Arcanum Backgrounds

Origins: Two Competing Needs

Backgrounds grew out of two design pressures when the team started work on Arcanum after Fallout.

Knowing who the player is. In Fallout, everyone grew up in a vault — young, ignorant of the outside world, selected at random. Any character made sense. Arcanum didn't have that luxury. The team needed a way to establish who the player character was before the game began.

Making every choice matter. Tim Cain had a personal design goal: everything in the character creation screen should have consequences. This extended to gender (which the whole team, including women on the team, agreed should have gameplay differences) and even the character's name. The name was converted to a number and used as a seed for the random number generator, which is why chest contents varied by character name. Players eventually compiled lists of names that guaranteed specific loot.

What Backgrounds Solved

Backgrounds addressed both needs simultaneously:

• World-rooting: Many backgrounds referenced having a famous parent, growing up wealthy, or having siblings. The Zeppelin crash narrative elegantly explained why none of these people were available in-game — the Zeppelin service was cancelled after the crash, leaving only slow ocean freighters, so your past connections were unreachable for months.

• Unique mechanical options: Backgrounds could adjust things you couldn't buy during character creation, at level-up, or even from items — XP bonuses, starting money changes, attribute effect modifiers (like encumbrance bonuses), skill effect adjustments, and inherent damage resistances normally only available from armor.

The closest Fallout equivalent was traits (which always had a good and bad side), but backgrounds did more and tied into the world fiction.

Balance Challenges

Tim made one early balance pass through all backgrounds to ensure none were worthless or overpowered. He never had time for a second pass. This became a problem because:

• Attributes and costs changed during development, but backgrounds weren't updated to match
• Some backgrounds adjusted things that stopped mattering as much in the final game
• Some backgrounds were deleted during development for being worthless or overpowered, but Tim no longer knows which ones — his Arcanum archive only contains the shipped files with no version history

Tim's Favorite Backgrounds

Listed alphabetically (not ranked):

Escaped Lunatic

Tim's "Mike Myers from Halloween" concept. Gave damage resistances (hard to get all-in-one from armor), but you started with no money, a huge reaction penalty, and only rags for clothing. Made you an outcast from the start — exactly what an escaped lunatic would experience.

Factory Escapee

Restricted to half-orc characters. Immediately rooted you in Arcanum's central story about half-orcs being exploited as cheap factory labor. Mechanically simple: +1 Strength but only 50 gold instead of 500. Essentially buying a Strength point for 450 gold, which became trivial after a few levels.

Frankenstein's Monster

+4 Strength and +4 Constitution, but -6 Dexterity. The math was secretly generous: you gained 8 attribute points but only lost 6, so diligent investment back into Dexterity would more than balance it out over time. Also gave electrical and poison resistance (with a fire penalty). The standout feature: permanent "dumb dialogue" regardless of Intelligence score — a fun roleplaying option without the mechanical cost of actually lowering Intelligence. Tim noted the corresponding Bride of Frankenstein background was less well-balanced, which disappointed him.

Magic Allergy

Gave a tech aptitude bonus but prevented wielding magic items. Great for roleplaying gunslingers or crafters. Crucially, you could still pick up magic items and give them to companions — unlike the reverse background, Technophobia, which wouldn't even let you pick up tech items. Tim felt Technophobia went too far with that restriction.

Nature Mage

Gave magic aptitude when standing on natural surfaces (grass, sand, cave floors — but not dungeon floors). Tim preferred it over the similar Day Mage (bonus during daytime, penalty at night) because Nature Mage was more tactical — you could step off a city street onto a patch of grass for an instant aptitude boost. Also better than Sky Mage (bonus only outdoors), since you can't exactly ask a dungeon monster to step outside.

Raised By... Series

Tim loved the entire "raised by" family (raised by elves, raised by orcs, raised by monks, raised by snake handlers, raised by the circus). These separated genetic background from cultural background — something Tim points out they were doing 20 years before D&D 5th Edition formalized the concept. Each gave bonuses and penalties reflecting the adopted culture (e.g., raised by snake handlers gave poison resistance from being bitten constantly).

Sold Your Soul

Gave a large permanent magic aptitude bonus (not location-dependent like Nature Mage), but immediately reduced your alignment by 200 (out of 1000) into the negative and capped your maximum alignment at that point. You could never be fully good. Combined with a significant reaction penalty, the game constantly reminded you that you were a bad person. Tim enjoyed how players would take it for the "free" aptitude bonus, not realizing the game would relentlessly reinforce their evil nature — making it easy to slip further into villainy.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5sI33homm8