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The RPG Pipeline was a posting board to keep track of upcoming tabletop rpgs from 2015 to 2021 (this Blogger version began in 2019). It covered new English language ttrpgs and ttrpgs going into crowdfunding.

Thursday 29 November 2018

Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls Role Playing Game

Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls Role Playing Game:

Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls Role Playing Game
Publisher: Ultimate Hyper Games

This contains the Players Guide, GM Guide, and the Corruption Compendium (a monster manual). I put them all together for convenience (even though they should probably be separate documents), so I'm sorry if the page numbering gets funky!

What is Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls Role Playing Game?
UHFMGRPG is a lightweight (ish) tabletop role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons. It's designed to be easy to learn, fun to play, but still have a lot of meaningful choices to make as a player. Its theme is the classic anime trope of Magical Girls! If you like flashy, exciting battle sequences with magical girls fighting monsters, this game is for you!

What will I need to play?
When I play tested this, we played online using Roll20, so I guess you don't really need anything, but if you want to play in person, you need a standard set of playing cards, 6-sided dice (at least 10), and paper and writing utensils for character sheets. It's nice to have things like miniatures, maps, etc., but these are not necessary to play (or can be improvised with whatever you have lying around).

What sets UHFMGRP apart from other Tabletop RPGs?
Fun mechanics: The biggest innovation in UHFMGRPG is its card system. To use your special abilities, you need to discard a card, but you can also use cards to empower your abilities, so there's a real dilemma on how and when to use your cards. It's also a lot of fun to use and empower abilities since players are encouraged to shout out the name of their abilities (just like in an anime) and when empowered, it just gets better. One of my favorites is an ability called "Final Strike" which has the special ability of allowing all players to contribute to the empowerment of it. Nothing beats shouting out "ULTIMATE, HYPER, EPIC, MEGA, FINAL STRIKE!!!" and dealing massive damage to an enemy!

Fun Dice: UHFMGRPG uses a dice system very similar to "Betrayal at the House on the Hill". I like how this feels better than a lot of other dice systems since it produces pretty consistent results, there's some randomness, but not as much as a D20 system like Dungeons and Dragons. When you roll exceptionally well, it feels really special, and when you roll really crappy, it's still kinda fun. The only downside to this, is that it's best to play with the dice from "Betrayal at the House on the Hill", but normal 6-sided dice can be used.

Hard, meaningful choices: There are so many good choices for character selection and ways to play each Aspect (sort of like a class) that it becomes a challenge to determine which set of choices is the "best" and no two characters will likely be the same. There are a lot of awesome abilities and perks to choose from and how and when to use these all matters!

No game is perfect, what's wrong with this one?
UHFMGRPG does a great job at being a Magical Girl battle simulator. Combat feels great and it plays nicely as a game. Where it lacks most as a system is handling what happens outside of combat. There's just not a lot of applicable mechanics for the day-to-day life of the Magical Girls. This was rarely, if ever a problem when I was GMing, I had great players though, who like to roleplay and it all worked great even without hard defined mechanics. But, my only regret at this point is not capturing that aspect of the trope in more solid terms.

The free playtest beta is available for a limited time. I really hope to create something that any RPG player might be proud to have on his or her bookshelf. If I get good feedback, I plan to hire an artist, and work on making this into a real guidebook. I don't know how all the pieces will fall into place yet, but I don't want the hard work I've put into this to be wasted.  If you would like to help support this endevour, I have placed it as "Pay What You Want", but do not feel any pressure to donate.

If you have any feedback, please email me at ultimatehypergames@gmail.com

Price: $1.00


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