Yuuyake Koyake
Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2011 2:14 am
As I floated the idea of running a session of Yuuyake Koyake at ennui's July 10th J-RPG-stravaganza, I thought I'd post a quick precis of it to try and drum up interest. It's pretty well-known in "foreginers who follow JRPGs" circles, and there's a rumor of a possible English translation and publishing deal a la Maid RPG, but it's not exactly mainstream, and probably needs a bit of an introduction. So!
Yuuyake Koyake: What’s the Deal, Then?
Imagine, if you will, a slightly-idealized modern rural Japan – maybe a bit more showa than heisei, a place and time where boys’ favorite summertime activities are bug hunting rather then playing with their DX. Think of a one-station town where two- or four-car diesel trains stop just once an hour, twice for rush hour – there isn’t even any staff on duty at the station most of the day. There’s a small shopping district near the station, with a general store, a greengrocer, a pharmacy, and the town’s post office and single bank. A river, crossed by a single bridge, cuts the town in half. There are a lot of farms – rice, of course, some dairy, some orchards. Along with a three-story town hall, there’s a single elementary school (older students have to take the train to the next town), a big temple, a couple big shrines and a fair number of smaller ones. The kind of town most of us wouldn’t bother to get off the train for, frankly.
There are a fair number of people in town, and many other living things, which have interacted with the people in the town for a long time. These are the PCs – not humans, but animals, henge, with subtle magical powers including the ability to take on human form. Why? Just because – in traditional Japanese folklore, for example, cats get magical powers just by living past the age of 15, and foxes, who live for hundreds of years, naturally learn a trick or two in that time. (It’s important to note that, in the base game anyway, the PCs are in fact explicitly “just animals” rather than “animal spirits.”) Henge are neither adults nor children, and usually appear anywhere from 8 to 18 years old in human form, and usually keep their animal tails and ears when they change. Most people living in town aren’t particularly shocked by this, since they’ve heard stories of henge their whole lives, but newcomers from the city might be surprised by a strange girl with fox ears, and anyone would initially jump to find a tanuki chilling in their living room. Henge live as animals first and foremost, and get their food as animals (and don't generally have any money at any rate), live in the woods or fields near town, and so on. They tend to keep their animal traits even in human form – cats are aloof, while dogs are sociable, tanuki tend to be slightly clumsy, etc.
So what do the PCs do? Mostly, they help people with their human-scale problems, using their abilities to smooth over differences or give people courage. They don’t fight evil, they don’t save the world or uncover great secrets. Think Totoro, but with less overt magic. Helping a scared young girl get home when she gets lost after dark while trying to find her way to her sick mother’s hospital is very much the kind of scenario you might see in Yuuyake Koyake actual play.
So what about the mechanics? Well, it’s a diceless resource-management system, a lot like Nobilis if you’re familiar with that. PCs have 4 stats, rated from 0 to 4. Each stat is associated with a broad class of action – “Animal” covers physical actions like running, jumping and hiding, “Adult” covers rational actions like using technology (henge, being animals, do not generally use technology a lot, and might easily be stumped by a vending machine) or knowing about human society, and so on. Any given action has a difficulty rating, and if your stat is equal to or higher than that difficulty you can do the action with no problem. If your stat is too low, you have to spend resources to raise your stat to equal the difficulty – you get a pool of resources every scene depending on the strength of your relationships to other characters in the story. And that’s pretty much it. The system does create a natural flow of play, with early scenes more focused on relationship-building, which gives you the resources to do more-difficult and more-magical things later on.
Different animals have different magical abilities. Cats have the ability to sneak into any place that’s not airtight, tanuki can (of course) change their shape, and dogs can lend strength to others, while foxes (being so old and slightly mystical) can create will-o-the-wisps or make it rain in broad daylight. Each animal also has weaknesses – cats are selfish, lazy and over-curious, dogs can be naïve and too-trusting, tanuki are clumsy and gluttonous, while foxes are just slightly odd, wearing fashions and using dialects several hundred years out of date – and can’t resist fried tofu (kitsune-udon is called that for a reason).
So that’s the game in a nutshell. It’s billed and designed as a honobono (feel-good, if you like) game, with a strong focus on mundane, human-level problems and their peaceful solutions. Combined with a strong tie-in to traditional Japanese folklore and a pleasantly idealized view of rural Japan - it's really very Ghibli - it sounds to me anyway like a fun way to spend an afternoon, and I’d love the chance to run it for anyone who’s interested.
Yuuyake Koyake: What’s the Deal, Then?
Imagine, if you will, a slightly-idealized modern rural Japan – maybe a bit more showa than heisei, a place and time where boys’ favorite summertime activities are bug hunting rather then playing with their DX. Think of a one-station town where two- or four-car diesel trains stop just once an hour, twice for rush hour – there isn’t even any staff on duty at the station most of the day. There’s a small shopping district near the station, with a general store, a greengrocer, a pharmacy, and the town’s post office and single bank. A river, crossed by a single bridge, cuts the town in half. There are a lot of farms – rice, of course, some dairy, some orchards. Along with a three-story town hall, there’s a single elementary school (older students have to take the train to the next town), a big temple, a couple big shrines and a fair number of smaller ones. The kind of town most of us wouldn’t bother to get off the train for, frankly.
There are a fair number of people in town, and many other living things, which have interacted with the people in the town for a long time. These are the PCs – not humans, but animals, henge, with subtle magical powers including the ability to take on human form. Why? Just because – in traditional Japanese folklore, for example, cats get magical powers just by living past the age of 15, and foxes, who live for hundreds of years, naturally learn a trick or two in that time. (It’s important to note that, in the base game anyway, the PCs are in fact explicitly “just animals” rather than “animal spirits.”) Henge are neither adults nor children, and usually appear anywhere from 8 to 18 years old in human form, and usually keep their animal tails and ears when they change. Most people living in town aren’t particularly shocked by this, since they’ve heard stories of henge their whole lives, but newcomers from the city might be surprised by a strange girl with fox ears, and anyone would initially jump to find a tanuki chilling in their living room. Henge live as animals first and foremost, and get their food as animals (and don't generally have any money at any rate), live in the woods or fields near town, and so on. They tend to keep their animal traits even in human form – cats are aloof, while dogs are sociable, tanuki tend to be slightly clumsy, etc.
So what do the PCs do? Mostly, they help people with their human-scale problems, using their abilities to smooth over differences or give people courage. They don’t fight evil, they don’t save the world or uncover great secrets. Think Totoro, but with less overt magic. Helping a scared young girl get home when she gets lost after dark while trying to find her way to her sick mother’s hospital is very much the kind of scenario you might see in Yuuyake Koyake actual play.
So what about the mechanics? Well, it’s a diceless resource-management system, a lot like Nobilis if you’re familiar with that. PCs have 4 stats, rated from 0 to 4. Each stat is associated with a broad class of action – “Animal” covers physical actions like running, jumping and hiding, “Adult” covers rational actions like using technology (henge, being animals, do not generally use technology a lot, and might easily be stumped by a vending machine) or knowing about human society, and so on. Any given action has a difficulty rating, and if your stat is equal to or higher than that difficulty you can do the action with no problem. If your stat is too low, you have to spend resources to raise your stat to equal the difficulty – you get a pool of resources every scene depending on the strength of your relationships to other characters in the story. And that’s pretty much it. The system does create a natural flow of play, with early scenes more focused on relationship-building, which gives you the resources to do more-difficult and more-magical things later on.
Different animals have different magical abilities. Cats have the ability to sneak into any place that’s not airtight, tanuki can (of course) change their shape, and dogs can lend strength to others, while foxes (being so old and slightly mystical) can create will-o-the-wisps or make it rain in broad daylight. Each animal also has weaknesses – cats are selfish, lazy and over-curious, dogs can be naïve and too-trusting, tanuki are clumsy and gluttonous, while foxes are just slightly odd, wearing fashions and using dialects several hundred years out of date – and can’t resist fried tofu (kitsune-udon is called that for a reason).
So that’s the game in a nutshell. It’s billed and designed as a honobono (feel-good, if you like) game, with a strong focus on mundane, human-level problems and their peaceful solutions. Combined with a strong tie-in to traditional Japanese folklore and a pleasantly idealized view of rural Japan - it's really very Ghibli - it sounds to me anyway like a fun way to spend an afternoon, and I’d love the chance to run it for anyone who’s interested.
). The manga, too, is just a comic that the main illustrator for the rulebooks does, which draws on lots of the same themes and has a similar setting (honobono youkai stories in modern rural japan). It's not a comics-emulation RPG in any meaningful sense.