Tokyo Heroes - Neko Machi

Tokyo Heroes

Sentai RPG By Ewen Cluney

Credits

Designed and written by Ewen Cluney

? 2006 by Ewen Cluney

All mention of copyrighted works is for references purposes only and is not a challenge of copyright or trademark.

This is the pre-release version of Tokyo Heroes; it's complete and theoretically playable, but it hasn't been tested much just yet. (On the plus side, it's free!) If you try it, let me know how it goes, okay?

Table of Contents

Introduction .............................................................................................................................................................4

Game Basics.................................................................................................................... 5

Example Heroes .....................................................................................................................................................6

Kidou Sentai Dynaranger................................................................................................ 6 Magical Girl Rose ......................................................................................................... 12

Hero Creation.........................................................................................................................................................19

Character as Communication........................................................................................ 19 Step 1: Team Concept................................................................................................... 20 Step 2: Aspects.............................................................................................................. 21 Step 3: Character Concept ............................................................................................ 25 Step 4: Attributes .......................................................................................................... 25 Step 5: Keys .................................................................................................................. 26 Step 6: Heroic Flaws..................................................................................................... 28 Step 7: Edges................................................................................................................. 28 Step 8: Profile ............................................................................................................... 35

Adventures.............................................................................................................................................................38

Episodes and Scenes ..................................................................................................... 38 Action Resolution ......................................................................................................... 40 Hero Dice ...................................................................................................................... 41 Battles ........................................................................................................................... 43 Transforming................................................................................................................. 47 Robots ........................................................................................................................... 47 Karma Points................................................................................................................. 48 New Toys ...................................................................................................................... 50

Bad Guys ............................................................................................................................................................... 52

Villain Character Traits................................................................................................. 52 Types of Bad Guys........................................................................................................ 56 What Bad Guys Do ....................................................................................................... 59 Sample Villains............................................................................................................. 60

Campaigns and Adventures.............................................................................................................................63

Things to Learn (And Not Learn) From TV Shows ..................................................... 63 Characters In The Middle ............................................................................................. 63 Getting Started .............................................................................................................. 64 Creative Heroes............................................................................................................. 64 Anatomy of an Episode................................................................................................. 64 Themes.......................................................................................................................... 65 Friends and Allies ......................................................................................................... 68 Genre Variations ........................................................................................................... 69 The Toybox................................................................................................................... 70 Game Seeds................................................................................................................... 71

Random Tables.....................................................................................................................................................77

Appendix .................................................................................................................................................................83

Suggested Viewing ....................................................................................................... 83

Introduction

This game is about heroes. As a player you take on the role of a hero. Somewhere in the streets of Tokyo a monster--a servant of the terrible Enemy you'll have to face one day--is going to hurt innocent people. He must be stopped. Luckily you're not alone; you're part of an elite team with the power to stand up to the bad guys, to find and extinguish the flame of evil.

This game is specifically about "sentai" heroes. Sentai literally means "fighting team" in Japanese. It calls to mind Toei's Super Sentai Series of tokusatsu (live action special effects) shows that has been going on since 1975, and Power Rangers, the American adaptation that launched in 1993 and is still going. There are many other titles, tokusatsu, anime, and otherwise, that it inspired, in Japan and elsewhere.

In particular, this book devotes a fair amount of text to including fighting magical girls, as seen in anime series like Sailor Moon and Tokyo Mew Mew. This is partly just because I happen to like magical girl anime (shut up), and partly because for the purposes of this game what's important about sentai isn't the spandex or the cheesy rubber monsters or the pyrotechnics, but rather the way a team of heroes work together to fend off the forces of evil. In this respect, Dekaranger and Sailor Moon are a lot closer to each other than they are to Kamen Rider.

This game is about cool, fast-paced action, and rolling dice. Lots of dice.

Text Conventions

In the text of this book I've taken a cue from Fudge in that players and player characters are referred to with masculine pronouns and the GM and GM characters with female pronouns.

Throughout the text, there are examples to illustrate how the game works. All of these use the same characters that appear starting on page 6, and they are always enclosed in boxes to indicate their example-ness. Some of these explain things in game terms, and some illustrate the genre with a piece of prose. You'll survive.

If You Don't Know The Genre...

...I highly recommend getting yourself acquainted. Knowing the genre really well isn't a requirement per se, especially for an individual player, but it does help.

For magical girls there are a fair number of anime series available on DVD. Sailor Moon is far and away the most appropriate for Tokyo Heroes, but Wedding Peach will do in a pinch, and Tokyo Mew Mew (re-titled Mew Mew Power in the English dub) is ideal too. Tokyo Heroes deals with fighting magical girls, however, so the likes of Fancy Lala and Minky Momo would be better served by some other RPG (like HeartQuest, BESM, or OAV).

The original, Japanese sentai series are hard to come by in the U.S., but there is of course Power Rangers, which currently airs on several basic cable channels, and is available on DVD. As for the original Japanese sentai shows, if you're super hardcore you can get the Region 2 DVDs; Amazon Japan has plenty of them and ships to the

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U.S., though it's all really expensive. If you're amoral you can get the Hong Kong DVDs with questionable English subtitles. For the rest of us there are some fansubs, such as from TV-Nihon ().

For both, see the Appendix (p. 83) for some more specific recommendations.

Game Basics

Stuff You'll Need

Since this is a tabletop RPG, the most important things are a group of friends and imagination. However, you'll also want pencil and paper (preferably including a character sheet for each player and a session sheet for the GM) and lots of six-sided dice.

Rolling Dice

Tokyo Heroes uses pools of dice; when you attempt something where the outcome is in question, you roll a number of six-sided dice, usually equal to an Attribute, but frequently modified by other stuff. The dice aren't added up though. A given roll has a Target; each die that is equal to or above the Target counts as a Success. The default Target is 4, which gives each die a 50/50 chance of being a success. The more Successes you score, the better the result will be. For simple stuff you can get by with just one Success, but for tougher stuff you'll need more, and if someone is directly opposing you you'll need to get more Successes than them. This is explained in detail on p. 40.

Measuring Time

In this game time is tracked in a fairly cinematic way; the campaign is divided into episodes, and episodes are divided up into scenes. These are first and foremost a way to keep up the pace and concentrate on stuff that's relevant to the story.

An episode is one incident, carried from beginning to end. There can be a little extra stuff thrown in, but in this game each episode is basically about a given monster causing problems and the heroes defeating the monster and solving those problems. An episode can sometimes take up more than one session of play, but one episode per session is the norm, and sometimes two if the episodes are short.

For the purposes of this game a scene is a step along the way, where one or more of the heroes (player characters) are doing something significant in a given place. The GM usually decides when a scene begins and ends, but the players can give input too; a scene should get directly into a situation where the heroes have to take action and make choices, and end before things start to drag. Unimportant stuff can happen outside of scenes, summarized in a sentence or two. Going to visit a victim's house can be a very important scene, but the drive there can be skipped over more often than not.

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