Category Archives: projects

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.)

Maid RPG Is Coming

events, games, Japanese, projects

With love to all of the Masters...

Update: Hard to believe it’s been 5 months since I first posted this. This is the single most viewed post on my RPG blog, by a margin of 3:1 (and the next two most viewed after are also Maid RPG related). Anyway, for information on ordering, downloadable extras, and so on, check out the Official Maid RPG Website.

Maid RPG is a role-playing game designed by Ryo Kamiya and published in Japan by Sunset Games. And, with some substantial help from Andy Kitkowski, I will be publishing an English translated version. We’re aiming to release it at GenCon Indy 2008, and I’ll be posting full details as we get closer to the con. Although we hadn’t really planned it that way, Maid RPG will be the first ever Japanese RPG to be released in English. However, Andy will also be releasing a demo version of Jun’ichi Inoue’s Tenra Bansho Zero.

In Maid RPG, the players take on the role of maids who serve a Master who lives in a mansion. That’s the basic setup, but what ensues is often an excuse for the most bizarre chaos imaginable. This is a game that embraces randomness. Characters have random Special Qualities, ranging from Freckles and Glasses to Stalkers and Cyborgs. During the game, characters earn points of Favor by pleasing the Master, and one of the things they can spend Favor on is causing Random Events.

The English version of Maid RPG is going to be a compilation of the core rulebook and both supplements from the original Japanese version. That means it’ll include not only the core rules, but optional rules for butlers, randomly generated masters and mansions, seduction, costume changes, and special items, plus a grand total of 17 scenarios and three replays, and more besides.

You might be tempted to think that Maid RPG is the kind of thing you’d put on the shelf and never play, but I can say from personal experience that it is a perfectly playable (if very weird) game. It has the potential to become very twisted (though you can use it for light romantic comedy too), but it’s a lot like an anime version of Toon. With everything we’ll be packing into the English version, this one book will be able to provide months and months of gaming. You can even play it “random style,” and do everything off the cuff to kill time.

We’ll be launching a Maid RPG website next month! Stay tuned for more news!

If you have any questions about the game, feel free to comment here.

3-Hit Combo!

anime, musings, projects, ,

Shatter The Wall Between Zero and Infinity!
I’ve well and truly gotten started on my fighting shonen manga RPG. I’ve tentatively titled it “Zero Breakers” (zero like “wandering the void between zero and infinity” and like Yaruki Zero Games). I’ve mostly been typing up the stuff that was already in my head and my notebook, but it’s going pretty smoothly so far. Assuming it doesn’t manage to completely come apart at the seams, I think I may be on the way to designing my dream game. And I think it’s starting to look more and more like a diceless technicolor cousin of Dogs in the Vineyard. OTOH I think it may actually turn out to be a great game for playing online (which I’ll definitely have to try once it’s ready).

And incidentally, I just found out that Christian Griffen is working on a somewhat similar game, called Anima Prime. I’ll have to find time to read through it, though from a casual skim its overall approach is a bit different from Zero Breakers (it uses dice for one thing).

Breaking Molds
Adventures of the Space Patrol has been kind of an unusual project for me in that while I have a certain look and feel in mind, and although I’ve certainly been putting all the B-movie cliches rattling around my noggin to good use, it’s not particularly based on something from another medium. I’m wondering if I haven’t been too beholden to source material in the past. AotSP has been an unusually easy and fun project to work on, though it helps that the rules are like a mashup of FATE 3.0 and Yuuyake Koyake, off the shelf components rather than all-original stuff. Of course, I get so much inspiration from outside sources that I wouldn’t dream of abandoning that approach, but I think I need to be more able and willing to come to projects from other angles. This is especially true considering that I tend to latch onto a genre and spend an inordinate amount of time (and sometimes money) immersing myself into it. The number of hours of sentai I’ve watched for Tokyo Heroes is literally well into the triple digits, for example. AotSP could easily have had me trying to absorb and imitate endless hours of Buck Rogers and Commander Cody, and frankly there’s something to be said for not having to spend that much time, however enjoyable, to get things done.

Interstellar Skulduggery!
I have, however, started reading the Lensman series. It’s basically the first space opera epic, and the earlier parts of it came out in the 30s. So far it’s rip-roaring pulpy sci-fi action with dastardly villains, square-jawed heroes, and lovely damsels in a universe of ancient aliens and sometimes literally world-shattering technology. I really want to know why it was allowed to go out of print, though on the plus side I was able to get a hold of the books for relatively cheap. There was a GURPS worldbook for it (and for the longest time I never knew what it was), but I’d love to see a treatment of it with SotC or similar some time.

More On Fighty Manga

anime, projects

Rob’s comments on my fighting shonen manga post, coupled with this thread on S-G have me thinking more about fighty manga and RPGs in general. I think in manga especially, fights are less about combat power, or even who wins or loses per se, and more about the costs and consequences that flow out of those things. Stories, especially melodramatic shonen manga type stories, have a certain flow to them, and a game that really wants to simulate them needs to be less about hitting or missing, and more about what kinds of consequences flow out of succeeding or failing.

I have no doubt whatsoever that there are people who like game-y combat in their role-playing (I mean, D&D. Yeah.), but while running my current campaign with OVA, I’m finding that the consequences of a given conflict are the more interesting part, for me at least. If a bad guy shows up and gets offed with little trouble, he might as well not have come at all. When the ship’s AI turned on the crew, and left Aleph severely damaged, Caden with one arm, Nameli with two out of five children dread, and everyone homeless and generally shaken up, it was what will likely be one of the more memorable moments of our involvement in the hobby. Whatever the outcome, the process of rolling to hit and to dodge and figuring damage and such just doesn’t interest me all that much, especially when it holds the threat of PC death. Danger can and often does make things more interesting, but in terms of playing a game around the table, having a dead PC is more often than not one of the most boring things that can befall a player, since (as noted in Nathan Paoletta’s recent blog post) the player’s input into the game drops to zero. Conflicts with fallout have less worry about deprotagonization and the incentive of making characters more interesting and (for this genre) possibly more powerful. (Plus fighting shonen manga characters hardly ever get around to dying for whatever reason).

Although it’s tempting to conclude that in anime a hero with sufficient motivation can accomplish just about anything, at least in the fighting shonen manga mode it’s more than a character has to have his motivations properly lined up in order to use his full power, and that power is what lets him turn his passions and principles into reality. As over-the-top and melodramatic as it is, the characters in Naruto have to find ways to use guile, cleverness, and sometimes sheer boldness to have any chance against what it otherwise a superior foe. However much Naruto wants to beat Neji for Hinata’s sake, just wanting to do it really badly isn’t enough. He has to put everything on the line, risk using the power of the Kitsune, and pull off something incredible with the Kage-Bunshin no Jutusu.

This means I’m starting to really see the shape of the system I want. In a conflict you would compare power levels, and commence a back-and-forth to try to push the advantage to one side’s favor or the other. The relative power levels determines “Standing,” which can go anywhere from a deadlock to a crushing defeat/overwhelming victory. In the end, both sides have to face a possibility of some kind of fallout, which can in turn create plot complications, from simple injuries to broken swords to a lengthy quest to prepare for a rematch. I’m thinking the final difference in power levels would become a pool of points that the two sides take turns spending on complications. (So that it’s in the player’s interests to come up with big but interesting complications so the other side has less to spend).

Characters would have a Resolve rating that could be helpful or harmful if it gets too high or too low, but its influence would be small compared to actual ability (unless a fighter’s Resolve gets completely broken and he loses the will to fight). I haven’t gotten far enough to decide on whether or not to use dice, but I know that randomness won’t intrude on the core of conflicts. There might be dice rolls for, say, trying to affect the opponent’s Resolve, but even that doesn’t feel quite right to me. I’m thinking there should be some kind of currency, as it would be helpful for moderating the flow of meta-game effects and character growth.

That still leaves a lot to figure out in terms of how to structure gameplay, how characters advance (for this genre they’ve got to be able to make major jumps in power level at times), and of course how to handle things that aren’t epic conflicts. And a name for the game itself. But I do think I’ve now passed the single biggest conceptual hurdle.

Assorted Things

musings, projects,

So, apparently Malcolm Sheppard has decided to pull the plug on Opening The Dark, for some reason or other. Although strictly speaking I could still use it since it’s OGL, I think I’m going to stick with my original plan to use a ST-ish Fudge variant for Catgirl: The Storytelling Game.

A Certain Japanese Game I’ve been translating will hopefully be moving forward very, very soon. I will have news on it as soon as I am able to reveal such to the public. It’s gonna be neat. :3

For Adventures of the Space Patrol, I basically have the entire outline of the game figured out (it helps that most of it is made from stock parts, after all), though there will no doubt be new challenges popping up as I go along. I had to go in and give some more thought to the selection of archetypes, and finally settled on seven:

  • Atomic Ranger
  • DroidBot
  • Plucky Kid
  • Galactic Spy
  • Space Trooper
  • Astro-Jockey
  • Altarian Engineer

The trick was to focus on what core roles to cover, and then to give them appropriately spacy-sounding names. I’m probably going to write up an appendix, PDF, or whatever of bonus archetypes (Cat Princess, Martian Barbarian, Pleiadeian Mentalist, etc.). More on all that as it comes along. In the meantime, here are some examples of the awesome artwork that so inspires me:

Yet Another New Game: Adventures of the Space Patrol!

projects

I’ve come up with yet another new concept for an RPG, albeit one I think I can bring to fruition without agonizing over how to get things done or letting it slide to the back burner for months or years. It’s (tentatively) called “Adventures of the Space Patrol.”

The original idea came from when I realized that Yuuyake Koyake was in fact named after a children’s song that perfectly describes its mood. I got to wondering what other kinds of games could come from children’s songs, and the first one that came to mind was “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” When I looked up more info on the song, I found out that there’s actually a version with a full five verses, and it speaks of the star as a benevolent light shining to guide travelers in the dark of night.

This line of thought met another halfway. Professional illustrators have a certain style of cartooning that’s at least as stylized as manga, but seldom makes its way into the mainstream (with Erin Esurance and certain Nicktoons being notable exceptions) despite being so dang awesome. I had picked up a book of Shane Glines‘ pinup art (NSFW) from Amazon, and the rather silly (in a good way) picture of a girl in a retro-futuristic jumpsuit holding a raygun got me to thinking in terms of “retro-cute sci-fi.”

I’m starting to think that in creating Yuuyake Koyake, Ryo Kamiya really hit on something important. Video games, especially the simpler ones, boil down to how the designers let you do one or more verbs. Some of the cleverest games come from picking an unusual verb, such as “eat” (Pac-Man) or “roll up” (Katamari Damacy) and running with it. Role-playing games are a little more complicated in that respect, but some really brilliant games have come from this same approach. In Yuuyake Koyake the verb is “help.” It makes non-violent role-playing practical, immediate, compelling, and easy to do. Aitsu wa Classmate (another RPG published by Sunset Games) does this too, and while Elite Beat Agents is a rhythm-action video game, its story is also all about helping people (and occasionally other things). I would really like to see more “good samaritan” games come along in the future, but of course the wonderful thing about RPGs is that if you really want something, you can make it happen yourself.

Put all that together, and we have the makings of a game that has the potential to be really moving, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a game where a girl in a silver jumpsuit and jetpack can comfort a girl whose mother was in a car accident.

Most of my attempts at game design revolve around a specific genre for which I can cite at least half a dozen specific works, and more often than not nearly all of those are anime/manga. In this respect Adventures of the Space Patrol breaks with that habit, which is probably good for me as a (wannabe) designer. Although I let some Japanese stuff creep in here and there, the game was inspired by a look and feel rather than a book or a TV show, and it’s up to those who play it to feel out how to put together stories, rather than trying to ape something from another medium.

So far the rules are not especially original. They’re rather like a mashup of The Shadow of Yesterday and Spirit of the Century, with some bits of Yuuyake Koyake, In A Wicked Age, and others thrown in for good measure. I’m less concerned with startling originality of rules than I am with making a quick and fun game that expresses the whole “retro-cute sci-fi” thing well. Characters are created by picking archetypes (Atomic Ranger, Martian Barbarian, etc.) and making a few tweaks here and there. It has SotC-style Aspects, but with the addition of “Bonds,” temporary aspects that define how your character connects with the current episode’s major NPCs. If I get it all the way done, I’m definitely going to include a replay and a couple of scenarios in the book, and do my darndest to get some good illustration-style art to go with it.

Another thing is that, although I really haven’t been trying to do it that way, I keep coming up with ideas for games that would be good for pickup play. (The other two are Raspberry Heaven and Dandelion Complex). I think even though I do tend to play long, convoluted campaigns with my friends, really want to be able to just throw a game together without having to worry too much about organizing a bunch of people week after week. Although it’s often rewarding, sometimes I get tired of being a cat-herder.

If I can, I’m going to try to get a version ready for playtest in the next couple of weeks.

In The Cards

musings, projects,

I wound up going in and filling out the online list of my RPG collection on RPG.net, which you can view here. Sometimes I forget (1) that I have some very strange, obscure stuff in there, and (2) just how many books I’ve sold off over the years. I own almost no Palladium stuff now, a lot less GURPS and Tri-Stat, and a whole heck of a lot more indie stuff. Anyway.

I wound up doing some brainstorming for Dandelion Complex, Raspberry Heaven’s twisted younger sister game, and I think I’m seeing the outlines of the game I want. It’s going to also use playing cards (I’m seriously thinking of putting them into the same book anyway), albeit in very different ways. Characters have cards dealt to them face down, and they can spend them on different things, whereupon they pick a card to turn face-up. For random events you check the card against a table, but certain cards will cause things to happen in the game regardless of what the character is trying to do. Additional cards are earned by pleasing the teacher NPC, a la Maid RPG.

Although I came up with the idea for Dandelion Complex as a game that would in some ways be a polar opposite to Raspberry Heaven (instead of Uno… 52 Pickup), they’re turning out to both be playing-card-based pickup games that actively defy any substantial attempts at preparation. They’re even starting to reference each other, since RH’s character color is perfectly usable in DC, and DC’s tamer random event tables could be used to get out of creative blocks in RH.

On a side note, I decided to get a box to hold my two decks of cards for these games. I was looking online and kept seeing boxes with capacities topping out at around 85 or so, but when I got to a local comics shop to look at them in person, it turned out that these are mostly sized for cards with protective sleeves on, so one of the boxes I picked up can easily fit three standards poker decks. The plastic cases meant for baseball cards and such that claim they’re for 100 cards could easily hold twice that for playing cards.

Cards found around my house last night:

  • A deck of One Piece playing cards in a plastic case, from a grab back at Anime Palace.
  • The cards from the combat game that’s included with the Dream Pod 9 Project A-ko RPG
  • A set of Clow Cards (from Card Captor Sakura), printed in Japan and bought well before the series came to the US. Now I kind of wish I’d bought that book they did on how to use them for fortune-telling. (Though as it turns out someone’s working on an English fan translation).
  • Six different Brawl decks.

Raspberry Heaven 0.2 Playtest 1

playtesting, projects

Sunday night was the first playtest of the new revision of Raspberry Heaven, and I think it’s promising (and a vast improvement over the old version) but in need of much more testing and tweaking. It probably didn’t help that I started coming down with a cold an hour or two before we started though. On the plus side I had time to go buy some Japanese snacks (Pocky, melon bread, rice crackers) to munch on during the game.

For those that are interested in looking at the current draft of the game:

Anyway, I was joined by Mike S., Elton, and Tim for the playtest. I’d e-mailed my current draft of the rules out to everyone, but Elton hadn’t had time to read it, so I had to explain the rules to him verbally. This is half of my usual gaming group. Although they’re a creative bunch (especially Mike and Tim), we haven’t had occasion to play many indie games yet (I’ve been working on it), and the players, myself included, weren’t always prepared to narrate on the spot. I’m not sure how much of it is simply not being accustomed to that kind of improvisation, and how much is just not being cut out for it. Anyway.

Me, Tim, and Mike got together around 5:30 p.m. and watched some Azumanga Daioh and played a couple rounds of Uno to warm up. I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t really like board or card games (Magic and Monopoly helped ruin both genres for me), but I find that Uno scratches roughly the same itch that Tetris does. I guess I have a thing for simple games with some simple logic tasks to them. I’m thinking of including (1) optional rules for playing Raspberry Heaven with an Uno deck, and (2) putting together rules for a custom Crazy Eights variant card game to play.

Character Creation
Elton showed up at about 7, and after another round of Uno we got into character creation. With the exception of Mike, everyone only really gave their characters a name and the requisite three Quirks. The PCs wound up being as follows:

  • Karin Takebashi (Elton): Tsukkomi, Tsundere, Physically Gifted
  • Yui Kinomoto (Mike): Boke, Obsession (Puppets), Genkisugi
  • Yama (Tim): Jock, Obsession (Eating), Busty
  • Kana Ninomiya (Ewen): Space Cadet, Slow, Genius

Characters

The decision to omit the fluff (likes, dislikes, best/worst subject, blood type, etc.) wasn’t conscious per se, and more to keep character creation from dragging on even further. I might try to have some game mechanical consequences to it (e.g., you can draw a card for a scene involving your Best Subject, but you have to discard one for your Worst Subject).

  • As I’ve been planning for ages, we took out my box of Pinky Street doll stuff and made representations of our characters that way. This wound up working pretty nicely, and it seems like after some fiddling everyone was pretty satisfied with that part. On the other hand I definitely need to see about getting some bases for the figures (they make them, but they’re mostly sold separately), since the dolls often fall down, and in Karin’s case the head would pop off every time that happened.
  • One thing I’m thinking about for character creation and such is to have a PDF for optional Quirk cards. You could use them to tangibly pick out Quirks and ensure each one is exclusive to one character, or randomly generate a character, or use them for reference.
  • Another thing I’ve been thinking about is making a small collection of iconic characters/templates that players can use to get into playing the game more quickly.

Scenes and Cards
I made a quick “Scene Template” that I think will prove indispensable to beginners playing the game. It contains all of the basic information for the core gameplay, and is a kind of visual guide as well. Everyone seemed to catch onto the mood values of the cards and the phases of a scene fairly quickly, though I think feeling out what does and doesn’t fit into a phase and the border between the narration part and role-playing part of each phase has a bit of a learning curve. We got through a total of five scenes, and ended the game where it felt appropriate to do so, partly because it had gotten kind of late on a Sunday night.

I had originally planned for the length of an episode to be measured in terms of how many times you shuffle the deck, but I also set it up so that characters get 3 new cards per scene, which means that with the base scene cards the four of us would burn through 18 cards per scene, and we’d get through as little as two scenes before needing to reshuffle. As is, those five scenes required three reshuffles. Playing with two or more decks shuffled together might be helpful–a basic Uno deck has 108 cards after all–but regardless I need to do something about the economy of cards. The 3 cards per scene did keep people from being stingy with cards as I had hoped at least.

Template
On the other hand, I’m not sure what to do with the basic way the cards are played. In practice the free-flowing Uno-style matching game is very non-confrontational, but it perhaps excessively rewards players who wait for others to play their cards. I’m not sure having it be oriented towards high cards is what I want exactly (it was interesting to see players choosing their cards in order to maneuver towards the mood they wanted for one thing), but perhaps a more structured turn order might help. Tim’s suggestion (which Mike seemed to dislike) was to have each player get a hand of five cards per scene, and set out one face-down for each phase, then flip them over all at once to determine the narration rights by high card (the 5th card would be usable for Special Moves, but you could only use one Special Move per scene).

Each Quirk gives a character a Special Move that lets them play cards differently (such as by treating certain cards as wild cards) at the expense of needing to include something related to it in the scene, but in the playtest there was only one instance of a Special Move being used for something other than a wild card. Some of them need to be tweaked to be more useful (I’m thinking you should be able to drop the tens digit of Addition Plays, so that e.g. a 6 and a 7 could be played as a 3), and some need to be tested period (like Draw Two). Still, on the whole I think I’ve found an effective way to motivate players to bring their character’s peculiarities into the game. It also eliminates the original version’s worries about checking for conflicting Quirks, though Play Adjacent is perhaps over-used in the Special Moves.

Emergent Story
The four girls are classmates in high school, and their homeroom teacher, Inoue-sensei, is a lazy, short-tempered otaku. The episode was about physical examinations (once a year students are weighed and measured), and anxiety about such. I’d originally thought it kind of a narrow subject for a full episode, but for the 5 scenes we played through it was about right. In homeroom, Inoue-sensei came in late, fuming that the release of the new game she’d lined up for had been delayed, and she decided to leave early. That Kana couldn’t quite tell the difference between Yui (who’d decided to jump in to “teach” the class) and the real teacher was enough to get Inoue-sensei to get back on track.

Lunch in the cafeteria led to Yama and Yui, massively laden with food, colliding in the middle of the cafeteria, while Kana watched helplessly.

Then we moved on to the physical exams. Yui gave plushies to everyone, and Kana went into the nurse’s office with a penguin on her head. Mr. Tuxedo wound up getting his own report from the nurse. Yui bragged about her own “secret weapon,” which turned out to be plushies stuffed into her bra. When it was Yama’s turn, Karin and Yui decided they needed to peek in, and Inoue-sensei (played by Elton at that point) came into the nurse’s office with a binder and started writing things down for some reason. Mike played a Joker, and got narration on the Resolution phase, so he said that the door Yui was leaning against collapse in, knocking down the privacy screens to boot so the boys could see in.

I had the next scene (which turned out to be the last) be in the principal’s office, where he was talking to Yui, Yama, Inoue-sensei, and the nurse to figure out what happened. He decided to let Karin decide Yui’s punishment. That scene wound up being all Spades, which means a Dream Sequence, so we wound up with Yui in some crazy bear costume, and then Kana waking up from sleeping in the middle of class to be scolded by Inoue-sensei.

Table

Conclusions
The use of scenes, phases, and moods from the cards seems to work pretty well, though it depends on the group playing, and I’d like to see how it turns out with players more accustomed to group improvisation type games. The major thing I need to do is work on how the cards are played, both in terms of the overall flow of the game and making sure Special Moves are sufficiently useful. We never actually used the rules for Memories, and while I think those serve a purpose in the rules, they no doubt need work too.

Raspberry Heaven 0.2

projects

The stuff I ordered from Sunset Games has apparently been shipped, via EMS. That means that although the shipping charge was about 2600 yen, the package should come in a few days. I will of course post more about them when they’ve arrived and I’ve gotten a chance to read through them some.

Anyway, I think I have (the next iteration of) Raspberry Heaven basically figured out, at least enough for playtesting. The replies to the thread I started on Story Games helped immensely, and gave me more insight into how cards can be used in games in general.

The way the cards are used wound up being closer to Uno (which is in turn very much derived from Crazy Eights and its relatives) than poker. (And I’ve wound up playing Uno on Xbox 360 a decent amount of late). There’s a rotating “tutor” role, whose job is to deal cards and supervise the scene’s pacing. They set out four cards for the scene phases face down, and flip them over as they feel appropriate to the pacing of the scene, and move the played cards to the discard pile when it’s time for it to end. When a phase starts, the players then play cards, trying to match suit or rank, until no one wants to play any more cards, and the player with the top card gets narration rights.

Each Quirk gives your character a Special Move, which lets you play cards differently, but also introduces something which may or may not be flattering to your character, regardless of whether or not you win narration rights for the scene. I thought about giving characters two or more things per Quirk (and I really liked Filip’s idea of having an Aspect for each suit), but that gets to be too many different things to do with cards per character.

One of the major things that needs playtesting is the overall economy of cards. As I have it written now, players get 4 cards in the first scene, and one card at the start of each scene thereafter. I think that might not be enough, but of course it partly depends on the players’ behavior. I might try having the game run through the deck more aggressively, giving players more new cards per scene and having them discard down at the end. That way the desired length of an episode could be measured in terms of how many times you shuffle the deck.

Regardless, I’m going to aim for a playtest next weekend (the 19th for those keeping track). I’ll probably do the thing I was planning on, having the players make representations of their characters using Pinky St. dolls, though at some point I’d like to do an Azumanga Daioh game, and have each player take a plushie of one of the characters (since, weirdo that I am, I have the Azumanga cast twice over in plush form…). If only I could afford these Azumanga Daioh playing cards (the only one currently on eBay is for $70 plus shipping, though it is for six decks). OTOH I do see a Lucky Star deck for $4.75, even if it does look bootleg.

(Add a custom deck of cards with different pictures of Raspberry Heaven’s signature characters to the list of things I’d like to do but probably can’t any time soon).

Catgirls The Dark Raspberry

games, projects, ,

Malcolm Sheppard has put together an OGL system called “Opening The Dark,” which is very much like Storyteller with the serial numbers filed off and some changes to the chassis. I need to make time to digest it at some point, but the SRD is available here. I may end up using it for Catgirl: The Storytelling Game.

I’ve also made major progress with the new version of Raspberry Heaven. I’m much more confident about it now, and depending on how much I get done I may run a playtest in a week or two. The new game is even more of a not-quite-an-RPG scene building story game, and it should be pretty easy to tweak for other things. It uses a deck of regular playing cards, and players put down cards trying to get the highest value for each phase of a scene (Introduction, Development, Turning Point, Climax) to get narration rights, but suits, special cards, and certain combinations all affect the mood and such.