There are aspects of fantasy roleplaying that rules, inadvertently, can actually take away. Today I just thought I'd mention a few things I kept in mind when creating Arcana Unearthed -- things I wanted to make sure the rules didn't remove from the fantasy milieu. (There are more, but these are some that many people forget about.)

Sieges and Castles
I love castles. And the battle around a castle, or a siege, is about as cool an event as a DM can put into a campaign. Rules that don't make living in a defensible castle worthwhile, or low- to medium-level spells that can bring down a whole castle wall easily, make this whole aspect of fantasy roleplaying less fun -- or at least difficult to justify.

Death
People should die. Harsh but true. If the magic of the game makes it so that people never die (because they are so easy to heal, cure, or raise), not only does the setting get really weird, but the feeling of accomplishment for success diminish right along with the consequences for failure. Arcana Unearthed has the means to raise the dead, but they are not as common or simple as in other games.

Battles
Let's face it: Combat is fun. Action is fun. Rules that prevent, or rather bypass, whole encounters with a single die roll, or mechanics that allow a character to simply end what would otherwise be an interesting encounter with some special ability, hurt the game.

Now, this is a tricky one. While there's no fireball spell, per se, in Arcana Unearthed, a well-placed area of effect spell with a really lucky roll in certain circumstances still might take out all the PCs' foes at once. That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things like turning undead.

While an interesting concept, I've chosen not to include turning or anything like it in Arcana Unearthed. I don't like the "with one die roll I determine whether this encounter is going to be extremely easy or extremely hard" aspect of turning. And in case you're curious, when we designed 3rd Edition, we did not balance undead with the assumption that there was a cleric who could turn in the party. So taking it out of the game does not necessarily mess everything up. It just makes undead encounters more like other encounters. (Undead in Arcana Unearthed are different than standard undead anyway.)

Interesting Scars and the Results of Combat
Going into a fortress and finding the commander to be a grizzled old veteran with a big scar running down his cheek a patch over one eye and a limp is a scene full of flavor. But with magical healing in the game, how can you justify such things? In Arcana Unearthed, magical healing works differently, and serious wounds -- like the loss of an eye, for example -- are much harder to repair. Now, I don't take this as far as having a lot of complicated and graphic critical charts or anything. It's much more a flavor issue. If you put in an NPC with a peg leg, the players don't say, "Why didn't he just pay the few thousand gold for a regenerate spell?"

Besides, I like the grizzled old veteran.

DESIGN DIARY PAST ENTRIES

* Still Talking Classes -- March 13, 2003
"I've saved some of the best classes for last. Let's talk about the runethane, the mage blade, and the witch...."

* More Classes -- February 27, 2003
"This time, I want to tell you about some of the other classes: akashics, magisters, and greenbonds...."

* Build a Better Fighter -- February 23, 2003
"The title this week is facetious. It really should be 'build a different fighter'...."

* The Magic Balancing Act -- February 13, 2003
"In Arcana Unearthed I'm introducing a new method of magic item pricing. First, I streamlined the item creation feats..."

* More Magic -- January 23, 2003
"This week, I thought I'd talk more about the new magic system in Arcana Unearthed."

* Magic -- January 17, 2003
"As a designer, magic in Arcana Unearthed posed a huge challenge. I knew that I wanted to ditch the Vancian system...."

* Design Decisions, Part Two -- December 24, 2002
"Here's a bit more discussion of some of the general issues I faced as I began designing Arcana Unearthed...."

* Design Decisions, Part One -- December 19, 2002
"Before jumping into another big area of Arcana Unearthed's design, like classes or the magic system, I thought I'd discuss some of the general issues I faced as a designer starting the book...."

* Arcana Unearthed Races -- December 5, 2002
"I started with the races. While I knew that the game needed humans as a basis, I wanted all the other races to be new. I didn't want to just create dwarf and elf analogs with different names...."