I haven’t been all that inspired to work on my own projects (though I did have some nifty ideas for Slime Story the other day), so I’ve been translating various things of interest, and I’ve hit on a project to tackle to kill time.

Witch Quest is a Japanese RPG that originally came out in 1991. It was designed by Adventure Planning Service and published by Oozora, which mainly specializes in shoujo manga. In 1995 they released a “share text” version, a set of free text files with the complete rules. After it went out of print, a doujinshi circle called Majo no Kai bought the rights and put out a revised version in 2001. My aim is to produce an English translation of the share text version and make a simple but pleasant PDF. It’s not the most recent, but it is free and complete.

The game is an “everyday magic” RPG. Players form pairs where one is a 13-year-old witch, and the other is a 1-year-old cat. Together, they solve magical problems and generally help people out. It’s very much in the vein of Kiki’s Delivery Service.

The share text consists of two books. Book I contains two full replays and two scenarios, while Book II contains the actual rules. Of both preference and necessity, I’ll be tackling Book II first. I need to nail down the game terminology and understand the rules to have any hope of translating a replay, and the rulebook part is more interesting to me anyway. I’m not desperate for assistance, but I’d welcome help with the translation if anyone with the requisite skills is so inclined, and I could use some help with layout stuff, especially when it comes to making a character sheet.

A lot of the rules are fairly traditional, and characters have attributes and skills and such, you roll dice to figure things out, and there are even hit points. One of the more interesting things is the “Witch Tarot” the game comes with. It’s a set of customized tarot cards that you use in character creation, and there are also instructions for using it for fortune-telling. One amusing thing with the share text is that, as with the character sheets and everything else, it includes text-based cards for you to print out.

As it’s a simple matter of cut and paste, I’ve made a PDF of the text-based cards (a PDF so those the folks who don’t have Japanese text support installed can see). The first four pages are the actual cards, and the last three are pages of the three different backings. If you want to make a set, print out pages 1-4, flip your paper around, and pick page 5, 6, or 7, whichever you like more.

Text-Based Witch Tarot Cards (PDF)
Japanese Share Text (LZH Archive)