Sailor Moon RPG Sourcebook

[Anastasia]

If you are an old, avid gamer, you may recall a BESM style sourcebook released for Sailor Moon. With all five girls on the cover and appealing to anime gamer geekdom across the board, this set promises a real Sailor Moon game. So, does it deliver?

It's a mixed bag. You see, the system is an early version of BESM and the Tristat system, customized and tailored to a Sailor Moon specific gameworld. The latter is in theory a good thing, and the former invites all the glitches and lacking polish than a beta would imply. I won't go too deeply into the mechanics of it in this post; instead I wish to maintain a broader outlook.

The above said, the first thing to bear in mind is that the system is threefold. At very low power levels, it favors the villians quite a bit. In the low-mid range, it's fairly even. And anything past that, it tends to favor the Senshi and Knights quite heavily, sickeningly so by the maximum power level. The fundamental problem is that the Senshi attacks rise far faster than anything else in the game, past defenses. To avoid this, you  need to either tone them down or keep your girls to low level attacks. The pluses they add to the DCV check quickly make them lethally hard to evade, and the damage of a level 6 attack can KO even the Wiseman or Queen Berly stats given in the sourcebook in a single shot. The baddies only have one real recourse in straight up combat - Positive Energy Deflection. While not a surefire cure, it helps...if you don't mind your NPCs all relying on the same trick.

Past that? Things get better. The combat system is straight forward, only needing two d6s to run. This keeps the dicing simple and minimal - there will be some if your PCs tend to use certain abilities often, but it's nowhere in the realm of a AD and D game's dicing frenzy. In light of that, I recommend keeping combat only in a secondary light, or to take the time to make interesting, new additions and baddies that keep the PCs guessing on the battlefield. It's not a good enough system to support fighting for the sake of fighting. In it's simplicity, it can wear thin swiftly. I found that creating entirely new abilities for the bad guys and monsters of the day to be most rewarding, flexing my creative muscles while keeping the Senshi off balance. Variety is the spice of combat in this game, make no mistake about it.

Beyond combat, it comes with loads of bonus material - source information, character bios and stats(Non binding, but they give nice examples of what the PCs can be like.), Japanese information to add flavor to the game, and even a timeline of events in Sailor Moon. Toss in a few possible seeds for adventures, even the requisite RETURN OF JADEITE scenario!!!!!11, as well as a very well done introduction, and you have a nice, self contained RPG system book.

Recommendations:

If you want to give this system a whirl, I'd recommend having a bit of GM experience under your belt. You don't want to be working the kinks out of the system while also learning the craft here. Be familiar enough with things to be confident in tinkering and adding things and house rules. Once you are, you can flavor the system here to taste and have a solidly enjoyable game.

I won't overly mess with it's strength, though - the relative lack of dicing and ease of play. It works with 2d6, I feel it's best to keep it that way.

8/10

EDIT - Hilarious typos.

EDIT 2 - Do you know that I fix the typos in 8 year old posts?

[Dracos]

JADEIIIIIIITE!

Dracos

[Anastasia]

*Snickers*

You know, Drac,w ith a set of lungs like that?

I need to get you to roleplay a Sailor one of these days. Maybe Sailor Draccy-chan?

[Carthrat]

Holy crap, Dune, you're obsessed!

FIND ANOTHER SERIES! O_O