(Updated the update on 7/10)

A short update this time. Things are basically moving smoothly. Kamiya-sensei and his friends were kind enough to offer some feedback on the English translation, which will hopefully help compensate for my inadequacies. Kamiya-sensei has also written an afterword/designer’s notes thing in the form of a conversation between him and E.B. II (the android maid with purple hair from the cover).

Maid RPG at Anime Expo
Although I wound up showing up about half an hour late, I ran a lively session of Maid RPG at Anime Expo on Saturday. I was too tired from life in general to plan out a scenario, so I just did a random event driven thing, though it was the first such game where the players didn’t spam the 1D6 Favor = Random Event button. At one point some Japanese people passed through the tabletop gaming room, saw the little sign that said メイドRPG and commented in Japanese that it looked like something perverted, but rushed off before I could comment back in Japanese. (Andy contends I should’ve told her it was perverted). It was satisfying in a way that the players would occasionally answer cell phone calls with “Dude! I’m playing Maid RPG! It’s awesome! My character is a cyborg fox spirit!”

See the comments for a sketch of the PCs that one of the players commissioned from Persona!

Website
We have a placeholder up for the Maid RPG website, but we’re hoping to have the full thing up and running in the next couple of weeks.

Maidenrangers of Love and Justice
I ran “Maidenrangers of Love and Justice” the other day, which I’m also going to be running in a scheduled game at GenCon (already full in case you’re wondering). It has this neat board game element where you set up a grid of 16 playing cards, which also represent random events. I was lucky that the generic pawns I ordered from Great Hall Games arrived about 2 hours before we started playing. My only complaint about the scenario is that because the PCs are searching rooms for items, and in some cases they’re rolling up to 5 times on the item table, it got exceedingly cumbersome at times, and I was getting a sore throat just from reading off item descriptions. I decided to make a set of item cards for myself. First I tried gluing printouts of the items to index cards, and the result is just plain massive and labor intensive. I then got micro-perforated printable business cards and just printed them out. The result was much better and altogether more managable, but it’s still a deck of 214 cards, with no coating whatsoever, so they’re awfully hard to shuffle. I’d like to be able to provide something like that to people, but (1) printing cards is expensive, especially for an accessory for a game we’re selling on a relatively small scale, and (2) making a PDF of the cards complicates matters a bit, since that’s about 20 pages of copyrighted material. (Of course, owners of the book, or the PDF, would still be able to make their own if they’re so inclined).

If I can swing it, I’m going to have paper miniatures and pregens and such for when I run it at GenCon (since playing with random characters resulted in having some PCs be at odds with the scenario’s goals), and some kind of tokens to mark when someone has searched a room (since only one search is allowed per room).

For this scenario the order in which PCs act becomes important, especially when you have 4+ characters. I think I’m going to implement some kind of initiative rule.

Original Stuff
I keep poking at what I’m tentatively calling “Maid RPG 120%”, which would be a collection of original material for Maid RPG. The “120%” indicates excessive completeness, since in its Japanese incarnation it was a 32-page game with 200 pages of supplementary material, and here I am trying to add more stuff.

• I’m turning two of my original characters (Kurumi and Kitty) into maids so that I can write Kamiya-esque dialogues to demonstrate the new rules and such.
• Rules for playing “stewards,” basically butlers, but with a power level more in line with maids. I have a draft of the rules finished, though apart from the Steward Types I sidestepped making any new random tables in favor of using ones from the rules for making butlers or maids.
• Another costume table, and another item table. I have the costume table all planned out, and I have a little over half the number of item ideas needed to make a new D666 item table.
• New worlds — Gothic (good for castles, vampires, zombies, etc.), Superheroes, and Bizarro (looks Contemporary, but stuff is truly weird and random under the surface). Combined with the ones from the core rules, this would let you roll a d12 for the World. Also, two new moods: Melodrama (for overblown soap opera stuff) and Intrigue (for conspiracies, assassination attempts, etc.).
• I have way too many ideas for scenarios. So much so that I’m putting together a table of 36 scenario seeds so I can include some of the ideas that are very by-the-numbers to set up and run (like the one where the Master buys android replacements for each maid, and they have to prove they’re better). There are still some scenarios I want to do full-length writeups for, including multiple prequels to Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden. I also want to put together some scenarios that make good use of the optional rules both from the Japanese version and that I’m working on.
• I’m planning to try my hand at putting together at least one replay.

If this ever does come to fruition I want to be able to take submissions from fans (who may well produce better material than me), though if it turns into an actual book it will then take actual money to produce, and we’ll have to limit the quantity of material to a reasonable amount.