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Verum is a universe created by dungeon master Jeremy Black/Arcadum. It was built off of a heavily homebrewed version of the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, featuring races, locations, mechanics, and lore unique to it. It is both dynamic and interconnected, meaning that the actions of players within it can leave lasting effects on the world, and potentially have effects on the campaigns of other parties. Verum has an official (albeit still under construction) website that can be found here.

The streams of Verum have two unique draws that help separate it from other DnD shows. The first is that it has very high production values, featuring original art for almost every character and monster, as well as original music to go in the background. The second is the choice in players, in that every player is an internet influencer of some kind: YouTubers, Twitch streamers, cosplayers, other dungeon masters, and even voice actors. Chances are, if they're a popular internet nerd, they've either played with Arcadum, or he's trying to get them on board.

There was also an official Web Comic taking place within the Verum universe called Chronicles of Verum, though it has been cancelled.

Arcadum streams on Twitch, and has a YouTube page, which, among other things, serves as a repository for streams of previous campaigns.

On August 31, 2021, information came out regarding Arcadum's off-stream behavior, the short version of which includes being harassing, manipulative, and abusive, especially against his female players and anyone working under him. In light of this information, all of his then-current and upcoming players dropped from his campaigns, his business partnerships dissolved their contracts with him, he gave up control of his Discord server, and the world of Verum has been largely disavowed by, at the very least, a significant portion of everyone who previously had anything to do with it. It is probably safe to consider the world of Verum in its previous form finished.

Campaigns taking place in Verum include:

Violet Arc

Glies Arc

Prologue

Main Story

The Divine Wind ^Players Same party as Scrolls of Not'Chek
Otikata's Curse ^Players

Chapter 1

Verum as a whole provides examples of:

Action Girl: This being what it is, pretty much all of the female player characters would qualify, as would a fair portion of the female NPCs.
Aerith and Bob: Names tend to range from the mundane (Jerry, Madeline, Eli), to the fantastic (Ikkar, Talis, Brewbad), to the ridiculous (Dik Cok, Moe Kowbull, Goker).
Audience Participation:
- Arcadum often makes use of some art, music, and the like created by his community in actual campaigns.
- Also the "Living World of Verum", a text-based massive-multiplayer online experience hosted on Arcadum's Discord and which subscribers of Arcadum's Twitch channel can become players in, where they can participate in roleplay events where they and their characters may interact with NPCs and other players, overcome challenges, and perform other acts of roleplay, potentially leaving their own lasting marks on Verum.
Arc Number: Seven is a major one.
- The current iteration of Verum was built from the actions taken in a campaign called "7 Years 7 Days", which Arcadum ran with 77 different parties of 7 players prior to taking to streaming on Twitch. All of the players that took part in this are collectively a deity for Verum dubbed the Seven.
- Verum has seven continents.
- A tale tells of how Lord Death made seven promises.
- The symbol of the Violet is a seven pointed star.
- While this isn't guaranteed, seventh episodes of campaigns often include significant events such as major lore drops.
Artificial Stupidity: Enemy behavior is usually the result of a combination of predetermined behavior patterns and dice rolls, allowing players to sometimes take advantage of them or luck causing them to do less-than-optimal things. Defied with enemies that have the Cunning trait or its improved variants, for which Arcadum will directly control the enemy to the best of his ability to attempt to defeat the party.
Badass Crew: Most parties tend to be this, or least build their way up to it.
Big Bad: The Herald is this for the Violet Arc taking place on Kalkatesh.
Big Bad Ensemble: The Glies Arc is shaping up to have two major enemies: Otikata and The Pale Emperor. And now Tyre may end up coming back for Round 2.
Bilingual Bonus:
- Due to one of his players, Ironmouse, being Puerto Rican and using Spanish on occasion in her portrayal of the Triton Umi Tormenta, Arcadum decided to make Aquan, the native language of the Tritons, be canonically Spanish. He even went so far as to learn some himself in order to portray characters speaking it back to her.
- With Glies being largely based off of east Asia, this was bound to happen. Otikata in particular as thus far spoken largely in Japanese.
The Cameo: As part of the interconnected feature of Verum, players occasionally make appearances in the campaigns of parties other than their own.
Crossover Finale: Tyre's End, the collective culmination of the Soul of Tyre, Heart of Tyre, and Shadow of Tyre campaigns.
Crossover Grand Finale: "Endgame", the culmination of the Violet Arc on Kalkatesh, was a nearly ten-hour stream that included the vast majority of the players that had taken part in plot-important campaigns up to that point as they pooled their efforts to fend off the Violet by defeating its Herald.
Death or Glory Attack: Clashes, which are basically a cinematic one-on-one between a player character and powerful enemy character. They take form of opposing saving throws (sometimes more than one), with the higher roll being the victor. By doing this, players can deal significant damage, lock the enemy out of using specific abilities, or inflict debilitating effects, at the cost of risking the enemy doing something similar to them if they lose. Taken even further with Team Clashes, which, as the name implies, involves the entire party getting involved, at the cost of risking a Total Party Kill if they fail.
Decapitated Army: In major fights that involve additional minor enemies, there will often be some mechanic that results in this when the boss itself is defeated, often due to the Mooks being unable to either exist or act without the boss's presence. There are exceptions, though, such as in Lost at Sea, where defeating Koi Fung resulted in a psychic backlash that wiped out most of the numerous undead that been closing in during the fight; however, one group of undead turned out to be hardy enough to be able to survive it, requiring the party to finish them off to conclude the battle.
Developer's Foresight: Much of the storytelling is presented as such, with Arcadum frequently claiming that he is fully prepared for most of what happens, with the main exception being "Into the Reeds" where he was fully willing to concede he wasn't ready for their craziness. In practice, much of the "planning" was just stock DM improv.
Enemy Scan: Implemented with the Martial Check mechanic. On every player's turn, they can perform a Martial Check without using up any other part of their turn. A successful roll results in the player examining an enemy well enough to discover a piece of information about it, including its abilities, weaknesses, likely strategies, etc.
Expy: Lightly enforced. Arcadum has mentioned that, when helping new players who are having trouble deciding on a character, he will often suggest for them to use references to characters or concepts from media that they are already familiar with as a starting point. So as a result, a number of player characters in his campaigns are in some way based on, or references to, other media.
Extra Eyes: Arcadum seems to be fond of this trait in enemy monsters, with the Herald and Otikata being standout examples.
Fan Art: Sessions will typically end with Arcadum showing off a series of fan art involving the party at hand that had been posted by his community.
Fantasy Kitchen Sink: With this being Dungeons and Dragons, it's a given. However, it's added to still further with Arcadum's own inclusions, especially Glies, which adds a whole continent with a variety of East Asia influences to the mix.
Fantasy Pantheon: Verum has an extensive variety of deities with similarly varied alignments.
Flunky Boss: Enemies with the 'Lord' Trait are this, being summoners capable of bringing new creatures into the battle.
Gang of Hats: Both figuratively and literally with the TOPS, a player-created faction for adventurers in Verum whose members usually wear top hats.
Gods Need Prayer Badly: The power of the various deities at any given time is dependent on how many people are currently following them, with players from both the streamed campaigns and the "Living World of Verum" factoring into this in particular.
Good News, Bad News: Arcadum will usually put it thusly, with varying degrees of seriousness:
Arcadum: I have good news, and I have potentially upsetting news.
He Knows About Timed Hits: When working with players new to D&D, or at least to Arcadum's particular system, the tutorial battle of the campaign will often have Arcadum speaking in-character as the enemies to explain the things that the players can do and how they can do those things.
House Rules: Verum is a heavily homebrewed version of Dungeons & Dragons, and Arcadum has little trouble adding elements as necessary in order to accommodate his players.
Kick Them While They Are Down: Enemies with the 'Ruthless' trait are capable of attacking player characters that have been defeated, hastening the process in rendering them Killed Off for Real. Exaggerated with 'Hopeless', where the enemy will actively go out of their way to do this (Fortunately, only a few extremely powerful and plot-critical bosses have that one).
Long Runner: The overall Kalkatesh storyline took place over the course of nearly twenty real life years.
Off the Rails: Given the sheer number of campaigns being run, it's almost inevitable that a few wouldn't go exactly as planned.
- "Shattered Crowns" Season 2 was intended as a city management, politics filled adventure, but thanks to a poorly thought out fireball, the characters get flung to a Space Whale in a whole other nebula.
- "Among the Reeds" was envisioned as a fairly standard story about rescuing a girl from a corrupt daimyo. Then the players killed a bartender, marked the entire starting town for death, and brought the Depthar to Glies. The original campaign had to be Cut Short and the players were moved to "Servants of the Spire".
Plot Tailored to the Party: Arcadum specifically builds the specifics of his campaigns around the abilities of the characters and players that run them. Campaigns regularly include interactions or obstacles that specifically call for an ability that one of the party members possesses.
Prestige Class: Paths, a new mechanic introduced in Glies, which players can obtain via meeting certain criteria over the course of their campaign, and grant them potential access to new knowledge, powers, and the like.
Ret-Gone: An effect of "Violet Death", which can be inflicted by powerful servants of the Violet. Not only is the character and every one of the player's other characters permanently killed with no hope of being revived, but said characters are erased from the memories of everyone who knew them, save for a very few specific figures. Until the Herald was defeated, that is.
Rule of Cool: Players will often invoke this in various ways, and Arcadum will unfailingly accommodate them as best he can.
Shared Universe: All of the campaigns take place in the same universe of Verum, with actions taken in any one able to have effects on others, and can at times even intersect.
Special Guest: Many of Arcadum's players are internet personalities of various kinds. If you follow just about any kind of internet content, chances are you'll find a name you recognize somewhere in his campaigns.
Synchronization: The "refraction" mechanic, which links together the souls of characters that share the same player. Under special conditions, this can result in effects like sharing memories between such characters; on the flipside, though, when one such character undergoes a Violet Death, every character connected to them this way suffer the same fate.
Time Skip: The Glies storylines, in addition to taking place on, well, Glies, a separate continent from Kalkatesh, also takes place 50 years after the Grand Finale of the Kalkatesh storylines.
Wake-Up Call Boss: New parties will almost inevitably run up against one of these at some point, usually accompanied by Arcadum making clear that he will no longer actively provide suggestions or warn against ill-advised decisions (though he will still answer questions, so long as doing so doesn't reveal things that the player's characters aren't supposed to know).

Individual campaigns taking place within Verum provide examples of:

Violet Arc Campaigns

Tropes specific to "Broken Bonds" go here.
Tropes specific to "Death and Debts" and "Steel and Silence" go here.

Amazon Brigade: The party of "Silent Knights".
The Chains of Commanding: As the Lords of Flowing Water find out, being rulers of a new city-state comes with a lot of responsibilities and politics that the party of rough and tumble adventurers are woefully unprepared for. Scrumpo and Guy in particular seem unenthused about running Lieve, with Scrumpo wanting to return to going on adventures and killing people and being horrible in the courtroom, while Guy mentions it as one of their many examples of not thinking things through.
Space Whale: Quierg, a planet sized space whale that travels the astral sea.
Weird Currency: On Quierg, the currency is teeth.

Glies Arc Campaigns

Tropes specific to Otikata's Curse go here.

Advancing Boss of Doom: In "Pride of the Nightwolf", the party ends up catching the attention of an Engorged One while in the Mists. Arcadum makes abundantly clear that they stand absolutely no chance against it under the conditions they were in, forcing them to run away. Even when Richard Freeheart and the Nightwolf attack it together, they only bring it down to a bit over half health before it grievously wounds the latter and outright kills the former. Fortunately, by the time it reaches the party, the Mists have receded, rendering it vulnerable enough to give them a shot at fighting it.
All Deaths Final: The "Servants of the Spire" campaign takes place in the middle of a Depthar nest, meaning there's no real way to work in replacement player characters should any of the current ones die. So, if any character should die in it, that's it for their player's involvement in the storyline as well.
Arc Words: For "The Divine Wind", "Nothing is forbidden".
Beam-O-War: In "Into the Mists", The Purging One is defeated when Kiliwen engages in one of these with it to destroy its core and comes out victorious.
Big Bad:
- For "Into the Mists", The Purging One.
- For "Lost at Sea", The Steward of Rot.
- For "Pride of the Nightwolf", Uzak Gyo.
- For "Scrolls of Not'Chek", Not'Chek.
- For "Shrine of Sin", Sinning Simon.
Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In "Into the Mists", Baeth uses the hand of one of the Purging One's deceased human crew like this to give the party additional security clearance when speaking with it.
Boss-Arena Idiocy: In "Into the Mists", when the party is in battle against the Purging One, they locate devices that they use in tandem to expose its inner core, allowing them to destroy it for an instant kill. Justified in that those devices were there specifically to disable it in the event that it malfunctioned (which it very much did), and it took a fair few good rolls for the party to successfully make use of them.
Boxed Crook: The party of "Servants of the Spire". Of course, this is much less due to their skills then due to the fact that the Spire attempting to send their own forces would have political ramifications that are much better avoided.
Bullying a Dragon: The gang of "Servants of the Spire" continually belittle and talk down to The Vizier, who is only restrained from killing them immediately by Azolon.
Clarke's Third Law: The Mists had always been thought to be a mystical phenomenon. It's actually a several millenia old piece of alien technology.
Cut Short: "Among the Reeds" ended at Episode 4 when the party is apprehended for their actions, directly leading into a follow-up campaign, "Servants of the Spire".
- Also, following the information that was brought forward on August 31, 2021, the entirety of the ongoing storylines have been effectively ended.
Fun with Acronyms: The Mist, or rather, Mechanized Internal Suppression Transporter.
History Repeats: A goofy Grippli who is best friends with a boisterous Orc who uses magic to bolster his martial fighting abilities? Are we talking about Verp and Worgh of "Shrine of Sin", or Wadu Heck and Og'Narak of "Trouble in Trisden"?
Karma Houdini Warranty: The "Among the Reeds" party, who tried to scam their employer by bringing him a disguised Ratticus instead of his daughter who they were supposed to rescue, murdered a bartender when they openly discussed those plans in front of him, and summoned Depthar to Glies, in some ways undoing the efforts of the "Into the Mist" party. However, their scam quickly falls apart, and they are apprehended and sent to Archmage Azolon, where he sends them out on the "Servants of the Spire" campaign where they have to clean up the Depthar corruption they caused, something Azolon sees as a Suicide Mission for them.
Kraken and Leviathan: The Mistviathan, which can appear throughout Glies. It briefly appeared in "Pride of the Nightwolf", and was vaguely implied to have been responsible for the attack on the Maidens Scorn in "Lost at Sea".
Low Culture, High Tech: Slowly, pieces of advanced technology are beginning to be discovered. Notably, Arcadum will describe them in terms that would make sense to the characters before revealing what they actually are to the players.
- In "Into the Mists" the Big Bad turns out to be an artificial intelligence that's begun to malfunction.
- In "Shrine of Sin", Verp comes across a modern day tablet with view of all over Glies. It's revealed that The Pale Emperor also has access to one.
Never Heard That One Before: In "Into the Mists", the Adventurer's Guild where the party meets up has a bartender named Sake. You do the math.
Portal Book: The Fables in Glies are pretty much a Type 2 version of these.
Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Most parties could arguably qualify, but a few stand out.
- The party of "Scrolls of Not'Chek"/"The Divine Wind", especially in how most of the members are deliberately Joke Characters. We have Anaalius, a Samurai whose body has been ravaged by constant drug use, loves shoving things up his ass, and is too much of a Cloud Cuckoolander to ever fight anything (or even notice he's in combat in the first place) unless his incredibly serious Split Personality takes over; Mataal Ika, a Bard who acts like an Emo Teen and sucks at playing music; Scribbles, a neurotic Sorcerer who's utterly terrified of her own magic; Schmeg, a Warlock who talks much bigger than he is and whose spell list is largely devoid of offensive prowess; and Brewbad, a melee-oriented Warlock who's also a Dwarf that's pretty much an anti-Dwarf. However, their creative problem-solving and ability to work together saw them obtain a number of interesting boons as they successfully completed "Scrolls", and some of their shortcomings were patched up in the lead-in to "The Divine Wind".
- Definitely the party of "Among the Reeds"/"Servants of the Spire", comprised almost entirely of characters that are varying levels of both incredibly sociopathic and incredibly stupid. Machio, a Barbarian who wants to become a famous chef, talks like Randy Savage, and craves Ho'Ask milk; Kaju, a drug-using Warlock who flunked out of magic school; Eli, a fanatically religious but utterly incompetent Cleric who knows absolutely nothing about his god and only has his job because his rich parents bribed his school to let him graduate despite him never studying; Rattacus, a suicidally depressed Bard who talks like Eeyore and, yes, sucks at playing music; and Dik Cok, a Rogue who wears an eyepatch just because it looks cool, attempts to pickpocket literally everyone he encounters, is dumb enough to try to pickpocket an illusion of a person (that he knew was an illusion), and is named "Dik Cok". Out of all of those, the Barbarian is the only one who comes remotely close to being the Only Sane Man or having any kind of moral compass. Together, they rarely accomplish much of anything due to their constant bickering, and what little they do accomplish is usually both completely unintentional and completely terrible.
Reality-Breaking Paradox: Weaponized marvelously in "Scrolls of Not'Chek". The Dust that the heroes encounter causes anyone who gets a whiff of it to go into an astral projection state, where their soul leaves their body as they commune with the gods. In episode 5, however, Anaalius hucks a vial of the stuff into Norubaga's face. Norubaga does not exist - he's just a memory that they encounter in the scroll. Thus, the interaction between a substance that affects the soul vs. a being with no existence at all causes the reality around everybody to collapse, sending them to the Black Mirror and erasing Norubaga from the fable.
Running Gag: "Piss RP". In "Pride of the Nightwolf", a couple mentions of urination had Tori Hayden briefly question why it seems to be so obsessed on in Glies. She was more right than she could've ever thought at the time, as most of the other campaigns in Glies since then have had moments of players randomly roleplaying peeing on things.
Sealed Evil in a Can: In "Scrolls of Not'Chek", the titular scroll itself is a can containing the majority of the Eyeless Ones. More than that, it turns out that Adrian Cotour, who tasked the party with retrieving it in the first place, was himself an Eyeless One, and wanted the scroll specifically to release them from it.
Time Skip: For the "Scrolls of Not'Chek"/"The Divine Wind" party, a month passed between those two campaigns.
Those Were Only Their Scouts: In the aftermath of the "Lost at Sea" party finishing battle with a group of Eclipse soldiers, Bota Freezefingers mentions that they were just a patrol, far less numerous than usual and with no elite warriors among them, at one point all but namedropping the trope.
Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: The entirety of the "Among the Reeds"/"Servants of the Spire" party. Machio Manis tries to be a Token Good Teammate, but even that doesn't really last.

Web Video / Verum

Campaigns taking place in Verum include:

Prologue

Main Story

Chapter 1

Verum as a whole provides examples of:

Individual campaigns taking place within Verum provide examples of:

Previous

Index

Next

Web Video / Verum

Edit Locked

Campaigns taking place in Verum include:

Prologue

Main Story

Chapter 1

Verum as a whole provides examples of:

Individual campaigns taking place within Verum provide examples of:

Previous

Index

Next