HeartQuest Diceless
Romantic Roleplaying in the Worlds of Shoujo Manga
HeartQuest Diceless is an odd, niche RPG aimed at emulating the kind of plotlines and tales found in “shoujo manga”, or “girl's comics” in Japan. For folks who aren't that familiar with them (that includes me, honestly), here's a general summary. While there are all sorts of manga available in Japan (and often exported to other countries), “shoujo” refers to the titles which are largely aimed at young girls. They generally involve female characters and have a strong emphasis on romance and relationships in addition to adventure. Sailor Moon is probably the most famous example.
So what is Active Exploits, anyway?
Since this genre isn't as random or combat oriented as many, the author has chosen to use the Active Exploits Diceless system, available for free at http://www.pigames.net. Since many people may never have heard of this system, let's first go over the basics of Active Exploits. It's a diceless resource management system. This means that while your character will have some set stats and skills, you can augment them by spending points, of which you only get a limited number. This means that interaction with other characters can still be very unpredictable; how dangerous a foe is will depend heavily on how many resource points they have and are willing to blow on this encounter.
The basic stats are Fitness (physical strength and dexterity), Awareness (noticing things and reacting to them quickly), Creativity (coming up with new ideas) and Reasoning (intelligence and general education). The three mutable stats (which can be spent to augment other actions) are Luck (representing the vagaries of random chance), Revelation (representing your personal insight and character) and Discipline (your willpower and personal determination). Each can be used in different situations and can have different effects. For example, Luck can be spent to resist physical damage, Revelation can be used to resist psychological damage (such as fear or insanity; they call these points dementia) and Discipline can resist fatigue.
The Active Exploits writers really like to use symbols as shorthand, which makes it a little difficult to understand the system until you learn to recognize all of the symbols. For example, every skill given will generally have at least one of 3 symbols... one with an “A” in it, one with an “F” and one with an “M”. These mean, respectively, that the skill is appropriate for a campaign set in an Antique setting (examples are the Victorian era and the Civil War era in the U.S.), a Fantasy setting (medieval, but with magical elements) or a Modern setting. If using something generally incurs Fatigue, it won't say “you take fatigue”... instead, it'll have two little lightning bolts next to it. That's the icon for “Fatigue”. There are only 13 symbols, so it's not very hard to learn them all, but you'll probably spend a few minutes going “Wait, what did the little drama mask mean? (flip, flip) Oh, yeah, it causes dementia.”
There are a bunch of skills and they're generally broken up according to what stat most influences them. Many also list secondary abilities, which can be used to boost them as well, but only by a single point. For example, the Boating skill normally uses Fitness, but says to use Awareness or Reasoning to navigate. The Forging skill also uses Fitness, but lists Creativity as a secondary ability which can be applied as well. You won't always want to use it, though.
Why not? Well, because there's a simple rule: whenever the total “effort” that you're exerting on a task (the sum of every stat that you've chosen to apply to it) exceeds your current Discipline rating, you take a point of fatigue. So really throwing everything you have into a task may leave you weak and weary. Too much fatigue will give you -1 or -2 penalty to all tasks, depending on exactly how exhausted you are.
They use a simple difficulty chart, which compares how skilled you are (the ratings are Unskilled, Apprentice, Proficient and Expert) to the difficulty of the task (Trivial, Routine, Challenging, Improbable or Impossible) and tells you the total value you'll have to get to succeed. Trivial tasks can generally be accomplished automatically by anyone who's stats aren't negative numbers, whereas performing an Impossible task when you're Unskilled in that area requires a whopping total of 8 to succeed. Since an average person has a stat rating of 0 and a rating of 5 is considered godlike, even superheroes aren't likely to be able to pull that off without spending all of their Luck.
There are some additional details, and some rules for advantages and disadvantages, but that should be enough for everyone to understand the basic system (I hope).
Back to HeartQuest!
The version of HeartQuest that I received was the PDF format. I'm pretty sure that there's also a dead tree version available, but I've only read the PDF. I doubt that there's much difference in the content, though.
The introduction discusses exactly what Shoujo Manga is and what sort of tales are expected in this genre. There's also a brief history of the genre and how some titles came to be available in the west.
Character creation uses the standard Active Exploits Diceless system, with some additional Skills, Gimmicks (personal advantages) and Convictions (personal credos or weaknesses that you are expected to roleplay; you can be penalized for going against them) to better fit the genre.
Some players may need a little while to adjust to playing in a game where skills like Calligraphy, Flower Arrangement or Sewing are considered about as important as Acrobatics, Climbing, or Brawling. The authors have also included a variety of social manipulation skills, like Bribery, Flattery, or (my favorite) Guilt Trip. I'm iffy on the inclusion of Fast Talk, Lying, and Persuasion, as they'd overlap a lot, but as long as everyone's clear on the differences it shouldn't be a problem. Most of the Gimmicks are pretty standard but I did like Flunkies (you have a small group of friends who hang on your every word and generally do your bidding for free) and Guardian Angel (you really do have an invisible force looking out for you). There are also some primarily malign Gimmicks, like Drama Queen or Fear of Commitment.
The Gimmicks don't really come with game rules; that's not in the Active Exploits Diceless style. Instead, they're pretty much just roleplaying guidelines that the GM should support as well as the player. For example, the standard Internal Compass Gimmick just says that you never get lost. Gimmicks are often assigned by the GM to further fill out someone's character concept.
The negative Gimmicks in HeartQuest includes some really cute ideas. There are quite a few listed here. My particular favorites are Nosebleeder (whenever you are aroused, you have a tendency to get embarrassed and have blood squirt out of your nose) and Gender Bender (you look more like a member of the opposite gender than your own). Both of these are Anime standards that I've seen dozens of different shows. That sort of attention to detail shows that the author has put a good bit of thought into the game.
Chapter 2 covers additional special powers and supernatural abilities necessary to support the “Magical Girls” genre. The system presented here is very freeform, with a single double-cost skill covering pretty much any kind of sorcery allowed in the GM's campaign. I did like the “Transformation” Gimmick, which allows you to magically transform from your street clothes into your battle outfit... and now matter how long or elaborate your character's transformation sequence happens to be, it all occurs pretty much instantly and no one can interfere with it.
This is not a terribly long chapter. At just 3 pages, there's not really much here besides a single example of creating a magical girl with the main Active Exploits Diceless rules and a few additional magical Gimmicks. But, as the author says, magical powers in this genre tend to be unique, with every major character being significantly different, so an exhaustive list of suggested powers would take up quite a bit of space.
Chapter 3 is just a basic summary of what roleplaying is and how to run a game. It has a small amount of GM advice (PCs should never die unless it means something, don't bother with maps or miniatures, develop NPCs in interesting ways) but it hasn't got much of interest for experienced players or GMs. Chapter 4 however, starts to dig into the meat of the genre: Teen Romance. First, the author describes what life & dating is like in Japan for youngsters, particularly how the various school years are laid out and what sort of exams are involved. They discuss little details like most schools prohibiting part-time jobs for students and the agonies of 9th and 12th grade (those are the years when you take standardized exams to determine what school you go to next... if any).
There's a big section on dating... interestingly, even dating is often prohibited by the school because it distracts students from their studies. We get a discussion of how Valentine's Day and Christmas differ in Japan. For example, the religious significance of Christmas is almost entirely absent since most folks aren't Christians and there's special significance to it if a girl offers hand-made chocolates to a boy on Valentine's Day.
This is a fairly well written section, and one that I'd consider really important for anyone seriously interested in shoujo roleplaying. It even covers some common tropes of the genre (including the importance of sports, homosexual crushes and couples who refuse to admit that they care about each other). We also get a short discussion of Forbidden Loves and what sorts of relationships are going to be illegal or frowned upon in Japan.
Chapter 5 delves into the Magical Girls genre a little more deeply. The authors briefly discuss a few variations on the genre, particularly the Magical Thief and the Magical Idol (e.g.- pop star). This section is only a vague overview, not a detailed study. Each variant gets a page at best, but then I think this product is aimed more at the sort of gamer who will recognize all of the titles mentioned already than someone completely unfamiliar with them.
Chapter 6 discusses historical and out-of-this-world settings (such as the traditional, “several students get teleported into a sword & sorcery universe” plot). It's only 6 pages long, so again, this is more of an overview than anything else. I did like the comments about the importance of “carefully sticking to the setting” when basing a game on a published manga that both the players and GM have read, just to minimize arguments about the characters and who's in love with who. They also go into a nice discussion about the whole “fish out of water” effect that out-of-this-world campaigns will be trying to instill and how best to achieve it.
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 describe three very different potential campaigns, each with a description of the setting, several example characters (including their stats) and enough plot hooks to get you going. First we get Sendai Academy, a traditional teens-in-high-school drama. There are stats for 7 example characters, and most have several potential plot hooks like secret crushes and family troubles. There are no magic powers or violent enemies here... but the next setting is Ghost Tamer Miyaki, which has them in spades. The title character here is a formerly normal teenage girl who (much to her surprise) has inherited magical powers and is now the official arch enemy of a powerful demon. Among her allies are a mysterious male character called Black Rose and a ghostly dog who doubles as both sidekick and font of enigmatic clues. Since both of these campaigns are set in modern day Japan, the third is Steel Heidi, a historical romance set in 1720's Germany. The title character is a skilled swordswoman and the personal bodyguard of Prince Hendrick of the fictional kingdom of Kensmarck. Naturally, her heart has gone out to him, but he must marry for political reasons, not love; to do otherwise would be to plunge the kingdom into civil war. All three settings are rife with dramatic possibilities and the first almost completely lacks both magic and violence. Very different from the “normal” RPG setting.
Chapter 10 contains some additional example characters for other sorts of games. We get the nerdy girl-genius who was promoted several grades ahead and who masters every subject with ease but whose social life is abysmal. There's a rock star with a secret shame. There are a wide variety of characters here (9 in total) ranging from ordinary teens to sword & sorcery Dread Hunters. It's a good source of inspiration for people trying to find a campaign that interests them.
Finally, the author wraps it all up with a bibliography of relevant shoujo manga and anime, including a one-paragraph summary of what each title is about.
HeartQuest is 84 pages long and strictly black & white with a color cover. The art is decent, if amateurish, and fits the genre quite well. There aren't any pics that impressed me, though, so I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone just for the art. The interior art is all on about the same level as the cover. The editing is quite good; there were hardly any typos and I only saw a couple of layout mistakes (mostly unnecessary gaps between two lines of text). While it's somewhat light on concrete detail, the genre it covers isn't really suitable for that sort of thing anyway. The PDF doesn't take full advantages of the format... that is to say, there aren't any bookmarks and the interior links aren't clickable, but that's not a big deal.
I'd say it's the best treatment of shoujo manga for roleplaying that I've ever seen, but it's the only one I've ever seen. If you have any interest in this genre, though, I'd seriously recommend HeartQuest. Be warned though, it's mostly an overview of the genre as a whole; it doesn't spend a lot of time on any one manga or subgenre, so it's not a suitable reference for any particular manga.
I give it a 3 for Substance and a 3 for Style. What will really sell it or kill it for you isn't the presentation, though; it'll be your interest in this sort of game. It's a big departure from the typical action & adventure RPG, so if you're looking for something that concentrates a lot more on drama than action, you should definitely give HeartQuest a look.
There are actually two versions available on RPGnow, one in Active Exploits Diceless and one using FUDGE (a dice-based rules-light system). There's even a rather odd-looking campaign pack out for it, called Musical Mistresses. At about $5-$8 each, it won't cost you much to check this system out.
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