Princess Wing is a Japanese TTRPG where you play as mecha inspired magical girls fighting against aliens, and I really like it. You may have seen my post about the game going around here before, and I've seen plenty of people since say they really want to try this. Lately, I've been thinking about running something in addition to my regular Sword World 2.5 campaign, and I've decided I might as well use that energy to share this game I enjoy and give people a chance to try it out. I'm not planning on doing a full campaign, but there's a few pre-written scenarios for the game, and I wouldn't mind just running through those once.

If you're interested in giving this game a shot, reply to this post. I plan on using voice chat in Discord and using playingcards.io for the map and handling the cards. And I'm in the EST time zone and have a full time job, so I'm thinking Tuesday or maybe Wednesday evenings starting between 6:00 and 8:00 PM EST and maybe an occasional Saturday afternoon. Since I'm probably only running a few sessions, there is some flexibility here. In my experience, an average session of this game lasts around 2 hours.

And if you're wondering how I am as a GM, I ran what's still the only actual play session this game in English that I'm aware of, and you can check that out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukTrR1604oc

Sword World began when a publisher wanted to make a magazine for role playing content, but didn't have the D&D license, so they hired the people behind the Lodoss campaign to design a fantasy game they could use instead. The result has been the most popular fantasy TTRPG in Japan since it came out in 1989, and while there's definitely a lot of D&D influence, it's mostly from 80s D&D, with only occasional ideas like feats or a class inspired by the Warlord coming from more modern editions.

So what makes this more than just "anime D&D?" What sticks out to me is the way you build your character. While the fan translation says you have "classes," it might be better to think of them as themed skill packages. Like if you take a level in Fighter, that gives you training in using almost all weapon types and in evading attacks, and that's it. It gives you no other skills whatsoever, not even initiative. And that's not a problem at all, because nobody is just a fighter, even at the lowest character level. You could combine that with levels in scout or ranger to get a big package of outside of combat skills. You could combine that with levels in Priest, which only gives you access to divine magic, to become something that's like a D&D paladin or cleric. You could take levels in Enhancer to spend your MP on breathing techniques that give you buffs inside and outside of combat (and in the case of one technique, turn you into an animal somehow nonmagically), or levels in tactician to give buffs to the party that build up a resource that lets you trigger larger effects. That combined with feats makes characters very customizable. A melee character who has a lot of options is just as easy to build as one who is just really good at hitting a guy with a sword over and over again, and either would be useful to the party.

So if you don't have a class that gives you training in a skill, the only roll you can make for it is a flat 2d6 with no bonuses, even if you have a high stat in something that would otherwise be helpful. You might worry from that that everyone needs to take a bunch of classes to make their character useful, but the game is more designed around the idea that if someone in the party succeeds, you all succeed, so you're just fine if only one person has levels in something. Like in my current campaign, out of five PCs, only two have levels in classes that give them any bonuses whatsoever to initiative, but initiative is side based, so as long as one of them beats the enemy roll, they go first, and so far, the PC's side has never lost initiative.

Anyone remember how D&D 5e was originally supposed to be modular, so that for instance, if you were a big 4e fan, you could use the tactical module to have more complex combat? Sword World 2.5 actually kind of did it. There's three forms of combat. In Simplified Combat, you and the enemies each get a front and back line, and ranges are basically measured in zones. Standard Combat happens along a one dimensional line, and specific distances matter. In Advanced Combat, you expand that to a whole 2d map like you'd expect in most D&D style games. I came into this off of running D&D 4e for a while, and I initially expected to start with Simplified Combat and move up as we learned the game, but so far, Simplified Combat has worked just fine for me. Everyone has enough options that it feels tactical enough to be interesting, but still faster than 4e combat.

I mostly like the default setting. I think of it as post-apocalyptic Eberron. Basically, there was a civilization where they developed roughly 20th century level technology out of magic, but it collapsed 300 years ago. So that means your next dungeon crawl might be in the ruins of a subway, and maybe you travel there on your artificer's reconstructed manabike, or maybe you fight off monsters so that Kingsfall can expand the reconstructed train network into a new area. There's even mention of a city built into the ruins of a giant mech, though I don't think that's been fleshed out in the setting books (though I might have missed it).

In terms of running the game, I've found it pretty easy so far. The assumption in this game is that adventures are discrete episodes, and it assumes you'll have 2-3 combat encounters, after which the adventurers can rest until their next adventure. This seems to be a much better reflection of how many fights you can narratively work into how most people play D&D style games than what D&D 4e or 5e tell you to put in between long rests. And the advice the book gives on building encounters works. I don't think it's quite as tight as D&D 4e, but it's definitely much better than 5e.

One thing I wasn't sure how I'd feel about is the fact that there's no equivalent of charisma or most social skills like persuasion or bluff. The book says that if you have to, you can roll based on Spirit for social stuff, but it assumes that most interaction outside of combat is just role played out. And you know what? It's worked fine. Last sessions was the first one where I actually asked for a roll for a social encounter. I was surprised how easily we could all get by without checks like that once we no longer expected to do it all the time.

So what don't I like? The main thing is how spread out everything is between books. For this game, they took the old school 80s D&D approach of having a book for low level games, one for mid level games, and one for high level games. And while it's nice that someone can get started with a cheap manga sized book, these three books spread out the races, classes, and sometimes mechanics between them. To make it worse, some things that feel like they should be core are in supplements. Like do you want point buy for stats, skills representing the stuff you do outside of adventuring, or that Advanced Combat I mentioned above? Those are in a supplement called Epic Treasury, which is largely a condensed printing of items, mounts, and equipment.

And damage is...weird. They wanted to use 2d6 for everything in the game. But they also wanted granular differences between weapons. Their solution? The Power Table. What this means is that to find out how much damage you do, you roll 2d6, then check the line on a chart that matches up to the power of the weapon or spell you used, and check the entry for your dice result. Like if you have a power 20 sword, and you roll a 7 on a 2d6, you'd check the power 20 line and see that a result of 7 on the chart means 5 damage. You then add in your relevant class level and strength mod and any other bonuses to get your total damage. It's clunky. But in practice, it's not that hard. Like there's a spot on your character sheet to write down the line relevant to your weapon. And if you're like me and play this on roll20, the character sheets on there will handle this for you and just give you the final result at the click of a button. Strangely, this only applies to players and all spells. Regular attacks form enemies are just 2d6+x damage.

Overall, I'm happy with this system. I wanted to run a fantasy adventure game, but after dealing with a 4e game that got to mid paragon, I wanted something faster and lighter, and Sword World 2.5 delivered it. If you're interested in looking into this game, you can find the fan translated pdfs here, and you can join the Sword World discord here.

If you've heard of Filled With Online before now, it was probably through the news that someone dropped a 600+ page fan translation of a Japanese indie game that no one had ever heard of. I took a look at it, and while it had some weird bits and its origin as a GURPS supplement resulted in a game that looked a little old fashioned in some ways, there was a lot to like in it. The setting is a dead MMO that's still running after the apocalypse, and players can be self aware AI NPCs who just think their game is the real world, NPCs who've found out the secret of their artificial reality, or humans who fled to space but have found back end ways to log back into the still running servers on Earth. Everyone gets to pick "skills" that mostly looked to me like D&D 4e powers, and the classes seemed really interesting. You can be a catgirl whose martial arts powers combo into each other, a small flying robot with a big gun, a sheep with sleep themed powers, an ape person whose powers are themed around both Son Wukong and Saiyans, or a fucking battle pastry chef. So me and a couple friends ended up really wanting to try this weird game, and we managed to get into a group with someone running fan translations of the official adventures. And unfortunately, we found that the game has some issues.

I probably should have started questioning how well this was playtested when I read about rolling and difficulty. This is a 3d6 roll under system where your stat is the base target number, and if you roll that or less, you succeed, and bonuses or penalties adjust that target number. Like if your stat is a 13, and you have a -2 penalty, you'll succeed as long as you roll 11 or less. Human characters can have stats ranging from 10-15, though other races have bonuses and penalties that can let them go beyond that. Here's what the book says about difficulty:

"•-0 is Easy. Even an amateur should be able to
manage this, but specialists will almost
always succeed.
• -3 is Standard. An amateur might struggle.
Appropriate Skill bonuses will come in
handy.
-6 is Hard. Generally impossible for an
amateur. You should be alright if you train
the appropriate Skills.
• -9 is Difficult. This is generally impossible if
you’re not a specialist.
• -12 is Near-Impossible. This sort of thing might
only be possible with the aid of another
specialist."

You might expect for that to mean there's a D&D style skill system where you get to add something to your stat, since otherwise, a human who maxed out a stat would fail at hard checks based on it 62.5% of the time, and anything harder would be ludicrously unlikely. That would just suck. Unfortunately, there isn't. It is possible to get bonuses to specific checks or to boost your base stats by one point at a time, but you need to select a Skill that specifically does that, and Skills are also the powers your character uses. Like if you want to do more than some basic attacking, you'll need to take a Skill from a class. At level 1, you get 1 Skill, and you get 1 Skill each level up. And while a level up happens after every session, you're probably not going to want to take boring +1s to a stat or +3s to a check for specific action when you could take one of the cool powers you started playing this game for.

I feel like most checks in the official adventures were hard ones, and we were constantly getting strings of failures. One player was explicitly "good" at lock picking, and even she was constantly failing to open anything. You can certainly make a fun game about bumbling around, but that's probably not why you were looking into this game.

As for combat, it became clear that it needed work pretty quickly. As far as I can tell, the main difference between being a close range melee character and a ranged character is that the former will struggle to make it to enemies before the latter kills them. We had one character built to be a tank, and I don't think he was able to even try hitting a single enemy until at least the fourth session. He kept having to use his action to move further to actually get next to things. I tried a melee character myself for a couple sessions, and while I made a point to build up movement, I still felt like it was a challenge to get to enemies on my turn.

Difficulty just seems fucked. Either enemies went down really fast, or they'd be long slogs that hit really hard. And you know how designers of tactical games have realized that solo encounters need to work differently than fights against multiple enemies, and they've implemented things like giving them off turn actions, dividing one enemy into sections, etc? The designers of this game didn't. They just use a character at a much, much higher level than the players with huge defenses, accuracy, and damage and one big attack a round. Like in our last session, we had two solo fights, and I saw someone land a fairly normal hit with OK damage be told that the target took none of that because their defenses were that high.

And the book actively gives bad advice. I decided to play a Shephy, a race of sheep people, and there's a bunch of Skills based around putting people to sleep (because counting sheep lol) then doing things like hurt them through dreams or puppet their sleeping body to attack other foes. Each race/class has a suggested build at the end of the section, and the one they provided had a decent amount of Sleep related things, so obviously this is something the designers thought was a good option. But when we got into combat, things were dying so quickly that putting an enemy to sleep didn't seem like a good option. Why spend a resource to put an enemy temporarily out of commission when I could use no resources to do that permanently with my weapon? I tried it once just to use it, but it didn't work, and I ended up feeling like I should have just attacked. And then in the last session with the solos, I finally got a chance to use it against the last boss of the adventure. It would probably mostly just result in someone getting a free, undodgable hit in and the boss taking a penalty until she was able to stand up on her turn, but that's still a useful thing. So I gave it a shot, but she made the roll to resist it. And the thing about how this was set up in Foundry was that I could see the target number she needed to hit to succeed. Her stats were so high that Sleep would only have worked if she had critically failed, which in this game is a 17 or 18 on a 3d6, meaning the thing I focuses my character on had only a 1.85% chance of happening. According to the GM, that was intentionally a stupidly overpowered fight¹ that we were just supposed to try surviving and that most solo enemies would have had a decent chance of being effected by Sleep, but that still means two things:

1. This official adventure sucks ass, and I don't trust these designers to know how to design a fun fight. This means they probably don't know how to balance a game for one.

2. Sleep is at best extremely situational, and it was a bad idea to recommend building a character around it to new players. It's highly unlikely that anyone playtested the recommended Shephy build, at least not at the levels we were playing in.

Some of these issues might be fixable with house ruling, and if this had a following over here, it's the kind of game you probably would see plenty of guides on how to fix things and which trap options to avoid. But since this doesn't have that following, if you want to play this, you'll either have to put in the work yourself or deal with the jank. There are still things to like here, and if you want to check it out, you can get the English translation for free here.

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1. Also, this opened with the villain almost one shotting three of us with an AoE. The only reason that didn't happen was that the tank took the hits for us and was the only one knocked unconscious. At least he finally got a chance to use the tanking powers he built his character around, I guess?

Embryo Machine is a tactical mecha RPG in a medieval world that recently got a fan translation, and it has one of the more unique battle systems I've seen in a while. When a round of combat starts, all players and the GM write down the next two actions they want to take in secret, then everyone reveals what they wrote, and then all first actions are resolved at the exact same time, followed by all second actions. This means it's all about predicting what both the enemies and your allies are going to do, and if someone gets it wrong, then there's collisions, targets moving out of range, and probably some general chaos. If this reminds you of the Neo Geo Pocket Color game Faselei, then congratulations on being as big of a nerd as I am! And also on already knowing how engaging this strange form of tactical combat can be.

Outside of that, it's low crunch outside of the mech and moderate crunch otherwise. There are hit location rolls, but you don't need to keep track of HP for individual parts. Instead, you just check whether the damage rolled exceeded a threshold for that location, and if so, the target loses something equipped there. That combined with the fact that you can loot defeated enemies' surviving parts makes me think this could end up being a game where you're constantly swapping out parts over the course of a campaign as they get destroyed in battle.

All that makes this game something I really want to try. If you want to take a look at this thing yourself, you can find the translation here. I should also note that there's a tactical board game form of this as well, and that actually got an official localization from Lion's Wing Press that you can buy here.