Whether you love rolling d20s or prefer the 2d6 system, if you fancy D&D’s initiative rules or Draw Steel’s innovative approach, or if you think that Daggerheart’s Fear & Hope is the best thing since Platonic solids were invented, there’s one big issue that plagues every TTRPG under the sun. I’m talking about players skipping sessions.
This unkillable monster has been the bane of GMs for decades, but one TTRPG has found a way to turn the problem into something fun. Sword World RPG, the Japanese TTRPG that made D&D almost irrelevant in the country, has rules to turn absent player characters into NPCs, making sure they can still join the fun of adventuring, looting, and slaughtering innocent goblinoids. The 36-year-old game somehow never got an English localization, until now, courtesy of Mugen Gaming.
“It reminds a lot of people of the Pawns in the game Dragon’s Dogma,” Shawn Davison of Mugen Gaming said of Sword World’s Fellow System in a video interview with Polygon. “The idea is that a character can go on adventures even if the player isn’t there. And a lot revolves around the game’s origins, when magazines were dominant.” Davison is referring to the beginnings of Group SNE, the game’s creators. They started by publishing their Dungeons & Dragons “replays” (a written version of what we call “actual play” today) in Comptiq, a computer games magazine owned by Kadokawa. RPG replays quickly became very popular in Japan. “You had this snail mail system,” Davison said, “where people were mailing their ‘fellows’ around to let the characters take part in adventures and campaigns. And it continued when the internet came around.”
With the Fellows system, a player’s character is converted into an NPC, using a simplified sheet. The Fellow has a list of default actions — a spell or a weapon attack, for example — and each one comes with a quote from the character, for extra flavor. The Fellow’s actions are determined by a d6 roll on a random table (but you can ignore this rule if you prefer less randomness), so the GM and the players can manage them with the utmost simplicity.
In fact, Fellows follow different rules from PCs and NPCs in Sword World. For example, they can’t be killed or targeted by enemies. Their goal is to be easy to manage and helpful without overshadowing the players or being “abused” by exploiting the rules. But the most interesting aspect is that, as Davison explained, Fellows always had a strong social component in the game. They were created so that players could share them between different parties, and then tell each other the stories of their adventures.
This focus on community and sharing is a good reminder that Sword World RPG is a game created by players. When TSR, the publisher of D&D at the time, forbade actual play sessions to be compiled and sold in paperback version in Japan, Group SNE did the only sensible thing and created their own game. Fast forward a few decades, and Record of Lodoss War , the anime and novel franchise based on Group SNE’s early D&D campaign, sold over 10 million copies, while Sword World RPG 2.5, the latest edition of the game released in 2018, sold over 400,000 copies.
Despite that success, we still have yet to see an English localization of the game. According to Davison, the issue was mostly licensing. Sword Word’s rights are split between Group SNE and Kadokawa, the Japanese media colossus that was recently acquired by Sony. “This is just my speculation, but it is probably that they couldn’t find anybody they could really trust, not being familiar with other countries’ publishing businesses,” Davison said. It all changed after one serendipitous meeting between Shawn and his wife, Ai Namima-Davison, and the members of Group SNE. It happened on a train platform in Essen, where they had attended SPIEL, the world’s largest game fair. Mugen Gaming’s great track record in adapting Japanese games for the Western market did the rest.
It took 36 years, but better late than never. Sword World will be a great addition to the landscape of fantasy TTRPGs. Even veteran players can expect something new. For example, the game encourages multiclassing with an open multiclass system that lets players spend their experience points to grow in any role. “Sticking to one class can actually be a problem,” Davison said. “You want to have a wide range of skills and abilities for your character, and build it in a much more fluid way.” This reminds me of classic JRPGs such as the Final Fantasy series, which let players operate beyond the rigid confines of a class system, allowing increased customization.
More fluidity and customization also encourage teamplay. In Sword World, you truly want to build your character by thinking of how it will synergize with the rest of the group. Imagine D&D, but everyone plays a Cleric.
Combat in Sword World is also reminiscent of JRPGs. “Your mainline fighters will be in the front rank,” Davison said. “Then your casters or ranged attackers can be in the rear rank, and you don’t have to worry about positioning on the battlefield.” There are also advanced rules for tactical movement, but in its essence, Sword World emphasizes theater of the mind even more than D&D. “Just focus on what you want to do and your experience rather than the specifics of battlefield positioning,” Davison said.
The game’s 2d6 system is easy to pick up and play, which will hopefully be a positive factor when the English localization is released. The Davisons didn’t give me a timeline, but they hope the release will happen no longer than a year after the crowdfunding campaign, which will launch on Backerkit in May.
