Kamigakari Thread

Legendary Arms RPG Kamigakari Thread

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>Minor storytime by kansai user's player
>Bug fixes to the Character spreadsheet
>Books are expensive, who knew
>People don't look at the question of the day
>translating a bit of the world setting.

Baseline things! And stuff:
>mediafire.com/file/183vmgy8b3w1uj3/Kamigakari.rar

Expansions and errata + Mononoke homebrew guide, FAQ, and a quick rules cheatsheet!
>pastebin.com/u/HomebrewAnon

Expansion Weapons Pastebin (Incomplete) And Item Pastebin
>pastebin.com/5LPmW9by
>pastebin.com/HzRenMqf

A character sheet hosted on Google Sheets (for online play!)::
>docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U2usvvHVbKX1OdaaOVvEykud1vr7PW9cRQz8LlUqiIY/edit?usp=sharing

Kamigakari is a JTTRPG focused on episodic storytelling, with simple but tight mechanics. Its design goal is to start players spread out, getting involved with the episode's peculiarities, and eventually coming together to fight a big bad, A la tokusatsu shows, magical girl shows, and/or other such shows in that vein.

TL;DR, Its a Monster of the Week Format game with an emphasis in the fluff on high power shenanigans of just about every type.

Japanese schedules suck, so JTTRPGS are optimized toward quick and easy sessions.That said, they can be adapted for longer ones with little to no effort.

Other urls found in this thread:

discord.gg/9RUTurB
screencapanon.imgur.com/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

/jttrpg/ Discord - Look for games in #on-topic, not #general.
discord.gg/9RUTurB

Storytime Imgur
>screencapanon.imgur.com/

Today's question:
>How well do you truly know the World setting of kamigakari?

I'm gonna give people a little to mull it over and think of how well you understand the setting some, before i go into it. Lets see how confident you guys really are.

40 minutes is about enough time, i think. But i'll start us off easy with this, With the paragraph for GM's to read to players.

>Kamigakari is a modern fantasy TRPG with a theme of superhumans battling false gods. PCs take on the role of —superhumans that wield power like that of the gods—and seek to destroy , the false gods. Think of “modern fantasy” like a story where people with special bloodlines, supernaturally powered heroes, and practitioners of magic investigate inexplicable incidents that occur in modern day society.

This is the first bit of information a GM is supposed to give to players, a rough summary of the themes and setting Involved in Kamigakari. Nothing groundbreaking, and if you are here at all you either know this, or figured it out.

I thought most people don't dig the base setting since it's super generic and designed for MotW, and immediately move on to using their own or at least change up the details. I myself couldn't name any of the NPCs in the book off the top of my head, so there's that

Partially, you are right. But thats because we never really looked into it terribly hard. I'm also grabbing some pictures where i can to reinforce certain things, which i hope will help.

Either way though, we never really went terribly in-depth. It was mostly my fault because i encouraged refluffing way too much, and people latched to that really hard.

That said, the setting, while somewhat generic, can be pretty interesting if you actually read into it. There's a lot of minute details you don't get just by skimming, which i'll go over when the time comes.

Next is "The Awakened". This is literally anyone capable of using a shard. Aramitama, God hunters, Mononoke, Even your equipment, to one degree or another. Conversely to this are "Innocents" those with no capability to use a shard, and no knowledge of the secret world of the awakened. The awakened all do everything in their power to keep the innocent out of the loop, so as to prevent causing world wide panic.

Each group of awakened each has an overarching goal. For godhunters, its the promise of ascension. For Mononoke, simply to keep on living and surviving. For Aramitama, They wish to become whats known as an Avatar of ruin.

Mononoke, In their struggle to survive, have special abilities unique to themselves. They have an aversion to sunlight, as their spirit is stagnant, and must by necessity do something about this. As such, They are capable of rooting their spirit barrier to a leyline, in a process called "Sanctify". By sanctifying their spirit barrier and rooting themselves to the leyline, they create a flow of spirit energy in their barrier, keeping them healthy and whole, while at the same time keeping out the sunlight that burns away stagnation. After having rooted, they can change the inside of their barrier to anything they wish, unlike a normal spirit barrier which is a mirrored landscape of the area it is activated in. Their natural enemies are Aramitama, who hunt them for their shards so as to become more powerful.

The promise of ascension is called many things in many cultures, but the general consensus is that it is a near omnipotent power that will bring happiness to all creatures not twisted by chaos and destruction. Both Godhunters and mononoke are interested in this to some degree, but Godhunters seek this above all else. Its the Holy grail, Ars Magna, Beltane, the Last Rune, Da’at, the Sage's Elixir. Any of these is a derivitive of the "Promise of ascension". Godhunters strive to obtain this power, in the hopes of ridding the world of aramitama for good. This is the grand goal of all godhunters.

Conversely, though, Aramitama seek nothing but destruction. They are entities made of pure chaos and destruction. Their goal is to become an avatar of ruin, a world ending creature that cannot be stopped once fully realized, And their method is the Contract of souls. By granting wishes in return for the souls of the wisher and any victims they create as a result, Aramitama hope to use the sheer spritual energy of so many souls for the purpose of Becoming avatars of ruin. However, you will never see two aramitama working together except perhaps under the scenario where they are two parts of the same whole .

Each and every aramitama wants to be the first and ONLY Avatar of ruin, and this divide is what allows godhunters and mononoke alike to stave them off. It is not a matter of intelligence or sapience, but raw instinct that each mononoke is a solitary creature, feeding on the spirit energy of mononoke and humans alike to become something grander. These two goals are so converse that even with the wish-granting powers of the covenant of souls, you cannot find the method to activating the promise of ascension. It is completely impossible, but no one is sure of the exact reason for this.

I know it well enough to know that there is nothing to know about it other than [insert random unrelated trope and hide it in convenient reality bubbles so it doesn't have to make any sense].

Well thats just overly pessimistic.

It also doesn't help that we barely have half the world information due to not having around 6 books worth of fluff

Anyways, All awakened have two things in common. The first is their shard and control of spirit energy, and the second is the crest that forms as a result. All awakened, bar none, have a crest. It is a symbolic representation of you as a whole. Spirit energy is the power that all awakened have, and use. While godhunters and mononoke have regular bodies that can be hurt and injured, Aramitama do not. They have entirely spritual bodies, and aren't capable of being harmed by anything but spirit energy. However, when an aramitama gains a body through a contract of souls or other means, they lose this immunity.

Everything with a shard has a crest, and with that crest comes a god name. These God names are monikers that define an awakened at the rawest of levels. When identifying an opposing awakened, what one looks at isn't their skills, abilities, or anything else, but the crest. Crests, regardless of their placement on your body, will shine through any cloth or armor once spirit energy is being used. It glows with a rainbow like light that pierces through all manner of concealment, revealing itself. However, Aramitama are exceptions to this, to a degree. Their god names and crests are warped, and altered. Nearly unintelligible to anything or anyone, but for the smartest of godhunters.In regular terms, Crests are like barcodes, and aramitama's crest is like a barcode that got twisted by heat or water

sorry for the low quality image, i needed to take it using my phone. I'll get a scan of the full pages when i have the opportunity

Quick question, do [Doubles] and [Steps] count as two portions, or one?

For example, if I had Invincible Manslayer, Attack Magic Expert, and Grand Spell Invocation, would GSI become free, or just require any one die?

The way i ruled doubles is that things like attack magic expert essentially acts as an overflow dice, meaning any one dice is okay.

With that specific combination, i would argue that it would do the same. You are reducing it to two die with invincible manslayer, then providing an overflow with AME, Making it cost any one die.

Moving right along, the topic of Shards and Gold.

Shards Are the source of all power in kamigakari. They are the be all and end all of being a godhunter, mononoke, aramitama, or anything inbetween. Shards are small rainbow glowing bits of metal, passed down from the age of true gods. Everything you use as a godhunter has a shard, from you to your armor and weapons. The reason that your weapons can be used against the forces of aramitama is that they channel your spirit energy through a miniscule shard, and your armor can defend for the same reason. When a particularly large shard loses all its power, it loses its glimmer as well, becoming an empty vessel known as a "Kushimitama". Kushimitama are powerful and transient pieces of once powerful creatures, and can be used for many great and terrible thngs. However, if they are not used as quickly as possible, the shard will dissipate, returning to the earth.

As such, god hunters, Unless they have a specific use for the kushimitama in mind, will transmute the kushimitama into Fools Gold. At one point, someone asked me why it is called fools gold, due to its similarly monikered counterpart Pyrite. The answer to that is that the name is entirely facetious. The gold gained from transmuting kushimitama is 100% pure gold, In the form of cylindrical ingots rather than coins. This pure gold is used in creating artificial regalia and other equipment, Since it can channel spirit energy incredibly well. However, it should be known that this gold is worth immense amounts of regular money. Yen, dollars, etc. A single Gold is worth several hundred thousand japanese yen, or several thousand dollars, each. As such, no godhunter will ever need to worry about money in regular society, as even a single gold will have them set for months.

Now for a moment here, i'ma break away from the fluff to get into some of the crunch.

The reason that divine souls regalia creation and similar talents do not give the gold to the player using it, is that the gold itself is used as material in making whatever is bought. Its basically alchemy with fools gold acting as the ultimate filler ingredient.

That said though, when learning that fools gold is 100% pure gold, i wondered if the gold found in the ground was actually from ancient mononoke, godhunters, and aramitama, mushed into the earth and turned into less than pure chunks.

As well as this, There's a reason besides spirit barriers that innocents don't know anything about the "Awakened world" as it were.

The reason for this is that the mass amounts of spirit energy used by all awakened cause all electronics to become inundated with heavy static, that looks like the item in question has simply malfunctioned. Regular equipment simply isn't capable of holding up against it, and simply stops working until the spirit energy is gone, which is likely when a battle is over. So even outside of spirit barriers, no one will get a picture or video. Perhaps not even audio.

This means that anything that is witnessed by innocents is spread wholly by word of mouth. Rumors, however, are interesting and powerful things. To the point that one distortion in the GM section focus' on this specifically. The only awakened to have carved their names into history are beings of myth and magic above and beyond the norm, such as shuten douji, king arthur, frankenstein, and many, many others. Gods, demons, and anything inbetween from myth and legend.

Most stories simply end as rumors, one offs that don't do enough to create a new myth, and so the awakened world treats them as fads, or interesting folk stories. However, some get famous in the regular world for being psychics, religious figures, and experts in various fields, as a result of cultivating a reputation slowly but surely.

That said, the electronics used by godhunters likely are made with fools gold and miniscule shards, like the weapons and armor they use, to allow them to use them effectively. these would probably be the so-called "Cursed items", that appear in rumor now and again.

So for right now, i'ma leave it here. I'd like for people to ask any questions they have about the setting so far, and i'll do my best to answer them.

Just for clarification, we only have the setting info from 2-3 books out of how many?

2.1 out of 8 in total, with 7 and 8 being mostly fluff and scenario's.

Elaborating on this a bit, we have the core book and the fluff of one, and a paragraph or two from book 2, as well as the additional rules from page 18 and 19.

On the bright side, we're making progress, for the first time since kamigakari user went MIA, slow as it may be.

Progress is progress.

It's realistic. And based on the mechanics, which we do have and which show the same amount of love and care and creativity: just bolt an interesting idea or two onto a bog standard system, don't think about how they could actually meaningfully interact with the system and call it a day.

If you don't like the system, why are you here?

I don't see the issue, honestly. The mechanics and settings are both simple, yes, but they are also well considered. They take into account a lot of small things that most systems would simply handwave, like how using abilities affects electronics, or why your characters use gold in a modern day society. Its succinct, but it does effectively make a setting and deals with most glaring flaws in logic, even before considering the ability to put up spirit barriers.

As for how the mechanics are seperated from the setting, i would argue this is to the systems strengths. Every system i've ever played where the setting is wholly ingrained into the mechanics ends up bogging down the mechanics for otherwise simple considerations. In DnD, as an example, martial fighters are often bogged down by ungodly amounts of ruleslawyering and reading. In shadowrun, even making a simple attack with a gun requires 12 or so steps. God help you if you aren't just hired muscle. By seperating the mechanics from the setting, the mechanics are allowed to do as they please, and so can the setting without being inundated with pointless amount of reading just to trip someone. Thus why we have expansions for both eldritch horrors and time travel.

TL;DR Being simple means it can do more without breaking its internal logic or bogging down sessions reading rules entries

Actually, thinking on it a bit, one of the most glaring issues in the system is that spirit barrier is just given to you at full power. It reduces the tension a great deal.

If they'd instead made it weaker to start with, like just the hammerspace and ability to hold a dude in it, and you had to use talents to get the full power one, would that be better?

I don't know too many JTTRPGs (really just this one) but at least for JRPGs, divorcing mechanics from the setting is par for the course. It can be good and bad since it means you can do quirky things mechanically, but at the same time you tend to wonder why characters with godlike powers don't use them outside of combat.

I kinda agree with though, I don't think there's as much thought put into the mechanics as you'd like. Combat in my campaign started to feel very same-y until the GM started including curve balls of his own design to mix it up - things like terrain effects and puzzle boss fights. Plus there's occasional talent design like Dark Killing Arts which just seems retarded.

>but at the same time you tend to wonder why characters with godlike powers don't use them outside of combat.

Actually, Kamigakari takes this into consideration with maneuvers and rules for using talents in scenes, but otherwise, i get what you mean.

Also, i'm not saying everything is mechanically sound. Not by a long shot. Mysteries of battle and dark killing arts are two such examples. I just mean that, for the most part, the system isn't bogged down by pointless junk, and keeps its core systems relatively simple and streamlined, allowing for quick and fun combat.

That said, the game is intended for GM's to start throwing those curveballs. Thats why it gives rules for creating distortions, mononoke, statting godhunters as NPCs and even bosses, and such. The largest issue in this is that the book doesn't have rules for making mononoke, which was fixed, albeit a bit slipshod, by homebrew user, and that we simply don't have at least 2-4 books worth of mechanics for GMs to use. As one example, i had a couple bosses use the arts adaptation talent from the first expansion, and it vastly changed the dynamics of specific moves and skills, because if you know the mononoke will die regardless you can make them suicide bomb and hope for a DKO. It also lets you attempt to heal up to a point where the damage is negated, and continue the battle from there.

If i had to say, the system gives a rough outline, expecting GM's to do their own thing.

>Thats why it gives rules for creating distortions, mononoke, statting godhunters as NPCs and even bosses, and such

Sorry, i meant "Altering mononoke", not creating.

Yeah, the barrier to lethality does sorta lower the stakes a bit

I'm drunk and what is this?

This is Kamigakari, a japanese rpg (generally) about high powered shonen heroes fighting demons and shit. It's rather nice.

Here's the first paragraph the most basic summary possible

>Kamigakari is a modern fantasy TRPG with a theme of superhumans battling false gods. PCs take on the role of —superhumans that wield power like that of the gods—and seek to destroy , the false gods. Think of “modern fantasy” like a story where people with special bloodlines, supernaturally powered heroes, and practitioners of magic investigate inexplicable incidents that occur in modern day society.

Finally some positivity. I appreciate that.

woops. first part of this was meant for

>Finally some positivity. I appreciate that.
I haven't followed the thread for a while, has people been grumpy or something?

Its been pretty negative, yeah. There have been a couple encouraging comments, like and , but most of its been fairly negative

I should mention, thats just this thread. Previous threads were pretty okay, but someone mentioned last time that part of the reason we don't have a lot to say is that we pretty much already know the rules by now. By extension, that means we haven't gone over the setting enough, so i was trying to get into it this thread, but then it just started getting negative almost out the gate.

I dunno why it is, but every time the setting gets mentioned at length, people get a stick up their ass

Probably down to how Kamigakari-user sold the game as fluff-able to every setting and ignore the base one, so most people did. The couple games I know about started with the base lore going out the window and being replaced with what-the-fuck-ever; I think even with the small pool of players interested in the game probably half or less of them are interested in the actual setting. And then there's some less-than-agreeable setting stuff like spirit barriers - I personally think it's ridiculous that a single kushimitama is worth twelve million dollars per player. Although I do want to play a godhunter who's needlessly decadent with his fool's gold, and a non-godhunter detective/investigator/master thief bumbles around trying to discover where the money comes from.

Yeah, i agree with the spirit barrier thing. Its a little too convenient to just have straight up. The thing with electronics is good, it gives some very logical credence to the lack of evidence about awakened, but the spirit barrier makes that somewhat moot, as is.

Personally though, i can somewhat understand the reason. Making a new character is a somewhat time consuming process, taking around half an hour to an hour if you know what you want. In japan, thats a lot of time, so lethality needs to go down as a result.

Also, where did that math come from for kushimitama? Assuming 3K Gold is 1:1 with 100K yen that'd only be 3 mil. Thats still a massive amount, but its not quite as easy to throw away 3K gold in potential firepower. I still love the idea for your character though.

In your opinion, if we altered spirit barriers a little, how positively do you think it would affect the game? It makes sense for mononoke and aramitama to use spirit barriers wholesale, but not so much for godhunters who's survival on a day to day basis doesn't rely on them.

I just assumed spirit barriers were a thing to solve the problem of massively destructive anime fights in places people actually care about.

They are, and they do, but the fact that they can be put up by players at any time with no cost is very limiting in what could otherwise be very dramatic area's. The book makes it seem like not all fights happen in a spirit barrier, due mostly to freelance godhunters, but at the same time there's never a reason NOT to put it up. No time lag, no cost, no death, no reason not too.

But no, the part i'm talking about is how barriers prevent characters from dying outright, and only give them [Shift:Taken out].

Two possible fixes i can think of are either to give it a time lag by altering the timing or cost of putting up a full barrier, or to remove the issue of non-lethality, since it doesn't actually make sense to start with. That would require altering how shifts work though, so the former could be an interesting solution. The third would be introducing a way to mechanically include the demerits of staying in spirit barriers for extended lengths of time, but i'm not sure how well that'd go.

I agree that spirit barriers preventing death is a tad bit iffy. Good thing people don't have to play exactly as the book says.
I've been thinking about the spirit barrier requiring some sort of upkeep. I don't know what, but I'm thinking you "lock" one of your spirit dice and can't use it for anything, to represent stress from maintaining a barrier. And then some sort of benefit from being the one in control of the spirit barrier, so the players and the monster would struggle for control of the zone. I think there could be done some real neat things with a sub-dimensional space that people can summon at will.

It is a touch confusing. The book states: "Awakened can create large quantities of Fool's Gold by fusing spirit energy with a Kushimitama. Fool's Gold made in this fashion is, rather than a coin, in the form of a cylindrical ingot that weighs around 100 grams." One would assume, contextually, it means the Kushimitama as a whole turns into a 100g ingot BUT

It says just a couple paragraphs down from that - "Because 1G, as mentioned before, is a gold ingot that weighs about 100 grams", and G is explicitly the unit of currency, not the ingot. So I went with that, and my math goes - 1G = 100 grams, 100 grams of gold is worth $4286.33, a Kushimitama gives 3000G per player, so * 3000 = $12,858,990.

That said I looked into it a bit more, and if 1G is in fact a 100g ingot, then each Kushimitama would be 300 kilos of gold and weigh five times as much as the average person. That sounds inconvenient, even for godhunters, so I'm inclined to think the line about 1G being a 100g ingot might be a mistranslation or else me just failing at reading comprehension.

>3000 for each player

Thats actually wrong. Its 3000 total gold per kushimitama, not per player. If used in that way, a kushimitama gives a flat 3000 gold. admittedly, your math is more accurate, but assuming 4 players and 3000 gold, the math would equal out to around 3M each like i said before.

Also, Don't forget the hammerspace. of the effects of spirit barrier, i think this is one of the better ones. It means they don't actually need to worry about the weight of the gold.

Well, i had two methods in mind.

First, change the timing to attack. This would make it so putting up the full barrier spends an action.

My second idea, is to give it a horrendous Spirit cost, as its supposed to be an area of extremely high density spirit energy 500 meters in diameter.

Third, Lock godhunter spirit barrier behind talents, and require those talents to unlock functions of the barrier. Increasing its size, effectiveness, whatever.

Oh whoops, my bad. Not sure why I thought it was per player - 3M is still a fuckton though. Which does make me wonder, does the setting mention how a PC goes about selling their Fool's Gold? Especially if you were playing, for example, a random-ass high schooler, offloading several hundred thousand dollars worth of gold is the kind of thing regular authorities notice.

I would imagine that the same companies that use fools gold to make artificial regalia would be willing to shell out the cash for that same gold if said equipment isn't what a godhunter wants.

Alternatively, its not like a currency exchange wouldn't be able to do it to some degree. Or perhaps specprov, as another example.

Actually, now that i'm thinking of it, what if all the gold in the world is actually "Fools gold" in varying degree's of purity, and the reason its a valuable metal used to back money is that its a stockpile of potential armaments?

That's actually a neat idea. Fool's Gold only comes from Aramitama though, so we're talking a LOT of dead false gods over the millennia. Could build up some lore about ancient wars between aramitama and true gods that left behind the veins of gold that's mined by innocents? That sort of world-building isn't my specialty, but you could maybe do something creative there.

It's not like there aren't businesses that sell to Awakened. I'm sure the Blackeagle Group would accept payment in Fool's Gold, for example. Someone who ends up with 3k G is probably going to spend most of it upgrading their equipment.

Actually, each player gets a Kushimitama.

>If the [Boss] is an Aramitama, all PCs each get a [Shard], and after acquiring XP, the [Shard] changes into a [Kushimitama]. Once the [Final Battle] is over with, the episode proceeds to the [Episode End].

Oh. Well shit, guess i got brain problems. Sorry for spreading misinformation.

That said, any GM that thinks thats too much is perfectly capable of just saying its one per duder.

I don't know. I kind of like Godhunters being rich as hell. Godhunters, almost as a rule, are independently wealthy, and even then, hunting aramitama is really expensive. Given that the core book says 1G is worth "several hundred thousand yen" (I assume about 300K), a basic two-handed Artificial Regalia sword costs over four hundred million yen. I have this great mental image of the Awakened community being made up of people who are all casually throwing around millions of dollars on shit that only they use.

oh, i totally agree. The idea of them being independently wealthy makes it harder to leverage them with regular money as well.

On the whole, i think its neat to have them be so separate from society because so far as society is concerned, they don't exist.

That said, i can also see an argument against that, as it breaks the logic of certain concepts, like a shotgun slinging ex-military hobo. That said, it just means they need to be hobo's out of choice, which isn't terribly far-fetched.

Well considered? They are both made of a very basic concept (modern world; slug away at HP until one side drops dead) and one or two ideas (Godhunters, Aramitama; Spirit), adding only the barest minimum of interaction to justify their existence.

There is no coherent purpose to the mechanics of the game and their design. Classes have no mechanical identity and battle boils down to simply reducing HP pools, with the only real variable being the speed at which it happens. Not because that is in any way interesting or made interesting, but because that's the way the creator just assumes RPGs are supposed to be.

I did not even mention the separation of setting and mechanics, only how both of them are separately, each for itself poorly thought out and incoherent.
It is also quite funny how the games you mention as examples for the integration of setting and mechanics are actually ones whose settings and mechanics are actively hostile towards each other. Not to mention that this has nothing to do with their inelegance and complexity. Those stem from the fact that the mechanics of these systems are complex for complexity's sake and bogged down by legacy elements. And simple is not automatically good, or elegant for that matter. Kamigakari is none of these. It's better than D&D and Shadowrun, but only because that's a low bar and its probable design process is marginally better.

1G is approximately $4286.33 or 471,946.36 yen, going off the value of actual gold. Which makes my characters current sword (value of 15,000g thanks to various Arms upgrades) cost 64 million USD, or 7,046,720,000 yen.

>adding only the barest minimum of interaction to justify their existence.

And this is a problem how? All it is attempting to do is justify juxtaposing the fights of myth and legend into the modern day, while keeping it secret to the majority. And it does that.

>Classes have no mechanical identity

What do you even mean by this?

>It's better than D&D and Shadowrun, but only because that's a low bar and its probable design process is marginally better.

So what, in your opinion, would actually be a good game?

I, Bookanon, Have come bearing gifts! Gifts of images! From the core book!

sorry for the filesize on the colored sets. i had to lower compression for the sake of quality.

I am also a retard! I forgot the first file!

...

Here are the NPC pictures for the core book. To figure out who's who is pretty easy, just compare the translated entries ages.

Still Retarded, those are the mononoke class pictures. Those are in order

I'm planning to crop out the actual art from these, i just needed to put them somewhere to switch from computer to computer. may take me a bit though