Category: Uncategorized

Sayonara Nihon

I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I’m home. I’m not fully on board with the situation, to be honest. I guess I can continue to dream that I’m back in Japan again, walking though the riverside yattai food stalls of Fukuoka, sampling the okonomiyaki of Hiroshima, slurping ramen at the counter in Oita. But it’s no substitute for the real thing. I used to live there a long time ago, dear reader, and my feeling about the second-hand experience can be summed up thusly. I have been consuming below-par sushi from a little place near my office in Ireland for years, fooling myself into thinking it was quite good, actually. But our generous friends and hosts took us out for the most affordable conveyor-belt sushi in Oita City last weekend and when I popped that first maguro nigiri into my gob, I realised I had forgotten how good it could be. I almost cried. I’ll never be able to return to that little lunchtime sushi place without the sure knowledge that they have been hoodwinking me for years.

Yellow Submarine

Anyway, I visited a branch of the Japan-wide chain of table-top and card game store, Yellow Submarine, while I was in Fukuoka for a couple of days. It was not easy to find! It occupied the third floor of a narrow building sandwiched in between a dentist and a beauty salon and it only opened at 12 pm, which seemed like a good idea, in fact. In addition to being, what appeared to be the only specialist store in the city, it also runs TCG games and tournaments in its decently sized play space. It was very quiet when I got there just after opening, which made it a bit easier for me to get some photos. The majority of the display areas were dedicated to glass cases filled with row after row of Pokemon, Digimon and Magic cards as well as several I had never heard of. It did have a small, but perfectly formed TRPG コーナー, or TTRPG Corner, though. Since it was so quiet, I got to spend quite a bit of time exploring it.

What I discovered, might, I think, surprise some Western TTRPGers. Call of Cthulhu is massive, it occupied pride of place, at eye-level (the buy-level, as anyone who has worked retail will be aware.) There were easily twice as many CoC books as there were for any other game and they looked so good. I wished I could have picked up the core book in Japanese but my suitcases were already creaking under the wait of the stuff I was taking home as it was. I did get a nice picture of the cover though. Look at that metal af artwork!

I think its a relatively well known fact, at this point, that Call of Cthulhu outsells most other RPGs in Japan quite substantially, in fact, but I wasn’t prepared for the amount of Jubensha on sale here. They were stocked in magazine racks and there was an impressive variety of them. They were not noticeably referred to by that term as far as I could tell, but I am not surprised by that. While we were in Japan, yet another spat broke out between the Japanese and Chinese governments over something relatively innocuous. Chinese people started cancelling holidays in Japan and the Japanese said they didn’t want them coming over anyway… This sort of thing goes on a lot and it’s no secret that there is generally no love lost between the two peoples who have had a troubled and violent history since the 19th century. So that’s why I was surprised to see the popularity of this Chinese LARP game format in Japan.

I think it’s also fairly well known that D&D and other such games has never done particularly well in Japan, despite numerous attempts by both TSR and Wizards of the Coast to push it. They had a massive publicity campaign for the most recent edition of the which involved this pretty incredible ad:

Maybe it’s doing better in other parts of the country, but in Fukuoka, 5E is relegated to the bottom-most shelf along with most of the other foreign games like the One Ring and Cyberpunk Red. Not only that, they didn’t have a single copy of any of the 2024 rulebooks. So, I’m guessing the ad campaign didn’t really work too well.

Meanwhile, the big Japanese fantasy adventure game, Sword World had a pretty generous degree of real estate on the shelves (I somehow managed not to take any photos of it, sorry!) It had a couple of editions there, the most recent of which has all the rules contained in a single tome (it usually comes in three books.) Once again, I really wanted to purchase it, but my bags objected. Luckily, it looks like there’s an English-language version in the works so I will be looking at backing that when it gets going.

A very pleasant surprise was that there were just so many Japanese TRPGs here that I had never heard of. They have never been translated to English to my knowledge and they represent a bewildering variety of themes, genres, styles and rulesets. Please enjoy the small selection of covers in the gallery below that I was able to take photos of. I wish I had the time and the bag-space to buy more of these.

TRPG + Accessory Getto!

Here’s what I picked up for myself.

• Tokyo Nightmare 001 Basic Rulebook – this is the rulebook for the Urban Action TRPG, Tokyo Nightmare, from now on referred to as TNM. It only cost about 1700 Yen (around £8.50 or $10.50.) There were a number of other books in this series but this one seems to have everything you might need to run a game of it. Contained in it are the basic rules, which are based, not on dice rolls but on playing cards. You also have a “Replay” section, which presents a comprehensive example of play. Interestingly, this is the first section of the book. After that you have the Rules Section, a World Section, a “Ruler” (that’s what they GM is called in this game) Section, a Scenario and several sheets including Character, Act and Battle. As a whole, TNM’s really interesting especially with its card-based rules and I’m looking forward to testing my Japanese language skills while exploring it. In fact, I was determined to get at least one RPG book from the start to help me improve my Japanese, which has been getting worse and worse for years.
• Dungeon Origami Tiles – I loved these things as soon as I saw them. I don’t use a lot of battle maps these days but these little collections of paper tiles that you can use to create maybe a randomly generated terrain or dungeon seemed so ingenious and cost-effective that I couldn’t resist. Each pack contains 45 sheets of top-down dungeon or terrain tiles. There are three or more copies of each tile in a pack, along with a thicker one with items (what they call markers) like logs and doors that you can cut out and place where you like. These are so versatile and useful I couldn’t believe they were so cheap! Only about 660 Yen per set! (that’s about £3.30 or $4.20!)
• Cheap-ass red dice – These come from a German company call Oakey-Doakey Dice. They come in a plastic drawer that can be used as a case/dice tray in a pinch. Very handy and very cheap. Only 880 Yen (£4.40 or $5.60!) The d20, upon testing, however, is only good in roll-under games.
• An incredibly clever d100 – There is a little d10 inside the bigger, transparent d10. Much less unwieldy than using one of those baseball sized d100s that actually has 100 sides, if you want to make a roll with a single die.

Conclusion

I’m going to be moping around dreaming of Miyajima, Katsu Curry and Sumo for the next couple of weeks, but at least I’ll have these few meagre Japanese TRPG items to cheer me up and keep me busy for a while.

I hope you enjoyed my report on a trip to a Japanese FLGS, dear reader! What’s your experience with Japanese role playing games, if any? And what do you think of them?

Seasonal Event

Our local RPG community, Tables and Tales, has just kicked off a month-long event to help introduce some of our newer members to the joys of halloween/spooky/goblin themed games through the timeless medium of the one-shot horror in which you play some dreadful miscreant and revel in their inevitable and total annihilation.

So far so good! We kicked things off last night with Another Bug Hunt, Mothership’s introductory scenario, immediately breaking with the format for the event by not finishing it in a single session. Following rules is for squares, says our Warden, Isaac. I’m playing an absolutely jacked exobioligist who should not have been trusted with the submachine gun he was issued for the mission. None of the PCs have died yet, although, the NPCs haven’t been so lucky.

We have a few more sessions lined up in the coming weeks, Shannen is acting as the chaperone for Goblin Prom which is a Honey Heist hack that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Tom is planning a Thirsty Sword Lesbians one-shot with a creepy flavour too! I have a couple of games lined up for the event. Later in the month, I’ll be facilitating the move of the family Balfour to the Scottish Borders in the late 19th century for Scott Dorward’s excellent Cthulhu Dark scenario, Fairyland (check out the actual play run by Dorward himself on the Ain’t Slayed Nobody podcast here. It’s one of my favourites.) But before that, I’ll be acting as Keeper for the first time in a Call of Cthulhu game.

The Game

Call of Cthulhu is a phenomenon. A horror game made by Chaosium and based on the works of HP Lovecraft, its been around almost as long as RPGs have and has had an enduring legacy and impact on not just the TTRPG space but the wider culture in general (although I understand that it is difficult to truly assess its cultural effects separately from its literary inspirations.) It’s the single most popular TTRPG in Japan and it has a dedicated following and niche actual play market that seems to have been thriving in recent years. You should check out the brand spanking new and fully improvised Push the Roll with Ross Bryant as soon as possible. Isaac and Tom have run several scenarios for us, which have gone down as some of the founding lore of our RPG group. And yet, I have never run a session of it.

I’m going to change that next Friday. Honestly, I think my interest in doing this is largely down to Mr Bryant’s new podcast, which I’ve been eagerly devouring. As a pretty traditional game, it’s a little crunchy but when you listen to the podcast, you get the impression that the mechanics can be left behind if and when they get in the way, especially with an enthusiastic and role-play-focused party. I remember getting frustrated with the truly execrable skill scores of my PCs in past CoC games until I realised that was by design. As ordinary civilians facing up against the terrifying reality of cosmic horror, you are supposed to fail and there are supposed to be serious consequences for those failures. That is what makes it horror. Well, that and the Sanity rolls. So, the mechanics can also be used to reinforce the themes of the game, when they need to. If you want fantasy heroes, you’re in the wrong place. If you want the thrill of terror when confronted by your inevitable and immediate doom, Call of Cthulhu is the game for you. Listening to Push the Roll has given me the taste of that again so I thought it was about time I put myself on the obverse of the Keeper’s screen to see what that felt like.

The Scenario

My Call of Cthulhu library isn’t huge so I went out to my local game shop, Replay and picked up the anthology of short scenarios, Petersen’s Abominations written by Sandy Petersen, the creator of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. It’s a nicely presented book with five “tales of modern horror.” This is one of the reasons I chose this anthology. I have been craving a game set in the modern world recently, and this scratches that itch. It also contains a set of pregenerated investigators for each scenario. This is a pre-requisite since I have so little time to work with. Finally, there is a nice selection of player facing maps and handouts in the back of the book for every adventure.

I chose the Derelict, for my one-shot. I decided on this one for a few reasons. First, it seems like the one I could most reliably start and finish in a single session of three hours or so. Second, I love the pregens presented for it because I think the players will easily get into them. Finally, the setting, a luxury yacht sailing the North Atlantic, is unique and I know its enticing for a couple of the players so it’s good for sign-ups!

The premise is a simple one: the yacht’s owner, a stock-broker (see my opening paragraph!) who lost his fortune in the 2008 financial crisis (its set in that time-period) is taking his rich and famous friends on one final voyage on the Delilah. He’s taking it to Liverpool to sell it. But on the way, they encounter the Derelict… I don’t want to give too much away at this stage in case my players decide to read this, but I’ll be back afterwards for a full report!