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 (later known as Group SNE) were making a mint selling "action replays" (basically, novelized transcripts) of their three Basic Dungeons & Dragons campaigns to a Japanese gaming magazine called Comptiq Magazine. They called this story-fied collection of interlinked campaigns "Record of Lodoss War". And they were making so much money, and amassing such a fandom, that they were able to get a 13 episode animated OAV series made to celebrate it. And since it was proving such a hit, the creators of Lodoss decided "hey, let's make a deal with TSR to get them to make a campaign setting book for Lodoss! Tons of people would love to play their own Lodoss campaigns!"
And TSR, in all its infinite wisdom, said no. They figured there was no way any Westerner would ever be interested in media coming from Japan, and somehow they missed that this would naturally give D&D a big "in" with the Japanese geek market. So they just gave up on it and went back to... whatever the fuck it was they were doing around 1988 that they thought would be such a clear and obvious money-maker.
So the Lodoss guys went "alright, screw it, we'll make it ourselves!"
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. However, eventually supplements were released that established Forcelia as actually being the world in which all the different nations from the three anime that they had released along the way - Lodoss from Record of Lodoss War, Alecrest from Rune Soldier Louie, and Crystania from Legend of Crystania - were housed.
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/
External Links[edit | edit source]
- 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.