OK here’s that bonus piece of anime/RPG ephemera I mentioned. This was something that got printed in Dragon Magazine #155, cover date March 1990. It was a letter from Gregg Sharp who is presumably this guy and also writer of Ranma 1/2 fanfic when that was what anime fandom did. ALL THE TIME.

Most campaigns that I have seen fall into the eclectic category, pulling in ideas from a number of sources. With appropriate changes and the mixing of ideas from various sources, this is perfectly reasonable. A source of ideas available at SF conventions (at the coasts at least) has largely been neglected, which is a pity since a visual medium helps game play.

This is the anime (or Japanimation or Japanese animation) room, where a number of films and series are being subtitled in English by fan groups here in the States. Not all are translated, but there is usually a translator in the room to explain the more difficult sequences. Here are a few anime movies that are likely to be shown at
conventions, with notes on useful, game-related material they contain:

Totoro of the Neighborhood: This one has three kinds of non-undead ghosts and a druid ceremony.
Lupin III: Some of the nastiest traps, hidden clues, and bizarre treasures that an adventurer could find are found in this one.
Urusei Yatsura: This one contains particularly nasty curses, bizarre supernatural creatures, a few magical items, and the sorts of problems that result when a genielike creature tries to be helpful (but whose competence is not all that she thinks it is). Plotlines can be found herein for R. Talsorian’s TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE game.
City Hunter: Though the plotlines are more in the line of a TOP SECRET/S.I. campaign, some are adaptable to AD&D game settings.
Supernatural Beast City: This movie is usually shown after midnight, as it is not family fare. Look for bizarre monsters and spells.
Dragonball: With four movies and two TV series, this has quite a few usable plotlines. The magic spheres in the title are a natural for a long-term plotline in AD&D games, as are a number of the spells, magical items, martial-arts techniques, and NPCs.
Saint Saeya: This one contains hundreds of new spells, magical items, and NPCs, with advice on “How to Kill Waldorf.” The series involves such things as the Greek gods and the Ring of the Nibelung, things with which many AD&D game players are familiar.
Dagger of Kamui: A few subtitled versions are out now, because a “kidsvid” professional translation altered the plotline beyond recognition. Look for hints on the campaign use of ninja and magical weapons.
Yoma: This deals with the earth spider, ninja, magical weapons, and “spawn of the earth spider.” The plotline is suitable for AD&D Oriental Adventures campaigns as is.
Ranma ½: Some really creative curses that could force role-playing can be found. Since this is a parody of martial-arts movies in series form, some bizarre martial-arts styles and weapons result.
Dragon Century 1 and 2: A new kind of dragon is introduced with good supporting lore. Really nasty demonic-style monsters are also included. Where can I get a miniature of Carmine?
Miroku: This contains new spells oriented toward the Oriental Adventures approach, a really nice magic sword, and an adventure suitable for the new AD&D SPELLJAMMER set of rules.
Mellowlink, Dougram, Orguss, Macross, Mobile Suit Gundam, War In The Pocket, Dangaioh, Patlabor Heavy Metal L-Gaim, Aura Battler Dunbine, Dragon’s Heaven: All of these movies or series have giant robot designs usable with FASA’s BATTLETECH® games; in fact, many have suspicious similarities to BATTLETECH game Mechs.
Demon Wind Kejiro: Would you believe magical swords made of wood? New spells, mainly nature-oriented, are also featured.
Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, E. E. Doc Smith’s Lensman: Both give some interesting ship and gadget designs, some of which could easily be placed in GDW’s TRAVELLER® or TSR’s STAR FRONTIERS® setting.
Dirty Pair: The troubleshooters could be placed in any setting with appropriate changes, though the essence of both Kei and Yuri should remain unchanged.
Yotoden (trans. “Legend of Magic Sword”): The entire series of three videos can be used as a set of adventures for AD&D Oriental Adventures games without changes, or with only minor changes as a “mainline” AD&D game. The saga has a number of magical weapons, gruesome monsters, interesting NPCs, and spells. Some of the spells used in the videos correspond to existing AD&D game spells, such as Ryoan’s use of a dispel evil spell in the first installment

What is hilarious is that this fairly innocuous letter still managed to get at least two responses, both complaining that he seemed to be suggesting the mecha shows mentioned stole from BattleTech (the “suspicious” comment could equally apply to BattleTech). The second even moaned that these weren’t the most common shows that got screened sci-fi conventions and that he should have mentioned Macross, Megazone 23 Parts 1, 2 and 3 (was this shown a lot at US cons in the late 80s/early 90s?) and of course Bubblegum Crisis. It wouldn’t be a rabid 1991 anime fan without BGC!

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A little out of sequence, but I’ve not done one of these in ages and this particular game has some relation to the bulk of what I’ve spent 2009 writing about on here.

You see, in everything but name, Teenagers From Outer Space is “Urusei Yatsura: The Role-playing Game”. I first picked it up around the time I was getting into anime, and I think I knew where its influences lay back then. Not that you’d have known it from the 2nd edition I found in a second hand book bin in Hull. That was printed in 1988 and had a cover that was more reminiscent of Galaxy High (coincidentally a show Japanese studio Telecom had worked on). I now see that the very first edition had had a more obviously anime inspired cover, so maybe it’s failure to set the world of fire led to this more traditional approach (interior art edges perhaps closer to Archie Comics house style than US Takahashi-clone).

But the actual contents were clearly inspired by Urusei Yatsura. The rules allowed you to play either humans or varying degrees of alien. Aliens had super powers such as flight, shooting electricity (Lum!), breathing fire (Ten!) and the like. Humans also had more powers like being incredibly endurable (Ataru), filthy rich (Mendou) or super strength (Shinobu).

Where the influence really shown through though was in the 20 mini-adventures, some of which you can see direct parallels with specific UY episodes, and in the some of the “goodies” (equipment) which included duplicating guns, mind swapping earmuffs and boy/girl guns.

In 1997, R Talsorian Games didn’t hide their anime influences under a bushel, and had released the Bubblegum Crisis, DBZ and Votoms games at this point. So they put Mekton Zeta and a re-release of TFOS under their ANimechaniX banner (inexplicable capitlisation RTG’s own).

This time the game had a firmly anime/manga aesthetic, drafting in US furry artists (that US furry/anime fandom connection raising it’s head again!) & Stratelibri (Italian gaming company) bods for the art (as well as a few left over bits of Scott Ruggles art from the 2nd edition). And it expressly mentioned anime in the actual text of the rulebook. Combined with extra material dealing with specifically Japanese bits and pieces, it finally felt like the product it always should have been.

So how does it play? Very well, if you like rules light, fast, silly games. Same basic mechanics as the bulk of RTG’s games (stat+skill+die roll vs. difficulty), but stripped down for speed. And unlike Cybergeneration (which I’ll get to later) I actually got my monies worth out of this game. The play style it lends itself to definitely fits more into my improv-tinged gaming ethos. The third edition may even be in my top ten favourite RPGs. We’ll see, if I ever get round to finishing this series of posts!

Possible bonus US RPG Scene/Anime Scene collision later tonight!

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I do wonder if the bloggers who have lambasted this simply aren’t old enough to realise what this show actually is. It’s not watered-down porn, there’s been plenty of that already and as it tends to be the shows those bloggers like they should be better at recognising it. This is sword and sorcery, the way it used to be done, incredibly sleazily.

Those of use old enough to remember Kinji Yoshimoto’s 1987 collaboration with Satoshi Urushihara – Legend of Lemnear will recognise that this series isn’t exactly uncharted territory for the director. Furthermore, those of us who have memories of the home video boom of the eighties know that this sort of sleazy sword and sorcery is a long established genre, albeit one that has faded over time.

Here’s a few examples of the genre taken from the excellent Wrong Side of the Art site.

Note the presence of a phallic snake in every single one of the posters? There should be no surprise when that very same imagery shows up in Queen’s Blade. The show is a poster for sleazy sword and sorcery come to life.

I also don’t think people really appreciate the sheer oddness of the source material, which is very much born out of that eighties interest in sword and sorcery. It is based on a game that is not, as I’ve seen it descibed/assumed (descrumtions?), a “H-Game”.

It is, in fact, the old Flying Buffalo Lost Worlds combat book game but with characters such as Chiron, Centaur Guard and Praxides, Female Flying Gargoyle replaced with characters like Claudette: Lord of Thunder and Airi: Infernal Temptress. Essentially they are artbooks of warrior women in the “chainmail bikini” mould that can fight against other artbooks. Though the series has also added the “plate mail apron” to the lexicon of useless battle armour.

The series thus feels doubly oddly out of time, far racier than most TV anime fare and dealing in the sort of exploitation genre that’s long fallen by the wayside, replaced by parody or more serious takes on the fantasy genre. Even the source game feels like it’s time slipped from a period where Games Workshop sold topless wood elf minatures.

Despite people decrying the moe-ification of anime and creating TV shows based on erogames, in the last 15 years or so anime (and it’s fans) has probably gotten a lot more conservative and prudish. Watching Urusei Yatsura drives that home somewhat (as has collecting clips for future 198x overload posts). That show went out in the early evening, and the last two episodes I’ve watched contained more nudity than any similar show I’ve seen broadcast today.

Obviously that prudishness has helped somewhat in the ailing OAV market, where you now see new episodes giving you nudity they couldn’t show you on TV. Not to mention “uncensored” DVD releases. But it’s also created this subset of fans who can’t seem to handle anything which is sleazy, as opposed to creepy. Anime has creepy in vast amounts at the moment and they seem to handle that fine.

In fact the original artbooks for Queen’s Blade never offered any actual nudity themselves, teasing the player with a Tobias Funke-esque never nude approach to its illustrations. Which is why a quick websearch shows that unofficial printed material outweighs the official products by at least a factor of 10.

This TV show, as well as mining that vein of 80′s sleaze Yoshimoto clearly likes, is acting like one of those OAVs I mentioned above. It’s a chance for the fans of the books to see their favourite characters in a state of official undress (as opposed the mountains of doujin works the game has inspired).

Now, don’t get me wrong, the TV show is just as terrible as those eighties sword and sorcery movies tended to be. The animation is nowhere near as terrible as some have made out, benefiting on occasion by the presence of Yoshimoto’s fellow straddlers of sleaze & mainstream, Urushihara and Yasuomi Umetsu, showing up to animate some scenes. They might be perverts but they are also excellent animators.

But those who endured Yoshimoto’s stint as director on Genshiken know that while he tends to maintain a decent level of consistancy in his animation, he’s not a very a good director. He’s not even that good when it comes to framing his T&A shots. It’d be a lazy comparison to call him the Russ Meyer of anime, but Meyer had a better eye with a camera than Yoshimoto does.

And if he’s a bad director, he’s a worse screenwriter. The show moves so incredibly slowly. It’s essentially a tournament show, with the various characters fighting one another to determine the new Queen. But it’s 4 episodes before we even get one of these tournament fights. And when we do it is one of the dullest sword fights ever filmed. Part of this slow nature is down to the fact he’s got to cram in every single one of the characters from the books into the show, but it could still be done with more zip than he gives the viewer here.

So it’s utter trash, but honest trash. And if you have fond memories of the exploitation side of the sword and sorcery film genre, this is probably worth checking as you’ve probably already watched a lot worse…

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John Hamm is Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis

Rick Katschke conducts backstage interviews on his Host and Guest podcast

PCL LinkDump asks if you Are Ready To Fight?

The horrifying origin of Jstache – if this had been a Channel 101 show it’d be understandable, but this…

More Scrappy Doo reminiscences from Mark Evanier.

Who’s behind Norman Osborn’s door? The Estate of Tim O’Neil knows.

John K breaks down appeal in cartoons. And then does it some more. And some more!

Scientists invent machine for drawing pictures of Giant Marshmallows.

James Mishler maps the genealogy of Dungeons & Dragons.

Square Root of Minus Garfield – further exploration in the field of newspaper funnies deconstruction.

Awesome Lucha Libre photography from Victor Ayala

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Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu is the best RPG ever. FACT.

I’d heard of it through White Dwarf, back when Games Workshop acted as distributor for Chaosium in the UK, but I didn’t get to play it until 1992-93 when I joined a new gaming group and they had just begun the epic Masks of Nyarlothotep campaign (which annoyingly we never finished, as someone joined the group who’d already played it).

The game was developed by Sandy Petersen, now probably more well known for his involvement in Doom and Quake (did he lose his computer game review spot in Dragon due to his shameless hyping of iD games?). Lynn Willis took charge of development from the 5th edition onwards, which is where I came in.

Using Gregg Stafford and Willis’ Basic Role-Playing ruleset as its basis, CoC is a roleplaying game set in HP Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos”. The original game was set in 1920′s America, but by the 5th edition included alternate rules for 1890′s Britain (Cthulhu by Gaslight) and modern day (Cthulhu Now). The difference in the games with regards game mechanics lies in the skills players have access to and what the skills cover.

The main edition to the Basic Role-Playing ruleset that CoC provides and is pivotal to the game and it’s position in game design history is the concept of SANITY POINTS. It is a mechanic designed to simulate the erosion of sanity faced by Lovecraft characters when faced with mind bending cosmic horror. Characters lose sanity points as they see and learn THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW, lose too many too quickly and you face temporary or permanent mental problems. Lose them all, and your character is no longer playable, their mind eroded to such a extent that they are a gibbering wreck or an amoral sociopath.

Of course you may die before you get that far. The other thing CoC is known for is the frail nature of the characters in the face of creatures made of extra dimensional matter. Oh and bullets’ll do a number on you too.

Getting a true horror experience is hard, of the adventures I’ve run, only Pagan Publishing’s “Devil’s Children” really freaked my players out to the extent they had nightmares. However as a supernatural investigation game it can’t be beat. Or as a weird science game. Or as black comedy. It’s simplicity lends it to being pretty damn flexible.

In the 90′s Pagan brough out Delta Green, a X-Files-esque take on the material. It’s not that far a reach, Lovecraft’s Whisperer In The Darkness is remarkably prescient of the UFO-Government conspiracy paranoia that abounded in the 90s, and the core plot of the campaign builds from that story. It’s a great sourcebook, and it’s follow-up Countdown is arguably even better.

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Good grief it’s been April since I did one of these, so hopefully you’ve all forgotten that I said I was going to do one post apiece for the 2nd Edition AD&D Gameworlds I’d played. Because I’m not.

Spelljammer

My all time favourite gameworld, all my life. Whizzing around on flying boats in space, the setting could be used to tie the various AD&D gameworlds together or as its own sci-fi tinged fantasy setting. I think it worked better as the latter as it offered a change from the norm in that creatures that would be deadly enemies in other settings could end up as uneasy allies in space. And the excuse of new alien worlds allowed it to amplify the AD&D goofiness tenfold. Hippo-men, space orcs called “Scro”, Space Penguins, Aliens that hatch from eggs that look like gold pieces, Elven Guyver Units and of course, Giant Space Hamsters!

Ravenloft

A fantasy horror setting that span off from the first edition “module” of the same name, the idea of this setting was characters from other gameworlds would find themselves drawn to the world via mystic mists, and then struggle to find their way home as the world itself tried to corrupt them.

Unlike Spelljammer, whose supplements and adventures stood alone, this was one of those settings where the majority of the adventures were IMPORTANT~! to the gameworld, and by the time the first run of adventures were finished, the world was changed and so they could sell the gameworld to you again! As disgustingly mercenary as that was, that campaign did have some great adventures in it, and the final two were suitably epic. And most importantly they were written to make your characters feel like they were important.

Forgotten Realms

Unlike the opening trilogy of adventures that launched the revised Forgotten Realms for 2nd Edition, which often felt you were sitting around while you listened to your mate read out some crappy fantasy. These were full of IMPORTANT~! things happening involving IMPORTANT~! characters, and you occasionally rolled dice, but you often found youself on sidelines while fucking Elminster or some other crappy Ed Greenwood character did something IMPORTANT~!

Anyway, not a big fan of this bogstandard fantasy setting, even in its Baldur’s Gater & Neverwinter Nights computer game forms. However it did have a couple of spin-offs that I enjoyed more…

Al Qadim & Maztica

These were ostensibly set in the Forgotten Realms world, but were Arabian Nights and Mayan/Aztec/Incan themed settings respectively. My love of pirates and sea-faring adventure made Al Qadim fun and Maztica was designed by two of my favourite games designers John Nephew and Jonathan Tweet.

Dark Sun

Well this was an odd one. It’s sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy, with characters far more powerful than normal AD&D ones. And buckets full of psionics. The game line had a very distinct look provided mainly from the awesome Brom. So, psychics in bondage gear fighting on a dying desert planet.

The main problem I found is the psionic rules and the sheer abundance of psychics really bogged the thing down. AD&D 2nd edition was never the smoothest flowing rule system, but adding another rule system on top that was deliberately designed to run against the grain of similar powers already in the game, added to the pain.

Mystara

This was an attempt to bring the old D&D gameworld to AD&D as an introductory way into the game. It also tried to use CDs to bring extra atmosphere to the game… This was around beginning of TSR’s death spiral that led to Wizards of the Coast purchasing them, and gimmicky releases abounded. It’s probably more famous now as the setting for the Warriors of The Eternal Sun game on the Megadrive and the D&D arcade games from Capcom.

Red Steel

This was another setting that took place on the Mystara gameworld, but had an usual game mechanic addition that made it a world of its own. Essentially it’s the Gold Rush as a fantasy setting. It took place on the Savage Coast, a land permeated with a magical mineral that as well as making the eponymous Red Steel infused every living thing with superpowers.

Yes, superpowers. It was Dark Sun’s problem all over again. If I remember correctly you’d have to roll up a superpower for everything inhabiting the land, be it cat, horse or tortle (a type of turtle man). It’s a great idea in theory, a whole load of paperwork in practice.

Others

In addition to these TSR created settings, there were various settings from other publishers. I definitely played in a campaign that took place in the City State of the Invincible Overlord setting and there was another that I think started from the Thieves World setting (based on Robert Asprin’s shared universe books).

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So after a session of MERP, this new gaming group introduced me to the most popular RPG on the planet – Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

AD&D was such a sprawling game, that I’m going split this up as during the time I was playing AD&D, I played and ran such a wide variety of campaign systems that they deserve some comment of their own. Today, just some comments on the game itself.

AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, I didn’t start playing until 1993, but that 1989 date is pertinent. Effectively the second edition is a document of TSR’s needless contrition to the 80′s witchhunt from Christian groups and spurious psychological claims that dogged them throughout that decade. The 2nd edition purged all references to devils and demons, and significantly toned down the artwork to try and placate criticism.

Backing down like this never works out well for the person backing down. The right move would have been to ride the storm of controversy and fight the criticism. There was an opportunity to become an anti-establishment subculture here and use the furor to sell more games. Instead, like the US comics industry in the 50′s, they kowtowed to their critics and cemented themselves as pawns to the establishment. Three years later a merger in the small press gaming world, would create a true anti-establishment gaming company. But we’ll get to them later.

The rules themselves were fine at the time. In retrospect, they are full of logical contradictions, albeit ones that long time D&D players were intensely fond of. Mainly they fondly remember the combat rules that revolved around the classic acronym THACO (To Hit Armor Class Zero).

The rule books were fairly horribly laid out, but fairly typical of American publishing – I remember seeing US console magazines in 90-91 and being bewildered by the poor typesetting they’d have, particularly compared with UK and Japanese magazines, they felt more alien to us as British readers than the magazines that read back to front in a language we couldn’t read, such is the power of layout.

However they way they replaced their “Monster Manual” from the first edition was a masterstroke of layout and design. The Monstrous Compedium was a ring binder containing sheets of monsters, normally one monster to a page. You could find the information with ease, and didn’t need to take a whole book with you to wherever you were playing the game. Of course later on they’d go back the old style monster manual in the sort of double dipping that must have played some part in TSR’s financial downfall.

Artwise it was the usual clash of styles that characterised TSR material at this time. It often felt like uncommissioned fantasy art that they’d purchased, rather than work created specifically for books. I’ll be coming back to TSR’s terrible handling of art in a later installment.

I’m probably being over-critical due to disillusionment created by TSR’s handling of the product line, and 3rd Edition that Wizards of The Coast released (yup, I’ll be getting to this too, very later). At release, and through the early years, this edition was very successful. And you can still have fun times with the rules, and definitely fun times with some of the material published for it, which I’ll start to get at next.

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I think I’ve covered all the games my first gaming group played. If I recall any others I’ll have to come back to them. And so onto the first game I played when I joined my second group – MERP or Middle Earth Role Playing as it was known in its unacronymed form.

MERP was created by US company Iron Crown Enterprises, using a simplified version of their Rolemaster system to create an RPG for the lucrative Tolkien licence. I’ll go into Rolemaster (and it’s sci-fi cousin Spacemaster) later, let’s just say the cut down version of the rules was a good move. ICE’s fortunes were pretty much tied to this game, when the license was withdrawn in ’99 the company only lasted another year.

Due to my lack of interest in Tolkien, I suspect some of the appeal was lost on me. However that also meant I wasn’t ever going to argue “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKED IN THE BOOKS!”. The first session I played involved a bunch of hobbits goofing around in some wizard’s tower. We didn’t play it that often, the GM for the game moved onto AD&D soon after I joined in.

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Top Secret/SI was the second edition of TSR’s not particularly popular spy RPG. The SI stood for Special Intelligence, a fact I am only just learning today. My sleepless nights are now over. I believe our teenage gaming group played this a grand total of three times, all of which I remember as being fun. It was just that we tended to be fickle in our tastes and we still tended towards the old Games Workshop wargames. We played one game using the standard rules, which was very much in the James Bond / Man From UNCLE mold. You played agents of ORION battling the evil espionage group WEB, it was all very sixties spy movie-like, girls, gadgets and glamourous locations.

Then, the other two games were using the adventure settings books they had brought out for it. “Agent 13” was the first, a setting recreating 1920s and 1930s pulp adventures. I’m not sure if this was based on the novels by Flint Dille (GI Joe/Transformers) and David Marconi (GI Joe/Enemy of the State/Die Hard 4.0~!~!) that TSR printed, or vice versa.

The second was F.R.E.E. Lancers by Jeff Grubb, that was plain nutty. Grubb, who’d been behind TSR’s Marvel RPG, spot-welded super powers and cyberpunk onto the espionage genre, resulting in a gloriously goofy mess. I can’t recall the details, but I do remember it being great fun.

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Now I’m moving into the realm of games that other people ran in my teenage gaming days. Though I did buy myself a copy of this later in life (and sold on ebay for a tidy profit year or so back).

Judge Dredd ran on a set of rules that were kind of WFRPG-lite, and similarly your starting character was pretty useless at everything. However that didn’t really matter, as being a Judge you were still better equipped and skilled than most NPCs you’d encounter. The game really caught the mood of the comic, and for a while was probably the closest thing to an encyclopedia of the Judge Dredd world. Mid-Late 80s Games Workshop had a similar sense of humour to 2000AD and the license was a good fit (though 2000AD was still a little more punk, whereas GW was new wave of British heavy metal). It originally came out as a boxset, later reprinted as a hard back book. Despite it’s all round ace-ness at being Judge Dredd, we never really played it that much, and I only ran it with my later gaming groups on a couple of occasions. It’s a shame as I believe the guy who had it also had the “Slaughter Margin” adventure, which I remember as being a critically acclaimed piece of RPG writing at the time.

Mongoose have a Judge Dredd RPG out nowadays, but I don’t know if that’s the old version updated, or something totally new.

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