Arium Complete Box Set

Welcome to Arium! This Kickstarter has two purposes: 

• To fund printing Arium: Evolve, the completion of the original Arium triptych trilogy.
• To fund a reprint of Create & Discover in a triptych box set packed w/ extra goodies!

Arium: The Worldbuilding RPG

Evolve Is Here

Arium: Evolve represents the next step in collaborative tools that make up Arium's award-nominated setting-building toolkit game.

Evolve makes use of every collaborative weapon in our design arsenal to ensure that whichever campaign (even THIS one... whatever you're playing RIGHT NOW) is one you will never forget.

Evolve is designed to enhance Arium: Create and Arium: Discover, and requires those two books to be fully used. Because of that, we've set out to build a great toolkit box set that will look magnificent on your shelf, has everything you need, and is easy to use at the table.

Evolve adds collaborative maps, asymmetric relationships, story-driven downtime, evolving truths and rumors, and tools for expanding a world during play. Use it with Create and Discover or bring its tools into the RPG you already play and love.

• Maps no one has to draw. Enjoy a structured, collaborative mapping system for RPGs in which players and the GM build the dungeon or hexcrawl together. Everyone contributes.

• Relationships where each side sees it differently. You chose Found Family. They chose Transactional. How's that gonna play out?

• Downtime that tells a story, not a spreadsheet. Between adventures, your whole table decides what happens next. Training montages, political intrigue, villain interludes... kissing.
• Rumors your table votes on to decide what's true. High votes become common knowledge. Zero votes, well, someone believes it. Every idea finds a home in your world.
• And more pages chock-full of additional tools, narrative examples, and illustrations.

This is in addition to the rules already found in Arium: Create and Arium: Discover!

Together, all three books form a cohesive, robust, and easy to teach and learn toolkit to pull your whole group into setting creation. 

New To Arium

Arium is a worldbuilding roleplaying game, designed to layer over any other roleplaying game you want! The tools in Arium are built as gameplay loops to help guide a group in defining a setting of their own: something entirely unique to your table!

Arium tools complement D&D, Blades in the Dark, TinyD6, Mothership, Call of Cthulhu, or any RPG, including the complete Arium system (self-referential, we know).

Arium helped a whole lot of people build and play in worlds they love together with their friends.

Arium: Create is a system-agnostic collaborative worldbuilding game. In an hour or two, everyone at the table generates, combines, and votes on the genres, cultures, landmarks, people, organizations, and treasures that make your setting unique. There will be tokens and sticky notes! Use the world with any RPG, or continue with Discover.

Arium: Discover is a streamlined, world-agnostic roleplaying game powered by six-sided dice and tokens. Its characters, Boons, Banes, and narrative tools adapt quickly to a world made with Create, or to a favorite book, show, homebrew setting, or existing setting from another game.

Each book works independently. Together, they take your group from zero to a campaign and setting that keeps evolving and growing with their characters.

For the Complete Box Set, Create and Discover return to print with new perfect-bound editions and join Evolve in one box.

Adept Icarus

We're a 3x ENnie Award nominee (2021: Product of the Year, Best Supplement, Best Aid/Accessory). We've published three RPGs: Arium, cyanstarlight, and Rue From Ruin, and we learned lessons from each of them. 

Today, Adept Icarus makes free companion web tools for EVERY ONE of our 100% human-made games.

What We're Making

The goal of this campaign is to fund the Arium Worldbuilding RPG Triptych Box Set!

What's in the box?

• A new printing of Arium: Create in paperback - a 52-page toolkit to build your setting.
• A new printing of Arium: Discover in paperback - a 72-page ruleset to play in and explore your setting.
• And the ALL NEW Arium: Evolve in paperback - a 72-page toolkit to evolve and grow your setting.

• Two included quadfold adventures: 
  • A Match of Blood & Tears by Steffie de Vaan 
  • Ol' Marsh's Manor of Mirrors by K.M. Alexander
• 12 handy double-sided quick reference rules cards for the table (4 for each book).

All of these tools are compatible with any RPG you want to use them with!

All-In

You can also get custom dice and our previous releases with the All-In pledge, including:

• Arcadia: Ride any ride. A theme park planet with cosmic horror lurking in the shadows. What else did you expect from a theme park planet? A 62-page paperback system-agnostic adventure setting.
• Thesystem: Explore any chaos. The cosmystical travel guide to a planetary system so chaotic, even your one weird uncle would say: "Yikes!" A 70-page paperback system-agnostic adventure setting.
• Arium: Flash: Prep any session. ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY fill-in-the-blank story seeds across 7 genres and 24 subgenres. GMs will never be caught unprepared again! A 170-page paperback reference.
• Arium: Bridge (Digital Only): Worldbuild any system. Our handy guide to adapting our setting creation rules to other popular RPGs. 

• Custom Arium Dice: 12 completely custom dice in triptych colors with Arium-rules hints built in!

That's it! We're not ruling out stretch goals, and have many things we could add without significantly impacting the project timelines. For now we're 100% focused on getting these items to you as soon as possible. After we reach our funding goal, we'll assess our progress on these commitments and decide what we can add!

Development Status

As of campaign start: 

• Arium: Evolve is written, playtested, and edited. The art is done, and we're in final layout. We plan to have the PDF ready for backers by the end of October.
• Ol' Marsh is in layout with a few illustrations pending. It's on track for digital fulfillment after we receive funds from KS.
• Everything else is complete or will be by the time the campaign ends.
  
  We plan to go to physical production in early November.

Stretch Goals

• Game Designers: Asha Ence, Drew Gerken, Will Munn
• Writers: Asha Ence, Drew Gerken, Will Munn, Diogo Nogiera (Discover),  
  Steffie de Vaan (Evolve), Daniel "Drakoniques" Oleh (Evolve)
• Editor: Char Irrgang
• Sensitivity Consultants: Mariam Ahmad (Create/Discover), Bee Zelda (Evolve)
• Layout Design: David Miessler-Kubanek
• Box Cover Illustration: Fernando Salvaterra
• Triptych Cover Illustration: Andreas Rocha
• Interior Illustrations: Tithi Luadthong
• Adventure Writers: Steffie de Vaan, K. M. Alexander
• Adventure Editor: Ginny Loveday
• Adventure Layout Design: David Miessler-Kubanek, K. M. Alexander
• Adventure Illustrations: K. M. Alexander, Kaspian Munn
• KS Video Producer: Jonathan Bowen
  'Discovery' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au

Online Tools

Adept Icarus also provides digital tools for Arium, and Evolve is right next in line.
The tools cost nothing and require no signups or downloads!

Try our existing tools now: the character generator and story flash randomizer are live at ariumrpg.com.

Get a random character or a story prompt where you can fill in the blanks on screen and print or share the final version. If we fund this campaign, we will make more tools. Worldbuilding helps, 

You can also see how the tools work for our other games cyanstarlight and Rue from Ruin if you want to get a more robust idea of the potential in these online tools. Each of our games has bespoke needs, and these online tools are designed to be used at the table in person, for online gaming, or however you need. 

They are enhancements, not replacements.

Pledge Levels

Digital Fulfillment

We've historically fulfilled digital files through DriveThruRPG.com, and Arium will be no different! In addition, we're offering RPG Trader as an alternative for interested folks.

Shipping

In the USA, Canada, and the rest of the Americas, Adept Icarus handles our fulfillment from our Florida warehouse. We've done this for over 4 years now, and we have it down to a science!

For EU and UK backers, we'll be working with GamesQuest, a UK- and EU-based fulfillment company, to make shipments VAT-friendly and as affordable as possible.

GamesQuest will also assist with other global orders, allowing us to expand customs-friendly shipping options to any region that receives enough orders by leveraging their shipping hubs. Generally speaking, we're talking about just 100 physical pledges in a region. This would also reduce shipping costs if we reach that volume!

Interviews

Actual Plays