Girl By Moonlight's Series Playbooks
Their anatomy and the fact that I wanna write one so goddamn bad.
So, let’s start by saying that I love Girl by Moonlight.
I love magical girl anime, and have since I was a little kid watching the Sailor Moon dub after school. I go through real intense Precure phases when my mental illness takes over and I need emotional empty calories, and I have Magia by Kalafina completely memorized.
But when I sat down with a group of friends wanting to play a magical girl TTRPG, we ended up having major differences in our thoughts about tone! (The genre, it should be noted, has a wide range of tones and styles folded into it, so this is to be expected)
And then we found Girl by Moonlight. In addition to being well-written and well put together, Girl by Moonlight gave us something fully revolutionary: series playbooks.
What Are Series Playbooks?
The game comes with four settings, and each of them gets a playbook made up of additional rules, GM principles, story hooks, character roles, and a load of other material to help the table explore the fantasy that each setting embodies.
In A Maze of Dreams: A surreal and dreamlike setting based on conspiracy and mystery, with cyberpunk elements. This reminded me of Delta State, an extremely obscure Canadian animated series.
Under a Rotten Sky: A surreal horror setting based on dark fantasy, drawing specifically from Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
At The Brink of the Abyss: A more traditional magical girl story drawing from the classics, particularly teen series like Sailor Moon.
On a Sea of Stars: A mech sci-fi setting with weird psychic elements, very Magical Girl Farscape.
Why Series Playbooks?
The obvious answer is that it gives your game flexibility. It allows you to write a game that supports drastically different tones and styles and actually support those tones and styles rather than leaving them up to the tables to homebrew.
But, in our experience, we found out something even better.
Series Playbooks facilitate the tone conversation at session 0. They made it easier by huge leaps! We came to the table with different ideas, but thanks to the game having packaged, supported, and named these four different series, we had an extremely easy time deciding what to play.
Now, the directions we wanted to take had names! We could tell wildly different stories from the “Default” (which I wasn’t super in the mood for) without making extra work for our GM, and all I had to do was say “I’m not feeling Abyss, but I could play the three others. Maze is my favorite”.
What’s In Them?
When I said I wanted to write one of these, Sean Nittner laughed at me, which would have given me pause except that I make big swings as a matter of principle.
Here’s an inventory:
Building the Series
A set of specific series-building questions written to help shape the world and story
Series Rules
Variant rules that will help sell the series’s specific fantasy
Series Abilities
Specifically tailored abilities to the series and its tone
Director’s Principles
Guidance for the Director to lean on to help support their decision-making
Obligation, Downtime, Mission
Ways the setting impacts the Obligation, Downtime, and Mission phases
Fallout
How to inflict fallout on the players in a way that matches the stakes of the story.
Pacing the Series
A handy director’s guide for keeping the story moving and tie things together, including how to end the story in a fitting way
But I Want To Make Legend of Dragoon Bad
Because I am completely normal about the 1999 Sony RPG Legend of Dragoon.
So normal.
So I am probably going to.
In the meantime, I don’t know, maybe you try using them for your game.
