Quote from: Mr. Analytical...this was then compounded by a published campaign where all the episodes seemd to have been written separately resulting in the adventures moving from investigation to fighting flaming wicker T-rexs.

Ready for a shocker?  They were, in fact, written independently of one another.  Stranger still: The introductory adventure that appeared in the Gamemaster's Screen?  Written before the authors had a working copy of the actual game mechanics.

So, another couple of caveats for potential translators.  Decide well before you even begin translation what your game plan is for the line.  Is it going to be a direct translation, or a "work inspired by"?  Give yourself plenty of time to get it ready and fine tuned for its new market.  Have playtested adventures/supplements, not in the pipe, but in the wings and ready to go within a month of publication.

!i!

I remember being on the old Nephilim Mailing list and it was interesting how even as the game was going out, there was no sense of a centralised direction.  You had people involved in the writing of the game arguing with each other as to whether or not the game was this exclusive study of occult practice or a gonzo occult thriller game.

There was also no sense that they were in effect rebuilding the game through the supplements though that's clearly what they wound up doing.

That was probably a result of the changing of horses in mid-stream -- changing line editors from one who saw the game as a spiritual allegory to one who saw it as occult conspiracy, and heading the creative team with someone who saw the game as his personal expression of real-life occult practice.  It was a bit of a sad mess.  You'd be hard at work on editing a translation of a hardcore old school flash-bang French supplement one day, and the next you'd discover that a new magic(k) system had been released that featured totally subtle and coincidental effects that were wholly at odds with the book you were working on and to which you were expected to conform.  Yeah, and then there was the bickering about theme.

Ah, well.  A dog best let lie.

!i!

Yeeees... Liber Ka.  Very clever, did anyone ever actually play with it?

What supplement were you working on out of interest?

The Selenim book.  At first I was just supposed to edit the translation, but then the whole project was offered, with license to re-write as needed or seen fit.  Let's just say that Liber Ka had little -- very, very little -- in common with the Selenim.  Alas, it never came near seeing light of day anyway, and my files have since been lost to changing computers and corrupted floppies.  I still have the hand-written translation from French to English, though.

!i!

(P.S. One of the strangely sad things about this affair is that I still don't know which one of the French fellows did the translation that I keep in a box.  There it is, a couple of months of hard work and devotion, all in very personalised, ball-point, hand-written print, on graph paper no less.  All dog-eared and smudged here and there.  It's a little chunk of someone's life, and I don't even know whose it is -- like when you find an abandoned postcard on the street.  Makes me a little wistful in a way.)

Ah yes, I remember you mentioning Selenim before.

To be fair to the guys at Chaosium, the tonal problems really were present in the french too.  

The first adventure they put out (the one which, I would argue defined the game much like the power behind the throne did for warhammer) was this incredible sandbox adventure that was amazingly french and full of little satirical jokes and weird twisted ideas.  It was full of investigation and weird conspiracies and is probably my favourite ever adventure.  It's actually so good that I've run it twice and am considering running it for an english audience with a different set of rules.

So they went from that to things like incredibly painstakingly researched historical pieces about the history of the Rosicrucians and a completely unreadable book about the philosophy behind the Mystery Cults.

It was always a bizarre game but the French kind of took the weirdness and carried it with a certain degree of whimsical charm but the Americans just took it and imploded messily before panicking and attempting an in-situ rebuild of the rules.

Quote from: J ArcaneHmm.  Thanks for the informative post andy.  I confess that most of my familiarity with the games, not being a Japanese speaker myself, is from what little info one can find in English.  And you and I both know just how little.

Sure, but on that latter point: I do not swing the cock when it comes to my exp with Japanese and the like. I speak with 'authoritah' or knowlege or whatever, but if there's one thing that bugs me more than mites it's J-goobers who are knowledgable and yet have that "God Compelx" of "I know more than you; I am the font of all knowledge". Pisses me off. So I didn't want to come off like that. :-)

QuoteAnd to some extent, you also do alleviate some of my own knee-jerk reactions too, because it sounds like these "storygame-like" features and things, it tends to be more a small part of a whole that's likely to be more familiar.

Oh, honestly? Yeah.  I don't know (or care) about people litmus or limits on the "swiney scale" (cause everyone is different and hard to measure without filling out a survey or someshit), but even all the FEAR company games I mentioned that 'you might not like' have A Single GM of Traditional Authority. There may be "story game elements" that you can sniff out here or there (especially about relationships and social stuff and the like), but they all pretty much have the standard GM. So, heck, you *might* like them after all, hard to tell.

QuoteSomething more like the heavily CRPG-based stuff I'd probably get more out of, and I've wanted to see the Megaten game since I first learned of it's existence.

You could kill a child if you dropped the Shin Megami Tensei RPG (any edition) on her.  There's also an RPG based on "Star Ocean: Till the End of Time" which has a simple combat system that was half-pulled from the RPG, and looks a tiny bit like the Usagi Yojimbo RPG. That might be your speed. Also, I gotta plug Alshard again, because it was created solely to be The Tabletop Game That Feels Like a CRPG, Without the Bullshit.

Oh, the other thing: There's a new 'version' or 'iteration' of the Tenra Bansho world coming out next month in Japan, called "Tenra WAR" (no official site, etc yet: Japanese game companies suck in that regards; no fanfare, just a website and info once the game is in the stores, not before): If you click on the link at the Tenra site ( //www.tenra-rpg.com ) and go to the blog you can read more about it. Basically, it's where in the future the world of Tenra fights the Steampunk-Western world of Terra (on the other side of the planet). I really have no idea what it's going to look like, though I have seen the author's miniatures series based on the idea　( http://pony-hp2.web.infoseek.co.jp/TENRA.htm ), and there were things like "battle catgirl maids" and shit (even more "gooey anime feel" than previous works, which is a little weird). I'm totally buying it, but I can't guarantee the quality until I see it with my own eyes...

...point being, and this is interesting: Alshard, as I mentioned, is the best-selling game in Japan for the last few years.  FEAR decided to take this system's backbone, call it the "Standard RPG System" (SRS), and basically make it into the Japanese version of the d20: Open license, etc.  And Tenra WAR, unlike using the system of Tenra Bansho, or Terra the Gunslinger, is going to use this new SRS system.  If it's anything like Alshard, I can guarantee that you will like it: Trad, trad, more trad, with pretty art, cool combat, trad GM role, no frilly story-tweking elements, etc. I'm really looking forward to it (I <3 Alshard and the games based off of it), and will try to drop a line or two once it's in my hands in 2 months or so.

QuoteHell, I'm pondering my own project of late that's intended to be a tribute to Dragon Quest.

Dude, if you finish it (in English), I will so fucking buy it that you might as well create the Paypal button right now.

-Andy

QuoteDude, if you finish it (in English), I will so fucking buy it that you might as well create the Paypal button right now.

 Well that's certainly encouraging.  Thing is, it was actually intended to be my NEXT project, after the one I've theoretically been working on for 10 years, but I've been in such a DQ mood lately (finished DQ5 last week), that it's pretty well been consuming my brain.

I spent most of yesterday trying to deduce a decent combat mechanic that still kept the stats in the game mostly recognizeable.  But without making the game too over complex.  I'm trying to go one roll, actually.

And I've got kind of a nifty seed of a back story in my mind for something I think will fight right into the sort of fairy tale romantic fantasy that DQ5 had to it.

Something I just remembered:

Quote from: FanPro's 2006 Year in ReviewAll of the above books have also been released in German by FanPro GmbH, and Shadowrun, Fourth Edition, was published in French this year by Black Book Editions. In 2007, Arclight will be publishing SR4 in Japanese, bringing Shadowrun back to Japan for the first time in ten years! Other licenses relating to the Shadowrun RPG are forthcoming, but we cannot spill that paydata just yet.

Andy,

Are you familiar with Daikatsugeki?

The entry from John Kim's fantastic website is as follows:

A Japanese-language historical RPG, set in the Edo period. It is based on various TV samurai dramas. This is a fairly stable period, so adventures are about fighting crime and solving mysteries rather than war. It uses a dice-pool system: roll (skill) d20's where each die over the difficulty is 1 success. Character creation is point-bought attributes and choice of two packages: surface profession (omote) and real profession (ura).

Which I think just sounds too cool for school (well, the concept, the system sounds about as cool as a chemistry class with a teacher frustrated that they ended up teaching bored adolescents).

The idea of a real and a surface professions is a great piece of genre emulation.

The system sounds gash though... roll several D20's? FFS.

Quote from: BalbinusAndy,

Are you familiar with Daikatsugeki?

Yeah, it's an interesting piece: It was one of the first attempts to make a "Japanese Themed" RPG in Japan:



It came out in something like 1992/93. Never played it though. And unfortunately, because it's so old, I can't find websites, better box cover pics, etc of it (it was a boxed set game).

-Andy