BESM Kamigan

Two annoying things that can happen playing a tabletop game at a convention are having to pick a pre-made character and figure out how that character is supposed to act, and/or making up my own character if the process is long and drawn out. No one time game should lose an hour of it's four hour limit to character creation, nor should I be playing the entire game wondering if I'm living up to the gm's expectations of what my character should be doing. I mean, the gm made this character (assuming the pre-made), I did not.

I'd never even imagined I could make my own character in a con game until I played Dogs in the Vineyard. You have to give credit to indy games. They know what the common gamer struggles with and shapes their entire game structure around addressing those issues. You won't find World of Darkness, Dungeons & Dragons, or Shadowrun creators deviating very far from the tried and true methods that made them so much money. So, DitV showed me that you can make a character in a four hour one shot game, but they still took too long to do so. I think half our game was going through each of eight people creating a character one on one with the gm. Try it, it's actually very fun, just time consuming.

So, you wanna do this right? Some considerations will have to be forfeit in order to save time. I created character templates for players to choose from. It is, in many ways, a borrow from D&D, right? But at the same time I've condensed the process way way down. For normal BESM character creation you'd need the book. It's not simple, and so gives you lots of options. The templates I've made fit the world in which we'll be playing and hopefully should run as simple as: pick the race you want from 7 different, and then pick the class you want from 4 different types each of 3 categories. Warrior class has the balanced fighter, the defender, the ranger, and the dual wield. Deception class has the ninja warrior, the thief, the swindler, and the alchemist. Mage class has the swordmage, the sorcerer, the priest, and the druid. Choose a race, then choose a class, then add the few bonuses listed on the class sheet to the race sheet, grab to d6's, and you're ready to embark on a mystical, magical journey through a world filled with wonder, danger, and excitement.

Kamigan is based on the idea of D&D set in an Asian fantasy universe. It is like many manga/animes in that it can be any mood you want it to be, whether it be silly fun, serious excitement, dark and scary, or sensual. I mean, there are cat-girls in here. So, come take a journey with me, won't you? The snows have just begun to fall, the fire is warm, and the road is long. Who knows what adventures lay before us on the way to see the imperial coronation...