Back in October I participated in a “tradgames jam,” and over the course of a few days wrote a first draft of a game called “Magical Fury.” The idea was to write a short and simple dark magical girl name, to play around with some of the ideas I’d been developing for my “Star Princess Astraia” story and hopefully shake out some cobwebs on Magical Burst. Magical Fury is kind of its own animal, but also kind of a Magical Burst Lite, with some similar things handled in a much simpler and smoother way. It’s hard not to draw comparisons between the two games, but then Magical Fury pretty much exists because of my dissatisfaction with Magical Burst.

Compared to my attempt at a Magical Burst novel (Magical Girl Radiant Yuna), Star Princess Astraia is a bit more brutal, and more focused on conflicts between magical girls. In that respect it hews a bit closer to Madoka Magica, as well as Lyrical Nanoha. It has reincarnation of magical girls (a darker take on what happens in Sailor Moon) as a major conceit, and thus magical girls have a (potentially risky) ability to look back to past lives. (Thus the story’s inciting incident is when a magical girl shows up at the protagonist’s work, threatening to start killing people unless the reincarnation of Star Princess Astraia reveals herself.)

It’s kind of a Powered by the Apocalypse game, in the same sense as The Sundered Land, and generally a very light, story-oriented game. The dice mechanics pretty much some straight from Sundered Land, and are a lot like if you took the basic AW rules and assumed that everyone has a +1 in all stats. It doesn’t use anything like HP or Harm though. Moves give outcomes and sometimes call for magical girls to take points of Magic or Trauma, which in turn can make them have problems (kind of like fallout in Magical Burst, but much simpler). After writing moves that say things like, “When you have a moment of true desperation…” or “When you try to do something that affects the real world…” I feel like I’m definitely using the framework much better than I did in Magical Burst.

One of the major things I like about it is that it has the part about girls becoming magical girls hard-coded into the default way to start playing the game. It’s a really important moment in virtually every magical girl story, and I think the lack of such is a big weakness of Magical Burst.

It also reduces combat down to a handful of rolls. While the tactical combat system I put together for Magical Burst is fun in its own right, it’s also time-consuming enough to dominate each game session. While I don’t dislike tactical combat–I enjoyed playing D&D4e regularly for years–there are times when it isn’t what I want, and when protracted battles just get annoying. Cutting it down to a few rolls and evaluating the outcome is a really refreshing alternative. I wouldn’t want to go that route in every game, but it seems to work pretty well for this one.

The new revision I’m working on adds an element of turn-taking scene framing inspired by Shinobigami. Shinobigami is a Japanese RPG (with an English release from Kotodama Heavy Industries planned) about modern-day anime-style ninjas. It’s a bit more mechanistic than what I have in mind for Magical Fury, but the basic gameplay puts PCs in competition and has them take turns setting up scenes trying to accomplish various goals. They thus ferret out secrets, form bonds, and have the occasional skirmish as well. Magical Fury’s take on it will be a bit looser, with the option to start a scene and see where it goes, and with the GM taking turns that they use to complicate the PCs’ lives and have threats creep closer.

Overall, Magical Fury is much more a “story game,” much more a set of tools to provoke you into telling an improvised story together. At this point I really don’t know where I’ll go with it, but it’s one of the projects I’m the most excited about just now. At the very least it’s going to be a massive influence on whatever Magical Burst turns into next, but I kind of want to bring Magical Fury to fruition on its own. A thin, simple book that won’t be table-torture for whoever I get to do layout.