A post where I rip off someone's post and mashup some tabletop RPG with bad(?) anime stuff

One thing I sometimes like to joke and self mock is being a not-so-closeted weaboo, albeit one who generally tries to keep his anime tastes separate from the general fantasy focus of the blog. However Gundobad Games wrote a pretty amusing post on some unholy setting/games mashup. This got me thinking about my own tables for unholy mashups. Some of these are random tables, some are observations and most of it is quite incoherent since 'anime' is not a genre, its a medium. Albeit one steeped in a variety of its own unique twist on certain genres and others mostly unique to it.

I know posting this one on the OSR MeWe will give people cancer. I'm sorry. Except not really.

Of course, making things anime-like requires more than just genre-blending. At a face value, if described in their simplest terms quite a few anime appear to be much more basic than they really are. The truth, in my opinion at least, is that what makes anime as amazing (and as reviled) is how so many of them have such utterly corny or balls to the walls insane presentation that floors people. Sometimes, that presentation isn't always obvious and just how insane, corny, bizarre or flat out trashy/raunchy can vary immensely from show to show. Some can be legitimately amazing works of fiction deserving of praise, others are utterly terrible and corny. Most exist somewhere in the middle and just become weirder from there. Take the classic shonen fighting manga and grandfather to the genre's entire modern formula, Dragon Ball. It's simply, at least initially, a retelling of Journey to the West but somehow its in a world which is bizarre and anachronistic, where advanced technology coexist with humble farmlands. Where the King of the World is a dog-man and talking, shapeshifting pig-men exist. And then it spirals into wuxia and space opera territory. Anime and manga often laughs at the idea of genre conventions.

Option A: Isekai

The cancerous genre which overtook anime and is only just slowly, maybe, ever so slightly dying down. Now as a concept, what is labelled as Isekai is a perfectly valid concept for a fantasy game and has roots in older works such as Alice In Wonderland, the John Carter novels or even Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. However, the modern 'Isekai' genre which is total ass cancer was born of the boom in popularity of Light Novels. They are cheap, the barrier to entry is low and the lowly trash of this world will eat up that garbage like I eat a box of Cheez-It when depressed. Isekai is simply, overall as a genre, the transposition of someone from one world to another, generally our world to a generic fantasy land. As a result here are some settings one could use for Isekai. The second table, called 'Set Up or Modification' combines one or more Isekai trend and/or quirk of its (more often than not crappy) writing to spice up the setting and add a level of anime-ness, for better or for ill.

1d8	Setting/Game	Set Up or Modification
1	D&D Setting: Could be Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Greyhawk or even Athas.	Chosen Hero: The characters (or just one of its a solo game) have been chosen to become great heroes and given powers/tools to help defeat a great evil of said setting. The PC are either really powerful by setting standard or more easily eased into/instantly raised to the higher tiers or levels.
2	Exalted
3	Wolves of God	The Overlord: Like the above, except instead of being heroes the player characters are cast into the role of a great evil which must destroy that world for one reason or another. Alternatively they are just overpowered assholes.
4	Tekumel
5	Talislanta	Bringer of Modernity: For whatever reason, the player characters are allowed and/or encouraged to bring in their knowledge or technology and somehow apply it or they have means to use advanced technology in the setting.
6	Pendragon
7	Legend of the Five Rings	The Waifubait: For some reason, a sizable portion of the cast are now cute girls and lovely women (more of the latter if you don't want jail time), including possibly a few major NPC now gender bent. They are both as cute/sexy as it gets yet somehow retain any badassery and skill of their canon counterpart no matter how implausible their age or gender may be within the setting rules. Reroll on this column and combine. If you rolled Exalted for this one, just increase the amount of waifus instead.
8	Go to your book/PDF dump and start looking for something you'd never expect to run!

Option B: The 'Legally Distinct Dungeon Fantasy' Mashup

This one is more directly in line with Gundobad's post. I call it the 'Legally Distinct Dungeon Fantasy' as a joke but what I really and, obviously, mean is Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, OSR and any and all games which are at least partially derived from the original games designed by Gygax and Arneson, which generally involve the Fighter/Mage/Thief archetypes, a group or 'party', monsters, dungeons, traps (not the anime kind, hopefully! Then again...) and generally a lot of fighting if or when things go sour.

Imagine D&D, but with elements of...
1d8	Genre A	Genre B
1	Fighting Shonen: If you are even vaguely familiar with anime you know this genre all too well as it's one of the most famous. These are your Dragon Ball, One Piece or Naruto. If you’re a bit older, it's Fist of the North star. People fight. A lot. They get stronger to fight more and fight more to get stronger.	Idols
2		Mecha
3	Monster-Hunting Organization: Also a fighting genre, but it generally involves humanity under threat from a specific type/category of monsters, a special organization which fights them and usually a ton of grim secrets. This genre can range in style/genre combination from Neon Genesis Evangelion to God Eater or even, arguably, Attack on Titan.	Slice of Life
4		Magical Girls
5	Death Game: There is a big event, tournament or whatever where the characters are involved (by choice or not) where different individuals or teams of individuals fight each other to the death for a prize. Technically Highlander would count in this category.	Urban Fantasy
6		Pseudo-Historical
7	Magical School: Okay, I honestly HATE this genre but it's so damn common it needs to be put in here. While the word ‘magical’ may imply fantastical elements, technically there are plenty of these which overlap into scifi, cyberpunk and even superheroes. Oh and don't forget to add some harems in there to be as cancerously anime as possible.	Cyberpunk
8		Reroll on this column and combine, ignoring this result. Alternatively reroll on Genre A too, I don't know?

The Result: Magical Dragon Idols & Cybermagical Dungeons

So I made those half-assed tables and tried to see what abominations I could come up with. By themselves many of these results aren't that weird, so keep in mind it required me to stretch the premise by taking time to develop what sort of anime insanity and awful/amazing nonsense could exist under said premise, possibly even character concepts.

In the end, I settled on a single concept. Its stupid.

"Imagine D&D...but with elements of Monster-Hunter Organizations, Idols and Cyberpunk"

Okay this one is kind of easy, but still a bit weird. The thing which immediately just to mind, at least to me, is the Symphogear franchise. In a world combining fantasy and dystopia future, the player characters belong to an organization which hunt down a specific threat to mankind. Now, perhaps the best way for this to go is to go down the darker path that Idols are very corporate and make them an Idol group which is back by a mega corporation or some shady organization with ulterior motives.

In a grim, gray and neon-lit far future world where mankind learned to tap into higher/lower dimensions for near infinite power and technological advancement, bubbly and nice idols exist as a ray of sunshine which bring hope and joy to those living in this gray and gloomy world. Yet under the surface, things go run much deeper. Reality is shattered by the multiple cataclysm which mankind endured and self-inflicted. Thaumaturgic Technology was once so advanced as to functionally make humanity's overlords nearly gods but mankind's greed and despair grew too much and many cataclysm endured. Humanity in the current age is still trying to advance but the government and medias keep a tight lid on the true historical origins of why cities were built upon layers and layers of ruins, why the the few non-arcology forests are cancerous masses of living trees and why dimensional wastelands exist. Beyond the grey and neon-lit cities, the world is a techno-magical wasteland.

The monsters from beyond the veil are drawn to despair and negative emotions, which are naturally plentiful in such a depressing world filled with salarymen with little to live for. And so young girls trained as idols are given the ability to tap into supernatural powers. In between their bubbly antics and idol shows, they repel the darkness just as much as they dive into the cybermagical ruins to recover artifacts so mankind is able to sustain itself and, hopefully rebuild.

Some random thoughts about all this:

• Do the fantasy races exist and, if so how do they fit into the setting? One option is they are similar to the Meta-Humans of Shadowrun and born of human tampering into Thaumaturgic Technology over the centuries.
• Perhaps the fantasy races, being mutants or reincarnation of beings from the 'other side' are the only ones with innate magic of some kind? Perhaps they exist outside the human arcologies. In that case, the idols may in fact be recruited from these changed people and given a new chance at life and luxury (at a price) inside the much safer arcologies in exchange for their services. Its possible some races may exist and be integrated into human society, possibly as elites or in secret. Elves come to mind.
• Perhaps the Magical Girls can hide their true race somehow, if needed? And if such an angle is pursued then each race is suitably redesigned to be more anime-like and this is where the so-called 'bad' races of modern D&D can come in handy. Tiefling are just cute anime people with little Oni horns which tend to produce delinquent idols. Halflings are stuck looking small and cute their entire life, be it as looking underaged or alternatively being shortstacks. Same and more so with Dwarves. If one is degenerate as shit this could easily escalate into monstergirl territory.
• Is there an Idol class everyone must take levels/be a hybrid of? Is it more like a Bard. That doesn't seem all that great when one think about it. Instead perhaps the Idol class is more like a form of singing-focused Paladin, complete with some Idol Code about always being bright, shiny, happy and all that?
• I'm going to hell for writing all this.

The Importance of understanding the past

This post will certainly skirt my 'no politics on the blog' rule a bit.

I don't really buy recent books (that aren't RPG books, obviously) anymore, there's not really appealing to it. Science fiction, fantasy and horror seems to suffer from a pretty bad exhaustion lately which, combined with the obsession with major intellectual properties which are then destroyed by inept writers (or perhaps on purpose, if you're feeling like being called nuts by people with their heads in the sand) just doesn't really make me want to buy scifi or fantasy novels. The other issue, which I've come to realize following my massive 'born again grognard' phase when I got really invested in the OSR is that fundamentally we (and by extension, most writers) are less and less able to grasp what makes a genre tick.

All we experience in pop culture are copies of copies. Like a telephone game, it increasingly lose its meaning. Ideas. Memes. Tropes. Call them what you want but they exist. Unfortunately people have lost much of their understanding and, when they do spot them, they often generate a sense of hatred for the past followed by a smug satisfaction of pseudo intellect nonsense. The 'trope has been subverted'. Your 'expectations have been subverted'. In actuality it just mean someone wrote crap and felt good about it. No, worse: they felt morally superior.

My most recent purchases in the last few years have been the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft,  Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, an English edition of Tolkien's work (I previous had it as a French translation). More recently (last Monday) I got my hands on Bulfinch's Mythology. Is that book perfect? Hardly, as it is well known that Bulfinch definitely loved to edit out things as to not 'offend' the delicate sensibilities of the Victorian, including young girls. Does that all sound familiar? We should not fear the past and we shouldn't shun it either. If I can keep being pretentious for a moment, I genuinely think anyone out there who is running a Tabletop RPG campaign of any type, but especially fantasy and/or scifi should go out there and read some old mythology. Not the modern takes, not the comic books and Hollywood version where Thor is an alien. These books are, for the most part, either readily available or in the public domain. There is no excuse.

Read some mythology and read some Conan and other pulp works. For science fiction, read the War of the Worlds and other works. You don't even have to like it. I'm not the thought police, you're allowed to dislike it or even think its abhorrent for all I care. Who am I anyway? A nobody. The important point is to at least understand the how and the why of these genres, how they evolved and what form their basis. You can't tinker around with concepts and ideas if there's no grasp of the basics and the core elements. This is how you end with a generation that felt so disconnected from the root elements and the myths that they don't even understand how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Hell, I sure at one point realized that I didn't 'really get it' and then this spiraled in a nearly ten year pretentious-as-fuck phase where I loved to use the term 'deconstruction' as if it meant something. Then one day you get tired of huffing your own farts. You crave the simple, the coherent. Are Conan stories 'deep'? Fuck no. It's pulp, man. However it definitely has lesson to teach on the simple basics of dropping characters in an adventure. The focus isn't on some deeper world building. Its not on some deeper meaning. It's about the how and the why and what adventures this bring.

You have to understand the rules before you bend them.

A Quick Look At Anime-Ish RPG (Some Actually Japanese!)

Just a quick post to look at a few games which are 'anime'-like because, let's face it, in spite of having mostly posted content for games compatible with old school, D&D-derived stuff it has been no secret that to some degree I am a filthy fucking weeabo. Not a particularly loud one, mind you: I never ran around with anime t-shirt saying 'kawaii desu' or other cancerous shit. I'm already pathetic enough as is.

Doublecross

Status: Legally available and translated. Can be bought on DrivethruRPG.

Closest Equivalent: Anime X-Men meet A Certain Scientific Railgun meet NEEDLESS, I suppose?

Let's start with one I actually ran a full campaign with, Doublecross! This is an even rarer beast, which is to say a Tabletop RPG where I own a physical copy of the damn thing and not just a PDF. These are indeed few and far between but Doublecross, for some reason, is a game I own the core rule book in physical form. In DX you play as an Overed, which is the mandatory fancy word they use for 'person with bullshit anime mutant powers'. What can make or break DX is that, for one thing, it's mechanics and settings are quite tied together as your character's powers also act as a corruption meter of sorts where the more you use them the stronger you get but also risk permanently losing said character. The fact this ties into an XP penalty can be quite annoying. The game also suffers from that very Japanese TTRPG 'thing' of being overly structured toward extremely railroad-heavy play with extremely rigid scene structure and combat/non combat dissonance. You can make a vampire loli or a catgirl if you're a degenerate.

Kamigakari

Status: Fully fan-translated but also has a completed Kickstarter. There's a bit of an issue over which version is 'better'.

Closest Equivalent: The Nasuverse (Tsukihime, Fate/Stay Night, Kara No Kyoukai)

In many ways, I'm told this is the 'rival' to Doublecross. Both games are fairly similar in their 'modern day anime fighting stuff' focus. The key difference is that Kamigakari is a lot more focused on urban fantasy. I haven't played KgK yet but I can definitely see both games as trying to a appeal to a similar market and demographic. There is a lot in there that can make it even come off as an 'off brand' Nasuverse, especially once you piece together all the options from the various supplements. I'd say one key thing with KgK that's superior to DX is that the various race/classes options are a lot more evocative in terms of fluff that a syndrome with some connected and disconnected powers. You can make a vampire loli or a catgirl if you're a degenerate.

Valor: The Heroic Roleplaying System

Status: Can be bought on DrivethruRPG.

Closest Equivalent: Any mainstream Shonen Jump title about people hitting each others.

This one, unlike the previous two wasn't made in Japan so right away you can expect the art to look a lot more amateur-ish like those terrible 'how to draw anime' books. That said, given its not a Japanese system its not as much of a nightmare to work with and homebrew so that's a plus. Whereas the previous two were setting-specific, Valor is genre-specific meaning it focus a lot more on the 'shonen fighting manga' genre. That's your Dragon Ball, Hunter x Hunter, Naruto Boruto's Dad, Bleach or, if you're a little kiddie, Black Clover and Demon Slayer. Anything which focus on fighting and getting stronger to fight even stronger stuff is 'shonenshit'. Wait. Does....that mean D&D is actually shonenshit? In any case, there is a system to create your power (what it does, usually a mega punch or a laser or something) and you can add things which make it stronger and reduce the cost with flaws, not unlike other games like M&M or even GURPS. Much like the others you can make a loli vampire or catgirl if you are a degenerate, provided that's what fit in the campaign.

Battle Century G

Status: Can be bought on DrivethruRPG.

Closest Equivalent: Any mecha anime. Or, more accurately, Super Robot Wars.

Okay now we're talking. Giant. Fucking. Robots. Do I need to explain this genre? It covers anything from saturday morning cartoon toy commercials in both the east and west (Transformers anyone?) to war drama (that sell toys) to weird pseudo intellectual existential nonsense (that also sell toys). There have been many mecha RPG but one thing I've tend to notice is that most games tend to focus more on the harder scifi take rather than having any mechanically feasible option to play the oversized action figure with rocket fists and combining. BCG can be a bit clunky but it has these options right from the get go, in the core book and that's all you need to know. This one is the least likely to have the vampire loli or the catgirl but you never know.

Big Eyes, Small Mouth

Status: Can be bought on DrivethruRPG.

Closest Equivalent: Deviantart?

The grand daddy of 'anime' RPG probably doesn't really need any introductions. Its a non-genre specific RPG system with point buy powers and isn't technically limited to doing 'anime'-styled games. Not much else to add because I'm going to assume people already know about it by now.

The Dumbest Game Ever: Dungeons: The Dragoning 40 000 7th Edition

Yep. I'm doing this.

I'm aware this post is going to be really weird and likely seen as extremely stupid. Its okay, it is. If you've never been around 4chan's tabletop board, or /tg/ as it is called you'll likely not get the significance of this absolute monstrosity. If somehow you are aware of it then skip ahead, this post assume you don't know what this nightmare of a game is.

Context: The /tg/ that was

Once upon a time, 4chan's /tg/ board was seen as something of a 'model prisoner' if one like to see 4chan (and derivative) as the insane asylum of the internet. The board, from what I understand of its early history came into being after too many people were posting on /m/ (the giant robot and tokusatsu board) too much Warhammer 40 000 under the excuse that it had mecha, power armors and giant monsters. This led to the birth of /tg/ which englobed not only Tabletop Wargames (like Warhammer) but also Tabletop RPG (such as obviously D&D) and trading card games (mainly Magic: The Gathering and for a time Android Netrunner).

For a time, it was good. At its peak (pre 2013-ish, I'd say from experience) /tg/ was a relatively beloved board. It would frequently discuss topics utterly unrelated to the actual board focus with far more intelligence and civility than the place you should be posting it on. Wanted to talk history without the loonies of the political board coming to stir up some really politically incorrect shit or the anime without the /a/ssholes degenerating into a war over whose waifu is better? Well, /tg/ was there and in many cases these threads devolved (or rather, evolved) into discussions of homebrew or game hack to run games inspired by whatever topic was being discussed.

Of course, nowadays /tg/ is a fallen board. Time, the accessibility of the internet, younger people getting into Tabletop via Critical Role (or other shows of that type, rather than being introduced into the game by friends with a common hobby or fandom*) and draconian moderators with a stake in a million culture wars has neutered the board. The greybeards of yore have left for the most part.. Things aren't as civil or as creative as they used to be. Or maybe its just me being a sourpuss about imaginary 'good old days'. Who knows?
*Which result in vastly different taste being my point here....

But there is one game which in my mind define the peak of /tg/ self-referential stupidity and unbridled insanity. A game which, in fact, is the byproduct of one loony who 'did it on a dare'. A game so stupid and so utterly ridiculous it surely deserve to live in infamy forever.

That game...is Dungeons: The Dragoning 40 000 7th Edition. Yes, you read that right. No there are no previous editions. The 7th is a visual pun because it come form the 7th Sea logo. This game is a work of art. Demented, stupid, childish, self-referential degenerate art! And it is glorious.

The embodiment of early 2010 internet neckbeard in-jokes.
Gone horribly wrong. Or right, you decide.

The Game In a Nutshell

This whole game is a joke. No, really, every single thing in it is a big in-joke and/or a meme of the time. It is essentially a time capsule of the early 2010 and all the dumb things which had shaped the game table of the people who tend to hang around /tg/. It is a giant in-joke, homage and unholy conglomerate of Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer 40 000, the World of Darkness, Exalted and other things with a serious heaping of the likes of Mass Effect. The latter of which, at the time, wasn't seen as a shameful child which has long since been buried and left to rot due to a squandered potential.

The setting is an insane mashup, with Warhammer 40 000 and its baroque space fantasy as its core alongside D&D-derived material, namely Planescape and Spelljammer. You have the 'Crystal Spheres' model of Spelljammer with Sigil acting as its usual 'hub' purpose. You have D&D outer Planes as planets alongside familiar Warhammer 40 000 locations. The typical D&D races are there mixed with their Warhammer counterparts with each race taking more or less from each version on a case-by-case basis. Then you have more insane crossover mashup. For example, the progenitor of Vampires is Khaine. Not Caine. No no, Khaine.

Yeah. This guy.

Mechanically this game is a monster. Its stupidly crunchy in all the worst possible ways. Its system is a bloated mess drawing inspiration from all these aforementioned games (with Warhammer 40 000 being represent by its then-current RPG incarnation, Dark Heresy). Its a clusterfuck of a system which can only be best described in bullet points as to dive right into it would give anyone sane a headache asking themselves what in the name of Hastur's scrotum they were thinking in making an RPG this messy. Except being a mess is part of the joke. That's the whole point. Especially if you remember how D&D 3e onward and White Wolf games are at time unbearably complex games compared to the slickness and simplicity of OSR games. In any case, it work like this:

You have a Race, which give you some bonus, some skills and a racial power. This range from the classical human of modern D&D with their flexible bonus to fairly recognizable D&D staples like Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves Squats alongside the Warhammer 40 000 race of the Tau. However the stranger races added to D&D as core races can be found here, such as Eldarin (not Eladrin but Eldarin. As in Warhammer 40 000 Eldars), Tieflings (here they are servants of Chaos with a capital C) and the Aasimar who rather than being part-Celestials are re imagined as a different kind of Angel. And by that I mean Angels of Death.

Space Marines. They're Space Marines, okay?

Then you have your Exaltation. Now the name here obviously evoke the Exalted of the eponymous RPG but here it mean any kind of particularly impressive 'supernatural splat', such as Vampire, Werewolves or the utterly-badass-yet-perfectly-mortal-Paragon. It also include the Atlanteans which are an homage to both version of the Mage RPG combined with the Solar Exalted as well as the Promethean which combine ideas from the game of the same name with evert cyborg cliche under the sun. There's also the Chosen, which combine Cleric and Favored Souls-type classes with the Daemon Princes of Chaos albeit extended to all other Gods, meaning you become a demigod essentially. There's also Daemonhost (which again, isn't tied to Chaos as 'Daemon' here mean any kind of Warp entity) who take cues just as much from the OWOD Demon as they do with Abyssal Exalted. Its really bonkers.

Then you have Classes which are the least insane part in the core book as they cover all you'd expect and a few more. These work somewhat like the Dark Heresy classes meaning you need to spend your XP on options offered by your class and the more you spend on it the more you unlock higher tiers which offer better options. When you finish a tree you can start a new one and get bonus.

There's also Feats/Assets/Hinderances as well as Magic. You also have Sword Schools taking cues from the infamous Book of Nine Swords as well as its ranged counterpart in a supplement, which is called Gun Kata and lets you build special attacks.

The whole thing mix something which I've been told is apparently a mixture of the Storyteller System with the 'Roll and Keep' of Legend of the Five Rings with elements of Dark Heresy. Trying to even remember how this game plays gives me a headache and leave my head full of fucks.

So why should we even care about this mess, then? Why post this on an OSR blog?

In many ways, DTD is arguably a poster child for the insane labors of love we put into our homebrew. The entire thing is half of an in-joke but also a genuine love letter to the sheer insanity of tabletop and the pure fun of doing something utterly stupid and gonzo. It may not be an OSR-related system by any stretch of the imagination but what I see in it is a similar spirit to all the homebrewing which went on and still does here.

And lastly...

I kind of want to try to bring this abomination to either Machinations of the Space Princess or Stars Without Numbers. Just because I'm insane like that. Is it nothing but dumb, derivative in-jokes? Oh yes absolutely. But there is no denying the absolute madness of this game was an important step in me discovering the insanity of home brewing and the passion project of people.

Edit: The post has had some typo fixed and some profanities removed since the original post.

So how would one do a 'Trapped-In-an-MMORPG' game, anyway?

In this cancerous mess of a post, the idea of the now-infamous 'trapped in an MMORPG' cliché of modern Light Novels and anime was outlined as being a potential concept for a game. While it has zero value to the old guard of grognards, to me it seem like an idea with interesting hybridization of very old school and very new school ideas: the kind of game concept which would appeal to the people my age or younger, in other words, those I game with. This is not a post to convince any veterans that it's a good idea. I'm well aware it has no appeal to those unfamiliar with MMORPG and modern video games and anime. Not that I blame anyone, a lot of things are pretty crummy these days.

Game Design Conceits

Obviously, a lot of MMORPG and video games elements are ill-suited to tabletops. Therefore we have to make some assumptions about what kind of video game this would be to allow a functional tabletop campaign to happen within it.

• The game most likely is ridiculously technologically advanced in order to work, therefore the implied setting is futuristic. Think less current video game and 'MMORPG holodeck'.
• The game is more likely geared toward action-RPG and/or third-person style action games and shooters (albeit from a first person view for the character) like Dark Souls, Warframe, the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer or TERA online than an interface-based MMORPG like Everquest or World of Warcraft. The players are inside the game, after all, using their minds to simulate the body's movements.
• The game very likely allow a more complex environment interaction than current videogames, allowing players to pick up environmental objects and move them. Doors can be closed, blocked by crates and objects can be stacked. In other words, anything short of destroying walls which limit the map itself is theorically allowed, at least within a dungeon.
• Towns likely have built-in safeties which render objects indestructible and unmovable. Same for NPC. This is to prevent players from breaking the hub areas and 'griefing'.
• Character death now mean player death, as per the cliche of 'trapped in an MMO death game' stories.

Mission-Based Gameplay

In my head, the game which would be best suited as an inspiration is not even a classical MMORPG: it's Warframe. Now I'm biased because it's what I've been playing for a month and it's really damn good, but nonetheless, there's a lot of good which come from a mission-based structure. This is not to say the open areas where players can roam don't exist but in many ways they are boring, antiquated empty areas where the only quests are 'go kill bears and bring me their asses'. Fetch quests sucks!

The fact each mission is labelled in what type it is BEFORE starting (and the fact that, in sandbox play, players can easily find them) mean that pre-mission preparation is not only a factor but a clear gameplay element. The mission blurs give hint of what enemies are inside and so what gear, powers, spells or whatever to equip.

Dungeon Missions

Dungeon Missions would form one of the 'core' mission types and are those best suited to the tabletop medium, as they themselves originally evolved from the tabletop roots. A dungeon in this definition is an 'instance' where a group of players enter. Under my current game design ideas, Dungeon Missions=/=Map Missions (I'll get back to 'Map Missions' in a moment): a dungeon is less open, more room-and-corridor-based and the environment is just as important as the monsters. There are dead ends and secret rooms. The game would use advanced procedural generation to create these dungeons but obviously, in real life, it would be a mix of random tables and GM crafting a suitable dungeon.

• Dungeon Treasure Hunt: Explore the dungeon and recover X amount of loot found in chest. This is different from 'dropped loot' from random enemies, as the chest is a distinct (glowing) in-game object.
• Dungeon Assassination: Explore the dungeon and find the boss inside and kill it.
• Dungeon Extermination: Explore the dungeon and wipe X specific enemies.
• Quest Dungeon: A major dungeon with elements of multiple mission types with a major boss at the end. Much more massive in size.

Map Missions

These are different from dungeons in their structure: larger rooms, more interconnected, little to no dead-end and no secrets. These are more similar to the maps you'd find in Warframe. They are designed to allow players and enemies to split up/regroup on a need and for prolonged battles.

• Defense: Hold out for X turns against enemies and prevent whatever you are defending from being destroyed.
• Escort: Similar to defense but with different map layout, you need escort a convoy from area A to B.
• Skirmish: There's a pre-set number of enemies in the map. Kill them all.
• Assassination: Like Skirmish, but you need to kill a boss to complete it.
• Monster Hunt: Like assassination, but with a bigger map and a huge boss at the end. Has more players in it than the usual party size, meaning it's a good place to bring NPC players (by that I mean someone playing the game who is an NPC, not an NPC in the videogame itself).

Exploration Missions

It's here that the 'holodeck' nature of the game come in, as nothing in real-life would ever have something of this scope (or at least have it and be good): Exploration missions are small hexcrawls where the players are expected to camp in-game. Given they are trapped in the game, this mean they are vulnerable when sleeping.

• Reconaissance: A 'small'-ish hexcrawl for a normal-sized group. It's an instance meaning only the goup can enter.
• Exploration: Every few days (or maybe weeks) or so, the game world will automatically generate a new hexcrawl area that multiple groups can enter and everything, be it resources or loot, is up for grab. This is a PVP mode, meaning player-versus-player. Considering death in the game is permanent, this is some serious stuff.

Knowledge Of The Game

While the players may be trapped inside the game, meaning they can't check the game's wiki, having to rely on purely in-game data (read: stuff in their sheet and game document), the more people play the more the exact stats of certain monsters and items will be known. Understanding the 'meta game' is an important element, as it will allow the players to prepare their loadout for the mission ahead. This also mean that manually acquiring the information is required, even if it mean just hanging in town asking other players what they know of X. Beta testers may still be in the game but this carry a risk: that things were changed between the beta and current version.

Random Elements?!

A certain level of chaos and GM flexing their creative muscles is still required: if everything was 100% planned out it would make for a boring game. As such the game has a certain amount of procedural generated 'special content' which has a small % chance of appearing in certain areas of certain missions. These are the 'funny rolls' on the random encounter table, these things which only happen on certain rolls and which may make the players crap their pants and run away from the encounter.

Players Interacting

One thing to remember is that the game world is currently full of other human beings equally trapped in this mess. People will panic, go crazy and worse. While the game world has static elements, such as merchant NPC standing still day and night, most of the Non-Player Characters of the campaign will be just as much individuals with names and lives as in any game.

Hirelings

Or 'noobs'! A good source of hirelings are other players trapped in the game who are lower level: being unskilled in the game and/or unable to grasp the more complex and deadly gameplay of higher levels and being afraid to die they tend to gather around good players and defer to their authority and skill.

Crafters

Some people will simply decide 'fuck it' and wait out to be freed from the game. In the meantime they will level up their crafting skills and make a living gathering materials for other players and crafting them new gear. These people form the core of the in-game economy, as in-game NPC invariably only sell the most basic of items which quickly become worthless.

Guilds, Conquest and PVP

In time, players will gather into 'guilds' which offer in-game benefits. The non-player guilds will become enemy or ally factions as the game shift into the 'domain management' of higher levels as players gather more and more resources to build themselves an in-game guild base. First a small building then eventually a fortress of some kind. Other guilds can attempt to invade these bases and steal their resources. Crafters not hanging in the town where combat is disabled will be found inside those, having access to the guild's vault (an actual, physical place in this game).

The Conquest mode affect the game's overworld: there are small towns scattered across the world, which factions can conquer and/or protect to gain additional resources. This mean that, rather than having to face some orc horde or hobgoblin army the invader are other players and their summoned NPC soldiers, 'built' using their guild hall and it's resources.

Terrible weaboo ideas to combine with (some) older RPG elements

Here is something that would rattle some people the wrong way. Fortunately almost nobody read this accursed blog. In any case, here are some flat out terrible (or hilarious/great, depending how you see it) 'weaboo' ideas to combine with one more more play styles or ideas found in older RPG and moder retroclones. The freak flag is flying high and the shameless weaboo reveal his power level!

This is a post sure to catch shit but consider it a synthesis of the things my players like and my attempt to learn from all the various retroclones and the play style of older games. A marriage between the grognard's ways and the crappy taste of the millennial generation, perhaps?

Probably what people who don't know anime think
it look like, or something...

Idea 1: Isekai

Oh Isekai. The most overused and mocked genre in anime nowadays, perhaps with some valid reasons. Now for the non-initiated, isekai is weeb-speech for 'transported to another world' type of stores, meaning technically Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz and John Carter are all isekai. Once upon a time this genre was just one among many, producing many good shows such as 'Now and Then, Here and There' or the first season of Digimon.  It's hard to deny there is a simplistic appeal to these kind of show.

And then Light Novel and Sword Art Online happened.

Sword Art Online pretty much set the standard for what Isekai would be seen as in the 2010: cheap, poorly written, terribly thought out power fantasy self-insert with bland characters and crappy harem meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Gone are the unique fantastical worlds of old replaced with cheap ass MMORPG....written by a man who never played a video game in his life. No, really, the creator of Sword Art Online does not play video games let alone MMORPG. Yet somehow this vacuous trash is seen as one of the big anime sensations of the decade.

How to use Isekai for a game:

There are a few ways one could use Isekai: after all the core premise is extremely simple but lend itself well to a tabletop campaign. One funny trick with isekai is that you could very hide the game is an isekai. If you play with people with people who are pretty weaboo-ish themselves (I doubt people in the OSR blogosphere do since most are over thirty or forty, I bet and so don't play with people in the 20 to 25 year old range) you could very much pretend you're running a very different kind of game and then BAM! Trapped in another world.  That said, a few more considerations:

• Of course, does Isekai itself need to be stuck with the trappings of anime? The answer is obviously no: the core concept itself predate anime and, in fact, one could argue modern anime are very much a case study on how NOT to run a trapped-in-another-world type of game.
• One could very much use a pre-existing setting of their choice, preferably a suitably exotic and fantastical one and bring in character from the modern world. Depending on the level of difficulty you'd want to throw at the players, it could be very well possible that these characters are dropped into a fantasy world with no money, no readily available weapons, unable to speak the local languages and possibly even not looking like the local inhabitants. This could make for a very harsh survival-centered game.
• That said the MMORPG idea has a few interesting concepts grossly underused in these kind of shows. Namely the realities of how MMORPG even works, even assuming the one the players are trapped into allow enough outside-the-box thinking to not make the game crappy. Basically, trapping a bunch of teen, young adults or even lifeless older neckbeards inside a virtual world is a sure recipe for the darkest kind of setting you can imagine once the PVP is turned on and the swear filter is turned off. Like Lord of the Flies but inside an MMO.
• Trapped in/transported to another world stories don't need to be fantasy. Again, John Carter and the stories set on Barsoom are a good example which predate anime by several decades.
• Alternatively, for more politically-driven game one could do the cliche of revealing the transported characters are actually royalty from the fantasy world. Now granted this one is less suited to games with high risk of death. Of course this could open an interesting angle: what happen when the Chosen Ones just....die? Can their once-sidekicks now step in to save the say and defy the odds?

Ultimately, I'd say isekai is prime sandbox material and the concept itself is quite divorced from anime. It just so happen that anime is the medium where these type of stories are more likely to be told nowadays. The concept is flexible to any level of serious one wish to have for their game, from having teenagers running around in a fantasy world with anime shenanigans to a much more serious survival story where average adults are thrown into another world with possibly no change of returning.

Hell yeah.

Idea 2: Mecha

Giant fucking robots. What else is there to say? Sadly, when it come to tabletop RPG I've found the genre to be criminally underused and I have written a previous post about my ongoing mecha exploration/pointcrawl/survival game here so this section will have much less explanations. This game is how I introduced my players to some new concepts like XP-for-gold. Except it's not gold, it's the resources they need to manage to keep their spaceship and mechs running. Pretty much most of what I had to say on the matter and the core ideas are in that previous post.

How to use Mecha for a game:

Much like fantasy, mecha shows and movies are a pretty varied lot, ranging from the harder scifi and military drama to kids in giant colorful toys whacking giant monsters with a pretty wide spectrum in between those extremes and some sub-genres some of which aren't even clear cut. Hell there's even fantasy mecha series. While mecha is often associated with giant laser sword, drills and two dozen robot combining as a genre it can be played with a rather straight face as long as the mechs are treated more as military machines with arms and legs. The actual plausibility of the mech's abilities is less important than how the setting and characters treat it: is a war machine or basically a giant superhero suit?

• Perhaps the players play a bunch of mercenaries in a war-torn planet or solar system: this very much allow to play things more like exploration mixed with combat and, at higher levels they build/conquer their own domain and it move more toward management.
• Alternatively as outlined in my earlier post, it's an exploration game except it is centered on mechs and giants monsters rather than armored faux-medieval adventurers and monsters. Surprisingly little of what they do in the game change but what tools they use and the overall setting is greatly affected.