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I'll be disappointed if I don't see a Tenra Bancho / 天羅番長 game show up sooner or later.
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 23:49 |
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Finished skimming the preview docs and I can't get over how much I love this. Quick question: Is there any limit on mixing-and-matching specialist archetypes? Is there any reason I can't have a taoist sorcerer who's a kugutsu and also an armour-riding ninja, full of bugs?
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ProfessorProf posted:Finished skimming the preview docs and I can't get over how much I love this. Quick question: Is there any limit on mixing-and-matching specialist archetypes? Is there any reason I can't have a taoist sorcerer who's a kugutsu and also an armour-riding ninja, full of bugs? You can't have more 107 Karma at chargen. Other than that, I don't think you can kugutsu with ninja or annelidist. Oh also, totally running games of this soon, maybe next week after I've had a chance to pick over the rules some more.
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mikeycp posted:Sooo Sentai is definitely possible then? It says there are some armours that can combine to form an even larger armour with multiple pilots. I haven't dug deep into the rules yet, but I'm gonna figure out how to do just that. ![]()
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I'm playing in an IRC Tenra Bansho Zero game right now. Here are some thoughts. Character creation seems clunky at first but it's pretty simple. I think part of this might be flipping through a huge pdf on a tablet that takes a few seconds to load each page. That said, the characters own. I'm playing a street punk Buddhist monk who headbutts people to remind them that life is suffering and the material world is impermanent. (Kabukimono/Buddhist Monk/Fist of Merciful Kannon archetypes) TBZ really, really thrives on proactive players. It helps keep aiki flowing for one, but with the way Intermissions and Zero Act and everything work it's important. I prefer proactive players in general though. Having an explicit structure is nice. We haven't interacted with the system a whole lot yet (we're about to!) but the advice and the structure help a lot even without the system mechanics. We're about do some combat, I'll post about that in a bit. edit: holy poo poo that poor bandit's nose, Buddhist monks are amazing. Mikan fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Oct 10, 2012 |
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I just finished my preliminary reading of the TBZ books, and the rules actually seem pretty solid for the most part. It's good to hear that character creation isn't too cumbersome in actual practice, because it seems pretty clunky from just a read-through. Did you make that character from the archetypes, Mikan? Or did that happen to be one of the pre-gens? And does anyone know if there are blank character sheets up anywhere yet? There doesn't seem to be one in the book. (Wait...found it: http://www.tenra-rpg.com/support.shtml) Anyway, two potential problems jumped out at me: 1) As mentioned earlier, it's a dice-pool system where the number of dice, the number of successes required, and the target number are all variable. I don't think this will actually be a problem. The reason it didn't work well in OWoD is because the storyteller had to choose TN and required successes, while the character and circumstance determined pool size, which isn't easy for the ST to figure out on the fly, making the decision end up being somewhat arbitrary. In TBZ, on the other hand, pool size and TN both come from the character sheet, and circumstances and difficulty only determine the number of successes required, and in most cases this will be "one", or "higher than your opponent" anyway. Also, there are good GM guidelines for how difficult to make opponents and tasks, so this probably won't end up being much of a problem. 2) A character's Kiai can be used both for one-time success-chance-boosting, as well as character advancement and consumables. This was a big problem I've heard brought up about the 7th Sea system, among others, where you never want to use your "do awesome stuff" resource, because you'd lose out on chances to advance your character's abilities. It may not be a problem in TBZ, but I guess we'll see? People in Japan must have been playing this for years already, it'd be nice if anyone knew what they say about the system. Factors that may alleviate the problem might be that spending Kiai to boost rolls seems so important, and Kiai is supposed to flow so readily, that it might actually be better to use it on rolls than to advance your character, especially since the game is explicitly not intended for long campaigns, and your characters start out pretty awesome anyway. One other thing that tripped me up is that, in the rules for Fate Rolls, it mentions that the number of dice is determined by your "Emotion Attribute". I was searching everywhere for what the Emotion Attribute was and what it does, and finding nothing. It wasn't until I got to the comic page about it that I realized it was supposed to be the "Empathy Attribute". I haven't checked the spreadsheet yet, but I assume it's been caught - I just mentioned this in case anyone else reading was confused. Overall though, I think the rules will turn out to be pretty excellent. The structure of the game and the way the rules work seem like they'll be great at promoting dramatic and exciting scenes, though I think it'll take a while for the people in my group to get into the right mindset. Can't wait to hear more reports from your game, Mikan! Tyndolionel fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Oct 10, 2012 |
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Tyndolionel posted:2) A character's Kiai can be used both for one-time success-chance-boosting, as well as character advancement and consumables. It is also a pretty easy thing to houserule out, even if it is annoying to have to do so, so if it turns out to be a problem it won't be one for more than one session or so.
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Tyndolionel posted:Did you make that character from the archetypes, Mikan? Yeah, archetypes. I used Buddhist Monk (pg 402) Merciful Fist of Kannon (pg 403) and Kabukimono (pg 391). It was surprisingly easy to make a character, took almost no time. If I were playing one of the armors or something like that it might have taken a little longer. As clunky as character creation looks, it really comes down to
and that's it. This is my character, by the way. Tenra looks kinda complicated but it's all really simple, it just has a lot of explanation and options. quote:Anyway, two potential problems jumped out at me: As you mention, since it's coming from the character sheets it's really not too bad. quote:2) A character's Kiai can be used both for one-time success-chance-boosting, as well as character advancement and consumables. This is true, but characters a) don't tend to grow a whole lot and b) have a set cap of 108 Karma and c) aiki/kiai flows in like crazy and d) as you mentioned it's not necessarily a full campaign kinda game so I'm not sure it will be a huge issue. I'll need to play more before I can say for certain but I feel good about it. As for the game, we got through Zero Act and the first act before wrapping up. It was a lot of fun! We're gonna handle the first act intermission next time. Combat didn't last too long since I hit a bandit in the nose and did double his Vitality ![]()
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Mikan posted:This is true, but characters a) don't tend to grow a whole lot and b) have a set cap of 108 Karma and c) aiki/kiai flows in like crazy and d) as you mentioned it's not necessarily a full campaign kinda game so I'm not sure it will be a huge issue. I'll need to play more before I can say for certain but I feel good about it. My understanding is that it's explicitly NOT a campaign game system, and that the idea of bringing a character between sessions is more of an optional thing you can maybe do than something that's expected of you. Maybe you can jiggle the starting Karma of returning characters or something to make their power level vs. karma score more balanced with the power levels of starting characters.
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Sort of on that note - Mikan, how long were you guys playing for, and does it seem like once everyone is familiar with the system, you really can run through a whole adventure in four to six hours?
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We played for 4-ish hours, but a fair amount of that was finishing up character creation and figuring out the rules and dealing with IRC goofery. Once things got rolling it went quickly and we got through a bunch of scenes in no time. I'm seeing if I can get logs. I definitely think you can. It's subject to the same traps every RPG has (players agonizing over every decision, spending a hundred hours discussing what to do next, derails) but the system is fast and the game structure does a lot to help. I think that's the real star of the show here, the game structure and advice.
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The karma cap making character "advancement" not an unequivocal improvement absolutely changes the calculation on "awesome now/awesome later".
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Tyndolionel posted:2) A character's Kiai can be used both for one-time success-chance-boosting, as well as character advancement and consumables. Yeah, since the game is kind of a one-shot thing (unless you explicitly set up the opportunity to run it again with the same characters), and since starting characters are pretty powerful, there's not a real strong motivator to spend on advancement. I've only seen about two instances of people using advancement in all the specifically one-story games I've run over the last 5-6 years: Once it was to ingest the Immortality Strain annelid, and another was to advance an Art of War from level 4 to the max of 5. You can tailor it a bit, though: If you want players to spend less on the Now, make the enemies weaker. If you want the players to spend more on the Now (kind of the default) make all the enemies naturally more powerful than the PCs, almost (if not explicitly) requiring characters to spend Kiai in dangerous levels to "win".
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This weekend, the guy in our group who was going to GM was sick and couldn't make it, so I convinced everyone to take a preliminary look at Tenra Bansho Zero. I just introduced some of the concepts and rules of the system, and went over the different character archetypes so that they could create characters. It was fairly slow going, since we only had one laptop there to read the PDF from, but we managed to create everyone's characters in the time we had. Characters included: -A vassal warrior who came home from war to find his wife and child murdered. Disgusted with his lord's incompetence in protecting his family and the subsequent investigation, he set off to find the murderer himself, a sword hilt found at the scene his only clue. [Hard Luck, Swordmaster, Paragon(Dragon and Tiger Style), Soulgem Rifleman] -A living doll created as a body double for a regent, who escaped rather than accept his fate as a target. While on the run, he ended up at the doorstep of a powerful old sorcerer, who took the doll in and trained him on a whim. The doll now seeks to understand what life truly is by gathering Sha in different ways to create the proto-beings known as 'Shiki'. [Onmyoji - Taoist Sorcerer, Kugutsu Runaway] -A man who seeks to perfect his skill in martial arts in order to attain true freedom for himself and those less fortunate. His training in Ki Manipulation allows him to serve as a doctor for the downtrodden as well as fight. None of this pays very well, though, so he performs as a traveling acrobat to put food on his plate. [Wanderer, Doctor/Healer, Paragon(Ki Manipulation), Traveling Performer] -An average guy who found that he had the blood of the Oni in his family, which explained the tiny horns he kept hidden. When trying to find out about his heritage, he learned of the oppression and misery those people, and swore to fight back. At two separate points during his life he scraped together the money needed for expensive, dehumanizing surgery in order to get the power he needed. First, he replaced his arms with mechanica filled with weapons, and then later underwent the painful process of samuraization. Is he finally strong enough? [Kijin, Samurai, Oni Blooded] -A soldier who is the model of loyalty and skill, whose devotion was recognized by entrusting him with a Gunlance. He also has a plethora of other weapons that he has collected and put on display in his house. (I don't have this sheet handy, but I think it was...) [Gunlancer, Weapon Collector, Soulgem Rifleman] Some weird things of note: The kugutsu and the samurai didn't take very high station (apparently the Kijin archetype doesn't need high station for any of their stuff) since they don't have a lot of pull in society, but they both took etiquette, and that's their only station skill, and none of the others have any station skills at all. So the only people with any training in etiquette both suck mightily at it anyway (Though the kugutsu could make use of his other high attributes to use etiquette in different ways). I saw this noted in the bugfix spreadsheet, and it seemed strange at the time to us, too, but the Samurai archetype doesn't start with any skills in combat. It seemed like an error that they get no skill in melee combat at all, but thinking about it, that may be intentional. The Samurai in TBZ don't necessarily represent what we think of as a samurai, and could be skilled with their fists or guns instead of a sword. Therefore the Samurai archetype leaves it open for you. It doesn't come with any preselected combat skills, and has no attribute point penalty, so it's easy to pick the combat skill you want, and just pay the 1 point to take it. I'm currently trying to write a scenario that incorporates all of these characters, and the advice in the book is helping a lot. I'm also borrowing ideas from the "Against the Tide" setting. I think I've been able to come up with some good destinies that will help them engaged with the game. I'm really excited to see how the mechanisms of the game's system shape the plot and the interactions between the player characters. One worry is that the player of the Doctor/Paragon is the type to balk at the idea of the Emotion Matrix and the prospect of not being able to keep the character's desires and motivations strictly within his comfort zone. I have high hopes for this game, though!
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Tyndolionel posted:One worry is that the player of the Doctor/Paragon is the type to balk at the idea of the Emotion Matrix and the prospect of not being able to keep the character's desires and motivations strictly within his comfort zone. I have high hopes for this game, though! Your cast of characters seems pretty sweet. Bear in mind that the Emotion Matrix roll could always be flipped around-- now it's the NPC's snap judgement of the PC. Ask the player what about their character might have prompted this response, and how they're going to deal with it.
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Five sessions in, three things that are bugging me about Ryuutama! 1) Which way do fractions round? If someone loses half his MP, and has 13 MP, is he left with 6 or 7? 2) Is there any reason, any at all, for non-Magic Types to increase their MP? 3) Are there any guidelines for how much gold I should be giving my party?
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I think you'd have to ask Ewen or Andy, 'cause I don't know of that many people who've played Ryuutama. Is there a translation kicking around out there, apart from the old limited release? Hey, Ewen, any further news on GSS? I'm guessing you've been busy with Channel A lately.
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Sweet setup!Tyndolionel posted:I saw this noted in the bugfix spreadsheet, and it seemed strange at the time to us, too, but the Samurai archetype doesn't start with any skills in combat. It seemed like an error that they get no skill in melee combat at all, but thinking about it, that may be intentional. Intentional! It's then assumed the character will either take the "four dots of melee weapon" archetype, or spend an attribute point to get Melee Weapons at 3 dots (that's what the Default Samurai Character has: it has an attrib cost of 1 because they have melee at 3). quote:One worry is that the player of the Doctor/Paragon is the type to balk at the idea of the Emotion Matrix and the prospect of not being able to keep the character's desires and motivations strictly within his comfort zone. I have high hopes for this game, though! They can, though! ...at a price! Remember that the Emotion Matrix isn't a "Story-Games-How-Hard-Are-You,-You-Pussy" dick-punching chart, it's a chart of suggestion. You absolutely roll on it, but you then commonly spend Kiai to change the relationship. Or the GM commonly gives Aiki to offer them something that works better for them/the scenario. In real play, it's supposed to be a back-and-forth: Mostly the GM saying "Hmmm. I'm kinda new to this GMing business, so having you starting out 'hating" the Princess is going to be hard for me to narrate into the game. Hey, let me give you 2 Aiki to be "friends" with her. Cool? Cool." In the US, though, a lot of my friends are the "Story Games" types, so they see the chart as a challenge or a rite of machismo: Sort of a "whatever the chart says, I WILL DO! To do otherwise means that I AM NOT A MACHO OR IMPROMPTU ROLE-PLAYER" But really it's not supposed to be like that. That kind of thing can produce strained games. So my suggestion? First time you roll on the chart, as a GM give him the Aiki chits to move him to a place you think he wants to go anyway. If he's like, "No, this is actually cool, I'll stick with it." then Success! ProfessorProf posted:Five sessions in, three things that are bugging me about Ryuutama! 1) Fractions/partial numbers always round down: So, 6. 2) Yes! ...ish. A: Because at level 6 they may decide to take their second Type as Magic, and it's therefore good to build up a little early. Also, Yes-ish because if you want to use Concentrate a lot, Gaining 2 MP means you get one more full Concentrate chance. Important for Technical type characters, and well anyone basically. 3) Not really. This will have to be winged. If the characters are lamenting not having enough to buy armor for like two sessions, have them be charged by a swarm of running/riding eggs. Don't starve them, but don't monty-haul them either. Heh, very vague I know, but this is really a strong-GM-centric game.
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Desty posted:Is there a translation kicking around out there, apart from the old limited release? (Kickstarter) Coming Early 2013! (after Tenra is "book in hand")
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DiamondSutra posted:Also, Yes-ish because if you want to use Concentrate a lot, Gaining 2 MP means you get one more full Concentrate chance. Important for Technical type characters, and well anyone basically. Then I must be reading the rules wrong, because I thought using MP for Concentration consumed 50% of your max MP, which would make more MP pretty useless for it.
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Desty posted:Hey, Ewen, any further news on GSS? I'm guessing you've been busy with Channel A lately.
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DiamondSutra beat me to the other Ryuutama stuff, but there actually are guidelines for gold rewards in the translation I have; it's the last table in the Scenario Creation section. I had to email the translator to find out what it meant because it doesn't actually use any words like "gold" or "money".
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DiamondSutra posted:(Kickstarter) Coming Early 2013! (after Tenra is "book in hand") I knew that was in the pipe; I'm already saving my pennies for some high level of backing I probably can't afford. Is that going to have a similar turnaround time as Tenra? Ewen Cluney posted:For GSS we're currently nailing down final details for the Kickstarter and getting final proofing done on the layout. I know I've been saying "Soon!" forever, but we are in fact inching closer. It's at a stage where I have to depend on a bunch of other people, which means I get to play cat herder. Sweet. I am also looking forward to coughing up money for GSS as well. I guess I've got the same question for you: how far along is the project once it goes up on Kickstarter? Will you be waiting for final funding tallies and then straight to the printers, or will there be more work to do?
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DiamondSutra posted:Thanks for the advice, it helped me understand what's going on better. I'm going to be running the first session tomorrow, and hopefully we'll get through Acts Zero and One at the least. I'm pretty excited! Anyone who has the PDF, take a look at the characters on p.224-226 of the setting book and tell me if what's going on is as hilariously obvious as I think it is. I was reading through the Kuze-Shu material, saw them, started reading the descriptions, and eventually thought to myself, "Wait a minute..." Then looked back at the other characters and started cracking up. Back to the system, something I noted from the way the rules interact and thought was pretty neat was the way the "Cheer" action lets a non-combat focused character participate in a battle, and also allows the game to have one-on-one fights without things getting too boring for everyone else. You can use the action to donate Aiki (or Kiai, indirectly) to another player. Since the combat-focused characters in my game don't have a huge Empathy stat, but Kugutsu will tend to have huge Empathy, the Kugutsu will have a large pool of Kiai to use to help out with combat, which they could use themselves to perform amazingly-unlikely turnarounds on stronger-seeming opponents. However, if they have Fates relating to the front-line fighters, they can help shore up their smaller Kiai pools. This means that the fighters have a huge incentive to interact and leave an impression on the Kugutsu, making them the center of attention in other scenes. Thus, the social power of high-empathy characters is reinforced by the rules, by giving other players a mechanical incentive to interact with them in a way that will generate an emotional response.
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Desty posted:Sweet. I am also looking forward to coughing up money for GSS as well. I guess I've got the same question for you: how far along is the project once it goes up on Kickstarter? Will you be waiting for final funding tallies and then straight to the printers, or will there be more work to do? The bonus material we're working on is taking more time, partly because for some of it I need Kamiya to send me a bunch of image files, and he's understandably busy with a ton of Nechronica stuff (they came out with a GM-centric supplement and a second replay book). On the plus side, he really liked the original material we're working on, to the point where he said he could see translating it into Japanese, and there's some nifty stuff of theirs they're letting us use.
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Ewen Cluney posted:Ideally that's how I'd like it to go, so that we can get the books out to people ASAP once the Kickstarter is over. The layout is just about done now. We need to get final proofing done and implement those corrections, plus Clay still needs to do the English character sheet, and there'll be the list of backers in the back of the book. Would the bonus material be covering the supplement that let you play ghosts or oni?
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jadarx posted:Would the bonus material be covering the supplement that let you play ghosts or oni?
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ProfessorProf posted:Then I must be reading the rules wrong, because I thought using MP for Concentration consumed 50% of your max MP, which would make more MP pretty useless for it. It does! But if you go from 6 to 8 MP, that gives you another Concentration: 6MP --> 3MP --> 1MP (3 concentrations) 8PM --> 4MP --> 2MP --> 1MP (4 concentrations) edit: oh... Yeah, the next level would be 32... DiamondSutra fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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DiamondSutra posted:It does! But if you go from 6 to 8 MP, that gives you another Concentration: Sixteen, right? 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1?
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DiamondSutra posted:It does! But if you go from 6 to 8 MP, that gives you another Concentration: Aha! I was confusing half of MP (8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1) with half of max MP (8 -> 4 -> 0). e: Good gravy I have been giving my party a fifth of the gold the game suggests. Quinn2win fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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ProfessorProf posted:Aha! I was confusing half of MP (8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1) with half of max MP (8 -> 4 -> 0). Sounds like it's time for a windfall in their future.
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Ewen Cluney posted:That's Mononoke Koyake, and we're planning to make it a stretch goal. I have a first draft translation of it done, but there'll still be plenty of work to do on it. It's probably the best of the GSS supplements, and the one that opens up the most possibilities. (Though the snake, spider, and centipede elder henge in the supplement after that are really neat too.) Nothing is more neat than playing Santa Claus. Nothing.
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Rasamune posted:Sixteen, right? 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1? Yeah. Turns out that I'm the worst engineer in the world when it comes to math: Basically it's every power of two that grants you another chance to halve: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.
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Seeing the Meikyuu books today was a real treat. And Nechronica had way more outright Guro than I was really expecting. Unfortunately we didn't get to actually play Tenra Bansho today, but mikeycp did run aldantefax and I through Meikyuu Kingdom kingdom creation, which was fun.
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Yeah, the 4chan /tg/ crowd (or at least a vocal enough portion of it) heard about Nechronica and wanted to know when an English version would be coming out, but Kamiya himself was pretty much convinced it wasn't a game that would fly in the U.S. Of course, even if I did want to pursue it, I'd like to actually publish a game by a different designer at some point. He is my favorite Japanese RPG designer--with Kawashima of Meikyuu Kingdom fame a close second--but there are a zillion other games to translate.
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Are there any specific legality issues if we wanted to scan in the Meikyuu Kingdom cards, TL them, and then get them printed at somewhere like the Game Crafter? I had a peek at what they look like thanks to mikeycp and while they are nicely printed, they're die cut lightweight cardstock, so they might not hold up to some extended punishment.
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That's probably what I'll end up doing once I TL them, at least for a personal copy. e: Also those are the old cards that I have, I have a feeling the new cards are better quality cardstock, since they seem to come in a box. e2: VVV They only seem to have the core books, and Days. Throw these into the search bar and it'll take you straight to them. The cards and Train book seem to be out of stock/print ![]() 迷宮キングダム (新・迷宮ブック) 迷宮キングダム (新・王国ブック) 迷宮キングダム・サプリメント 大殺階域 シニカルポップ・ダンジョンシアター 迷宮デイズ mikeycp fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Oct 21, 2012 |
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If you can get me Amazon JP links for the full current edition of Meikyuu Kingdom series + the cards, I will probably put an Amazon.jp order in some time in the next month or two!
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More on Meikyuu - I had some ideas brewing for speeding up localization so I sent a line over to Carpe Fulgur, the two goons (BlondRobin and SpaceDrake) who did the excellent localization of Recettear, Chantelise, and Fortune Summoners. Their somewhat unique position is ideal for getting a full localization or just a translation done, plus they have a little extra clout since they have an industry record. I talked about it with BitchtitsMcGee and Mikan in IRC just now, so we'll see what comes out of it!
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 23:49 |
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Cool? I wouldn't have a project anymore, but whatever, I guess.
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