To The Party, and right this moment I’m seriously considering offering to run the first four years of Arcanis for his group. He’s said before that me doing it is the only force on this earth that could make him roll up a 3.5 character again. 

Whether you’re knitting, crocheting, or cross stitching this square, you can download the Rogue pattern here. Instructions and charts for both knit and crochet are listed in the pattern. When you’re finished making it, don’t forget to Instagram your squares at us @lattesandllamasyarn with the hashtag #geekalong! Want to hang out with other people making the blanket? You can find moral support in the Geek-A-Long group on Ravelry here.

~Megan-Anne

Hang in there guys. We’ll get through this.

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