Curious about all things Arcanum Worlds? Read on and if you still have questions just throw them my way.

Arcanum Worlds was founded by Jesse Sky and James Ohlen around 2018 to launch the Odyssey of the Dragonlords Kickstarter. This epic 5e D&D campaign was a huge hit and still has a massive fan following and is often considered one of the best 5e adventures to be made (for recent news about Odyssey, scroll to the bottom of this blog…)

And it is the first level 1 to 20 campaign I played in many years. I was the Dungeon Master for my kids and their friends and we ended up playing through the entire campaign (and had a blast!)

James went on to create Heroes of Baldur’s Gate and Minsc and Boo’s Journal of Villainy. The latter was published via Wizards of the Coast and all proceeds went to charity. (I helped a bit with editing on Minsc and Boo; my first collaboration with the Arcanum Worlds folks!)

While James and Jesse went on to work with Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast to create the Exodus science fiction franchise, I started work on my own tabletop roleplaying book (which would eventually become Raiders of the Serpent Sea). Given that they weren’t going to be producing anything new for a while, it seemed like a good opportunity to publish Raiders under the Arcanum Worlds brand–helping me with more exposure and ensuring that the AW brand would continue.

This was also probably the beginning of some level of confusion for readers! So I’ll attempt to clarify. What we decided to do is to create a shared universe with as much (or as little) overlap with each other’s projects as we individually wanted. Each of these books is generally an individual project (though we have shared artists, editors, and other contractors). But each book is the creative endeavor of one of us. We are creatively (and financially) independent from one another–hence the Arcanum Worlds Canada branding I used (and implicitly we can think of the rest of the group as Arcanum Worlds USA).

But the cool part is that we can go off and spin tales in each other’s worlds, use art from any of the books, or add to these worlds in whatever ways we can think of. So in some of the secondary material for Raiders, I created ways to merge Odyssey of the Dragonlords with Raiders of the Serpent Sea, for example. And in Reavers of Oath and Ruin, the Arcanum Worlds USA folks unveil an adventure set in the world of Raiders of the Serpent Sea (see below for more about that).

After Raiders of the Serpent Sea, I ended up working on contract for the Exodus franchise. A lot of my work hasn’t been directly related to the Exodus videogame however. For example, I helped James with Chains of Asmodeus (which became another for-charity release via WOTC, but is also technically part of the Arcanum Worlds USA franchise). This was neat experience because I ended up learning a lot about the inner workings of how WOTC puts together a book. This shined a light on some of the issues with Raiders in terms of organization, styling, and the monster stat blocks.

(And this is why I’ve slowly been rebuilding the stat blocks and offering revised version of them through the newsletter and I’d love to one day rebalance the encounters as well–though that will have to wait to see if I can fund the Foundry version of Raiders).

Next up, still under contract with WOTC has been three tabletop roleplaying books for the Exodus Franchise. These aren’t strictly Arcanum Worlds titles but a lot of the artists (as well as James and myself) who were involved on other Arcanum Worlds (Canada and USA) titles were involved again here. The books include:

• The Traveler’s Handbook (player’s guide)
• The Exodus Encyclopedia (monster manual)
• Chronicles of Melayu (adventure — not released yet)

Click here to learn more about Exodus.

This year I’ve also helped with putting together Stygian Passage for Arcanum Worlds (USA). James has posted a bit about this book: https://x.com/JamesOhlen/status/1953526575363699080

And I’ll end this post with a reminder to check out the latest from Arcanum Worlds (US). They are ramping up for an exciting Kickstarter centered around a remaster of the original Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign. Do sign up! (It includes a new adventure set in Grimnir, the world of Raiders of the Serpent Sea).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcanumworlds/odyssey-of-the-dragonlords-remastered-edition