BESM d20
Produced and Released by: Guardias of Order
Introduction by: Keith "JC" Hayward
Artwork by: Bumblebee

Introduction

Welcome to, what I hope to be a growing addition to Japan Hero. The RPG Hero section, being a sub-section of Fan Powered.

Fans and geeks alike are no stranger to the world of RPG. We’ve our own forum that’s bursting with them and across the internet fans and friends battle for the sake of the world with blade and mech and sometimes both! Gamers will also be familiar with playing RPG’s on their favorite console, be it Skies of Arcadia , the immortal Final Fantasy games, or the ground breaking game of the year, Knights of the Old Republic. But there’s another style and format that RPG’s take, and that’s tabletop gaming.

If you aren’t familiar with what “Tabletop Gaming” is, you might know it better by the name, "Dungeons & Dragons". If that still doesn’t clue you in, give this hilarious flash cartoon a gander. ^_^

My good friends and I have been gaming for about a little more than a decade now. Basically, it’s our poker night. We all find time away from busy schedules, bring books, Mountain Dew, smirks, our bag of dice and then proceed to blaze trails of legend and adventure, be it in a “galaxy far, far away” getting our collective butts kicked by the dark forces of the Sith, or storming a castle, wading through an endless scores of orcs, goblins and mountain trolls to take down their dark master once and for all.

Video game RPG’s cannot compare to a talented storyteller and his cast of good friends. In Tabletop Gaming, if you want to pick up a rock and chuck it through a window, you can. You can say anything you want without worrying about a menu and everything is interactive.

As any Japan Hero knows, there’s more things to daydream about than swords & sorcery… there are more galactic realms to blaze trails through than just those inhabited by Wookies and scruffy looking nerf herders. We want our games and daydreams filled with henshin belts, morphers and changers! We want to drop kick insane bad guys and power crazed martial artist! We want a watch that can call giant robots and a realm of space that has absolutely any and everything in it from cat girls to space pirates to endless armies of mechanized ‘bots! Hell, some of us even just want to go to school in Japan and try and get a date without the girl we like finding out we turn into a black pigs when hit with cold water!

Enter: BESM d20; This book makes all those things possible.

Gather your best geek friends, come up with a concept outta your favorite anime or tokusatsu… get a piece of paper and a couple dice and prepare for the gaming experience of a lifetime. It’s fun, exciting, hilarious and a great way to spend an evening without really having to go anywhere, but your friends basement.

Without any further adieu, here’s my friend Max “Overdrive” and his detailed review of BESM d20.

Review
Guardias of Order’s BESM d20: Anime role-player’s handbook.
By Max “Overdrive”

I’ve been a fan of anime for as long as I’ve been playing role-playing games (RPG), now more than a dozen years. In that time, I have created scores of anime styled characters to play in a multitude of RPGs, but unfortunately all have fallen short of the anime that inspired them. No single role-playing game ever seemed to offer a set of playable skills and abilities needed to embody the spirit of anime. I had heard of the old Big Eyes, Small Mouth game, but no one I knew played it and it’s Tri-Stat system that struck me as too simplistic and too foreign to the heavily-detailed gaming style that I enjoy. It sounded like it could be cool, but at the time, I was unwilling to learn another new system.

Much to my delight, in 2003 Guardias of Order released BESM d20, which uses the d20 system that Wizards of the Coast came out with for their reprise of the old D&D system. I got my hands on BESM d20 a couple months back, and I’ve taken my sweet time reading and re-reading it, trying to get acclimated to the nuances of the system. Though the new rendition of BESM has the enormously popular d20 system for its framework, it still keeps the fast and loose intention of the original game. Things are less regimented, more fluid, and left to the imaginations of the players and the storyteller. Combat runs at a different pace, and is more descriptive than mechanical. Special abilities are legion, and the character classes (should you choose to use them; BESM d20 can be played without character classes) slide smoothly into any anime-styled campaign.

All this may suggest that BESM d20 is simple to master. Nothing could be further from the truth. Beginner gamers and storytellers will likely find themselves intimidated by the twisting and somewhat blurry character creation process, and many of the rules governing battle and skills are extremely different from what vanilla d20 gamers may be used to. The rules all make a lot of sense, once you read through them three or four times and sort them all out. However, novices will want a grizzled veteran of role-playing games on hand to sort out any confusion and help with understanding of the rules. Also, you will most certainly want to look elsewhere for a character sheet. The one provided in the back of the book is only marginally useful than a blank sheet of paper.

The look and feel of BESM d20 is straight up anime. Guardias of Order brought a number of extremely talented artists onto the BESM d20 project, and must have paid them really well, because they did one fantastic job. My hat goes off to the whole BESM d20 art team. A wide array of anime styles and genres are represented in the well-placed artwork throughout the book. The standard edition of BESM d20 only has black and white interior art, but this does not at all diminish the superior quality and design of the images within. However, if you don’t mind paying for it (twice the price of the standard edition), the Deluxe edition is printed in mind-blowing full color to show off the Real Ultimate Power of the artwork inside. I have never in my twelve years of gaming seen a book which such consistently phenomenal art as BESM d20.

So what can you do with it? Imagine any anime you’ve ever seen and loved. BESM d20, coupled with its sister book, d20 Mecha (which I recommend to any BESM players who plan on including vehicles, powersuits or giant mecha) will allow you to create anything you can imagine. Want to run a game to emulate Big O? No problem. Naruto? Check. Street Fighter? Hai! Zoids? You betcha. Even the traditional sword and sorcery genre anime like Record of Lodoss Wars is easy and fun to recreate. Mixed genres like Those Who Hunt Elves? Just as easy Cowboy Bebop? Yer dern tootin’, space cowboy! Even more fun, in my opinion, is creating your own anime styled campaign and using the BESM d20 rules to augment the experience, like Japan Hero’s Keith “JC” Hayward is doing.

Conclusion

To sum up all my thoughts on BESM d20, if you want to play anime-styled role-playing games, this is the number one resource to have. You should probably have a D&D 3.5 Edition book on hand to help with rules. BESM d20 is expensive for its number of pages, but there’s nothing better for what it does. In addition, I can’t say enough good things about the level of support that Guardias of Order provides. At their website, you can find system reference documents for all their major systems, as well as forums for discussion and any errata updates for their games.

In the coming weeks and months, I will be providing conversions of a number of favorite characters and mecha using BESM d20 and d20 Mecha. Also, look forward to upcoming pictures and narratives from JC’s BESM game, where you can see anime and gamer geeks in our natural environment.

Grab the book, grab your friends, get some dice, then fire up your robot, strap on your changer and make sure your Japanese school uniform is ironed. You’re about to enter a fantasy world like none other before it. BESM d20 is definitely worth the price of admission.

Max “Overdrive”