Anima: Beyond Fantasy

>She's at least trying to hold the Empire together
>Goes out adventuring without telling anyone
>The High senate is not allowed to do anything administrative in her absenses.
It's a wonder the empire isn't already collabsed in itself.

>Barny
>Lucanor
>Barny
OG EMPIRE OF SOLOMON COMMING BACK BBY.
>Holy
>Solomonic
>Empire

Tbf, like half the orders to the senate probably come from Kisidan, and nobody in their right mind would give him back-sass. Also, her "adventuring" is more along the lines of trying to actually SEE what's troubling her people, which is pretty admirable.

Not denying your get, or anything, but can we not? Because that shit's how Omega fucking happened in the first place...

In setting? You got flavors depending on where you are.
>An entire province that's early slavic folklore, the woods are going to eat you, the plants are going to eat you, everything is probably a demon, etc.
>A small continent that's Japan and China slammed together, both countries despise each other, and Japan swiped the stones that keep wizards from accidentally opening gates to various hells when they cast spells.
>Gritty low-fantasy provinces where nothing nice happens, the land is poisoned from an ancient war, and the ruler is a cold-blooded bastard.
>Soaring high-fantasy, including a tournament held every three years where the best combatants compete for a favor from the Empress.
>Resident Evil-style survival horror spots, including the mansion from 1 and Raccoon City. Amount of convoluted puzzles up to GM's discretion.
>Secret happenings, assassin guilds, orders of mages either bent on reinstating a Magic Empire or stopping said Magic Empire assholes from enslaving the normies, The Inquisition purging non-humans in Christ's name AMEN, and an organization of non-humans split on whether they should befriend or exterminate all humans.
>Even-more-secret organizations bent on putting their race first, one organization hell bent on killing the gods, and the Gods themselves all in a massive stalemate.
>Abdul Alhazred is a crazy chick who wants to bring down those extra-super-secret organizaitons because they keep fucking with the world and trying to pull it's strings.

>An entire province that's early slavic folklore
You forgot, because early slavic folklore doesn't HAVE enough monsters, they also had spanish and latin american folklore monsters, because fuck you, enjoy getting gangpressed into a spectral procession.

Don't forget the Inquisitors in said province who decided to fight the demons with their own magic, and are so batshit insane that it somehow is working...

No that user, but it sounds fun. Are there any trap classes or are they all viable ? I'm mostly interested in Necromancy.

>Necromancy
pls go away blacksun.

But
>classes
Anima classes are point templates, not classes on itself. hardest to make "work" is weapon master as it tends to be a more fiddly warrior.

They're all pretty viable, but Hybrid classes - Warrior Summoner, Warrior Mentalist, Wizard Mentalist, and Warlock - feel slightly weaker because they sacrifice their Secondary Abilities for combat versatility.
Weaponmasters are actually pretty easy. Just take Guardian Ars Magnus, Hard to Kill and/or Eternal Bloodline, bolster your Wear Armor, Forging, and Alchemy, and become a literal shield made out of meat, metal, and anger, that your enemies are going to have to try to do SOMETHING about before they can eat the squishier characters.

I hear Mentalism falls off at high levels, but cannot confirm, because very few people actually reach high levels.

Yes and no. It's heavily dependent on what powers are involved. Ones that force resists -
Consume, the Telepathy tree - suffer the worst of it. Powers that deal in intensities also fall off because of the increase in high-tier/enchanted armors with good elemental resists, or an increase in things that are flat-out immune to certain elements. Powers like Laser that deal regular damage are gimped only against Elementals, but the Elemental Attack Ki Ability can help. Lastly, powers that use some weapon or another - Magnetic Acceleration Attack and Ballistics - stay mostly unchanged, and even get boosts, because the items they fire can be of better quality and have better enchantments the higher the levels go.

But, Mentalism is still one of, if not the most stable of the supernatural disciplines, because it has next to no resource drain - the occasional fatigue loss from a failure - and can be fairly reliably used each and every turn, making it the second best for prolonged fights, after just straight hitting things with other things.

So then which of the classes tends to do the most damage? From my reading while Weaponmaster has bonkers high survivability potential, Acrobatic Warrior, Warrior Mentalist and Shadow seem to be up there as hurtybois.

Thief and Illusionist definitely seems to be the best non-combat classes, too. Doesn't seem like there's too much competition there.

Most THEORICAL damage?
Probably wizard being a cheeky cunt and tsunaming a major city.
On "I want to kill that guy real hard" technician and high level taos.

what is a gool alternative to Anima? beside exalted and godbound?

Unironically gurps.

The four most common ones I see are as this user says , changing Social Disadvantages to grant general CP points, raising the MK value of a couple of classes by a marginal amount, usually +5 or +10, and letting Weaponmaster DP discounts apply to Ars Magni and Impossible weapons.

Anything else tends to fall into personal taste. I know on the forums there was a couple of people who liked to divide all numbers in the system by 5 so they could make the system into a d20 system. I myself have made extra rules for Reach melee weapons and some other crap like vehicles and generic materials. After seven years of playing the game I can't say there is anything you HAVE to patch. I'd say people tend to overplay the so called "jankiness" between the various sub-systems, and if I remember correctly, pretty much every Anima thread we've had over the past few years has started with that sort of opening statement.

what options lol?

Technician can do the most raw damage with massive AoE x6 superblasts of ki, but that's generally not feasible without your GM breaking the setting to include shitloads more artifacts than it has. I'd have to say on average each sub-system, that is Ki, Magic, and Psychic is pretty balanced overall in respects to causing damage. Magic wins out over the other two overall though, since Psychic Powers don't have unique effects and Ki Powers are strictly combat effects and the like. It tends to have more "utility" with each of its effects, like Tsunami for instance as user linked above says can do things like destroy huge swathes of land at once while also letting the wizard ride his pimping boat where it doesn't usually belong.

All of them.
GURPS as anima is v. flexible and while not allowing as much supernatural skullduggery out of the gate if you don't know what the fuck to do, supplies it with a much deeper combat system.
I'd say it is a good replacement for a crunchy heroic realism feel of bullshit+shiv to the head kills you.

he also could use D6 fantasy or D6 legend

never played em so no idea.

Bad part about gurps is that it can be much more fiddly than anima, specially at high points.

Are Domnius Exxet and Arcana Exxet worth using or do the extra rules they introduce not really add much?

Use them. For Dominus, it's a massive overhaul to how techniques are made, on top of adding all kinds of neat things like Ars Magni or Impossible Weapons. For Arcana, new casting methods, metamagics and new subpaths really add to a wizard's versatility even more than they already have. Pscyhics get a little bit of stuff, as do summoners, but those are more minor. I particular favourite of mine from Arcana exxet is the Grimoire system, since it introduces limits on mages by the setting. That is, it's extremely hard for a wizard to find higher level spells in written form, meaning you can't just spam all your paths to 100 as people are wont to do. In fact, you can barely manage to hit 60 in a path off the top of my head. Anything past that and you generally tread into GM willingness territory.

Immunity-type Artifacts aren't as common at this user says, in fact, looking through prometheum exxet, you'd be hard pressed to come up with more than five artifacts that grant even ten immunities. There's a single item, the Rudraskha Ring that grants more than that (20 Electrical Immunities). One of those items is hell, the Power level 4+ Yasakani no Magatma. Essentially this means aside from one-off zeon charged items with the barest hint of 6 Intensity protections, Artifacts aren't going to play any major part at all in massively reducing the capabilities of elemental effects. You're much more likely to encounter a mage with the appropriate spells, such as a Creation Mage that boosts all resists or a Fire Mage that boosts his fire-based resists with Fire Immunity. Even then, in a normal game you're not going to see bonuses from those spells much over +20 and 20 Fire Immunities (+100 Bonus) respectively. The Fire Immunity boost does mean that the character question is likely immune to all but the strongest of Fire Effects, but the Creation boost and other similar effects just mean it's slightly harder to fuck with them is all. (By the way, when remember the bonus Accumulation rule from Chapter 16 if you really want to prevent people from going hog-wild on min-maxing.)

But he is correct to say Psychic Powers that focus on affecting resists are in general very hard to power up. You can always sink 5~ PP into a power to boost it heavily, but that comes at the cost of upgrading everything else. Strictly speaking, even the best of Psychics aren't going to achieve much better than a 240 Almost Impossible in the average "End-game", so you can look through the list of powers to check out what level of resists that actually is. For Telepathy, that generally hits 160 PsR across most of its powers, Cryokinesis is 140 PhR, while Psychokinesis/Pyrokinesis are all over the place, and so on and so forth. Helps to keep the averages in mind.

user you're quoting. In my defense, he was asking about high levels(10+), where things get out of hand and your'e picking fights with Gairas/C'iels, The Powers in the Shadow, Nightmare Lords, and Messengers.

And I never considered the averages, unfortunately, because I've been dealing with a Min-maxed Electromag/Teleportation Mentalist in my campaign, and I REALLY need to have strong counters to him and his insanely frequent open rolls.
Like the Jurgand Agent who will show up with Barnabus next session, who is packing a whopping AT 20 and immunity to Inhuman or below Psychic Powers.

Is there a significant portion of Gaia 2 translated, or just that one interregnum?

I took a stab at translating the Turak a while back. Think I got most of it right...

Maybe today will be the day I finally get around to feeding that OCR'd file through Google Translate and try to make sense of what comes out. That's why I ran the Adobe OCR over it to begin with.

Speaking of translations, is there an English version of Dramatis Personae anywhere?

No worries user, I'm particularly prickly as a GM on setting balance, but I'm not trying to make myself seem %100 correct.

Averages are good for keeping balance across the board in my opinion, regardless of what you're actually doing. Skills, Characteristics, Resistances, Life Points, etc. Lots of math unfortunately, but a little bit of work goes a long way.

I agree however, there is no shame in applying crazy numbers when it comes to the Imperium and the like. I try to be strict for the averages of all my characters and NPC's to keep the setting "level", but I'm as guilty as the next GM over for making things like the Imperium or Messengers redonk. Moreso that I've done some technomagic homebrew... hah.

Yup. here you go user. Don't ask me for its accuracy or whatnot, I got it off the old forums or on an old Veeky Forums thread, I cannot remember.

It looks pretty smooth across the board user. I can't give you a rating of how accurate it might be overall, I';m not yet that far advanced into my Spanish learning, but I can certainly tell you it's better than the results I had machine translating it after OCR'ing it.

Speaking of that... sigh, a couple months ago I finished OCR'ing all of Gaia II, then my friend and I together fully machine translated it, but I'm really not sure if I should be putting that up on the internet.

Haha I'm doing Dramatis instead of Gaia 2 because it's much easier when you don't have to proofread what's been copied out of the document. I ain't touching the stat blocks, though. Fuck all them Spanish abbreviations.

Anybody know what Ethnicity: Asher is meant to mean? My lore knowledge is a bit rusty. It's in XII's description.

Well, now I won't bother. Sling up the MT'd Gaia 2, 12-odd heads are better at editing that shit than only two.

Asher is the official English translation by FFG, and as I just mentioned my Spanish is not up to snuff whatsoever so I can't say what it might mean. You can find information on the Asher in the first Gaia and stuff.

The statblocks for Gaia II... man, that shit was a pain in the ass. I hand wrote every single one after cross checking what each abbreviation meant with the english version. And alright, here's the link to my dropbox... but sigh, it's nowhere near perfect in a lot of ways. Readable yes, but there are some areas where the machine just spit out garbage that vaguely makes sense enough to get through. This is actually why I'm learning Spanish, so I can correct my mistakes as I do a full English pass. That sadly, won't be anytime soon, but feel free to fuck with it.

dropbox.com/sh/exwwtemooavny51/AAAs12IkWN4I-Trw3m3wFNeCa?dl=0

Good luck finding that

Asher iirc is gyppo.
It is just his ethnia like ryuan (chinese) or norne (vikang)

I see you don't have the little preamble page, or the crap floating around the top of the contents. Here's the latter, I'll slap the lot into a PDF.

I am ... the legend
In the end ... you've been what everyone ...
They left?
And so ... the world comes to an end
I have many names ...
Contemplate true power

Lazarus!
Tears?
Do you finally have ... fear?
You will do ... (This is "Va a hacerlo..." which means more like "You will do xxx" than "You will suffice")
Is that the secret of your survival?
Project Eternity
Five will be ...

Va a acerlo means he will do it.

Oh that's in the very last PDF, "The END". My friend wanted to put it all in its own PDF because his OCD was triggered splitting it up between the separated PDFs.

Having it out of order triggers my autism, so I'm going to rip that apart and turn the lot into a single bookmarked PDF.

Go right ahead. Me and him decided to keep it split as it is because we have each individual chapter loaded up as its own Google Doc. It makes translating each section... hrmmm..... right, compartmentalized. I'm so brain dead right now sigh... but we compartmentalized it so we could translate it piece by piece together, working on different chapters at a time. Final products ended up staying split because I didn't want to edit a fuck-off massive PDF.

And I put up my map of Theresia into the dropbox. I linked it some months back, might as well put it in there anyways. Haven't gotten around to slaving away at the other maps due to my health (just like learning Spanish and actually editing Gaia II sigh...)

>non human """ culture"""
>IT IS OK FOR ME TO BE AN AUTHORITIATIVE FASCIST CUZ C'IEL TOLD ME
>ALL OTHER RACES BELONG IN MY DINER PLATE
>WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR
>No gods *burp* only high gnosis
>i am a literal parasite
Non humans do belong in a pike.

I'm assuming the "WAR WAR WAR" is the Duk'Zarist line, and the facist quote is the Sylvain line, but the others... no idea. To put it that way is to generalize their situation way too much however. Sure the modern Gaia is set up to place "non-humans" on a pike, but within that modern Gaia is a lot of non-humans working for peace. It's not that black and white, even for an Inquisitor (look at Alexias for example).

Give any defense to duk'zarist or vetala.
Go ahead.

The Duk'Zarist probably haven't blown up their third of the planet.

Well there's not much information on modern Vetala. I can't remember the Captain's name from Les Jaeger, but he most certainly is not a good individual. I did the Gaia II translation and I can't remember if there's any significant Vetala in there either actually... but that aside, yup, their Empire was fucked up in its own way. To them though, dominating other races to feed on since blood is their primary source of food, wasn't wrong at all. Typical vampire-like arrogance and all. It's morally dark grey in my opinion, they'd have died out as a race if they didn't consume the blood of their followers. I'm sure like with all races there are the stereotypical truly evil Vetala and there are the nicer human-loving Vetala, but anything beyond that is conjecture.

Duk'Zarist... well in the beginning they were most certainly friends of Humanity. When their warboners got ahold of them and they began their thousands of years of constant war for war's sake though... well, again, from their perspective, they're just following their Gaia-based creed of the strong rule over the weak. While less forgivable versus the very literal need to survive the Vetala must endure, the Duk'Zarist aren't an evil culture. It's like looking at Noah, the Shajad. He ain't evil either, but he sure as hell starts wars left and right to create strong opponents to clash against and defeat.

In humanity's eyes after the Imperium spread the Cult of Christ though, none of these races would have redeeming qualities whatsoever, and the morally grey areas of either culture would fade into pitch black. They were painted that way, as devils, to be exterminated because of all the strife Zhorne wanted to avoid (notably, some races tried to come to peace with humanity before tragic fuck-ups forced them into war).

>shajad aren't evil!
>zemial & mesenguis

Do people generally set their campaigns before, during, or after the Last War (Eljared starting shit)?

>looking at Noah, the Shajad.
You gotta read, boy.

Zemial and Abbadon, you mean. They are %100 evil. There is no ambiguity in their entries, even if Abbadon's entry does state he looks upon his duty as the primeval evil as more of a "theatrical" role than anything else.

Every other Shajad is neutral. Jedah? Super neutral. Noah? Bit darker but still neutral. Erebus? He made a ton of mistakes with Theresia but he isn't evil at all. Those mistakes he made out of love too, and he has his own code of conduct to boot. Eriol? So neutral it hurts. Meseguis? She's probably the darkest of these five due to what lifelong revenge means, but she's still not evil. She also cares for those grieving and suffering.

Compare to the beryls then.

Mikael is %100 good, she's taken on prayers from the Christians who don't even know their God is a fake. Gabriel is also %100 good, but she's focused on a different aspect of good, that is love and emotions. Rafael is a bit more neutral than pure good, but she's still primarily good. Uriel is probably the most neutral so far, but still, he's good-natured, especially when it comes to freedom (but that obsessive free-spirit attitude means he can't be quite fully good). Azrael is neutral for the most part, simply because while her justice is "good", she and her servants have committed their own versions of atrocities. She's much more like Noah than she might care to admit. Barakiel is flat out neutral, no ifs and or buts. She really only cares about herself and C'iel. Edamiel is very deeply evil, her corruptive hedonism on top of destructive apathy is the farthest from good any Beryl can possibly be. It's key to note however, she'd be a much more neutral deity if she dropped the whole... apathy act.

So in total, mostly good and neutral-good. Shajads are in comparison, on the darker side of neutral on average.

Edamiel is neutral, and a punishment for hedonism.

She is nothing of the sort. She is an empty being that tried to cloak herself in pleasure to disguise the apathetic void she really carried inside her. To say all hedonism leads to emptiness would be preposterous, as there is many different forms of hedonism on top of the fact that she isn't actually a punishment for it. She amongst other things, synchronizes with sociopaths who cannot understand or be understood by others, the type of person who i completely isolated from others despite being surrounded by them.

Edamiel is objectively evil, but she isn't the kind of theatrical evil that is Abbadon or the maddened lust for power that is Zemial. She is the evil created by apathy so intense it devours life and everything worth living for around it. She herself may be rather neutral because of her apathy, but the indiscriminate destruction her and her chosen inflict upon the world with their mere presence has not even a single ounce of neutrality in it.

What is the most evil beryl/sajad and why is it zemial and edamiel?

>Non humans do belong in a pike
>in a pike
I mean, yeah, you could probably use Essence or Creation magic to grow a Steelhead Pike big enough to eat a Jayan in one go...
Unless you meant the weapon, in which case just give the non-human an Envy of Spring Dagger, and they can hang out in the wooden haft of the pike.
Dodge for Duk'Zarist, Block for Vetala.
The one I'm running started about a year after the Fracture of the Heavens.
I getcha. I threw in a Lost Logias SMG in the loot the Mentalist yanked from Matty-G's castle vault. Strangely, both the Mentalist and WarSum wound up having some Solomon blood in them(which I determined by doing a percentile roll, with a 95+ being yes, everything else being no). So he can use it, but his Attack is shit. And the Solomon Bloodline might bite them if they have to retrieve their powers from Longinus.

Edamiel yes, but Abbadon is far more evil than Zemial, due to consciously working towards evil ends, rather than being an unthinking, insane beast whose very blood can drive divine executioners mad with but a drop.

Abbadon also takes being evil out of aving nothing else and even then with theatrics and over the top.

to the point of taking the name Satan for himself, no less.

With the limits to physical disadvantages, baseline high attractiveness, and affinity for fire, you could say their entire race is pretty hot.

You are funny knife ear.
You get genocided last.

Yeah - high-power GURPS chargen can be fiddly unless you take a "broad strokes" approach and don't sweat the small details so much (wildcard skills, etc). Even then, a lot depends on how the GM is doing chargen.

But if you wanted to stay around in the lower-power side of Anima's setting, I'd say that it would offer more nuance than the regular Anima rules without being more complex (at the very least, combat would be more orthodox, and there'd be more flexibility with certain power types).

Totally worth it. Promethium is great as well, big book of items - very easy to abuse, but also fairly easy to control.

Summoners get a ton of love - a lot more FF-style ability summons, and then Incarnations and the Multiple Familiars advantage. They also benefit from Sanctums more than regular mages.

>Promethium is great as well
Shame about the translation.

You're right, I have no idea what I was thinking when I was exhausted last night. Summoners have Incarnations, Sheele, and Invocations added in the book, not to mention the fact that occult rituals can be done by anyone without the gift (so summoners do exceedingly well with them generally).

There is a document written by a user on the Anima Forums that corrects most of the mechanical translation errors, though he left the fluff text untouched due to how much there is.

First time rituals.
They're... they're pretty cool.

Mechanical translation errors?

There are a bajillion fuck-ups from FFG translator in Prometheum, the worst of which are mechanics that don't work anything like their original version.

I hope that anybody that picks up the English version retranslates all the books, rather than just trying to use FFG's ones.

>All those fixes
Holy shit.
Seconded.

desu the worst is that ffg has done this a million times to a million games, it is the always the same shit
>Buy foreign IP that is popular on it's native lands
>Do a shit translation
>SEE IT DOESN'T SELL BTW WE'RE NEVER REVISING THE TRANSLATION BECAUSE IT DOESN'T SELL THIS ISN'T IN NO PART OUR FAULT.

Carlos had mentioned something on his twitter back in June about "Soon he would have information"... but there hasn't been a peep since. Well, there was a spanish post about all of Badland's indie games being off in December or something, but that doesn't count IMO. It was supposed to be about a new publisher by the way, but if four months have passed, either he's working on something in secret or whatever deal he was trying to get fell through.

I wasn't aware they'd done many other translations.

Who would people want to do Anima English Take 2? Modiphius do English versions of a bunch of Swedish stuff, and have links to Spain in that they're working with Corvus Belli, but they'd provably take 14 years to actually translate it. Cubicle 7 translate some French stuff. Judging by Gate of Memories, Anima Project's (or whoever did the translation) own English skills aren't perfect.

>either he's working on something in secret
Wasn't there something about a Gate of Memories DLC?

i never understood how Guardian works

Okay, your standard block buddy/push aside maneuver requires you to have initiative over the attacker or anticipating the attacker going after your buddy in order to even attempt it, and applies fairly nasty -30 negative penalty to your defensive skill to actually succeed in the maneuver.
Guardian ditches the Initiative/Anticipation Requirements(unless your initiative is low enough to count as being surprised against the foe) and drops the penalty to a comfy -10.
For extra lulz, combine it with Samiel: Final Retribution and an absurdly high amount of LP(From high con, being a Weaponmaster, and taking Hard to Kill 3), and turn all the LP into bonus points you can use to drop a massive fuck-off attack against the offending party.

The DLC yes, but the context of the thread had to do with finding a new publisher. If it was DLC and not an RPG publisher though, oh well.

>or anticipating the attacker going after your buddy in order to even attempt it

that is the part i don't understood

do you need do declare that action before he even think in attack your buddy?

Basically, before initiative is even rolled, you say you're anticipating a certain individual making an attack against the person you plan on defending.
That's also how anticipating surprise works, incidentally.

i would have that in mind, my game is in a eternal hiatus, to the point that i don't remember my character personality or ambitions, or anything roleplaying for that matter, the only thing i got is "the built" which is very weird, because paladin looks like a good martial class, but actually is more like a class for socials secondaries skills, like the freelancer but with more health.

I find just jotting down a few personality quirks in the "Background" field can help when session drought happens.
Of course, it's a little harder for me now, because I'm the GM of our current game, and I gotta remember who's in the are with the Party, where they are, what's going on, and what's probably going to go down.
And that's before one player goes to a wedding one weekend, his mom's birthday party the next, and another wedding the following one.

The Paladin is a fine martial class, they have good Wear Armor, LP, and skills. They make for a much better leader type fighter than a Warrior does, that's for sure. They can get decent access to Ki as well, it's just not as efficient for them as for other classes is all.

Banish is a fun plus, that shit is super cheap to use in comparison to the other summon skills.

But it comes with the drawback of one of the most heinous failure tables. going to banish a Lord of Darkness, only to fumble and have SEVERAL MORE pop up is almost guaranteed TPK material.

Errr... I never said anything of the sort. Banish is the easiest of the summoning skills to use, and to smartly use summoning skills requires planning and investment. This is no different than a pure summoner, though a Paladin has far less to worry about. To be smart about Banish, you keep it high enough to effect creatures around your level with a %100 success rate with a Five Turn +0 ritual. Anything less is just reckless stupidity.

they've done 2-3 of em

Apparently there will be news of a new book in the next couple of months.

Then again, APS also said they'd put out news about a new printing of the game in "one or two months" at the end of March, so...

I played Anima quite a bit in the day. The GM refused to drop the game even though almost everyone hated it, not least because of his tendency to push his creepy catgirl rape fetish into the storylines.

Anyway the game is shit. Lore and worldbuilding is very low rate weeaboo crap, what you see in those edgy american kids that draw a shitty webcomic trying to imitate what they think is manga, from the two or three actual manga issues they've read. And mechanically it's an abortion, with an unwieldly combat system (seriously, if you gain the initiative you've won the fight regardless of all other factors), a retarded and overcomplicated class system and a mismatched and tremendously unbalanced powers system (those summoners are OP as fuck, and ki-users are unbeatable in combat).

Really, just go and play Exalted which at least is half baked. This turd of a game is not even a quarter baked.

>0/10

Here's your (You) user, savor it.

Can someone explain me how grimories work exactly?

What about them specifically? They tend to act as either information sources on whatever occult topic they concern or as books meant to teach mages how to use whatever magic is written inside of them.

For summoners, the occult knowledge, ritual lists, and invocations are the most important. For mages, Magical Theory is the most important because it's what allows you to actually advance further along a path (though grimoires over 50 are extremely rare, meaning it's very hard to advance past that by setting). Also important to mages, if you're into casting spells from books, is the "Spells" section of the grimoire, since hey, free spells. Sadly, those spells are limited to whatever level they were written as.

Don't you have like half MA or something?

It's my groups go-to system, though the campaigns have always been in homebrew settings so I don't know shit about Anime's actual story beyond what I've seen here and tidbits of the group discussing it. Never once looked at any part of the books that didn't concern building my character