Category: Roleplaying

The players need to be able to describe the matsuri that their personae have created, and most players do not know anything about Shinto matsuri when they start playing, so the game system needs to support the description. This is the most important function of elements. The elements are things that are included in the […]

The important difference between kagura and norito or mikë is that it is possible to fail to perform kagura. Once a norito has been written, it is simply a matter of reading it off a sheet of paper, as shinshoku do not memorise most norito. It is theoretically possible to fail to read the norito, […]

What are the mechanics for creating a matsuri? Creating the baseline matsuri doesn’t need any mechanics at all; the shinshoku just copies the norito out of a book and does the basics. The mechanics, then, are for improving a matsuri beyond the baseline. A baseline matsuri provides 1 shin’i, no dice to roll to determine […]

It is time to start getting specific about the mechanics for matsuri. In the real world, most matsuri at jinja follow a fixed pattern. The participants are purified, standard miki and mikë are offered, and the shinshoku reads a standard norito, copied out of a book of norito. Such a matsuri will be the baseline, […]

In the early stages of the game, matsuri are the main way in which personae can influence kami. If they are not kannagi, personae can only speak directly to the kami when they are all in kamikakushi, which is, by default, a relatively rare situation. The way in which matsuri influence kami is, therefore, a […]

Tamao is the main kami in, er, Tamao. The title of the novel is a bit of a giveaway there. I wrote the novel four years ago, so I didn’t design him in terms of these rules, but I should be able to do it retrospectively. In addition, this example should make sense even to […]

Shin’i means “kami authority”, roughly speaking. (The apostrophe indicates that you should finish the “n” before starting the “i”; it is shin-ee, not shi-nee. Pronounce “shin”, but not “knee”.) It is written with the character for “kami”, which is pronounced “shin” here, and the character used in for authority in the thirteenth century laws I […]

The eight powers defined in the previous two posts will determine the number of dice that kami get to keep when intervening in the world in a supernatural way. What, then, determines the number they get to roll? Here, I want to use the interests of the kami. As I said when introducing kami, every […]

What, then, are the powers of the aramitama? Once again, I would like to have four, because human beings like symmetry, and it also makes things a bit easier to remember. The aramitama is concerned with change, disrupting the way that things are. As discussed in the last post, something counts as a change if […]

When we come to define the game-mechanical powers that fall under each of the mitama, we are moving firmly beyond anything established in Shinto theology or legend, and into the purview of game design. The powers here are designed to allow kami in the game to do the things that kami do in legend, but […]