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Japan's Most Popular Fantasy TTRPG Isn't D&D! #dnd #ttrpg
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Japan's most beloved fantasy TTRPG isn't D&D.
It's this, Sword World.
Sword World was created by Group SNE in 1989.
It's fantasy RPG in its purest form, you play as Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and small folk called GrassRunners, who can take on classes like Fighter, Bard, Priest, Ranger, Sage, and Sorcerer. You explore a fantasy world and go into dungeons to slay monsters.
The game is built around a 2D6 system, with the players rolling the dice and comparing the result to a power table to find out the result, which means the game has a surprising amount of outcomes despite its smaller dice.
The system is clean and functional, even if it isn't that special today due to how many rules-lite games are on the market.
What makes it remarkable isn't the system. It is its release history.
Sword World arrived in Japan just as Western fantasy was cresting in popularity. but while D&D was largely confined to specialty hobby shops, Sword World was published as a standard paperback and sold in general bookstores. Plus, it retailed for 640 yen. It was cheap enough that people picked it up on a whim. D&D wasn't.
Thus, Sword World won. Decisively. For years it was the dominant fantasy TTRPG in Japan, which makes it one of the very few games that can genuinely claim to have beaten D&D on its own turf.
Alas, it never left Japan. Fan translations exist, and there are current efforts toward an official English release, but for now it remains almost entirely unknown to Western players, which is a shame, because a game that actually dethroned D&D in a major market is, at minimum, worth knowing about.
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