In this episode I’m joined by Jake Richmond–one of the designers of Panty Explosion and other great games–to discuss anime fans as a potential market for RPGs. We discuss our experiences running games at anime conventions (particularly his experiences at Kumoricon in Portland, Oregon), and how best to design games that can appeal to anime fans.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #11 (46 minutes, 57 seconds)

Show Notes

1. Introductions
• See games by Jake (and Matt and Nick!) at the Atarashi Games website
• Jake Richmond Interview on Geekorner Part 1 and Part 2
2. RPGs at Anime Cons
• Kumoricon, a local anime con in Portland, Oregon
• GameStorm, a local gaming con in Washington.
• Go Play Northwest
3. Designing For Anime Fans
• High School Debut, one of Jake’s favorite manga.
• Tales from the Floating Vagabond
• Mike Holmes talks (rants) about combat systems and photographers.
• Playtest doc for Ewen’s Azumanga Daioh-inspired Raspberry Heaven game.
• SaiKano (Saishuu Heiki Kanojo/She, The Ultimate Weapon)

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

In this episode I’m joined again by my friend Jon Baumgardner to talk about Blue Ocean Strategy and how it might be applied to designing and marketing small-press RPGs.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #10 (43 minutes, 14 seconds)

Show Notes

1. What is Blue Ocean Strategy?
• Tom Peters
• Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean; existing vs. untapped market space.
• Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore
• Blue Ocean Thoughts: Sell Me On…, a post from this blog on “fair process.”
2. Innovating the Medium
• Serial Homicide Unit (and the mp3 demo)
• D&D Podcast on WotC’s structure for selling miniatures, an example of Dungeon Tiles, and the Dungeon Delve supplement that explicitly references Dungeon Tiles.
• Disposable Heroes paper miniatures from Precis Intermedia
• Joe McDonald’s Ribbon Drive
3. Innovating in Marketing
• Evil Hat’s PDF Policy, and the episode of That’s How We Roll where Fred talks about his views on PDFs.
4. Addendum: Overcoming Objections
• Natural 20 Podcast
5. Any questions you’d like us to discuss in the future? Please comment!

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

In this podcast I give an overview of a talk between Ryo Kamiya (designer of Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake) and South (current publisher of Witch Quest) about “everyday magic” RPGs that appeared in a doujinshi they collaboratively produced called “Doko ni Demo Aru Fushigi.” They discuss the challenges of heartwarming, nonviolent RPGs.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #9 (20 minutes, 9 seconds)

1. Introduction
• The RPG Haven Podcast
• Doko ni Demo Aru Fushigi’s Cover, from Tsugihagi Honbo (some NSFW content)
• Witch Quest, from Majo no Kai
2. Games Without Combat
3. Assembling Scenarios
4. Conventions & Catharsis
5. The Limitations of Classes/System Does Matter
6. Kamiya’s Early RPG Experiences
7. A Fantasy Countryside
• Beast Bind
• Double Cross
• Tokyo NOVA

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

In this episode I talk about the referential nature of geek subcultures, and how that affects and can be used by role-playing games. Nerds naturally reference stuff, and use that to communicate better by generating a shared subculture. The question is, how can RPGs take full advantage of that, in both play and design? This is another solo episode, because in some ways I like doing those better, despite the fact that it’s harder to come up with good topics for them.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #8 (42 minutes, 17 seconds)

Show Notes

1. Introduction
• The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art by Daniel Mackay
• Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine
2. Intertextuality of Geek Subcultures
• My current D&D character Octavia was partly inspired by Devilotte from CyberBots.
3. Big Setting Games
• Nightwish’s song “Wishmaster” and Blind Guardian’s song “Soulforged” (a fan video with footage from the unfortunate direct-to-video movie) are both based on Raistlin’s adventures from the DragonLance novels.
• I’m working on both a novel and an RPG for my Slime Story setting. Here’s the prologue, and if you’ll recall, episode 3.5 of this podcast was a reading of that.
4. Otaku Culture
• Otaku know series like Gundam, Yamato, Evangelion, and more recently stuff like Lucky Star and K-On!.
• The Touhou Project
• Jonathan Walton’s Bliss-Robed Lie, a great example of what hacking and riffing RPGs can produce.
5. Using and Creating Subcultural Contexts
• Nathan Fillion visited our GURPS Firefly game at Gen Con SoCal.
• Canon Puncture Actual Play, featuring the Star Wars PTA game.
• Queen’s Blade, Japanese Lost Worlds game books that in turn have spawned a franchise with figures, an anime series, etc.
• Pinky St. dolls!
• Toki Densho Angel Eyes, a really cool, but very obscure Japanese PlayStation fighting game. (Available from the PlayStation store!)
• Abstract Nova publishes the Althelia RPG, and Tales of the Seven Dogs Society, an anthology of stories based on the game’s world.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Of Podcasts
As I alluded to before, I’ve decided to slow down the podcasting a bit, not that I ever had much of a schedule to speak of. I’m slowly setting up a couple more interviews, but I have more than enough other stuff going on at the moment.

However, WalkerP over at The RPG Haven has started up a podcast of his own. The first episode, an interview with Cynthia Celeste Miller (of Spectrum Games), just went online today.

More on Raspberry Heaven

As you might have surmised, I’m gearing up to start playtesting Raspberry Heaven, and having entirely too much fun preparing the materials for it. I printed and cut out two sets of quirk cards, and even made a (flimsy) box for them. There was also a short thread on the game on Story Games, where it was pointed out (not for the first time) that the text doesn’t make it clear enough that the characters are all schoolgirls; I’m working on fixing that now.

I’m also working on scripts for 4-koma comics to put in the book, but I’m not having any luck finding an artist to hire who can actually draw 4-panel comics with screen tone. I may have to look into getting someone from Japan, something I’ve been wanting to figure out how to do anyway.

In this episode I talk briefly about a variety of different topics that have been on my mind.

1. PDFs and Piracy
• Palladium Books on RPGNow
• DLSite.com, Japan’s major site for selling electronic doujinshi stuff. Among the few tabletop RPG products are some stuff from Tsugihagi Honbo and Kodanuki Soba (which does D&D4e adaptations of elements of the Dragon Quest games).
2. Randomness and Cinematic Role-Playing
3. Oban Star-Racers
• Official Oban Star-Racers Site
• Sav! The World Productions
• Oban at Shout! Factory
• Preview of Episode 1 on Veoh
4. Grognardia: Genre Bending
5. Raspberry Heaven Design Notes
• Raspberry Heaven Playtest Rules
• Sunshine Sketch, available from Yen Press
6. The “Pink Panther” is what you get when you put a scoop of strawberry ice cream into lemon-lime soda.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #7 (32 minutes, 26 seconds)

Next Time
I haven’t decided what to do next. ^_^;

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen (with his mascot character Kurumi) courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

In this episode I’m joined my by longtime friend Jon Baumgardner. He’s worked at several different companies doing marketing and brand management for anime, and I brought him on to talk about marketing techniques for small-press/indie RPGs, and for marketing to anime fans.

There’s a bird cooing in the background in some parts. I don’t feel like re-recording. Meow.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #6 (50 minutes, 37 seconds)

Show Notes

1. Introductions
• Jon’s blog and Jon’s twitter.
• Master Plan #47: Tangibility in Mechanics
2. What is marketing?
3. Small-Scale Marketing
4. Selling an Experience
5. Marketing to Anime Fans
• OVA: Open Versatile Anime
• Anime conventions include FanimeCon, Anime Expo, Otakon, etc.
• GeekBrief.tv
6. Specific Techniques
• FatCow Web Hosting
• Tom Peters, Seth Godin
7. Addendum: New Millennium Currencies
• Anime News Network
• The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss (and Tim Ferriss’ blog)

Next Time
The next episode will be “Random Thoughts”, another solo podcast, where I’ll talk briefly about several different topics that have been on my mind.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Somewhat embarrassing but very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

(For an added bonus, I recorded a piece on Dragonball Evolution for Anime Confessions.)

In the second half of my discussion of Japanese RPGs with Andy Kitkowski, we talk about indie/doujin TRPGs, some neat games we’ve seen, and localization issues. Also, for whatever reason the mp3 file worked out to be precisely 40 minutes.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #4 (40 minutes)

Show Notes

• Comiket is a massive convention for selling fan-made comics and such.
• Tsugihagi Honbo, Ryo Kamia’s doujin circle. Sunset Games, his original publisher.
• Flowers is an adaptation of the Touhou series.　Here’s the dice they made.
• Gundog, a modern action game.
• Silver Rain
• Meikyuu Kingdom
• Yuuyake Koyake, another game by the designer of Maid RPG.

Next Time
Next time I’ll be joined by my longtime friend Jon Baumgarder to talk about marketing for small-press/indie RPGs and to anime fans.

Andy and I will definitely be talking about Japanese RPGs more in the future, so please feel free to let me know about any other topics you might want to hear more about.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

In this episode I’m joined by Andy Kitkowski to talk about Japanese tabletop RPGs. This is sort of a general overview, and we’ll be returning to this topic in future podcasts to discuss various things in more detail. Our talk went on long enough that I’m splitting it into two installments. This time around we talk about how RPGs came to Japan, the Japanese TRPG subculture, and Japanese RPG design trends.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #4 (43 minutes, 23 seconds)

Show Notes

• Meanwhile… The Super Games Podcast. Episode 12 is Andy’s interview about Tenra Bansho Zero.
• Sword World, the foremost Japanese-made TRPG.
• Record of the Lodoss War on Wikipedia. Originally featured in Comptiq magazine.
• Lucky Star manga artist Kagami Yoshimizu got into RPGs through Lodoss War novels and replays.
• In Episode 66 of Canon Puncture, Jason Morningstar talks about Fiasco.
• Night Wizard, a game from F.E.A.R.
• Ryuu Tama (Dragon Egg)
• Alshard ff, a Final Fantasy-inspired TRPG, also from F.E.A.R.
• Fusou Bukyouden, a wuxia RPG.
• Tokyo NOVA, the first Japanese cyberpunk TRPG.

Next Time
In the second part of our discussion, we cover doujin/indie RPGs, some neat Japanese games we’ve seen, and localization issues.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

This is a special “bonus” podcast with a reading of the prologue of Slime Story: The Legend of Doug, a novel set in the same world as the Slime Story RPG I’ve been working on. The main character is an average teenage monster hunter named Doug, and in this chapter an ordinary monster hunting run becomes one of his most memorable ever when he runs into Rita, Los Banos’ #1 monster hunter and host of the Monster Show video blog.

If you want to read some more of the story, I’ve posted up a draft of Chapter 1: Saying Yes on DeviantArt.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #3½ (17 minutes, 59 seconds)

Next Time
For the next episode, Andy Kitkowski and I will be sitting down to talk about Japanese tabletop RPGs in general. Please comment if there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear us talk about.