What the svante is an Arrhenius?

In August of 2019, I sat down with a piece of paper and started to think up ideas for my own tabletop roleplaying game. I'd always loved TTRPGs, ever since my parents got me the D&D Basic Rules red box in 1983. Now, 40 years later, I'm on the verge of publishing my own game. 

So what is Arrhenius? First off, it's pronounced "ar-REN-ee-us" with a silent H and the stress on the second syllable. The name comes from Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, the first person to really bring up the idea of man-made climate change. I didn't want to make another fantasy RPG. There are so many of them already and they all do a decent job. There didn't seem like there needed to be more of that. I was interested in trying to tell other stories, stories with settings that we don't often see. That piece of paper I started writing ideas onto back in 2019 had two lines back to back. They read:

• A game set in the year 1,000,000

• A game set during the next Ice Age

There were other ideas, but those were the two best. I dove into Wikipedia to try and figure out when the next Ice Age might be. A million years in the future was too far, but turning the Gregorian calendar's odometer over to 100,000 seemed fair. I liked the idea that the Ice Age can't be stopped. You can try and deal with the ice, but you can't stop it. And knowing our track record as human beings, we would absolutely arrogantly try and deal with it, most likely by arguing for a long time and then dying. My dive into Wikipedia started to teach me about concepts like the Anthropocene, the notion that we've entered into an age of Earth specifically influenced by human beings. And I read about glaciation, and climate change, and I eventually stumbled across the name of Svante Arrhenius. Svante was a scientist in the late 1800s who was the first person to propose that humans could change the planet through climate change. Something about his name really struck me. And stuck with me. And eventually my "ICE AGE TTRPG" Google Doc was renamed to "ARRHENIUS" and I went from there.