Praxis Arcanum

Hi, Mark! 

So I started a series of videos on my YouTube channel in which I give a first look to an indie game that caught my eye. 

I'd love to do it with Praxis Arcanum, so I'd like to ask your permission to show the game in the video.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence but I was amused by the name, since the Praxis Arcanum is also the name of a group in the fictional setting for Eternal, a digital card game.

Praxis Arcanum is a deck-building, multiplayer storytelling rpg about settings shaped by weird power. You can play anything from X-Men to Grisha with it---your setting just needs to involve a power that folks can access that is outside the range of what people can do in this world.

The PDF is 62 pages, with solid layout and some helpful illustrations.

Mechanically, Praxis has some solid crunch on it. In the same style as Fate Of The Norns, you build a deck of standard playing cards for your character, then draw hands from it. Playing cards of a suit allows you to pass skill checks relating to that suit, and the more cards you play at once, the stronger your attempt is.

This makes the ratio of cards in your deck matter, so if you're heavy on hearts, you'll have an easy time of passing hearts checks, but you'll be less likely to draw the cards you need for others.

However, playing cards means marking experience on cards from a 'buy list' that sits next to your deck. Accumulate enough exp, and you can buy more cards into your deck. Get enough cards of a certain suit into your deck, and you unlock new passive and active bonuses.

It's all very cool, although it involves marking the heck out of multiple decks and sometimes genuinely destroying individual cards, so probably don't play this with decks you want to keep pristine.

The GM also has a card deck, by the way, and plays a slightly separate minigame where they draw cards to apply obstacles and complications to the story.  It's neat to see the GM position being lightly gamified like this, but it doesn't ever seem to turn into oppositional gameplay. The GM is still not ever out to *get* the players, a la Descent.

Overall, this is a really cool engine that turns several decks of standard cards into the crunchy core of a fun, mini-campaign-oriented rpg. It packs a lot of the fun of a deck-building game into a storytelling framework, all without requiring you to buy custom cards, and for that alone I'd strongly recommend it---but it's also well-written and has good GMing tools.

Played a one-shot today. It was amazing! Really enjoyed it. With world creation, we kind of answered upcoming questions by mistake, but we worked around it. Also, managing what I'm capable of based on what cards I have in my hand feels a bit strange, because why am I suddenly not as effective at, say, physical tasks? Then again, it probably doesn't have to be characterised that way. Either way, I had a fantastic time, and I'd love to play a longer game. ^_^

Just had my first game of this; we were only running a one shot but I can already tell I love this system. I played a mad chemist scavenger (named Amaryllis Delphinium Wickham) on a mission to collect a haul of magic space metal to help keep her steampunk  city from dying out to the roaming kaijus of the region. Alongside her were a pyromantic street child (who turned out to be pretty good with explosives), and a psychic man from a line of adventurers.

I love this game, I've been playing it for a few months and I am excited to see it fully fleshed out! 

Hey, I'm loving the way this game is set up. I have a few suggestions:

It's very difficult to read light gray text on a white background. I'd advise switching that up. 

On page 20, I'd change the graphic so that it's in the standard order of Club-Heart-Diamond-Spade. It's confusing when that is switched for seemingly no reason. Also, is the graphic trying to say that you get the first ability when you have three cards of the same suit in your box, and then you gain the second ability when you get 8 cards of the same suit? It's hard to tell from the graphic.