Jake on Yaruki Zero Podcast and Geekorner!

Check out Yaruki Zero Podcast#11, where Ewen Clueny has me on to talk about designing games for anime fans, anime conventions (specifically our recent experiences at Kumoricon) and more! Thanks Ewen!

Also, Guy has posted the 2nd half of our interview on his site Geekorner. You can also read it on Figure.fm. In this part we talk about Classroom Deathmatch and The Magical Land of Yeld. Thanks Guy!

Interview

Guy posted this interview with me on both his own Geekorner and Figure.FM. Awesome! The first part is all about Panty Explosion, what the game is about, why we chose that name and how Matt and I work. The second part, which I guess will get posted at some point, is all about Classroom Deathmatch and The Magical Land of Yeld. Thanks Guy!

Podcasts and minitaures

The Pulp Gamer podcast had a nice review of Sea Dracula in their September episode. They also said some nice things about Ocean and Panty Explosion.*

You can hear the whole thing here. They start talking about sea Dracula and the other games around 18:05.

The Screaming Alpha did a nice review on Left Hand Miniatures fantastic Japanese school girl figures. Remember those? The ones that were made to go with Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch. It’s a very flattering review (which is good, becausethese are really great figures), and they say some nice things about Panty explosion and Classroom deathmatch toward the end of the article. Cool!

*Something that did bother me about the podcast, one of the participants (the female one) compared Panty Explosions Japanese school girl subject matter to a game about necrophilia that they had talked about at some earlier point. One of the participants clearly new what the game was about and defended it, but the others were pretty obviously just taken by the name (which I’m used to, and is somewhat forgivable I think). Still, the comment was less about the game (which, again,  I’m used to) and more  “Japanese school girls, eh? Nudge, nudge. wink, wink”.  I’m starting to feel bad for Japanese high school students. They haven’t  done anything to deserve this awful reputation they’ve gotten. Overall, I think the comment reflected poorly on the person who said it.

New Classroom Deathmatch game on Myth-Weavers.com

Here’s a link to a new online Classroom Deathmatch game that is just getting started. this is pretty much the best organized and presented CDM game I’ve ever seen, and it looks like the GM is still looking for players. So check it out, even if all you want to do is watch or read the GMs excellent write up!

kumoricon wrap-up

Here we go.

Matt, Nick, Ben, Alexis and I were invited to come to Kumoricon and run our games, as well as Maid RPG. This was a very last minute thing, and we barely had any communication with anyone at  the con prior to showing up on Saturday. Kumoricon is huge, crowded, messy and exhausting. It SEEMS to be much more disorganized then other large shows I’ve been to over the last few years, but there also seems to be a greater willingness among the attendees to just hang out and try whatever was in front of them. We ended up being stationed in a small room for the entire weekend, where we ran 7 or 8 packed games.  We were the only people to use the room for most of the weekend, so traffic was largely limited to people coming in to see what we were doing. There were a lot of neat things that happened:

- The ONLY advertising we had was a single sheet schedule posted to the door of the room we were using. Still, we had to turn away players from every game we ran, and most games were full with 7-9 players (Yeld was lightest at just 6, but that was because we put a cap on it early).

- People wanted to play our games. As Ben said over at his blog, we didn’t experience the normal reaction we get at game cons where people get weirded out by what our games are. Instead, people were ready to sit down and play our games without any kind of reassurances or convincing! Panty Explosion, Maid and Bliss Stage were all big hits BECAUSE of their sexiness, implied weirdness and appeal to a niche market, not despite of these things!

- Most of the people who played with us signed on for multiple games, and a few hung out for almost every game we ran. We had to sneak out of the hotel on Sunday night to avoid running even more games!

- Unfortunately we didn’t have any books to sell, but if we had we could have sold quite a bit. After every single game we ran players were asking to buy our books, often with cash in hand. We all came away feeling like we could have sold 5-10 copies of anything we ran just at the table. The dealers room was as packed as any I’ve ever seen, and the attendees seemed willing to buy anything. Next year I’ll plan to have a table, and expect to sell 20 copies of any game I care to bring. As a sales venue for MY games, I feel like Kumoricon trumps any con I’ve ever been to, including Gencon.

- The number of missed opportunities were staggering. We were invited to the show pretty late, but if we had been on board earlier we would have been able to organize many more games and a dealers booth. I feel like that would have just been the beginning of what we could do. Next year I’d like to host a panel, sponsor a contest, participate in the art show and the creative studio and take a whole lot more pictures.

- I think there are two notable differences between the attendees of Kumoricon and the game and comic cons I’ve been to, and that’s enthusiasm and age. Every single person I talked to at the show, whether painfully shy or aggressively friendly, was super excited to be there and very enthusiastic about trying… anything. The average age of attendees seemed to be much, much lower then most game and comic cons. Closer to 18.

- The main thing I walked away from ( and I think Nick, Matt, Ben and Alexis all agree) was a certainty that we had found our target audience, and that they were as enthusiastic and eager as we had always suspected they would be. I’ll be seriously reconsidering my interest in traditional gaming cons as a sales and promotion venue in the future.

So we’ll be going back next year, bigger and better.

Jake

Kumoricon Schedule

Atarashi Games will be at Kumoricon on Saturday the 5th and Sunday the 6th. You’ll find us in the rpg room. Here’s what we’ll be running:

Saturday the 5th: Panty Explosion, Maid RPG, The Magical Land of Yeld

Sunday the 6th: Classroom Deathmatch, Bliss Stage, Ocean, Sea Dracula

We’ll be running these games sequentially, so if you attend and stay for the whole time you can play all 7!

Atarashi Games at Kumoricon

Nick, Matt and I will be  at Kumoricon on September 6th and 7th.  We’ll be running Classroom Deathmatch, Panty Explosion, Sea Dracula, Ocean and The Magical Land of Yeld, as well as Maid RPG and Bliss Stage! Look for us in the rpg room.

I’ll be posting our game schedule sometime next week.

Jake

Sea Dracula Wins

Sea Dracula won the 2008 Indie RPG Award for Best Free Game.  Sea Dracula was also a runner up in the Indie Game of the Year and Most Innovative Game categories. You can see all the winners here, and get Sea Dracula for free here.

Fuck yeah!

This is the second year in a row that Nick and I have taken this award. We won last year for Classroom Deathmatch. I wonder what we’ll win for next year?

Ocean is now available for sale!

Ocean is now available for order!

An abandoned underwater research station.

A nightmarish creature from the depths of the ocean.

A trapped group of amnesiac survivors.

These are the clues.

Solve the mystery.

A new survival/mystery story engine from the award winning co-creator of Panty Explosion and Sea Dracula.

40 full color pages. Square bound 8×5.5 book.  Just $15.00!

Order at the Atarashi Games store or the un-store!

The new Magical Land of Yeld play test document is now available!

New Yeld is here! Nick and I finished up the new Yeld play test document about a week ago. This new version of the rules takes into account the huge amount of feedback we’ve received over the last year, most especially from our friends up in Seattle.

Big changes to this edition include revisions to reward and adventure dice, an entire new focus on towns and friendly adventures, revised traps and updated monster stuff (and some sample monsters) and more focus on player roles and duties within the game. there are lots of more mundane changes and additions as well, including some new spells, weapons and special dice!

There are a few things we decided to hold out for now, either because we’re not sure if we plan to include them in the game or because we’re still working on them and want to save them for the next update. One of those things, set pieces, is something I’ll be posting about real soon.

Three ways to get Yeld!

Download for free! Download the new document in PDF form for free here!

Buy the PDF at RPGNOW! We’re also offering the PDF for sale at RPGNOW for $2.00. This is the exact same PDF that we’re giving away for free. Selling the PDF through RPGNOW exposes us to a wider audience. This also generates a little cash that helps pay Yeld related expenses. You can buy the PDF here.

Buy the Whitebook! The Whitebook is a 175 page 5.25 x 8 inch square bound book containing the full game text. Last year we had a lot of people ask if they could get print copies of the play test rules, and a few people went out of their way to make copies on their own. I know that personally I find it a lot easier to read a book then a PDF. Copies of the Whitebook (so called because the cover is all white with a simple black logo) are available at the Atarashi Games store for $13. The price includes shipping.

Play Yeld with Nick and Jake!

Nick and I are both running Yeld games at GameStorm this year. My Sunday game has already filled, but Nicks Saturday game still has room. Everyone who plays in eitehr of these games will receive one of the Yeld Whitebooks!

Ocean Playtest

I ran Ocean at Go Play SE PDX 17 last night. Just 8 hours after I wrote it. I thought it went very well. I’ve posted the current draft of the game text as well as my proposed changes over at the Go Paly PDX forum. Comments are very, very welcome.

Jake

Sea Dracula news!

First off: the Official Sea Dracula Website. Finally. As if that were not enough…

Sea Dracula Wave 2 is here! Featuring 10 new covers by Lukas Myhan, Jason Morningstar, Joel Shempert, Alvin Frewer, Joe McDonald, John Harper, Anna Kreider, Albert Anderson, Travis Brown and Jake Richmond.

Wave 2 is available as random singles ($1) or as a 1o pack ($8)! Buy Sea Dracula Wave 2 at the Atarashi Games Store or the Un-Store!

The bad news? Wave 1 is no longer available! Oh no! Lucky foryou, you can still see the Wave 1 covers in the Sea Dracula Cover Gallery!

Panty Explsoion on the un-store

Vincent Baker has set up the indie rpg un-store. The un-store isn’t really a store (although it looks like a store). It’s more of a catalog where each buy it now link goes directly to the individual game designer. So you can buy Panty Explosion and Sea Dracula from the un-store and the money goes directly to Nick, Matt and I.  The store doesn’t take a cut! Even better, we handle your order directly. So we can totally answer all your questions, sign your books or slip in some sweet Panty Explosion miniatures with each order!

Here’s a link to the our page at the store. Why would you order from the un-store instead of the Atarashi games store? No reason really. Click on either and they direct you to the same paypal account. I do the shipping and packaging for both too. I like to think of the un-store as a back up in case the Atarashi store goes down again. it goes down a lot. You noticed? You and everyone else.

Bounty Head Bebop on RPGNOW!

We don’t usually post about other publishers games, but we thought you might be interested in Heroic Journey Publishing’s new game Bounty Head Bebop for a two reasons:

Reason 1: Inspired by Cowboy Bebop!

Reason 2: Art by Panty Explosion/Classroom Deathmatch co-creator Jake Richmond!

BHB is a D20 game that does a damn good job emulating the style, action and world of Cowboy Bebop. Jake did over a dozen illustrations for the project, including this sharp looking cover. You can buy the game in PDF form at RPGNOW. We hear there’s a hardcopy version in the works as well. Excellent!

Classroom Deathmatch wins Indie RPG Award

I didn’t get to go to Gencon this year, and haven’t really been paying to much attention to the news that came out of it. I was a little surprised to hear that my game Classroom Deathmatch won the Indie Rpg Awards Free Game of the Year award! Holy shit! It was also a runner up for Game of the Year and Best Production. Matt, Nick and I are very pleased. You can download a free copy of the game here.

Classroom Deathmatch is a full mod of Panty Explosion, designed to emulate Koushun Takami’s excellent novel (and the film and manga it inspired) Battle Royale. We released Classroom Deathmatch for sale in both book and PDF form early in 2007, just a day before the Virginia Tech shootings. I spent a lot of time after the release trying to assure people that we we’ren’t trying to cash in on that tragedy:

“The game had been on sale for less then a day when the shootings happened. I thought about pulling the game off the market for a month or so but decided against it. Classroom Deathmatch is all about making tough choices and dealing with difficult subjects. Murder and betrayal weren’t easy subjects to deal with before the Virginia Tech shootings, and they aren’t easy subjects to deal with now. But a good RPG needs to push players to answer difficult questions and deal with uncomfortable situations. Classroom Deathmatch does this damn well (in my opinion), and I think if you tried it you would like it.“

Despite the really nasty attention we got, the game went on to sell several hundred copies in it’s first few months of release,and received several really excellent reviews.

After we sold out of the initial print run we decided to let the book go out of print. Matt, Nick and I were all involved in other projects at the time, and none of us had the drive or time to shepherd Classroom Deathmatch through another print run and round of promotion. We instead decided that we would offer the game for free on the Atarashi Games site.

Anyway, thanks for the award. that’s awesome!

Jake

Panty Explosion sans GM

For about a year I’ve been promising to share my ideas and methods for playing Panty Explosion without a GM. Filip and a few other guys over at Story Games finally called me out on it. So here you go.

Very shortly after releasing Panty Explosion I discovered that (for me) the game worked very well without a designated Superintendent. I was mostly doing store demos and convention games at the time, playing with people who didn’t know anything about the game. This was different from the play testing Matt and I had been doing earlier in the year. Different circumstances, plus I had developed different methods for playing, presenting and facilitating the game. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that because of this the game itself changed.

One of the things that I noticed fairly quickly was that when the game was working well and all the players had a good understanding of who their characters where and what their story was, the role of the Superintendent became almost superfluous. What I mean is that most of the time I would find myself sitting quietly at the table watching everyone else play, occasionally answering a question or providing some flavor for a scene. This became a reoccurring theme in the game I facilitated. As the Superintendent I would start off by explaining how to play the game and setting up the first scene. After that the players would mostly take over, and I usually wouldn’t get to give much input until the end of the game, where I would take the role of the Demon and roll some dice. And more and more often, I found the players were doing that part as well!

I should make it clear that I wasn’t sitting quietly because I was bored or didn’t know how to participate. Rather, these games became the kind of ideal situations that designers hope for, where the player immediately grasp how the game is supposed to work and be played, and the session itself gains a life of it’s own and no longer requires your input. That’s good. Shit, it’s great! But it occurred to me that it didn’t really leave much for the Superintendent to do. It was fine for me, as the games creator, to sit back and enjoy other people playing my game. But for another Superintendent? That experience might not be so much fun.

I think it might help for me to talk a little bit about the role of the Superintendent in Panty Explosion (and Classroom Deathmatch). It’s easy to call the Superintendent a GM, but that may set up a false expectation. The Superintendent has a few different duties:

The Superintendent creates the School.

The Superintendent is in charge of the Demon.

The Superintendent is in charge of framing scenes.

The Superintendent decides when Agendas have been resolved.

Creating the School and deciding when Agendas resolve are pretty minor duties. One is done before the game starts and very often involves the participation of the other players. The other is largely decided by the other players, and only requires the Superintendents agreement. Framing Scenes is an important part of the game, and is one of the two tools that the Superintendent has for shaping the games story. But players can also frame scenes. The Demon is the only real power that the Superintendent has. The Superintendent gets a pool of Demon dice to create monsters and other challenges for the other players to face. These dice are what gives the Superintendent power and authority in the game.

t became apparent very quickly that (as I said before) a game of Panty Explosion that was going well didn’t need a Superintendent. I don’t mean that the responsibilities of a Superintendent could be ignored, just that a single player didn’t have to dedicate them selves to the job. I discovered that it was very easy to spread the weight of the Superintendent role around the entire group.

The way I’ve been playing the game with both my friends and new players, the way I’ve been introducing it to new players, is to have all players share the responsibilities of framing scenes and controlling the demon. The common question I get from people who have played the game is how do you build a story without a central Superintendent to guide the game. What they forget (or missed in the first place maybe) is that the story in a game of Panty Explosion is made up of two parts, the Students Agendas and the confrontation with the Demon. So each scene in the game needs to address one of these two parts, with a preference for resolving Agendas. So what a game of Panty Explosion is going to look like is a series of scenes strung togetehr, each scene addressing one or more of the Students Agendas. Some of these scenes are going to be about the Demon, but really the Demon is just there to provide antagonism. To keep the Students from completing their Agendas.

So once you can see that, playing the game is pretty simple. Players frame scenes where they can address their Agendas, and other players provide antagonism either with the Demon or just by playing their own Students. Connecting these scenes togetehr creates a story and eventually leads to the confrontation with the Demon. Someone needs to be in charge of keeping track of the Demon dice. I usually put a big pool of dice in the middle of the table to represent the total Demon dice. Any player can act on the Demons turn and use dice from the pool. Once the pool is down to about a third of the dice, I tell the players that we need to head into the final encounter with the demon. At this point one or two of the players usually take charge of the Demon, describing the scene and dictating all the demons actions.

In a one off game this method will usually result in an entirely improvised game with just 2 or 3 really intense scenes. For multiple session games the players will often do some planning between sessions, and you’ll start to see elaborate plots and relationships unfold. The Demon will often develop a personality and a theme, even if it’s being controlled be several different players.

When I tell people about this style of play, they often complain that it won’t create a good story, or that it will be confusing. I’ve found the opposite to be true. What you need are a group of players that are willing to share and are open to improvisation. These are things that Panty Explosion forces on it’s players anyway, and I think that’s part of the reason this play style has been so successful for me over the last year or so. If anything, Panty Explosion is about compromise and the realization that not getting what you want can sometimes be better then getting exactly what you ask for.

That’s pretty much it. No rules and no real guidelines, just a rambling example. Sorry. At this point you may be scratching your head and wondering why the version of Panty Explosion that you know sounds completely different from the one I seem to be playing. As I said before, the game has changed for me. This is how I play it now, and I find it very rewarding.

Shit, I forgot the important part. Playing like this frees me up from being the Superintendent and allows me to lead the game by playing a Student instead. I find this is much more helpful for teaching new players how to play and how to use their agendas and the scene framing rules to create stories and drive the game in interesting directions.

Hope this helps.

Jake

Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch miniatures!

Left Hand Miniatures has produced some excellent new Japanese Schoolgirl miniatures. Graydon Gorby produced these miniatures specifically with Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch in mind! This set comes complete with four different schoolgirl miniatures, each with 3 different weapons or accessories! These are perfect for players who want some awesome visual aids for their Classroom Deathmatch and Panty Explosion games! You can buy the full set here for just $13.00! This is just the first of 3 planned sets featuring girls from different schools!

Matt, Nick and I will be using these miniatures in all our Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch demos for the rest of the year. We’ll have a limited number of sample miniatures to give away at demos as well!

-Jake

Panty Explosion in the Oregonian

If you live in Portland Oregon you may have seen this in you morning paper:

Laura Oppenheimer interviewed Matt, Christian Griffen and I a few weeks ago. The front page article is all about our games and Portland’s indie games community. There’s a nice big photo of the three of us, plus some good art from both Panty Explosion and Beast Hunters. Good stuff! Laura and photographer Benjamin Brink were great. They had a lot of really smart questions and seemed like they were really interested in what we had to say. I’m just happy to see the words “Panty Explosion” in the Oregonian. read the full article here!

Jake

Welcome back!

We’ve been gone for awhile, but now we’re back! I have a few announcements!

1. The Atarashi Games store is back! You’ll notice a few new products on the store, including the Panty Explosion Panties! These are actual panties that come with rules to use in your games! You’ll also find Bliss Stage by Ben Lehman and Sea Dracula by myself and Nick Smith. We’re expanding the games we offer on our store to include stuff by some of our friends, as well as non-Atarashi games that Matt and I work on!

2. We’ve let Classroom Deathmatch go out of print. Classroom Deathmatch sold out after Gencon last year, and has been unavailable ever since. The game had a fantastic first year, selling over 300 copies in just 6 months, but we’ve decided that we want to focus on other projects for the time being. Our current plan is to release a new and updated version of the game sometime next year. In the meantime, we’ve decided to offer the current version of the game as a free download right here on our site! This is the full retail PDF version of the game. You can find the permanent download link on the sidebar to the right!

That’s it for now!

-Jake

More Actual Play!

Here’s some awesome Classroom Deathmatch and Panty Explosion actual play that was posted on the Atarashi games forums. Good stuff! If you want to know what a fun game of Classroom Deathmatch or Panty Explosion looks like, check these out!