The Tenchi Muyo! RPG is my Carcosa
There’s this store north of Denver - Black & Read Books. They have an entire wall of GURPS. Yards of GURPS. Enough GURPS that if it all fell on me at once, I would definitely die.
I assume I’m being a big stupid idiot right now1, but I cannot take seriously the idea that people once had feelings about GURPS. It feels like a media property designed by scientists to resist love - a Flex Seal™ against emotional resonance. “Finally, a system that evokes no genre! Where every mechanic is empirically validated!”
How many procedures in that big ol’ wall were ignored in play? Why was the 90’s indie scene so suffused with… density horniness?
At the height of trad play, how far did the obsession spread?
What is Tenchi Muyo?
I refuse to explain what Tenchi Muyo! is, because doing so would force me to consider my own proximity to death.
What is The Tenchi Muyo RPG?
A cursed object. A collection of questions I cannot outrun.
Let us begin.
I’m in awe of the casual bathhouse nudity on the back cover. A real canary in this Proto-GamerSupps coal mine.
Imagine existing with this object in a public space.
I also love the back cover’s effort to sell the concept of Tenchi Muyo, as if a single living soul ever learned of the anime by reading this book. Did they expect some guy in a silken Goku shirt to buy this on a lark at Sam Goody?
Mr. Mackintosh was clearly quite enamored with this picture of Ryoko. It is used not only on the cover, but also on the credits page and character sheet. The stats flower kinda fucks I do admit, but it would fuck far further if its text was legible to the human eye.
The base system is Tri-Stat - 2d6 roll equal or under stat resolution, with point buy character generation. Body / Mind / Soul are the eponymous three stats, though the text does advise “If two or three stats are closely related to the action, an average stat value should be calculated instead, rounding up to the nearest whole number.” (Love casual division in my check procedures.) Degrees of success are determined relative to the stat’s target number. DM fiat roll modifiers of +/-5 are permitted, and PC skills subtract from task difficulty.
Successful Attack checks may be negated by an active defense roll. All stats being equal, a turn in combat using this system will result in nothing happening 75% of the time.
None of this is explained until page 134. The early page count is instead spent on character creation (admirable), and summarizing the plot of the OVAs one episode at a time.
“The exotic girlfriend sub-genre” sent actual shivers down my spine. It’s 1,600 words long.
Sincere question - what is the purpose of these episode summaries? I’d thought them a byproduct of deranged obsession at first, but a similar per-episode summary is present in the Slayers d20 supplement.2
I’d have preferred the authors’ dubious hyperfixation be channeled into more gameable material, like the blueprint of Tenchi’s house on page 156.
(Why is there a dedicated urinal room? Is the visible door on the left side of the front entrance fake? What secrets reside in the top right room?)
Here’s how the authors chose to fill the page count instead.
Perhaps I am being unfair. There is much cruft on this corn cob, yes, but what of the gameplay? If we look past the low-resolution full-frontal nudity presented casually beside the weapon rules, are there diamonds in the rough?
Nothing says harem rom-com like calculated torch durations.3
Two-hundred pages of this - plus the two 109-page expansion books (which apply an identical breakdown to Tenchi Universe and Tenchi in Tokyo), a character diary, supplemental adventures, and a GM screen. Here’s my favorite snippet from the latter.
The book nearly redeemed itself in the final pages when the full page ads jumpscared me with the origin of the prehistoric catgirls meme.
If any of you can explain how these writing norms came to be, please, god, message me on Discord. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Tenchi Forum, a community I know nothing about, for curating these PDFs. You help darkness seep into the world in a way I can respect.
And to the indie creators who made it this far, remember, in your bleakest moments of self-doubt, that this is how far we’ve come.
I’m heading to Pride. Perhaps gay people watching will quiet my roiling thoughts.
TTYL XOXO
——————————————————