This past weekend I was lucky enough to run some playtests of Alter Arms at Katsucon, an annual anime convention in the Washington, D.C. area. There, I got some great feedback that I wanted to write about in order to review the game’s current status. WHAT’S NEW? I had three sessions of about six players each with most players being in their early 20s, but most having only a peripheral knowledge of the subject matter based on exposure to Power Rangers and Sailor Moon. Most players were experienced with other tabletop role playing games, and those with little to no experience said that they felt they were able to grasp the system pretty well. Compared to last time, I had pregenerated characters with names and motives written on the character sheets in order to give players material to work with when acting them out. I also increased the difficulty of the encounters, and also increased the characters’ levels to match the challenge. The enemies the players fought were tougher overal...

I had the opportunity to playtest Alter Arms at the Music and Gaming Festival (MAGFest) earlier this year, and wanted to post about how the experience went. FEEDBACK I tested the game once on Thursday with three players, twice on Friday with six in the morning and six in the afternoon, twice on Saturday with six in the morning and six in the afternoon, and once on Sunday with two players, for a total of six sessions. Each session ran about an hour and a half, with games with more players running into two hours. After each session, I recorded a freeform survey of the group to gather their opinions. POSITIVES Almost all of the feedback was positive. Players said they enjoyed how the system enabled them to create their characters how they saw fit, which I had intended in my efforts to emulate the source material. I designed the three vector stats to allow players broad avenues to describe how their actions were success or failures, depen...

Hi everybody! My name is Duffy Austin, and this is the production blog for my tokusatsu-themed tabletop role playing game, Alter Arms. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 90s, I was blown away by the Power Rangers phenomena. At the time, it was astonishing to see such care and dedication being put into creating a live action television show about people in brightly colored costumes fighting crazy monsters with lasers and giant robots. Looking back, a lot of the series hasn’t aged well, but the charm of it, and of all special-effects driven shows like it, remains. No matter how silly the special effects, or plots, or lines seemed, the fact that the creative forces behind them sincerely presented them made them real and important. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered the original Super Sentai series that provided the footage that was used to make a lot of Power Rangers. The franchise, and the entire genre of tokusatsu , had been around since the 1950s...