Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura

Graveyards

A hidden graveyard, containing tombstones of Arcanum's most diehard fans, can be found at the location W: 1060 S : 809 on the world map. Another graveyard has lots of humorous epitaphs written on the graves. However, many of them are taken directly from Baldur's Gate.

Manual

Following on the tradition started in the Fallout manuals, Arcanum's manual includes an actual cooking recipe. This time it's Grandma Cookhill's Three Bowl Bread.

Mod pack

On 7 January 2002, the development team released a free mod pack, containing six new and exclusive adventures. It can be downloaded here.

Mods

Chris Beddoes has produced a mod for this game that addresses some balance issues, makes it overall a little more challenging, and replaces the entire opening area and quests. This latter is important because the opening area was used in the demo, and many players have just seen it too many times to want to start a new character any more, despite the near-infinite possibilities for character design. It can be found here.

References

• There's a location in the game called the "Isle of Despair" which is a penal colony which holds it's inmates in a remote island behind a magical barrier that makes it impossible to escape. Now, when asking the generic NPCs for its location, they answer:

"You mean the Black Isle? I'm not quite sure..."

Black Isle Studios is the name of Interplay's RPG division, and the former home of Arcanum's development team.

• A portion of the Stillwater giant quest contains a major (and fairly obvious) reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, specifically the part where you have to trace the beast to a cave and capture it. In fact, the whole sequence plays just like in the movie, you follow some giant footprints, enter a dark cave filled with bones and dead bodies, and so on.
• There's a Fallout reference in the walled city of Tulla. Apparently one of the students had to venture out in the Wastes to find a Water Gem. He has since returned and the Mages fear how the journey changed him and the influence he might have on other students. Plus, he's wearing mechanized armor.
• There's actually a reference to Bill Gates and Microsoft stealing the ideas for their Windows operating system from Apple's MacOS. One of the most influential and wealthy of people in Tarant is Gilbert Bates (Swap the G and B in Gill Bates and you have Bill Gates) because he brought the power of the steam engine to mankind. Another steam engine developer, called Cedric APPLEby is spiteful of Bates's success and claims that he invented the steam engine first and that Bates had stolen the idea off him.

Server shutdown

The official online servers were shut down on 1 November 2008.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack to Arcanum was composed by Ben Houge for string quartet and was provided in its entirety on Computer Gaming World's May 2001 demo CD.

Both the soundtrack and its sheet music are available as a free download.

Stillwater giant

Despite the result of the associated quest, the Stillwater giant DOES exist. It can be found on a random encounter between Stillwater and the pass to the elven city.

Information also contributed by Rambutaan, Sciere, Terrence Bosky, uclafalcon, Unicorn Lynx, weregamer, Wojit and Zovni