Sword World RPG
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Sword World RPG is a fantasy roleplaying system and setting from Japan, and is basically Japan's answer to Dungeons & Dragons as the single-most famous, well-known and beloved fantasy RPG in its home country. Ironically, it would never have existed if TSR hadn't fucked up.
Back in the late 80s, a bunch of Japanese guys in the anime and manga business (later trading under the name Group SNE) were approached by Kadokawa to run D&D campaigns for them, with the intent of printing "action replays" (basically, novelized transcripts) of the sessions in a Japanese gaming magazine called Comptiq Magazine to promote the game. It had to be done in Basic Dungeons & Dragons, because AD&D hadn't been translated yet. They called this story-fied collection of interlinked campaigns "Record of Lodoss War", and it got so big they were able to make a full-length OVA adaptation of it. (They also published Tunnels and Trolls in Japanese at about this time, which did reasonably well and proved there was pent-up demand for tabletop RPGs in Japan.) Seeing as they were making huge piles of money and people couldn't get enough Lodoss shit, Group SNE decided, "hey, let's make a deal with TSR and make an official campaign setting book for Lodoss! Tons of people would love to play their own Lodoss campaigns!"
And TSR, in its infinite wisdom, said no. They figured there was no way any Westerner would ever be interested in Japanese fantasy, and weren't interested in writing content exclusively for the Japanese market. So they just gave up on it and the Bitch went back to embezzling corporate funds through Buck Rogers games nobody played. With no other choice, the Group SNE team shrugged and said "Fine, I'll do it myself."
Their first creation was Lodoss War Companion RPG, literally Lodoss: The Campaign Setting, but using a new rules system of their own invention. It sold well enough that they took what they learned from Lodoss War RPG, improved the mechanics, and released them as a new game called Sword World RPG. This RPG was initially set up as entirely separate to Lodoss, taking place in a world called Forcelia. Eventually supplements were released that established Forcelia as actually being the world where the three series they had already released took place and added them as countries within Forcelia - Lodoss from Record of Lodoss War, Alecrest from Rune Soldier Louie, and Crystania from Legend of Crystania.
In 2008, Sword World RPG: 2nd Edition was released, moving on from the Forcelia setting to a new setting called Raxia, which is established as a world created by the combined power of epically powerful, sapient, magic swords. A "2.5" edition, also set in Raxia, was released in 2012.
Sword World 2.0 and 2.5 are currently being translated into English by a group of fans on Reddit. The subreddit for the fan translation can be found at: https://www.reddit.com/r/SwordWorld/
The System
Sword World's system is called the 2d6 System. It's a lot like Basic D&D for obvious reasons; attack matrices are the order of the day, and most rolls direct you to a fuckhuge "rating table" to tell you what you actually rolled. There's even a separate "power table" for each weapon type. This was a compromise to squeeze a bigger range of numbers out of two d6 but that doesn't change the fact that it's clunky as hell. Still not as bad as Rollmaster though.
External Links
- Sword World Translation Project Wiki - Home of the fan translators who use it to coordinate and track progress.
- Complete Sword World archives - Related to the above.