Editing: Done!
Andy has finished the editing for Maid RPG, after which he has to get back into Tenra (AFAIK still on track for February 2009). He’s been going insane about editing, much like how I’d been going nuts with translating day in and day out, but that part is pretty much done. We did decide to change some things that seriously just went too far outside the realm of good taste (and it took a lot for a given thing to earn that judgment, honestly), and a few (especially in the item table) that were just too ridiculously obscure to Americans (like the references to Akumetsu and Patalliro). Regardless, Andy tried to be subtle about it, or at least find something keeping with the wacky and referential spirit of the original.

Anyway, that means that except for some possible last-minute fine tuning, we are well and truly into the layout stage. Exciting, huh? :3

Actual Play
I ran a scenario from the book, “Black Cat Mansion.” It went rather smoothly and surprisingly quickly. I don’t think I’ve ever once gotten through a game session in 2 hours before. In that scenario, the Master hasn’t shown up yet, so the maids need to use the seduction rules just to have Favor points to accomplish stuff. I got two interesting things from running the scenario. First, the two players who I expected to be the most skeeved out by having their characters seduce each other were the ones who went all-out doing so. The other thing is that the relatively simple, structured setup of the scenario helped the game laser-focus on certain things. That’s almost certainly why the session went by so quickly. It probably wasn’t as immersive, but then (1) being a wacky one-shot with totally random characters will do that anyway, and (2) it likely helped the players get their characters into seduction and shows of affection without feeling embarrassed. And they got the mega-happy ending, although one of the PCs had to get a good roll and then go crazy spending Favor to pull it off.

Mini-Maids
There are still some details to work out, but we’re planning to put together a free PDF (or some such) for paper miniatures of several maids, plus a handful of masters and butlers. The game in no way requires them, but (1) they’re fun, and (2) they would in fact be handy for the Maidenrangers scenario. Very silly chibi art, and I’m thinking of putting together full stats for each of the characters pictured.