Tenra Bansho Development Journal

Hey, we’re a Facebook group now! Look for “Tenra Bansho” in a Facebook search.

So, as the final bits of editing of the game draw to a close before layout begins in full, I find myself wanting to post more about the game but without the time to do so. The classic conundrum of, “I want to talk about the game, but I’m too busy writing the game to talk about it!”

In any case, over on RPGNet a patient fan was asking, “What kinds of characters can you play in this game?” Well, the answer is “Lots”, but that’s not very helpful.

There are certain “core archetypes of character” for the game: These are the kinds of character types that whole chapters of the book are devoted to. However, when creating your character, you can pass up all of those to be something of your own creation as well. In any case, here are the core character types in brief, and a little bit about each. Future updates will talk about each archetype in detail:

Armour-rider: Often children of nobility, their innocence wakes the 14-foot-tall mecha-like armour and keeps it moving, their skill and training make it formidable in battle. Armour are genrally two armed two legged humanoid mecha, but they can come in all shapes and sizes: Legless wheel-driven armour, multi-legged insect-like armour, etc. When the armour rider matures and realizes that battle isn’t a game, that people are dying horribly with every sword strike, the mecha rejects her. Each armour is a state-of-the art magical wonder crafted and granted solely by the mysterious Shinto Priesthood.

There are lesser mass-produced armours called “Kimen Armour” which adults can pilot. But while strong, they are no match for the true Priesthood-crafted armour.

Onmyoji: Taoist sorcerers, these aloof mages harness the natural gossamer-like “sha” power latent in the earth, and weave it through will, gestures and invocation writing into a creature. They can’t shoot fireballs from their hands, but they can easily write a few lines on a scrap of paper, throw it into the air, and summon a terrible dragon spirit to breathe fire on their enemies. Recently, some sorcerers use a combination of abacus and “kimen” calculation engine to store and retrieve shiki spirits easily. Older, refined wizards refer to these upstarts as “Shiki slingers”.

Samurai: A sorcerer can summon a shiki to be bound to a device or object. A samurai is what happens when a sorcerer binds a monstrous shiki spirit to human flesh. Samurai is the designated name for those individuals who have thrown away their humanity in return for power: Having rare balls of metallic soulgem implanted into their skin, a shiki is bound to their living bodies. If they survive this horrifying ordeal, they will from that point be able to switch on this power for a time: Their bodies gain mass, muscle, and chitinous plates. The soulgems erupt with color and power the body. The samurai achieves superhuman reflexes, stamina, accuracy and strength for a time. Enormous power, bound to the flesh and bone of a samurai.

They only had to give up their souls to get it.

Buddhist priest/monk: There are three orders of Buddhism in Tenra: The traditional Phoenix sect owns the temples, as well as the hearts and minds, of most of the people of Tenra, and practice the sutras in cycles of meditation and reflection. The Ebon Mountain order is made up of monks from all walks of life who gave up their cloistered lives and live out in the land and amongst the people: Many train in fierce martial arts to protect the people they encounter. The Bright Lotus cult brings peace and understanding directly to the people, and act as teachers, historians, and performers: Their message is simple, and it’s catching on with the people.

Kijin: Kijin – “Man and Machine”. If you are wounded in battle and lose an arm, your lord will gladly pay the expense to condition you with a replacement arm of steel, perhaps with a gun or blade attached to it… and send you right back out to the front line. Kijin are the men and women who have traded in their weakness for steel: As medicine in Tenra improves, so does the ability to graft more and more metal on to flesh. At what point are you no longer human? Ask a kijin; they take bets on when they cross this line.

Kongohki: Take a fresh soul, one that died horribly, in great pain, anger or frustration. Now wipe its memories away, and bind it into a mirror, a mirror which powers a human-sized armour. That’s essentially what a kongohki is. They speak with emotion, they can even feel emotion like normal people. But they are warrior-robots with no memories of their past. The only problem is, those memories were not truly wiped away, only deeply suppressed… and it’s only a matter of time before something triggers a full remembrance. What will the kongohki do when it remembers who it was, and how it died? Will it become a monster, or will it come to grips with its new life?

Shinobi: Ninja make up the spy armies of Tenra. Shinobi are those rare ninja who undertake a kind of soulgem surgery which adds these batteries of power under their skin: Shinobi use this power to enhance their ninja abilities, and become able to do things like fly like a hawk, become invisible, gain demon-like power in combat, and so on. Sounds like a great road to power. Only problem is that ninja and shinobi have no lives of their own: They are a toll of their clans, to be used and thrown away for the goals of their group.

Kugutsu: There are artists in the land who have learned that they can carve wood from sacred trees into the likeness of humans, and give them life. Those wooden dolls take on an illusion of flesh and blood and live like (sheltered, beautiful) human beings. Kugutsu means “mannequin” in Japanese, and while they feel and have human emotion, while the are trained to understand human art and history and culture, they are not human themselves. They are properties of immense artistic value to be traded and fought over by lords and regents.

Mushi-Tsukai: Mushi-tsukai, or annelidists, are the doctors and biologists who study the native creatures of tenra, the annelids. Some of these annelids, when adopted into the human body, confer abilities to their host in a kind of symbiotic relationship. As long as the human host fulfills the annelid’s needs, the annelids will protect and enhance the host: Chitinous plates will form on their bodies, blade shafts will protrude from their arms and legs, they will be able to spit acid or extend their eyes on stalks.

Other humans find the annelidists horrifying and tend to shunt them. But when their own child or loved one is hurt and needs medical attention, they’ll head straight to that old hut on the outskirts of town…

Oni: When the humans came to this planet thousands of years ago, they weren’t the only sentient life on the planet. The native people called “Lu-Tirae” lived with the land in a state of connection and harmony. The humans put a stop to that pretty quickly. Seeing their horned heads, the humans called them “oni” (demon), feared them, and drove them from their lands. Later, it was found that if the mysterious heart of the oni is encased in steel, it acts as a perpetual engine or battery which can power large magical constructs… like armour and kongohki.

Originally hunted for being different, they are now hunted by lords driven by greed for the bounty of priceless magical engines their bodies contain. The oni command powers of the earth and the mind through their hearts and horns, and these abilities are perhaps the only thing that kept them from total annihilation.

Shinto priest/maiden: The Shinto Priesthood is a shadowy organization and agency which has two faces: On the outside, they are the shrine maidens and priests who tend to local shrines, calm the kami and perform rituals for cleansing and harvest. On the inside, they are the dominant organization of Tenra, extremely secretive and controlling all of the advanced technology from the ancient times, and use it to keep all of the nations of Tenra in a constant state of warfare with each other.

Why do they use their powers in this way? Is it to keep the nations from rising up against the Priesthood? Or is there truly some benign reason to keep the land in a state of total war?

Ayakashi: The deep forests and seas contain spirits. Not shiki, not kami… something else. This otherness is the ayakashi. The great tengu of the mountains, the fire spirits, the cursed sentient longsword, the cold woman of folklore and the illusory village are all ayakashi. Some watch over the humans, interested in their fate. Others stop at nothing to curse or eat them. They are all tied to the land, and have wonderous powers by human standards. Even though some can take on human form or even have offspring with them, what lies in their hearts can never be truly known by human beings. They are dangerous and unknowable.

Other: The game lets you create any kind of “feudal Japan with gunswords” kind of character you might imagine. While there is no chapter devoted to “blind swordsman”, “vassal lord’s wife hunting for revenge”, “yakuza boss”, or “daimyo’s concubine”, you can create these kinds of interesting characters as well without a problem.

Later on, we’ll look into these character types in detail.

That was the tagline on the back of the book, when it was originally released in 2000/2001.  Today? Probably not quite as applicable, as there are more games on the market that aim to be “a complete campaign/story/gaming experience within one session”. But it’s worth a look at the intention behind that tagline.

When Tenra came out in Japan, sessions in Japanese tabletop groups were the same as in the West: Primarily really long campaigns that went on and on for weeks/months/years. The complication in Japan is that:

1) Most gamers in Japan only meet up for gaming on weekends. At least, that’s the common way to do it. For folks in school, they’re busy with homework, cram school and club activities on the weekdays, so weekends are their only free time. For folks in the workforce, doing anything other than “going out for drinks” after work on weekdays is hard to get more than two folks to commit to, especially for a multi-hour gaming session. So they usually happen on Saturdays, for sessions of 4-6 hours (then maybe dinner afterward).

2) …which also means that, if you’re a Japanese shmoe who was just introduced to gaming and are interested in pursuing it further, BOOM you’ve inherited a huge time-sink of a hobby. Unlike stuff like calligraphy, flower-arranging, martial arts, cooking classes… which you might do more than once a week even, but only for 1-2 hours a shot. There are not many “3+ hours required” hobbies in Japan, and traditionally it’s been a problem to keep folks coming back to the hobby, even if they seem to enjoy playing.

Junichi Inoue’s solution was to create a game where you could tell an entire story – Introduction, characters, climax, epilogue – Within the span of one single gaming session. Did you have fun? Good, you can come back and do it again, either with new characters and a story with a different location and setup, or with the same (or most of the same) characters.

Great idea. There’s some caveats, though.

* The single gaming session assumes a group including one gamemaster and 3-4 players, at about 4-6 hours of rather focused play (where everyone knows the rules). If folks don’t know the rules, or there are 5 players, the time can increase dramatically. Exponentially. Reducing the number of players from 4 to 3, or 3 to 2, can give you a solid and dramatic story in less time. Adding a fifth, because of the way all the characters interact with each other, can multiply the time required for everyone to get that fulfilling story by 1.5-2 times. That’s why the standard Tenra group size is one GM, 3-4 players.

* If you were to play on weeknights instead of a weekend block, you’re looking at 2-3 3-hour sessions rather than one long sit-down session to get the same amount of play time. I’ve run both the one long session game and the 2-3 session game, and found them both fulfilling.

* You have to jump straight into the action. Less of the aimless chatting with the faceless barmaid, and more cutting to get your character in front of the King, or the Antagonist, or the major background NPC.

* You can experiment with time a lot more: One session can span two days, two years, or two decades, depending on what the GM has in mind. If you decide to run a second session with the same characters, you can set that next session a few weeks or a few years later without a lot of dissonance.

* You won’t be as emotionally attached to your character as you would be in a Long Campaign Game. It just happens that way: Attachment happens over time. However, with the fast nature of the game, players are more willing to have their characters change, or die, as they see fit. The end of a session can sometimes be an explosion of changing emotions, self-sacrifice and shifting relationships.

All in all, there’s a lot of give-and-take with the fast nature of the game. You’ll see and do things that you haven’t done in your longer campaign games. You’ll also feel a lack of things in Tenra that you may get out of a longer-running game.

The cool thing is, even though the game professes to be fast, changing, episodic, and suited for “one-shot” sessions, it also contains solid advice for (gasp!) running longer “campaigns” as well, using the same (or mostly the same) characters from session to session for an extended period of time. It suggests a campaign set up as either wandering do-gooders like the Zatoichi movies or the Japanese classic drama “Mito Komon” (a high servant to the daimyo goes in disguise from place to place with his companions, sees evil, then at the end busts out his royal seal, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good); a stationary collection of do-gooders in a major city, like “Hissatsu Shigotonin” or “Baian the Assassin” (ok, in both shows the characters are all killers, but GOOD killers); or perhaps stage out a war epic, where every adventure the world changes little by little based on what happened in the last scenario.

You’ll be getting the best of a long campaign game: Long-term goals, attachment to characters, taking root in a campaign world. However, you’ll still note that from adventure to adventure your characters may change a lot more than you may see in your normal long campaign game: That change is written in the Karma rules. You’ll also keep the scene framing and “moving to where the action is at” (be it social action, physical action, story action) of the one-shot Tenra game as you play in this campaign mode: Rather than having one “adventure” broken up into a dozen sessions, you’ll be running a dozen “small adventures” – each with their own NPCs goals and antagonists – which tie into this larger “campaign”.

My recommendation: Try running or playing 2-3 single session games (or 2-session games) with your friends first to get used to the rules, the types of characters in the game, and the kind of stories the game creates. Then give that multi-adventure campaign game a shot once everyone is familiar with the game.

So I was talking with Luke (who, with Drozdal, is working on the layout of the game) this last weekend after a rousing set of Roller Derby at the North Carolina state fairgrounds.

In Tenra Bansho Zero, you engage in combat just like other tabletop RPGs: You make a series of attack rolls. You take damage, in the form of a kind of Hit Points (Vitality) and Wounds. When you use magic, you use a resource called Soul, a kind of spiritual resource like Magic Points (MP) in console games you’re familiar with.

But there’s nothing deeper for Social conflicts. Social conflicts come down to in-character role-playing, plus maybe a roll: Something like “I try to convince the warlord that what he’s doing is wrong! I roll my Spirit and Persuasion against his Spirit and Willpower!”. You can still “do things” with that roll: You can spend some resources to get more dice, to lower your difficulty number and get an advantage. But the roll comes down to You vs Them, Most Successes Wins. There’s no “Social Points” to whittle down in social conflicts until one concedes.

This seems like a bit of a design flaw, really. Admittedly, the game is close to nine years old and all, and stuff like Social Combat is kind of a more recent RPG development. Therefore its lack seems like a flaw, or a Something Missing… until you look a little further.

I didn’t even have to go as far as to compare Tenra against other games from FEAR that did have some kind of social maneuvering/extended conflict mechanic to determine that the lack of such a system was a conscious choice. I simply had to Watch More Samurai Movies. I had to think back to all the Zatoichis, all the Hissatsu Shigotonins, all the Mito Komons, all the Baian The Assassins… or over to manga like Blade of the Immortal or Shigurui, or anime, or back to Kabuki Theater:

There’s Always a Boss Fight. In fact, there Must Be A Boss Fight. That’s the way the drama works. And that’s the way the game works.

The town is on fire, burning all around us. The warlord’s men are slain. He stands before you, sheathed katana at his side. He drops his Boss Speech, then draws his katana.

You can reason with the warlord. The princess (PC) can step forward and point her finger and demand that he stand down (with a contested roll). However, true to the fiction, the game will not end with the warlord sheathing his sword and turning himself in (even if that was historically perhaps more accurate). Hell no. Because there’s got to be a boss fight.

Instead, the princess convinces the warlord that he was wrong. She can destroy his beliefs. She can taunt him, or sympathize with him. She can make him believe that his quest (which in his mind was for a noble goal) was folly and in fact mistaken.

But he will still draw his sword and attack. Perhaps instead of “Shut up! I don’t believe you!” (the princess fails her social roll), he has tears rolling down his cheeks: Confessing his sins and wrongdoing as he attacks, he says, “But this is all that I am now. I have nothing. I am nothing!”

You can still have a quick-roll roleplay and social conflict. It doesn’t mean that the boss fight is avoided, though. It just means that the boss comes into the fight in a different state of mind.

And when you defeat the boss, did you kill him? Did you spare him, avoiding that final killing stike (but knocking him out)? That’s up to the players. But first they have to beat the boss in the scenario-ending boss battle. When I explained this to Luke, he nodded his head in complete understanding. The answer was there this whole time in front of us, we just had to think about the story medium to realize it.

It’s something to think about when creating a scenario. You can design a game of clever twists and raw role-playing excitement, or a bog-standard but fun Mission Quest (”Go X and Do Y, I demand it!” says the lord). But don’t get past the fact that, be it a baddie NPC, a misguided NPC, or a PC-turned-Asura, just remember: There’s got to be a boss fight.

In between finishing up the last few sections of the book pre-layout, I’ve been running games of Tenra, both locally for my own game groups, and at conventions and the like. It’s been fun, but also a real lesson for how the game should be run, played and some pitfalls that can happen. Here’s a few lessons learned.

Three heroes protect a prince, stop an assassination plot.

This campaign came from a complete adventure that I ran at Origins Game Fair 2009. Three people who had never played the game (or even heard of it in some cases) got together, picked some characters, and jumped straight into the action. Role-playing ensued, lots of cool character drama.

The lesson I learned here was that the players, when left to their own creativity, can come up with things that can really make a scenario flow.

At one point, near the “last boss” encounter, one of the characters catches a glimpse of the baddie, watching the heroes fromthe lip of a mountain cave. I asked that player, “…but there’s something… odd… about him, something that stands out to you. What is it?” (I had literally nothing in mind when I blurted it out, I just wanted to give the player some agency in the scenario.

That player came back with, “He’s got horns on his head. He’s an oni!”

That pretty much blew the lid off the rest of the scenario. Right then and there, the last boss went from (in my notes) just some guy that wanted to overthrow the kingdom from the shadows, and turned him into a sympathetic but vengeful enemy: An oni who is fighting for revenge against the cruelties inflicted upon his oppressed people, not caring who he hurts along the way. I even ret-conned the previous fight the players went through (”Now that you think of it, the last ninjas you fought had very angular features. You’ve heard stories of oni who file off their horns, they must have been oni as well!” and the like) to fit with the dramatic change.

Just goes to show, sometimes a random thing blurted out on chance can flip the entire narration of a story, and for the better.

In the book, player input and techniques are given examples, in order to encourage other GMs to be open to player input.

Two Brothers and a Monk Find the Last of the Silent Leaf Ninja, Kill an Enemy General

This was a scenario I ran for my local gaming group. The author intended Tenra to be played in one single sit-down session; but the assumption was that most players play RPGs on Saturdays or Sundays in 6-hour runs, and would never have the time or energy to run on a weekday. Here in the US, society works a little different, and many of my groups meet after work hours in the evening to game for shorter periods (usually 3-4 hours). In that regard, keeping focus a game of TBZ would last about 2-3 weeknight sessions. There’s no problem with keeping track of resources like chits and kiai, but keeping momentum can be a problem.

The lesson I learned here was to be better prepared. When I run TBZ, more than most games I run I try to have a solid beginning (a solid idea of what to run for players during their Zero Act scenes), and some “middle points” in mind but flexible (Names of major NPCs, a general flow of major scenes or events that may unfold), but keep lots in the air, in order to be flexible enough to change the later events depending on how the players act in earlier events.

The problem is, real life sometimes interferes, and I found that some days (where I planned to sit down for 15 minutes and plan out the next scenario for that evening) I had no time to plan, and only minutes to get things together before the game began! Unlike other RPGs I run where I can as a GM stall a bit (”You’re in a tavern!” -and encourage Tavern Chat that doesn’t push nor derail the game; “Thugs attack!” -and have a weak-enemy combat to get people fired up for what comes next; etc) in a game like TBZ that demands aggressive scene framing (to the point where you call the beginning and ends of scenes like a director for a movie) you have to be a little more on the ball. You have to have some idea of what will come next.

In the end, what I learned was to always have a few scenes or major events ready to pop out at any time. If the adventure changes because of those player actions, I’ll at least have something that I can manipulate a little and bring in anyway, or discard altogether in exchange for something else. In any case, having a few scenes in the pocket can really push a game session forward.

To that end, I’ve written some advice like this in the GM/Scenario Creation  section of the rulebook.

Three Child Mecha Pilots Save the Kingdom from Angry Kami

This is the current campaign I am running now for the same group as the above: It actually takes place at the same time as the scenario above, but looks at a war between two kingdoms from the other kingdom’s viewpoint.

What I proposed for this scenario was an experiment, and one I had a hunch about, but was able to verify: Given the exact same character (in terms of attributes, skills and even Fates), three different players will each run the character in a different and unique way.

I wanted this scenario to be one where most of the players were the same class. I settled on a Tenra-Evangelion (Tenragelion?) crossbreed, where armour-riders launch from a repurposed underground shrine and fight angry kami that threaten various cities of the kingdom. Gendo Ikari has been replaced by a mask-wearing Shinto Agent.

In any case, the character used was the exact same for all three; the only slight difference I did was one of the characters also had the “Oni” template added as well, but it was more for flavor than to make use of her oni abilities. But three girls, three mecha pilots, and what we were left with were:
A haughty, older princess-type with handmaidens, who thinks she’s the best, and is wary of the oni.
A younger, troubled shrine-girl from a homeless background who works in secret for the Agent of the shrine. She’s very mature for her age.
The youngest, an oni girl who was recruited for her unique piloting skills (she requires a special helm and armour), in an experiment to recruit oni armour-riders for the kingdom.

Three characters, all the same stats and skills, and totally different directions for each character. It really proves that a character, especially in Tenra, is what a player brings to it, not what is written on its sheet.

And yep, that bit is already in the book.

More information to come. We’ll be looking at some of the dramatic-focused rules of the game in posts to come.

How The Sausage Is Made Translated

Wow, it’s been about 4 years since I started this project, the translation and release of Tenra Bansho Zero in English. At the time, I thought it would just take about 2 years tops to knock this thing out from Start to Publish. 4 years later, and I’m on the last run of text, finishing the last of the rules sections and prepping it for layout. One thing that this work has taught me, is a new-found respect for the amount of time and care that goes into a well-translated project.

I’ve translated tech documents, manga, business emails and websites, and by far the hardest project of them all has been Tenra Bansho Zero. I believe that this is because of two reasons:

1) At first I thought my job was to simply translate from Japanese to English. As time progressed, it became clear that my job expanded: I had to rewrite whole sections from scratch, preserving the intention of the original author. I had to collapse lots of sidebars and supplemental text into sections of the main text. I had to not just translate rules that were complicated, like the rules behind crafting a magical shiki spirit or yoroi armour, but I had to understand the rules back and forth: Sometimes that alone took hours or even days to fully grasp. I had to clarify play and rule examples. I had to add a lot of supplemental text for a Western audience, in order for the game to be understood by the same “New to RPGs” audience in the West as it was understood by that same target market in Japan.

It was a lot more work than I imagined. Normally I can crank through about “one page an hour” of dense text, depending on the source material. With Tenra, though, adding in the amount of re-writing, understanding, and research involved, it was more like “one paragraph an hour” in some places, “one column an hour” in others. I realized that “one section” of the book usually required 1-2 full weekends of reading, writing and translation to complete. The project forced me to reset my expectations for translation, more than any other project.

2) I care about the source material! This can be a real pain for translators. Sure, I have a small (read “very small”) financial stake in the success or failure of this project, but more than that, I’m very proud of this game. I got pulled into Tenra Bansho Zero because of the pretty art, and ended up becoming absolutely fascinated by the theater-like structure and rules. I feel like I’m putting in as much work into translation as the original authors put into writing the book. Those nigh-obsessive “The final work must be PERFECT!” reactions of my brain creep up in every page, every paragraph, every sentence. I’ve often gone back to reread and re-edit sections I’ve earlier translated once, twice, and evern five or more times. Too bad this wasn’t a simple business project that I could wrap up and fire off when I was done: I manufacture those translations. In the case of Tenra Bansho, I’m crafting the translation.

Official release dates became as if writ on water as one, then the next one, broken or bent. I realized that the game book required more written content to be easily playable. I folded in a lot of content from the original supplement book. I’ve also had to omit or cut out other text from the core book that I intended to include earlier (like the full Replay that appears in the supplement book) in order for this project to emerge, and not simply be “in progress” forever.

But in the end, I think it will be worth it. Tenra Bansho Zero will be complete soon, very soon. I’ve seen the rough layout sketches that Team Burning Wheel have put together, and they are incredible. I don’t know if the English release of this game in the US will create the kind of gaming revolution that it did in Japan (as White Wolf’s Vampire RPG in the early 90s brought all sorts of new players in RPGs, Tenra did the same for new players interested in anime and manga over in Japan in the late 90s and early 2000s), but it will be frighteningly fun to run and play. Folks in the RPG scene who already like anime or manga will surely find something of interest. And I hope it makes the rounds at local anime conventions, and perhaps generate interest in folks receptive to roleplaying in those communities. Getting the book in print is only the first step.

Pre-Orders

Eventually, the writing will be finally done (at a guess, 4-8 weeks). Layout will be finished from there. I’ll find some printers and get some print proofs. Then I’ll open the game up to pre-orders.

Pre-Ordering is an interesting mess, one that until recently I never got involved with. I would often see announcements, like “Game X is Coming Soon, We Are Now Taking Pre-Orders!”, and be confused by what exactly they were asking for. “The game is going to come out eventually anyway, so why don’t I just wait until it’s out and then buy it then, even if I’m positive that I want to buy it?” Some companies would even start taking pre-orders before the work is even finished, or before it’s ready to print, only to be delayed months/years.

Pre-Orders on the small-press level represent something else: It represents how much money the publisher will have to print their first print run. It’s no secret that the more copies you can have printed at once, the cheaper each copy will be. You could find a printer to print 100 copies of your book for $16/copy, where they would only charge $9/copy to print 1000 copies of the book. And I’ll be honest, I’m shooting for at least 1000 copies of the book for this first run.

At a guess of about $10/book (full color), not including shipping fees and tarriffs, 1,000 copies will cost $10,000 USD. The traditional model for small press publishers is, of course, to take out a loan against their house or car in order to fund that print run. Tenra will be no exception. The more pre-orders I can secure directly (when the time comes), the less money I’ll have to pay from my own pocket up-front for that first print run. If pre-orders go well, then perhaps a few hundred more copies of the book could be ordered at the reduced price. It’s a delicate balance.

The only problem I’ve found with pre-orders is that, even knowing the above and “wanting to support the small press publisher”, you’re paying the full price of the book up front, only to wait a few weeks/months for those orders to be fulfilled and sent.

To that end, I think Luke Crane (of Burning Wheel) does pre-orders right. When he takes pre-orders of his games, the pre-order copies usually are limited, and come with something “extra”. When they sold Burning Empires, they upped the price a little, but each copy came with a limited signed art print from the author of the original comic. The recent pre-orders of the Mouse Guard RPG each came with a free full-color comic.

To that end, I’m currently deciding what extras I could add to a pre-order of Tenra Bansho Zero. Optimally, the extras will be something special, that will help the buyer get a little more out of the game: A free supplement. Some limited-run items. Play aids. I have a few ideas which I’m currently looking into, we’ll see how they work out. With 100-200 pre-orders, I could fund much of the initial print run without worrying about losing my car, so that’s a plus. We’ll see how this works out in the coming months.

Playing the Game

I’ve been running an extended game of Tenra Bansho with my weeknight gaming group. I’ll post more about our adventures and surprises in the upcoming weeks.

For now, I gotta get back to the books: There’s translatin’ to be done!

Are you coming to ORIGINS this year? If so, event registration has started, and the events are set. Here are the TBZ-related events coming up at ORIGINS Game Fair 2009:

6056 Tenra Bansho Zero – Shinobi Ultimatum Lord Buren has made use of your ninja clan for generations. This time, everything falls apart as one betrayer threatens to turn against the lord and destroy the clan. One soulgem-studded samurai hulk, a ninja, an worm-using annelidist and a fearsome cyborg must ferret out the traitor before it’s too late. Experience the first ever English translation of this Hyper-Asian Japanese Role-Playing Game! New players, anime and manga fans welcome. Playtest an upcoming RPG release from Japan. New players welcome.
WED 2:00 PM 3:45
1.45 hours: This session will be “a taste” of the game.

6308 Tenra Bansho Zero – Shinobi Sacrifice Lord Buren has made use of your ninja clan for generations. This time, everything falls apart as one betrayer threatens to turn against the lord and destroy the clan. One soulgem-studded samurai hulk, a ninja, an worm-using annelidist and a fearsome cyborg must ferret out the traitor before it’s too late. Experience the first ever English translation of this Hyper-Asian Japanese Role-Playing Game! New players, anime and manga fans welcome. Playtest an upcoming RPG release from Japan. New players welcome. THU 12:00 PM 3:45

6727 Tenra Bansho Zero – The Ten-Blade Samurai Lord Kagetora has gone too far. His machinations for control of the Dragonscale Territories have consumed too many innocents, and his war plans must be put to an end. One Buddhist monk, a conniving geisha, a sleek mankiller robot, and a female warrior with a sword as long as her body stand against the tide of war. Experience the first ever English translation of this Hyper-Asian Japanese Role-Playing Game! New players, anime and manga fans welcome. This session is a special session of the game, comprising approx 5 hours of play. You will experience a complete full-length campaign of Tenra Bansho Zero from start to finish. The role-play in this event is gonna be turned up to 11. Play a full campaign of an RPG release from Japan. A 5 hour session, run as a complete campaign in one sitting. New players welcome!
FRI 12:00 PM 4:45

While the book won’t be complete by ORIGINS (it’s still in final editing/layout), we will be attending the fair, sharing a booth with Khepera Publishing (makers of the excellent game HELLAS, which I often equate to “Greek Tenra” because of the rules and setting). We’ll have Tenra-related material, and likely a mock copy of most of the completed sections of the book.

Still on road for a 2009 release, gotta update the FAQ from 2007 to 2009. I will do so with much shame. (^.^;

…the preliminary layout is being worked on now. I’ve seen some drafts, and it’s fucking gorgeous. The things that can be done with B&W line art… incredible.
That is all for now.

Hey all: Just in case you see the site go offline for a big, or the blog become unresponsive: I’m moving back-end web storage to a new server. Something always breaks when I do so, so I’m just giving everyone a heads up!

EDIT: And moved! Holy crap that was painless. That’s a first.

…didn’t happen. (^.^;
As for a “pre-release ashcan” for GenCon, I’m afraid those plans were stymied. In the eyeball, with a knife. About a week before the con, I came to the realization that it wasn’t going to happen unless:

* I charged too much for what amounted to a collection of unedited text and notes.
* To make it clean and understandable, with all the rules needed to play the various character archetypes, I’d have had to Not Sleep at all for almost a full week.

Instead, I decided to refocus in the time right before and right after GC finishing the rest of the game text. Another case of us (me) trying to bite off more than we can chew.

However, because I refocused on the game text, more sections have been completed. The only thing left to get together is some of the new notes for rules, and new play notes. I’ve also decided to draft up a few scenario hooks, which will take an evening or two. We are also collapsing the editing and layout into one passthrough, so instead of Writing, Stop, Editing, Stop, Rechecking, Stop, Layout, Print, Publish, we’re doing Writing-Editing-Layout, then Recheck, Print, Publish. While I don’t want to jinx myself, it looks like we’re still in line for a February/March release for the final version of the game.

Also in the news of the wide world of Japanese roleplaying, Maid RPG was released at GenCon 2008. I was involved in this project as a publisher/director (Ewen, who helped translate a few sections of Tenra, was “the man” in charge of translation), but otherwise the games are released by different companies, etc. It was a bittersweet experience, rushing a game through for a GenCon release: Lots of sleepless nights. Also, whereas I wanted Inoue Jun’ichi’s Tenra to be the “First Japanese RPG Ever Released in English”, that honor now goes to Ryo Kamiya’s Maid RPG. Here’s how all this relates to Tenra, though:

* I wanted the experience of publishing a game BEFORE Tenra, so I know what pitfalls to avoid, and what to do right. I wanted to get my feet wet on another project so that we wouldn’t, to use a vulgarity, fuck up the release of Tenra Bansho.
Luckily, it was a real eye-opening experience, and I gained a lot of solid knowledge which I’m applying to Tenra now: Everything from how to promote the game, to things like editing, layout expectations, printing problems, expectations of time and delays, creating and harnessing a Tenra community, and even some thoughts on how to promote Tenra at GAMA/GenCon next year.
* Also, all of the profit I’m making from MAID for my involvement in the project, I’m funneling into the first (expensive) print run of Tenra. The silly/cute Maid RPG is helping fund the release of the dramatic/hardcore game Tenra! This means that we can produce more copies on a lighter budget.

Soon, my major involvement in Tenra will simmer down for a bit (once editing is complete, it’s going to be much int he hands of our layout gurus). When that happens, that’s when I’m going to turn to creating quick-play guides and the like.

GenCon came and went, and was a blur of constant action.  I ran two events of Tenra Bansho, one scheduled ( http://picasaweb.google.com/ziggurat/GenCon2008/photo#5236825831857653394 ) and one unscheduled.

These sessions convinced me that I needed to add a little more information to the game, for the GMs who will be running it for their groups.

Over running the game over 20 times, I’ve realized that I’ve relied on a lot of knowledge and experience built up from running one session after another: The best way to introduce the setting. The best way to introduce the players to the rules. Good ways to set up Zero-Act scenes. How to run the first combat. How to help ease the players into the Fate/Kiai/Karma rules without inundating them all at once.

What I’ve really hated in RPGs is that thing where you play a game for the first time, maybe with a GM really familiar with the game, or even the author: They run the game in a certain way, and you have an awesome time. You buy the game, read it to run with your gaming group… only to discover that all those tips and tricks that the GM was using were things that they made up themselves: None of that advice is in the actual game book itself.

In TBZ, the first supplement has a full “replay”, a real game session codified and written up like a screenplay, so you can follow exactly what happened and when, how play happens and the like. These are great in Japanese RPGs, because through them you can see how the rules work in actual play.

Since we won’t have the space in the core book to post a complete beginning-to-end replay, I’ve decided to go ahead and codify a “first game session of Tenra” into its own section. Basically, it’s a small handbook for the GM to read, and prepare for, their first session. It will describe a good methodology for breaking new players into the game: Matter-of-fact advice for running scenes, for introducing rules (and in what order, and what rules to ignore at first, etc). I’ve already written about 70% of it, and the tone is conversational enough that blocks of it (explaining to people how the rules work, and why) can simply be read out loud, almost as if it were “boxed text” in a module. We’ll see if it’s helpful, or if it’s dead weight. In any case, if someone has a problem understanding a rule or its purpose, they could look at this section to see how it should be introduced. This might shed light on those rules.

Also, in the process of writing this section, I was able to find a great spot to fold in a lot of the GM advice found in the Tenra Bansho supplement. I was hoping to do this anyway, but it was like finding a nice round hole to fit a peg into. So I’m hoping that no one will suffer through the text like some of us did, asking ourselves in the process:

“Why the heck do we roll to see what our characters think about other characters? Don’t we have full control over our own character’s feelings?”

“Why does the karma track go up to 108? Why not 100?”

“What is the point of raising my character’s fates or creating new fates? And why are we free to raise fates in between acts as much as we want, without having to pay any cost?”

“Fates can totally be min-maxed!  …is this a bad thing?”
etc. A lot of us suffered through trying to find out the purpose behind those rules: Some parts are explained in the designer’s notes in the game text. Other parts (the emotion matrix) are explained thoroughly in the supplement’s text. Yet others aren’t explained at all, hoping that the player will simply “get it” through play. We’re going to put enough information into the game so that there’s no confusion over how to use a rule, or why it exists.

Oh, and by Rule, I’m talking about the more RPG-esoteric stuff: Character’s beliefs and goals (”Fates”), ‘dark side’-points (”Karma”), influence over the game mechanics (”Kiai”), How PCs feel at first about other PCs and major NPCs (”Emotion Matrix”), etc.

We’re hoping that in doing so, we’re imporving upon the original text. Making it even easier to jump into play with fewer bumps!

-Andy