I wrote about a resurgence of role playing games in my New Years post, and that trend has continued well beyond expectation. First, Lion Wing Publishing announced several English TRPG translations, including the Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne TRPG from 2004, Kedamono Opera, and Wares Blade!
The Shin Megami Tensei TRPG has long been out of print in Japan and commands hefty prices on the secondary market. Kedamono Opera is narrative TRPG from 2022 that I’ve mentioned on Twitter previously. Wares Blade is a robot-fantasy game from the eighties and nineties that has similarly been out of print, though not as rare as Shin Megami Tensei. I happen to have a copy of the starter box set and will write about it later this year.
Domestically, Wares Blade is having a comeback in Japan. It began with a board game and fiction, but they’ve started releasing PDF versions of the core game and supplements. I purchased a couple of the PDFs and the content is very clean scan data that has not been run through OCR. A sample PDF is available from the official site.
Blade Arcana, a game of heroic fantasy, also recently got a massive tome of a new version, and there’s a steady stream of new TRPGs, including one where players are cats.
Very exciting times!