Webcomics | Yaruki Zero Games

I’ve kind of been all over the place lately, and getting creatively obsessed with different things at different times. I’ve done three playtest sessions of Dragon World (it’s getting there), then got into working on my UFO Girl novel, then started having a creative crisis over Neko Machi, then we went through a bit of a shakeup at work, and now I have a cold. I’ve been meaning to record and post up a solo podcast for ages now, and thinking of trying to do them as kind of a regular thing. Somehow I haven’t been able to find the time to even get started, and with this cold it’s not gonna happen this weekend.

Kin-Yoobi Con
I had a booth at Kin-Yoobi Con, and sold Neko Machi mini-comics and buttons, plus Maid RPG. It taught me some interesting lessons about the anime crowd, most notably that when it comes to art those folks gravitate much more strongly to characters they already know. I’m wondering if there’s a way to use that kind of appeal for RPGs but on the level of fan art seen at the artists alley at an anime convention.

Mascot-tan
A while back I had an idea to do new games based on the Maid RPG rules, which I would call the M.A.I.D. (Maniacs’ Asymmetrical Interactive Delusion) Engine. I decided to start working on a new version of Mascot-tan that’s basically a Maid RPG hack. So far it’s sticking fairly close to the basic Maid RPG rules, the main difference being that (by default) the group rolls and agrees on one mascot theme (bands, fighter jets, game consoles, RPGs, whatever), rolls up random stuff for their characters, and then each player picks which specific thing their character is a mascots of. Also, I started writing up new tables for most everything from scratch. Funnily enough even for anime maids I’d end up changing some things if I were to write up a Special Qualities table today, on account of anime has generated new kinds of cliches since Maid RPG’s original publication in Japan.

There’s also something else cooking for Maid RPG. :3

Ambitions
I want to bring Magical Burst or Dragon World to fruition in the next 6 months or so. Lately I’ve had kind of a love-hate thing going with Magical Burst, so it’s been hard to muster up the desire to actually look at it, but I have gotten some more feedback. (Plus I’m not good at balancing creative projects. I tend to work on one thing to the exclusion of others.)

Shout Outs

With Neko Machi I have the privilege of collaborating with C. Ellis, a woman who is very dedicated to creating comics. She’s doing a webcomic of her own (We’re All Star Children), is a contributor to the Womanthology project (which looks all kinds of amazing), and does plenty more stuff besides. I really do know a lot of amazing people these days, and she’s high on the list.
A while ago I translated a short story for Kizuna: Fiction For Japan, a charity fiction anthology for Japan tsunami relief, and it’s now available as a Kindle e-book.

Wilhelm, one of the few people to really take an interest in my translation of Witch Quest, is trying to crowdsource a Witch Tarot deck for it.

I haven’t been doing quite as much on the RPG front the past few weeks because I’ve had a lot of other distractions.

Yuuyake Koyake Mail
Today two new Yuuyake Koyake books came in the mail. Kore Kara no Michi (“The Road From Here”) has rules for playing as humans, as promised. Interestingly, they do have Powers, but almost all of them have a cost of 0. There are also 3 pages of Weakness/Additional Power pairs for humans. The Touhou Yuuyake Koyake book has around 80 pages of replays, which apparently has Riko (the raccoon dog girl from YK) visiting Gensoukyou. The rules section has two new character types–shrine maidens and fairies–and also, intriguingly, four pages of powers followed by two pages of weaknesses for “Gensoukyou Residents.” It has writeups for several Touhou characters, and it’s interesting that several of them list more than one character type, like Reisen’s statblock says “Rabbit + Visitor.”

Slime Story Playtest
I’m planning to run my first Slime Story playtest this Sunday. I’ll have quite a bit to say about it later.

NaNoWriMo
I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year, working on an oddity called “UFO Girl” that I’ve wanted to do for ages. I’m a bit behind right now though.

Neko Machi: A Webcomic
Way back in early 2003 I started a webcomic called Neko Machi (“Cat Town”), about a bunch of catgirls in high school, loosely based on me and my friends. It went on pretty regularly for 3 or 4 years, but I had to stop after a while. I’ve now enlisted my friend C. Ellis to handle the art side of things for a resurrected and reinvented Neko Machi. We’re off to a rocky start in some ways, but I’m really excited to be doing it again. The tools are vastly better than they were 6 years ago, and my writing has improved, and I get to work with a very talented artist this time around. There’s been some talk on Story Games about what indie RPGs can learn from webcomics, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing where we can go with marketing this comic and what I might glean from the experience for RPGs. (I definitely smell a podcast topic…)