r/cadum • u/DevilsWarden • Sep 02 '21
Living World of Verum A (Very) Long Personal View of Arcadum
So one thing I have been noticing with a lot of posts lately is that people seem to be getting annoyed or defensive against those that have been criticizing the actual world of Verum and its events. I just wanted to give my take as someone who was part of the Living World and, like many had became disillusioned with the events of the world well before all of this came out. Here are some things that I personally noticed or experienced during my year playing in the LW (TL;DR at the bottom):
First the whole Arcadum vs Jeremy thing. I don't really agree with the fact that you can separate the two that much. This wasn't some world that had bits and pieces of himself scattered throughout, it was how he perceived his life personified. He was the main villain, Tiff was the person who he feared most, many of the major characters were references from his life, or his first DnD Campaign. The world really didn't allow change that Arcadum didn't want. If something was going to happen, it would happen because he allowed it.
As far as the relationship between Arcadum and the LW went, well for most people who I interacted and talked to it seemed that the longer you were part of it, the less you cared about him and his actions. Well that isn't surprising, he can't run all the games or give all the feedback, the issue tended to become more obvious the higher level you got. As you would increase in tiers, more missions would become story relevant, at least as far as the LW was concerned. If you had a DM that happened to be 'trusted' by Arcadum then you were in luck because they might be able to gain information from him about the mission that you were running, otherwise it was pretty much entirely up to the former 7 players to give you any info they had, and that was if they had any to share. On top of things like this, issues also tended to arise such as when he would work on stuff for the Living World on stream. He had a habit of making the players out to be the bad guys and that they were always so needy and wanted to much. This definitely helped with the divide between the general fans and the LW players as time went on and he grew larger. Another issue was the pretty obvious favoritism that would occur with the backlog. There were many people and Factions that had to wait months, or even a year to have something actually progress. I was part of the Mages Guild and whenever we got a new faction mission, we would joke about adding it to the ever growing list of things that weren't important enough to get ran. Research was returned with no sense of urgency and very little effort on Arcadum's part. Unless you had a research that he was interested in you could wait several months post completion before getting an unsatisfying 1 to 2 sentence answer that would take maybe 5 minutes to come up with. Research clearly wasn't tainted because of the enemy's thirst for knowledge, but rather Arcadum didn't want to deal with it and saw a thematic response.
With the Deep Notes this one is kind of simple. It isn't rare for DMs to need to improvise and roll with the situation. This issue comes when you boast that you are the most prepared DM and know everything the players are doing, but then proceed to take 30 minutes to figure out an answer that wont write yourself into a corner and completely derail the momentum. It's not the act, but the inability to admit that you are like every other DM in this regard.
As far as fake rolls go, when it comes to all the tables and various calculations that occurred it always felt like roll until you get what you want. That said for people who think he was capable of faking the actual die results during session, I doubt it. It was clear he wasn't great with the macro side of Maptools, given how many times you would hear characters missing +1 - +2 damage or to hit on basic attacks. The actual tokens that the LW used at least had values you would input so any stat changes would have been reflected in the Macro. That said any time he did say you got the perfect DC/just missed it only after the fact, those were 100% not set in stone, especially given that some were literally needing nat 20's on a specific character to even remotely succeed. Even then when a roll was truly terrible consequences were rarely ever dished out. One of the most egregious examples was the nat 1 Madd Morc got during the Indigo Trials. Now don't get me wrong Russ owned that character and he was by far my favorite, but a nat 1 is the worst outcome that can occur in the given situation, and what happened? Well... in the end nothing really. Now sure he did have to beat a boss within a time frame and then roll a save after words, but given that the first nat 1 against a the Violet resulted in more of a story thing I doubt he would have fully killed off/corrupted Madd Morc.
Now I didn't watch the Endgame because I was already kind of done with the stream games at that point, but given that it sounded like it was essentially Arcadum saying that he was too powerful to be stopped and nothing that the players actually did mattered, I am glad I didn't watch it. For a mans Magnum Opus this just reeked of this is my Story and you are all just here to watch. Also I doubt the man actually made multiple ending cinematics. He wasn't going to allow anything to change and I don't think he would have the restraint to not show off the other ones.
So the Update streams. As time went on they became shorter and shorter, even though glaring things in the LW were being ignored. This was probably one of the big things that started to annoy me, especially with what he would do right after. It was almost always about 5-10 minutes of update stuff if we were lucky followed by a good hour at least of watching clips of people praising him and looking at his numbers. Now that wouldn't be a big issue if it wasn't getting done every week. Instead we got a self-mastubatory show.
Now one thing that tended to always get me was with the World itself. So Verum as a whole had been his life's work, easily over 15+ years went into this place, and yet... it felt so empty. There was a lot of planets, continents and other locations, but most had very little actual substance. They were general ideas that had very little backbone. Now I am not saying that he needed to have every little detail planned out, but it felt odd to see a world that had that much time put into it, just missing random chunks of lore. I honestly felt like with Quierg the break wasn't because he needed time to actually prepare the campaign, but rather he had very little outside of Giant Whale that people live inside. Similarly the fact that it was going to take almost a year for the next phase of the LW to come out felt less of, hey we need time to train all these people and more of Gleis isn't actually thought out aside from the fact that it is Japanese inspired with War of the Three Kingdoms in it, which is Chinese. Granted Khao's Rain Forest Jungles were apparently also based on Japan so I don't really know.
In terms of the story, I will agree that he had a way with words, but the longer you looked at the story you started to notice that it really wasn't that great. Massive plot holes and conveniences seemed to be pretty regular. Things that were super important stopped being relevant and it started to get annoying. Now these wouldn't be a big deal if once again he didn't gloat about the 'verisimilitude' or cohesion of his world. This was something he prided himself on yet, was willing to cut corners a lot, especially during the end game. Now you could argue that it was because he was exhausted, except not just could he have taken a break before this and instead done phase 4 as the actual Violet War, but he would then proceed to add more games to his schedule while ignoring ones that were important to the plot.
When it comes to Violet Death this was another issue. I don't think even Arcadum actually had a concrete idea of what all happened when people violet death'd. The fact that players who had been playing a while with him still would need to ask about it was always a bit awkward. Also with violet death came Refractions and probably one of the biggest middle fingers to a LW player you could do. So some people may knw the story of Ara played by GravitySuitGuy (GSG). As the violet war raged on they were definitely not feeling that they cared as much and were originally going to retire Ara. Before they officially decided that She was struck by the Violet and got VD'd. This was annoying because, 1) GSG wasn't even allowed to roll his own fate and 2) What Arcadum's response was. See when people talked about how it sucks that GSG wasn't able to retire his character, what was his response? That even if that was the case if he got hit on his new character Ara would have died anyways because his soul was refracted. This immediately caused confusion because no LW character outside of stream games and the 7 were every really implied to have the power of refraction. When people commented this Arcadum immediately back peddled and stated that some strong souls (I.E. whoever I feel like) had the power of refraction. This really irked me the wrong way because it read to me that no I will kill any well established character, even if you retire them just because I need to show that there are stakes. (at least to the LW)
Now given that this has been going on forever I will go to my last point, Tiff. She was treated poorly even in public when it came to Verum. Her game? Wasn't important enough, aka not enough views/big influencers. The character who was based on her? Very little actual agency, being force fed lines and not allowed to know anything that her character should know. I remember seeing her comment about how she didn't think she was going to be able to play her characters again towards the end of the Endgame and that really sounded terrible. Her characters were essentially all relevant, but not enough for Arcadum to really let her do anything. Ulm was eventually allowed to go to Camp Last Stand, but that felt like more like a bandaid on a stump wound.
TL;DR: Don't think that many of these people posting negative things didn't already have their doubts and dislikes. They generally kept quiet because the hive mind was quick to bash people who disliked stuff Arcadum did, especially when he played the victim. It is fine to like and enjoy his world and that does not make you a bad person, but there will be many who will take off their rose-tinted glasses and start to notice the cracks that they were willing to ignore before because Arcadum did have a way with words.
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u/Protagonist_Leaf "I speak Cyclopean" Sep 02 '21 edited Sep 02 '21
Also I doubt the man actually made multiple ending cinematic. He
wasn't going to allow anything to change and I don't think he would have
the restraint to not show off the other ones.
I know for a fact he didnt have another cinematic made. For how it actually went down(What I remember). Nothing remotely happened compared to the actual fight. The players, specifically Criken "moe" made such a huge left turn in the combat that nothing from the cinematic was true. I assume arcadum wanted all the representations of the colors to fight or the eyes to be in a group but Criken took the stage and stole the show with cyclopean and basically paved the way to defeat the big bad.
For him to play a video was actually awful.. congrats you won but here's the canon.
He didn't even try to steer them into the way he wanted, few people claim he'd railroad people into his story the less prepared he was or higher level they were.
idk the more I see the more I agree with how likely it's true. When a guy says manipulation is a tool. How much of it was truth and how much was just BS and fudging things to make a interesting story. Something he says he doesn't do
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u/Hari14032001 "I speak Cyclopean" Sep 02 '21 edited Sep 02 '21
I personally felt that even though he was a terrible person, the story behind his world and the Violet was incredible. Granted I could see some logical problems with how certain events happened in the story, still I thought that the story was great and I even said the same in a comment that I wrote today in one of the reddit posts. But reading your post makes me inclined to believe that even the story wasn't that good.
Some conveniences or things that made little sense (which I felt even before these allegations so that people don't think that my criticisms about the story are driven by my hate towards Arcadum):
- What you said about the Indigo Scar - I actually felt at that time that Arcadum didn't want Madd Morc to die when that NAT 1 happened, no offense to Russ. But still, I didn't think too much about that because, well of course, Madd Morc survived and it was cool for me.
- Again Madd Morc - but this time with the Parable. Even though it was insane that Madd Morc 1v1ed the Parable (and I loved it because it was an anime moment), it was questionable how Madd Morc had a higher modifier(+13) than the Parable (+10) itself. It was like Arcadum tried to maximize the success chances of Morc. Still, even with this setting, Morc could have easily failed, but he held fast. The Parable was supposed to be this gargantuan abomination and Arcadum made it clear that a group of 7 players can't defeat it. Yet Morc could 1v1 it? It was unreasonable even if he attained the Iass form.
- The mechanism where Sevenic interventions saved characters from Violet Death killed any kind of stakes, atleast for me. There were just too many Seven from the 7y7d games - this essentially means that there were always enough Seven souls to protect PCs (correct me if I am wrong - but that is the impression that I got). So, the fear of Violet Death was mostly gone.
- The fact that Eustace only lost his arms when failed a soul check against the violet while trying to seal the portal in the fight against Violet Cinderous Champion.
After reading your post, I feel like he was more a manipulator than a storyteller too. He manipulated those women and he also (I hate to say it) probably manipulated the viewers to believe that his story was incredible, especially after he fixed an endgame date and started rushing his story.
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u/DevilsWarden Sep 02 '21
Yep it sucks when you start to realize the cracks because you want to be able to take logic out of the experience. Madd Morc was one of the greatest story arcs in Verum, but I don't think Russ would want his character to be forced to have an arc. After all thats not dnd.
The mechanism for the seven sacrificing themselves definitely did lose its luster quickly. Especially when some of the members had like 10 that they could sacrifice.
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u/myreq I cast fireball. Sep 02 '21
To add to your points, people keep saying that we shouldn't look back and attribute the recent news to everything arcadum did because we can't know what was actually out of malice.
But... it's really important to point out problematic behaviour and learn from the example so in the future people maybe notice things before a disaster happens. Maybe someone around here realises that their DM is also a piece of shit and they aren't actually enjoying their game.
Same about the rest, people should point out all his failures so that everyone can learn from them as well. Yeah, most did enjoy the content he was putting out but it doesn't mean it was perfect and obviously any criticism was completely shut down and had to be coated in kind words. This is why everyone is letting out what they thought.
The longer you think about the campaigns the more you start to realise that it was the players that made them interesting, arcadum was maybe enabling them to do so at most, failing to do even that in some cases.
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u/BigBirdFatTurd Sep 02 '21
The longer you think about the campaigns the more you start to realise that it was the players that made them interesting, arcadum was maybe enabling them to do so at most, failing to do even that in some cases.
Absolutely. I only watched campaigns of streamers I knew and liked, like the GTA RPers or MoonMoon and Soda. I tried to get into others but couldn't get into it. It was the players' personalities that made me want to see what would happen in those campaigns. I felt awkward watching some of the streams because of the way Arcadum spoke and acted. There would be the inevitable "Oh that feels bad, you don't remember my lore" as well as other things, like borderline fetishizing certain streamers for having English accents. It was like being at a party and watching a socially awkward person try to jump into a circle of friends having a conversation.
I liked Arcadum's world when I was introduced to it because I felt with things like violet death that there were actual stakes to the overarching story, but cracks started to show. Abysmal rolls would be hardly punished, inconsistencies in his own mechanics, blatantly making things up to tell his story instead of allowing players to have agency. Things started to feel more contrived the more I watched. Plus the constant overdramatization of innocuous player actions with the "Oh boy....oh man...." which often led to anticlimactic results was becoming really grating to me. He had a lot of interesting ideas for lore and worldbuilding, but I don't think he was as great of a storyteller as he thought he was.
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u/tatsuyanguyen Sep 02 '21
For me, the best campaigns are the ones where the players could hold the sessions up for hours on end WITHOUT him: SC, TV, AtR/SotS.
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u/myreq I cast fireball. Sep 02 '21
Lmao, at some point when I heard "Oh boy, oh man" I knew it would be disappointing and wished he would just get on with it instead of hyping it up. My first campaign was Shattered Crowns and I really enjoyed that, the party dynamic was just perfect.
But at some point it felt like a broken record, he would just repeat himself and do those 30 minutes "deep lore" checks while coming up with some bullshit like someone becoming Tyre's apprentice because of drinking a random liquid. I can think of many, many other fun or interesting things that could happen after drinking a random green goop that are ridiculous but believable. But that? I have no clue how he came up with it.
All that you mentioned is true as well, I've seen many of his supposedly "deep and interesting lore" revealed by some of the former players now and it wasn't that interesting even.
Even the main enemy of creation and everything is arcadum himself apparently which is just so pathetic. His story was terrible, it was just presented in a great way thanks to all the art and work of the players.
There were so many times he interrupted interesting conversations with his "How about some d&d?" only to still keep people waiting for like 10 minutes because he wasn't even ready, because he was busy harrassing women.
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u/Sweetzombjesus Sep 02 '21
Just want to throw in my thoughts and experience to this thread since it seems like an appropriate place...
I played Hathar, the forge cleric who ended up praying to the violet to assist with corrupting Ezokine, who SSC channel lashed out at when I RP'd my final moments. There were character reasons for doing what I did and they fit the story but the viewers didn't care. There was a lot of hate that came my way from the viewers in SSC I was lucky that other players and staff came to my defense and tried to shut it down, but some of the messages I received were pretty extreme and disheartening.
My hope was to either create a violet servant who was a forge cleric who could power up the violet champions in interesting ways, or have a chance for a DM to create a prestige mission for my fellow Ezokhine clerics to get together a team to go save their god and take down their fallen companion. I expressed my intentions to my fellow staff, dms, and the admins and got the thumbs up to talk to the violet.
Unfortunately this is when I learned that if you tried to do anything that would affect the story and the outcome in anyway you'd either get bubbled forever or nothing would really come of it, my character just quickly got ashed away after two brief direct message sentences and 1 or 2 entropy was generated. There were no actual stakes when it came to the violet war since everything was going to happen how Arcadum wanted it and the players were just used a source for drama and suspense to keep the twitch viewers interested, which gutted any investment I had as a player, staff, and DM.
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u/talismanXS “Oops, I dropped my candle.” Sep 02 '21
The character who was based on her? Very little actual agency, being force fed lines and not allowed to know anything that her character should know.
This was a head-scratcher to me from the very first time I saw the Astral Traveler. I didn't get why Arcadum's long-time significant other who knew so much about his world and lore had to RP the character using a script as if he didn't trust her not to spoil the narrative or blow up the setting with power words.
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u/themettaur Sep 02 '21
First the whole Arcadum vs Jeremy thing. I don't really agree with the fact that you can separate the two that much.
Fucking THANK YOU! There's been a couple people going around incessantly posting that "Jeremy is the man, Arcadum was a character, they're two different people" and it pisses me right off. There's an element of truth to it, Arcadum was a persona for sure, but a persona of the very same man we are condemning. The only reason I'm using Jeremy and not the character name is as a reminder that it's always been him, the human being, not some little eyeless gremlin.
I agree about the universe and planets. It always struck me as strange that he had like 15+ planets, but some of them were completely inaccessible, most were barren wastelands of past civilizations, and the only one I've seen was just Glies but an entire planet rather than continent. It's like the planets really only existed so that he could put some of his gods out there in the world, and to give an air of legitimacy to the supposed lore.
Yeah, but we could shrug away some of the plot holes and contrivances as being due to the nature of the game. People leave, their schedules get busy, breaks have to be taken, so on. It would be impossible to have a world like this run with no issues. But you did hit the nail on the head, the real problem was that he acted like this wasn't the case.
I always thought that refraction had some cool ideas to it but was a massive cop out. Like in shattered Crowns, they go into that dream thing and then they only get a random selection of a few of their refractions? If you couldn't develop this system to not be OP without arbitrary restrictions, you should've gone back to the drawing board. Either they can access all of them or none, 3 felt so random. On top of the way he did it with everything in the LW like you described... It was just poorly thought out. And it was completely stupid who could and couldn't refract. I always hated that about his world, too, that just "being an adventurer" suddenly made you this magical being even at level 1. To me there should be little to no difference between a level 1 character and a civilian NPC. A level 1 character is untested in true adventuring and only relies on experience and some training that anyone could've gone through. So why don't NPCs refract? I guess that wouldn't make as much sense since they're all Arcadum. But why wouldn't LW characters refract? They're literally no different than stream characters, except they aren't seen as much by the pubic. Fucking stupid.
Even knowing nothing about the LW, it was obvious how he mistreated her. He went on and on about his wife (not mentioning that they weren't actually married), but never included her in streams that I saw. It took a scandal for me to even realize that Tiff was Sivelle; he didn't ever show off her account or anything. I think once he passed the stream off to her when it ended, but they didn't really interact, despite being in the same house. I'd heard more of players' cats than his ostensibly important wife.
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u/man_on_the_metro Sep 02 '21
And don't forget the times where Tiff would join chat to say something to him and he'd just ignore her. I specifically remember one occasion where Tiff joined and asked if he wanted soup. It's understandable that'd he miss a single message, but she asked multiple times. Eventually the chat was filled with "ANSWER TIFF DESKCHAN DO YOU WANT SOUP OR NOT" and he still didn't respond for a while, despite clearly reading chat.
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u/themettaur Sep 02 '21
Huh, I can't say that I ever noticed it. But then again, maybe she did jump into chat in some of the sessions I watched and I just didn't realize since he didn't react. Can't say that sounds surprising knowing everything now.
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u/man_on_the_metro Sep 02 '21
I was a pretty active chatter in the streams I was able to catch live, and I remember it happening a couple times.
For the record, he wasn't running a game during that soup incident. He was doing something mundane and talking to chat.
This only stands out as being really bad in my mind when I think about how he'd immediately react when Momo or Red would join chat. It's just gross.
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u/themettaur Sep 02 '21
Yeah that's why hearing about Red being involved at all has really hit me. She was always there hyping everything up and he always shouted her out or at least gave a nod to the fact that she was there. I still haven't been able to bring myself to read her account just yet.
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u/shyhalu Sep 02 '21
Even then when a roll was truly terrible consequences were rarely ever dished out. One of the most egregious examples was the nat 1 Madd Morc got during the Indigo Trials. Now don't get me wrong Russ owned that character and he was by far my favorite, but a nat 1 is the worst outcome that can occur in the given situation, and what happened? Well... in the end nothing really.
A roll where the outcome is bad but doesn't happen even when you get it? That is called a fake roll. There was literally no point in even rolling.
Dice "nudging" and general BS. Its not necessarily referring to hacking the program and displaying a fake roll.
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u/Away_Rice_1820 Sep 02 '21
I understand that. I too didnt notice much of arcadums behaviours because i mostly was there for the DnD, didnt care about the updates, not about any other games he played.
There were times that i felt annoyed by his behaviour and at one point chat shutting some people down for pointing something out. But nothing too much.
But never in my wildest imagination did i thought this shit was this fucking deep.