Yay! My first new post on WordPress! I’m still working on getting acquainted with the interface and whatnot. Anyway.
In case you’re wondering “yaruki zero” is Japanese (やる気ゼロ) for “no motivation.” It’s an “extreme in-joke” (meaning I’m the only one who really gets it and finds it funny); when I and some other students were forced to do a skit for a Japanese class, after the ordeal was over I was thinking, “Well, that’s what happens when you have a group made of up people who didn’t want to do this in the first place. We’re ‘Team Yaruki Zero!'” Like my Go Play keychain, it’s also a reminder to myself to actually do stuff.
My package from Amazon Japan came in the main on Thursday, so I now have shiny new copies of Ru/Li/Lu/Ra, Alshard ff, and the bunko version of Arianrhod. I will post about these more when I’ve had a chance to really read them. At the moment I’ve been distracted by the manga I ordered along with them (new volumes of Genshiken, Yotsubato! and Rozen Maiden), plus I want to finish reading Gary Alan Fine’s book Shared Fantasy, which is a sociological study of RPGs from 1983, before I have to return it to the library.
Although the setting of Alshard looks fantastic, the underlying system is very, very similar to Beast Bind and Arianrhod (and part of why I picked up Ru/Li/Lu/Ra was just to make sure I picked up something not from FEAR). Interestingly, FEAR has taken the basic rules from Alshard (specifically the version from Alshard GAIA) and created what appears to be an open system, called (heh) the “Standard RPG System” (SRS for short). I’ll have to sit down and read/translate it, and see just how much they allow people to do with it. I’m wondering if they’d be amenable to an English translation to it, especially since it would be perfect for some of my more mainstream RPG project ideas (notably Ether Star and Catgirl: The Storytelling Game).
I also got the newest issue of Role&Roll, Japan’s main RPG magazine, and was inspired to post about it on Story Games herehere. Admittedly in posting it I was sort of crossing my fingers and hoping, but I was still (pleasantly) surprised when Tad Kelson posted saying he was going to try to put together an indie gaming mag.
I’m also hard at work on my anime RPG project (I still don’t know what to call it; I’m using “Anime Dreams” as a placeholder). I have a small notebook I use to write down stuff when I’m away from my computer, and I’ve literally filled up about 40 pages just with ideas for this game. Right now I’m mainly working on the conflict resolution rules — which will be at the heart of the whole thing — and it’s taking a heck of a lot of work. I keep catching myself staring off into space on the train and thinking really hard about it. I’m exceedingly happy with how this is turning out so far, but how well the conflict resolution rules work is going to be the main test of how good a game it turns out to be. I’ll be posting more about the gritty details soon, when I’ve got my tentative version a bit more straight in my head. At the moment it’s looking like the game will be diceless and resource-based, which in turn means I ought to go look at Yuuyake Koyake again.