Ark City Arcane Blues

Ark City, USA. A concrete jungle people flock to, a major centre for commerce and home to many a broken dream. Great wizards have, in the past, built their skyscrapers here. Monuments to their power and influence, now fueling dark projects to keep their legacy. This is not a story about the benevolence of Capitalism.

Ark City Arcane Blues is a tabletop RPG for 2 to 5 players and 1 GM about modern day magic users who are trying to survive in a world where power and money are one and the same. Go on morally dubious jobs, get paid, rise against capital using your honed magic.

Key Features:

• Create Powerful Mages: Pick from among 15 Archetypes, each with customizable powers and a bevy of Knacks and Tricks available.
• With great Power: Each archetype power comes the opportunity to define your own powers your own way. Write your own powers with ease!
• Make your way in Style: No physical attributes. Use the 6 character Styles (Forceful, Underhanded, Erudite, Quick, Glamorous and Diplomatic) to decide how your character approaches situations.
• Rich variety of encounter styles: Win in engagements not through sheer force but with panache and quick thinking using the Qualities system to indirectly dispatch enemies. Use combat rules even for mental or social engagements.
• Test your mettle with Tarot: Use the Tarot Check method to face adversity. Match reversed cards with your own, in suit or value, in order to determine how well your characters succeed. Give someone a push using your ace in the hole, or keep it for later.
• The Power of Tarot: Interpret anything through the lens of tarot. Have regular checks be modified by the effects of Major Arcana, upright or reversed.
• A unique setting: Discover Ark City, a city under the power of megacorporations where magic is so ubiquitous as to have become mundane. Everyone can use magic and most people do on a daily basis. Discover fashion styles and explore new presentation styles in a world where turning into an animal-human hybrid is as easy as finding a good shapechanging parlor.
• GM tools galore: Use a variety of tables to generate anything from new one-shot jobs to new corporations and even new neighborhoods. All are powered by tarot, and all are flexible.
• Includes a smart character sheet file: With a smart character sheet, it becomes much easier to keep track of your character! Comes as a .xlsx file.

You will need a tarot deck to play this game. The game is playable over virtual tabletops if they support decks of cards, and hands of cards.

You can also check out Ark City Free Magic for an early taste of this game.

Content Warnings: Being a role-playing game the content of a game can vary a lot. That said, the Shapechanger archetype is thematically linked to Body Horror. There are also templated missions that imply violence perpetrated to union reps or whistleblowers on the count of rich/powerful entities. This is meant to show the moral bankruptcy of capitalists but may be upsetting.