Category Archives: Japanese

Magician’s Academy RPG

games, Japanese,

Magician’s Academy is a series of light novels by Ichiro Sakaki. It’s about a school where people go to learn magic, but it has a wacky moe-infused sensibility. To give you an idea, one of the teachers built a machine called “Mimigar Z”, which caused most of the school to sprout animal ears. There’s also an anime adaptation called “Macademi Wasshoi!”, which is how I originally discovered it. It’s kind of a gratuitous, guilty pleasure, doubly so since the character designs (and the art for the light novels) were by BLADE.

mar

Magician’s Academy RPG (or “MAR”) is an RPG from F.E.A.R. that adapts the light novel series using a tweaked version of their SRS house system. It’s the third game they’ve done that’s a light novel adaptation (the others are Kaze no Stigma and Shinkyoki Soukai Polyphonica). It’s one of those bunko (little paperback) format RPGs, a little over 400 pages, and I was able to order it through the local Kinokuniya for about $12 (where the Japanese price is 800 yen).

For this post I’m going to run through the stuff that makes it different from other SRS games I’ve read.

Character Creation
MAR uses SRS’ typical character creation scheme, where you pick out a total of 3 levels from 1 to 3 different classes, which in turn determines your attributes and what special skills you can pick from. What makes it different from other SRS games is that characters are a combination of a “Macademi Class” and a “Style Class”.

The three Macademi classes are Magician, Shinma (supernatural beings like angels, demons, etc.), and Irregular (people and other things with crazy powers). If you know the series, Takuto is a magician, Tanarot is a Shinma, and Suzuho is an Irregular. Under Magician and Shinma there are several Aspects. For Shinma these are the four elements, plus Chaos and Balance. For Magicians these are different kinds of magic (Enchant, Summon, Shield, Power, etc.)

Style classes relate to the character’s role in the story, things like Servant, Joker, Misfortune, and Artificial. Where Macademi Classes give a character skills representing special powers, the skills you get from a style class tend to be more meta-game. For example, SRS features “Appearance Checks” (登場判定), where the GM can have a player roll to see if his or her character gets to show up in a given scene. A Servant character can take the Allegiance skill to get a bonus to Appearance Checks if their master is also in the scene. On the other hand the “Misfortune” Style Class gives you lots of skills that let you take damage and such in place of other characters.

Impulse System
This is one of the most distinctive aspects of the game, though one I have mixed feelings about owing to how it’s implemented. It’s like they stumbled on something kind of like the aspects from FATE, but IMHO the implementation relies a little too much on GM fiat.

Each character has a set of twelve personality traits, arranged into pairs as follows:

Brave/Careful
Compassionate/Rational
Honest/Stubborn
Trustful/Skeptical
Tolerant/Serious
Passionate/Naive

Each class gives a list of personality trait ratings, and you pick one of your character’s classes as the base. From there, stuff in the game’s lifepaths and such and modify these numbers, usually by shifting a point from one side of a pairing to the other. For example, the “Everyday” table has a “Research” entry, which gives you -1 to Brave and +1 to Careful. There are also items that can affect personality traits, such as Bunny Ears (which are in the “Moe Item Table”), which give you +1 to Trustful.

In play, the GM can call for a player to make a Personality Check (2d6 plus a personality trait, against a difficulty of 12) to see if the character will in fact do something. So, if the characters are late for class and they come across a girl who needs help, the GM might call on a Compassionate check to see if the character actually lends a hand. Any time a personality check makes a character veer away from what the player wanted, the character gets an Impulse Point (衝動店), which the player can use for a host of fairly typical metagame effects. There’s also a special rule that once per session you can substitute Passionate in place of whatever personality trait the GM is asking for.

Chaos Chart
The Chaos Chart is a sort of random event table, intended for the GM to be able to throw something out to compensate for things going out of whack in the game. It has three charts, for the Beginning, Middle, and Ending phases of the story. All of the entries push things much closer to the ending, if not outright resolve it, and not a few of them have characters from the novels show up as well. (“Tanarot suddenly shows up, and resolves the incident. Go to Ending.”)

To be honest I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s the kind of setting where throwing in random stuff certainly makes sense, and I suppose that having the option to just say, “Oh, Tanarot took care of that. Now, about your characters going on a date?” fits as well. I like the idea of bringing the canon characters into the game–the setting is neat, but Tanarot and company are a big part of what gives the story its distinct feel–but needless to say I have mixed feelings about chucking them in as deus ex machina to fix things.

Other Stuff
Whatever one thinks of the house system approach of SRS, MAR does actually take advantage of its strengths. In particular, at the end of the book there’s a section on taking stuff from other SRS games (Alshard Gaia, Polyphonica, etc.), which would give GMs plenty of critters and characters to mess with.

There is a “World Section” that explains the setting, but it’s barely 12 pages. Especially given that it’s actually put out by the same publisher (Famitsu Bunko, though it at F.E.A.R. are both parts of Enterbrain), this suggests that they’re assuming people who buy the RPG will also be into the light novels. I ordered the first novel in the series along with the RPG, and the two certainly look like they belong together. The book has brief bios of the major canon characters (and Hapciel), but no actual stats.

On the whole, this looks like a neat little game, though you clearly have to be on board with the game having a very strong GM role to really enjoy it as written. If there was an English version of this, I’d most likely be willing to give it a spin, but on the whole I think I’d rather use a crazy Maid RPG variant. Not unlike Penguin Musume Heart, while watching Macademi Wasshoi I kept feeling like I was watching something that runs on Maid RPG’s physics engine.

TRPG Book Report: Doko ni Demo Aru Fushigi

Japanese, musings, TRPG Book Report,

Doko ni Demo Aru Fushigi

With so many TRPG books to go through, I’ve decided to start posting about the various books I’ve got as I go along. First up is Doko ni Demo Aru Fushigi. This is a 50-page doujinshi produced as a collaboration between Tsugihagi Honbo and Majo no Kai. Tsugihagi is Ryo Kamiya’s circle, and responsible for Yuuyake Koyake. Majo no Kai, headed up by “South,” published a print edition of Witch Quest, a free TRPG available as text files. Witch Quest and Yuuyake Koyake are both heart-warming “everyday magic” games, so it was natural for the two circles to collaborate on something. However, the notion of doing so came right when Kamiya was hard at work on Mononoke Koyake, so if they were going to do such a project, it needed to be one that wouldn’t place undue burden on either party. This book is the result. They met online, played a session of each of their games, and had a lengthy dialogue about everyday magic in general, and the book has a transcript of the discussion, sandwiched between two replays. It’s not the most impressive RPG book out there, but for me it was definitely worth the 500 yen.
Continue reading TRPG Book Report: Doko ni Demo Aru Fushigi →

The TRPGs Have Landed

games, Japanese

I now have the care package of Japanese RPGs and such that Andy picked up for me in Japan. It’s been a while since I got more TRPG action, and now I have a huge stack of books to go through. (I put all of the pictures up on Flickr). I’ll be posting extensively about this stuff as I read it, but here’s a quick lowdown of my initial impressions.

First, here’s a picture of the loot. Be impressed.

Continue reading The TRPGs Have Landed →

Maid RPG: Update 9 (Goodies!)

Japanese, projects

The layout for Maid RPG is all done, so at this point we’re pretty much just getting our crap together for GenCon. In the meantime, I have some nifty stuff to share:

Update!
Andy’s done an update to the placeholder for the Maid RPG website, with some links, some info, and the English character sheets. We also now have a Maid RPG mailing list set up.

Maid For Yotsuba
For those of you who can stomach such things, a friend of mine (Usually Random) has been running demo games via IRC coordinated through 4chan’s /tg/ board. There are inevitably people who feel the need to denounce the game, often with profanity, but there’s actually a lot more enthusiasm than anything else. There are logs, characters, and even the beginnings of a Sangoku Musou (Dynasty Warriors) mod on this wiki.

Minis!
My artist friend finished up some printable Maid RPG miniatures he did for me as a birthday present. One set is for the pregens I made for running Maidenrangers of Love and Justice at the con, and the other is a smattering of generic masters and maids, and one butler.

Print them out (preferably on cardstock), cut them out, and glue them together (a glue stick or simple white glue works best), and you’re ready to go.

Comics
The original Japanese books had some little comics that for various reasons didn’t make it into the English version. I’ve whipped up some quick translations of these for your amusement. I didn’t flip them, so all of these read right to left.
Continue reading Maid RPG: Update 9 (Goodies!) →

Maid RPG: Update 7

events, Japanese, projects


(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.

Maid RPG: Update 6

Japanese, projects

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.

Maid RPG: Update 4

Japanese, musings, projects

I’ve finished the last of the scenarios, which means the base translation (which will need plenty of editing) is done at long last. The last one I did was “Tales of Suspense,” though I can’t really explain what it’s about without spoilers. Regardless, the scenario file–about 48,000 words, 117 pages in a basic MS Word format–is off to Andy for editing.

Translating
One of the things that can be really aggravating about translating from Japanese to English is the use of the passive voice. In English you’re not supposed to use the passive voice because it sounds weak and weaselly. In Japanese, sentences often leave the subject implied, so effectively using the passive voice actually makes you clearer. In Japanese RPGs, this lets designers talk about the PCs or whatever without having to start every other sentence with “a character who” or “if the PCs.” But it also means that the translator (that’s me) gets to play detective trying to figure out what the subject of a sentence actually is, and then do a sort of written Rubik’s cube exercise to turn it into a decent English sentence. As much as I love Japanese, one of these days I want to learn and start translating, say, Spanish, so I don’t have to deal with this kind of thing.

Scenarios
I know I’ve posted about the scenarios already, but they both show what’s different about the game itself and in many cases show a novel approach to scenarios/adventures in general.

There are several scenarios that have a very tight structure. Very often these involve the PCs working towards some kind of goal (ranging from throwing a birthday party to conquering the world, depending on the particular scenario), and it very carefully delineates what they can do to work towards it, and how much. These scenarios allow for more freedom than you might think–especially for PCs who are willing to use the seduction rules to get what they want–but certainly not as much as you’d ordinarily expect. The furthest extreme is “Maidenrangers of Love and Justice!” which actually bills itself as a “Maid Board Game,” where you build up a 4×4 grid of playing cards (representing both rooms and random events that occur in them) for the PCs to move around in.

Owing no doubt to the game’s basic nature, there are a lot of scenarios that deal with social situations of one kind or another. The game still has plenty of room for the action-adventure stuff that’s more typical of RPGs (albeit with a spin that only Maid RPG can give), but there are also scenarios about competing to marry the Master, becoming friends with a ghost girl, helping little kids have a place to play, and so on.

There are also very few scenarios that you could use in an ongoing campaign without major retooling, though there are some that give advice for launching into sequels (“Miko RPG!” even advocates developing a new game), and in one case, there is a sequel provided (“Be Our Demon King!” is followed by “Rise of the Demon King”). Although there are some major Western RPGs available in translation in Japan (notably D&D, WoD, and GURPS), my experience with Japanese-made games is that they tend to focus on short-term play rather than long campaigns. In F.E.A.R.’s Alshard ff, “Campaign Play” is actually listed in a sidebar rather than being part of the actual section on styles of play. In Maid RPG you can store up Favor to raise your maid’s attributes (it’s one of the more expensive things to do with Favor), but the game’s text doesn’t really address the idea of running a campaign at all.

Maid RPG scenarios often assume a particular master, or at least a general type of Master (e.g., a young Master who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes), and won’t really work without him. On the other hand, there are also a lot of scenarios that leave at least some of the prep work up to the GM. This could be flexibility or laziness depending on how you choose to look at it, but there are scenarios where the fine details of the Master and/or mansion are left up to the GM to create.

There are still some scenarios that are fairly traditional (like “Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden”), and the game certainly holds up just fine with a traditional play style, or with no scenario at all.

Promotional Stuff
Wayne from Anime Expo’s tabletop gaming department has confirmed that Maid RPG is on the schedule for AX, Saturday at 10 a.m. Hope to see… someone there!

Random Thought
I’m sorely tempted to write a Maid RPG scenario to enter into Fight On! magazine’s contest. The rules say that entries have to make use of Otherworld Miniatures‘ products in some way, but otherwise they can be for pretty much any game. And Maid RPG has already gone to weirder places than involving Pig-Faced Orcs. The due date for entries in July 20th though, so whether or not I can even write something up depends heavily on what’s going on with work and whatnot.

Maid RPG Update 3

Japanese, projects

There are a lot of people who’ve helped make this project possible. Andy Kitkowski is the most obvious and important, since he’s doing pretty much all of the business side of things (me being so helpless and useless with that stuff). Ryo Kamiya not only designed the game, but has been really awesome about answering my questions. My good friend Mike S. has been evangelizing the game, and offering help in the form of editing and suggestions.

One thing that deserves special mention at this point is my Eee PC. I bought a green 2G Surf a few months ago at Micro Center (the only place in town that actually had them in stock, and just the color I wanted too). It has let me work on Maid RPG on trains and buses, at friends’ houses and at school, and (while the battery lasted) during yesterday’s power outage, sitting on the front porch as the sun set. It runs on a variation of Xandros Linux, and I’ve been typing stuff up in OpenOffice Writer and using Gjiten (which I’m finding to be a brilliant little program) to look things up. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever owned anything that was quite that much of a conversation starter. While I was using it at a local Starbucks (to work on Maid RPG, naturally), not less than six people asked me about it in the space of an hour. (And one guy jokingly asked if it was made by Hasbro) .

Right now I have about 30 pages of scenarios to translate, which comes out to six scenarios total. Just this morning I finally finished translating the very last scenario in the very last book, “Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden.” It’s epic, both in terms of its story and its size (12 pages, which is about 3 times the length of a typical Maid RPG scenario), and it takes the tropes established in the game and renders them on a worldwide scale.

In the year 20XX the “Maid Hazard,” a mental waveform sent through the internet blanketed the world, and caused a forced an evolutionary leap in a significant portion of the population. Countless people, men and women, young and old, became young, beautiful Maids. The Maids possessed superhuman abilities, but needed Favor from normal humans (Masters) to function. That’s just the start of the 50 years of the A.M. (After Maid) calendar covered in the back story. By the time the scenario actually begins, it’s the year 50 A.M., and the few surviving Masters are desperately seeking a way to stop the machinations of the tyrannical Maid Empire, lead by the Final Maid, Eve. The PCs are “Alternative Maids,” Masters who don special “Alternative Maid Suits” to gain the powers of Maids without falling under the Final Maid’s influence.

Anyone who knows the kind of fiction I write can tell you, this is the kind of awesomely screwed up thing I would think of. I seriously want to put together a prequel scenario about people enduring the Maid Hazard and its aftermath.

Lastly, in response to some questions asked, Andy has posted a bit about how and where we’ll be selling Maid RPG in the comments of Update 1.

Maid RPG: Update 2

events, Japanese, projects

Progress Report
At this point I have eight scenarios left to translate, and after that the project is pretty much in other people’s hands until GenCon. Ideally I need to get this done within two weeks or so, which means there’s something of a silver lining to the fact that my hours are becoming spotty to nonexistent for me crappy day job. After going through enough text to fill a largish novel, I’ll be entirely too glad to be done with this project.

That’s partly because it means I’ll have time to work on my own RPG projects, and partly because I’m looking forward to actually being able to play Maid RPG again, and enjoy all this material I’ve translated. I’m already picking out some scenarios and such to run with my friends. For that matter, every time I’m stuck away from my computer, I keep thinking up more and more original material for the game. I’m not sure I want to go to the point of actually putting together a book though. It’s possible, but it’s a long way off too.

Butler RPG
Anyway. There was a thread about Maid RPG on 4chan’s /tg/ board (if you don’t know what that is, you should probably stay away). There seem to be a fair number of people who are into butlers (and hey, they do have a few butler cafes in Japan), so I might as well tell you about the butler rules. Butlers are an optional character type, and as group of PCs can only have one butler. The butler has much higher attributes, but (1) automatically loses opposed rolls against the Master or maids, (2) must spend Favor to remove Stress, and (3) cannot spend Favor on Random Events. The “Maids at the End of the World” replay features a butler character, and demonstrates how although the rules theoretically limit how much they can cause chaos and such, they can still be part of the total wackiness of the game.

Seduction (Or, How To Cause Trouble)
The first supplement of the Japanese version is called “Koi Suru Maid RPG” (Maid RPG In Love). The Seduction rules are one of the main reasons it’s called that. These let characters make rolls to emotionally dominate others. If you seduce someone you can give them orders, but they can gain Favor and remove Stress through romantic activities with you. And that doesn’t prevent them from seducing you back. Calling “Seduction” was kind of a compromise. The Japanese word used is closer to “enticement,” but where it’s heavily used in some scenarios it can be bent into forming an emotional attachment in general. Based on the replays, it’s the kind of thing that would make some people uncomfortable, but it can also make life a heck of a lot more interesting.

Demo Games
I’m running two registered Maid RPG events at GenCon Indy 2008, one on Thursday (which still has 3 slots open!) and one on Saturday (all full). I and a couple of my friends who will be coming plan on running some more sessions at Games On Demand (something you should check out anyway if you’re attending). I’m also in the process of signing up to run a session at Anime Expo 2008, and if there’s interest I’ll be running a session or two at FanimeCon‘s open gaming area. If you’re attending any of those, let me know if you want to play. :3

(Also, my friend Mike is planning to run it at KublaCon).

Maid RPG: Update 1

Japanese, projects

Welcome Back!
This is where I have to go all-out to get the translation of Maid RPG done in time, but I’m pretty confident I can pull it off, maybe even with time to spare. The last post on the game generated a heck of a lot of traffic, without me really trying to get it linked anywhere myself. This is all pretty exciting, especially when I look back at just how much I’ve now translated. Doing all three of the original Japanese books doesn’t look nearly so insurmountable anymore. In any case, I’m going to be posting about different aspects of the game leading up to its release.

Scenarios
You seldom see adventure scenarios in Western RPGs, so I have a hard time making a properly informed comparison, but I have noticed that Japanese RPGs are more likely to include at least one or two scenarios in a core rulebook, and Maid RPG adds a total of 15 in its two supplements. Compared to the very few I have read (like Gold Rush Games’ incredible Shiki collection for Sengoku), the scenarios I’ve translated for Maid RPG so far seem very constrained. They map out a very specific role for the maids in the story, such that you could easily make a flowchart of the events of the scenario. I suspect that in actual play it’s not quite as stifling as it sounds, but it’s definitely more constraining than your average Western gamer is used to. I would compare it to certain indie games, like The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, in that you’re forced to do certain things, but you get a heck of a lot of freedom within that context.

Regardless, there’s a huge variety of scenarios, from throwing a birthday party to battling other maids for the fate of the world. In between are a tokusatsu hero, a murder mystery, shrine maidens fending off an evil god, a marriage contest, a case of amnesia, and more.

Costumes
Of the many optional rules in the game, my favorite is definitely the Costume Change rules. Maids can spend Favor to cease being a maid, don a different outfit, and take on the role that accompanies it. Maids who change costumes lose their Maid Powers, but get some new powers related to the costume. This covers professions (doctor, secretary, scientist), fetishized outfits (school swimsuit, school uniform, nurse, shrine maiden, etc.), and anime references (plugsuit, Mobile Suit costume, tiger-striped bikini with horns, etc.)