Heh heh. So this is a Japanese RPG book, called a TRPG for 'tabletalk', as 'RPG' in Japanese is used almost exclusively for the videogame type.
This here is a special one. This is the official MS Gundam RPG, using R. Talsorian Games Mekton Z rules. RTG, for those that don't know, was the company behind Cyberpunk 2020, my very favorite RPG. Mekton Z (pronounced 'zeta'), and thus Gundam Senki here, use the same system, Interlok.
Very
cool. Not sure I'd have gotten it new, listed at ¥4800 in 1999) but my
copy ran less than a quarter of that - and it still has the hex maps and
fold-up counters!So, the book is in Japanese of course, and rather difficult language (political, military, and gaming terms abound), but I now have official write-ups of the characters and mecha from the year one war! See, there's Amuro!
The book itself is about B4 sized and a very Japanese dust-jacketed softback. 336 pages, 123 pages of setting, 50 of rules, and the balance of NPC and mecha stats!
Hi!
ReplyDeleteI have been trying to find this game for a long time, I have found a seller on Internet, but I am still on the fence as I can't read Japanese, and I don't know whether the stats at least are understandable. I am particularly interested in the capital ships; are the stats in the same format as in Mekton Z?
Thanks for stopping by. The stats are mostly kanji and pretty dense. Because of that I haven't been quick with translating this. However, I have a friend who does this sort of thing professionally - so I suppose I could tap him and try to get something put together to publish here.
DeleteAs for buying the book... it runs pretty cheap on the second-hand market here... mine was near mint and only a bit over ten bucks. Don't know what the international sellers are asking... but it shouldn't be much more than that.
Stay tuned I'll try to get something together...
Hi, THANK YOU ever so much!
ReplyDeleteI have found a Japanese ebay seller, and he is asking around $75 :(
Are you based in Japan? Is there a cheaper seller you know that would consider shipping?
I had also been looking at the Gundam Sentinel Outlaws Edition website:
http://www5a.biglobe.ne.jp/~outlaws/gundam/
It is very interesting, Google does a decent job at translating, but the mechanics look somewhat complex, more wargame than RPG. I managed to create a formula to adapt their stats to the Mekton Zeta Tactical System (which uses Structural Integrity instead of locations.) I recalled an old post on the MZ mailing list, where the author of the Gundam Senki RPG posted the stats for a MS-05B Zaku, which has the equivalent of SI 7. So I normalised all the stats to the MS-05B. For example, the RX-78-2 Gundam has SI 16, which sounds about right. A Magellan capital ship would have SI 24 (which fits the "tin foil" model of ships in the Gundam universe.)
The formula is: ROUND( Basic Endurance/7+Armor (maximum value)*2/3 )
Conversion of weapons also looks pretty easy; I consider the average of the d6 rolls.
The one stumbling block I found is, there does not seem to exist any information about ship-to-ship combat, so I have no idea how to convert them (the Gun and Vice Gun stats are meaningless to me, but I might as well be missing something.)
Anyway, thanks for any and all help you will be able to provide.