Arcadian Tales is a play to earn NFT roleplaying game built on the Algorand blockchain. I was first drawn into the game when I heard it described as “like a D&D campaign, except you don’t need to have a Dungeon Master, a group to play with, or hours upon hours to play a session.” — DJ Balawala
You play as a member of the Adventurer’s Guild, and your world is the land of Arcadia. You can travel the land, explore the map, enter into combat, search for loot, and more. The goal of the creator zHamster is quite simple — to create a world in which you will enjoy spending time in. You have the freedom to play as you like: casual or hardcore, roleplaying or optimizing.
The game is currently in beta form on discord, though it has a vibrant community surrounding it. Arcadian Tales features beautiful hand-drawn characters and a theme remnant of a fantasy book. This article will walk you through the game’s details, and provide information on how to get started.
Table of Contents
Arcadian Tales Overview
Play to Earn Aspect
Playing Arcadian Tales
The Future of Arcadian Tales
Dox & Safety Check
Support the Blog
Arcadian Tales Overview
Gameplay in Arcadian Tales centers around the use of “protagonists,” which are limited mint hand-drawn NFTs. Your protagonist is customizable; you can name it, train it, level it, choose a class, equip it with items, and travel around. Each NFT is a 1/1, and serves to function as a character save file. This means that the protagonist’s info (level, class, statuses) are linked to the NFT and not the player, making them completely transferable at any time. Each protagonist starts out fairly similar to the others, with only a slight difference in base stats based on race, but quickly grows specialized as it is leveled up and itemized.
In order to play, you need a protagonist. These are in limited supply, but you can check the availabilities of them on NFTExplorer. Currently, availability is rather low so your best bet if you are looking for a protagonist is to follow along in the discord server and keep an eye out for secondary market sales.
Exploring Arcadia
Your protagonist or band of protagonists can then wander around the continent of Arcadia, where they will encounter various scenarios and opportunities to gain experience and rewards. This is done through the use of time restricted commands, which allows characters to perform certain actions every X hours. While wandering the lands of Arcadia, there are many rewards you can come upon, but the most important is the game’s currency, Arcadian Gold Coin (ARC).
Training A Protagonist
As your protagonist gains experience and levels up, it will be able to choose a class and specialization. The more levels you have, the more skilled title you can select. Currently, these result in specialized stat increases which boosts your character’s skill rolls.
Play to Earn Aspects
One of the core tenants of Arcadian Tales is “play to earn, not play to win,” and the game has done a great job sticking to that principle. Alongside ARC (ASA ID: 654669653), you can also earn Coupons, the currency of the Grocery Store Game.
ARC is important because it is used to purchase equipment, companions, and consumables; all of which help your adventurer by boosting its stats or resetting cooldowns. You can purchase items from the game’s coin shop on discord. ARC can also be sold on exchanges or swapped to other players, but it is notably not an investment.
The primary way to earn ARC is through playing and undergoing hourly, daily, and weekly actions. These will be described in more detail below, but there are also a couple more ways to earn. You can participate in server-wide events and competitions which reward high quality NFTs and generous amounts of ARC. You can also quest for it on the Aegir Tactics server with their heroes.
Playing Arcadian Tales
Arcadian Tales is currently hosted on Discord, through a comprehensive bot and pre-written scenarios that your protagonist will occur. The server also hosts the discord community, where players can chat with one another, form parties for caravans (coming soon), enter into giveaways, and more.
There are a couple major commands that are important to maximizing the experience you gain and rewards you can earn. You can refer to this gameplay guide for a more in-depth explanation, but I will list the most important ones for getting started below. These commands should be entered in one of the bot channels in the discord server.
Starter Commands:
!help: lets you check all available commands
!setaddress: connects your algorand wallet to your discord account
!inventory: checks your items
Earning Commands:
!wander: 1 hour cooldown. Explores your nearby area. Can result in a small amount of ARC or other consumables being found.
!solo: Can be used once a day for each protagonist. Causes your protagonist to go on a mission, in which your choices dictate their likelihood of success. Gains experience, has a chance at rewarding 100 ARC. Bad rolls result in lost coupons.
!weekly: Can be used once a week per user. Has a moderate chance of earning 100 ARC.
Leveling & Item Commands:
!equip <protag> <item>: Equips your protag with an item. Max of 2 protags, 1 of which can be a companion-type.
!train: Spends a small amount of coupons to train the protagonist of your choice.
The Future of Arcadian Tales
As mentioned before, Arcadian tales is currently in beta, which means there is a lot more to come. Here are a couple of things you can look forward to in the future.
A combat system (party and turn-based), including player versus player fighting. A scenario system, with in-depth scenarios that respond to your status and held assets. A caravan system, allowing players to split up their protagonists and travel with other players. Gen-2 of protagonists, bringing a lot more opportunity to new players of the game.
You can take a further look at the project’s roadmap here.
Dox and Safety Check
Not all projects in the blockchain spaces are trustworthy, and unfortunately some turn out to be complete cashgrabs. While it is difficult to ascertain whether or not a project is safe, there are a couple key indicators worth looking at.
Dox Check: Arcadian Tales is not a fully doxxed project. There are many projects where I would argue this is a red flag, but I believe Arcadian Tales is not one of them. I have seen zero cash grabs and a build-first mentality from the creator, zHamster. She has been very transparent with every aspect of the project and I do not have any hesitations regarding her being undoxxed, but as always, form your own conclusions.
High Effort Website: This gitbook was recently released and it is very detailed. All the in-game scenarios are hand-written with clearly high levels of thought and effort behind them.
Ultimately, Arcadian Tales has not done anything to raise a red flag. They have been around since August of 2021 and there have been no token launches, no fundraising, and no cash grabs. The only purchase necessary is a protagonist, but you only need one to have full access to Arcadian Tales. Always do your own research and come to your own conclusions, but you can check out their socials here:
Arcadian Tales Twitter
Arcadian Tales Discord
Arcadian Tales Website
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Thanks for reading, and stay safe!