ARC is a role-playing game where heroes defy the cruel Doomsday Clock to save their world from a looming apocalypse. Rules-light, tension-heavy, dripping with deliciously dark art yet lovingly written for all storymakers at heart. Stories you make and play in ARC run against a timer. While heroes navigate and transform the world around them, the real-time Doomsday Clock ticks to an irreversibly cataclysmic event. That doom is up to you. It could be an explosive battle, the literal end of the world—or something more intimate: the departure of beloved spirits, the farewell of an era. In game design terms, ARC borrows brazenly from OSR's "rulings over rules", openness to bizarre and unexplained phenomena, plus the many invisible ways it empowers ingenious, player-driven ideas that can subvert situations...or even the rules themselves. ARC also sneaks in inspiration from narrative games, unobtrusively encouraging subplots and hooks that tie to characters' backgrounds and motivations. In ARC, your hero matters, but the world must also matter back. The game's prompts, samples and scaffolding build this world to inspire your play.