Small Company Big Mess Table of Contents

Thanks to Grant Chen for lending me his collection of Guardians of Order books for research.

Table of Contents Small Company Big Mess ...... 1 Introduction ...... 2 Bezzum ...... 2 Ways to Say “BESM” ...... 4 The Tri-Stat System ...... 4 Licensed Games & Books ...... 8 Actual Headings from BESM Books ...... 11 BESM Supplements ...... 12 More and Weirder Games ...... 14 d20 ...... 16 Definitely Not Guardians of Balance ...... 18 Some BESM 3rd Edition Character Templates ...... 21 Bezzum 3rd Edition ...... 21 Downfall ...... 22 A Long Epilogue ...... 23

Sample file

1 Introduction Guardians of Order was a Canadian tabletop RPG publisher that had a huge im- pact in a tiny industry during its decade in operation. Other publishers have put out anime-inspired RPGs before and since, but none have ever had the commercial success of Big Eyes Small Mouth (“BESM”), Guardians of Order’s flagship game. While their story is neither as long nor as strange as that of Palladium Books, it’s still a pretty odd chapter in the history of the hobby. A man named Mark C. MacKin- non founded and helmed Guardians of Order—the name was based on his favorite Amber Diceless character—and while he’s not as eccentric as Kevin Siembieda, his odd personal vision defined the company throughout its life. As in All That Glitters is Pal- ladium (my zine about the history of Palladium Books that you should totally check out) I’m going to be harsh, but I’m going to try to be fair. While I have a decidedly low opinion of the level of game design that Guardians of Order brought to bear in the Tri-Stat system, they were important and even impressive in a lot of other ways, especially to those of us who are interested in mixing anime and tabletop RPGs. For as long as Japanese animation has been a thing that existed, there were always at least some people outside of Japan who took an interest in it. From the 1960s until the 1980s, most Americans only got to watch anime when it was dubbed and repack- aged for syndicated TV, with shows like Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, and Robotech. Then in the 1990s anime fandom reached a tipping point. Com- panies like Viz Video, AnimEigo, and AD Vision started releasing VHS tapes of anime, and the fandom was expanding, with more conventions, more fansubs, more everything basically. Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon, two of the most popular and iconic anime series in Japan, finally got releases on American TV (albeit in heavily edited dubs), and cable channels (and also KTEH, San Jose’s scrappy PBS station) started showing anime. We were obsessed with Ranma ½, Tenchi Muyo!, and Evangelion, and had watched Ninja Scroll and the Street Fighter II anime movie a few times too many. That was the backdrop against which Guardians of Order and Big Eyes Small Mouth came onto the scene. We hadn’t yet figured out that anime isn’t a special magic thing from Japan, just a form of entertainment that you can sit down and analyze like any other. We had a new pop culture form of Japonism, a new way to obsess over the amazing art of Japan from afar. That was not the best base from which to put together a role-playing game, but in 1997 no one knew any better. Bezzum MySample first encounter with Guardians of Order was in the late file1990s, when I stum- bled across the original 96-page gray Big Eyes Small Mouth book at a local game store. That store is now long gone, and the mall where it was has since remodeled and gen- erally become super-trendy, with a Uniqlo and everything. The book used one of those shitty pseudo-Asian fonts like you see on Chinese takeout containers on the

2 front (the font is called Ginko by the way), and the decent-quality art of a bunch of martial artist characters had a gray background that didn’t quite match the gray of the cover.

The title was weird, but it definitely shouted “ANIME!” if nothing else. One of my friends made a running gag out of calling it Small Ears Big Head, Big Eyes Small Nose, and other variations that I can’t remember because it’s 2019 and I’m tired. The book had the original Guardians of Order logo with what looked kind of like Akane from Ranma ½ wearing a kimono and riding on a very Rumiko Takahashi- esque unicorn. (I put my attempt at a version of it on the cover of this zine BTW. Also, holy crap was Ranma ½ a huge thing in 90s anime fandom.) Later on they had the words “Guardians Of Order” (with the “of” incorrectly capitalized) in what looks like a condensed, bolded Helvetica, flanked by red kanji saying 秩序 (chitsujo, meaning “order” or “discipline”) and 護衛 (goei, meaning “guard” or “escort”), giving the im- pression that someone had looked them up in a Japanese-English dictionary. They finally settled on a griffin/shield/maple leaf logo that lasted until the company’s demise. Guardians of Order was proudly Canadian, a fact that matters to the story a lot more than it probably should, and not just because they used Canadian English (which turns out to be pretty close to British English in terms of spelling) and metric units despite having a mostly-American audience. BESM wasn’t their very first product—they first did a toy-based wargame called Toying With Destruction —A Large- Scale Battle System For Toys—but it was their first RPG and a breakout success.

Sample file MacKinnon called the rules of BESM the “Tri-Stat” system, with a red triangle logo that proclaimed the name in bolded Helvetica. This was of course well before print on demand was viable and people were still taking out loans to get RPGs printed.

3 MacKinnon got a print run of 1,000 copies of BESM, hoping he’d sell them off eventually, which makes it kind of weird that he felt the need to give the underlying system a name and a logo given that he apparently wasn’t anticipating there being a second Tri-Stat game. Of course, this was around the time when named RPG systems—Mas- terBook, D6, SAGA, Amazing Engine, Interlock, Fuzion, Basic Role-Playing, Unisys- tem, Fudge, Silhouette, and I could go on but we don’t have all day—were a common thing, but there’s a reason you’d have to be a bit of an RPG historian to have even heard of all of those. Whether it was optimism or just following prevailing trends, MacKinnon wound up having a hit on his hands. That print run of 1,000 books went by pretty quickly, and Guardians of Order would go from one-man hobby-with- money to a full-on business with an office and multiple employees. Ways to Say “BESM” • Bee-Eee-Ess-Emm • Bee-Eee S&M • BEH-sim • Bezzum • BeeSim • Anime: The Role-Playing Game • Anime: The Disparate Pile of Mechanics That You Occasionally Use While Freeform Role-Playing Anime Stuff • Small Nose Big Head • Big Breasts Small Waist • Huge Eyes Small Brains • Big Eyes, Small Mouth and Nose, More or Less Normal Proportioned Ears, Exaggerated Hair, and Stylized Proportions (BESMNMLNPEEHSP) The Tri-Stat System First, we need to explain the rules of BESM/Tri-Stat though. Guardians of Order was a “house system” kind of RPG publisher, and apart from their d20 stuff, all their RPGs used some form of Tri-Stat. Characters have three stats—Mind, Body, and Soul—which range from 1 to 12. When you make a basic check, you roll two six-sided dice, and you succeed if you roll at or under the relevant stat. In 1st Edition you just had a flat pool of 2d6+10 stat points Samplethat you assigned however you wanted, so that it felt lessfile like assigning traits to define your character and more like arbitrarily picking out your odds of success in three different areas. The game tells you that an average human has a rating of 4, which means that an average person has about a 16.67% chance of succeeding on an average task. For a long time, they insisted on listing modifiers as changes to the roll

4 rather than the value you’re rolling against, so having a –4 modifier on a roll was, counterintuitively, really beneficial. Eventually they adopted the concept of a Check Value, which was the Stat plus whatever modifiers, which you would then roll against. In the 90s it was common for RPGs to have derived stats calculated from characters’ main stats, and while making people do multiplication and division to make an RPG character isn’t the worst thing, it’s definitely fallen out of fashion. In BESM you have Health ((Body + Soul) × 5), Energy ((Mind + Soul) × 5), Combat Value (the average of all three stats), and Defensive Combat Value (Combat Value minus 2). Health is the character’s capac- ity for damage, while Energy is a pool of points you could spend on certain powers and such. And yes, Soul is twice as valuable as Mind and Body in terms of giving you points of Health and Energy. From there, you have a pool of Character Points (10, 15, or 20, decided by the GM) that you spend on Attributes (advantageous traits) and Defects (disadvantages). Attributes have a cost per level and effects listed for 5 different levels, while Defects have 2 different versions and grant 1 or 2 bonus points. (They later added a 6th level to most Attributes and a 3rd level to most Defects.) Some Attributes and Defects had clear mechanical effects, most notably those that tweak the aforementioned numbers up or down, but quite a few were incredibly vague about what they did. The “Cyber- netic Body” attribute for example didn’t actually make a character stronger or faster or anything. Instead it gave them varying degrees of nebulous “advantages.” The game expected you to buy the stats and derived value modifiers needed to have the character function how you wanted, but didn’t really articulate that. The result was a functional game, though by the standards of games of the time the rules were oddly vague. Since most of my experience with RPGs up until then had been with Palladium, Toon, White Wolf, and to a lesser extent GURPS, I wasn’t pre- pared for this style of game. What I know now that I wish I’d known then is that BESM is the creation of a hardcore Amber Diceless fan. The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game is the creation of Erick Wujcik (who also did a bunch of work for Palladium Books), based on the novels by Roger Zelazny, about a quarrelling family of ridiculously powerful beings that traverse the multiverse while scheming against each other. When a group sits down to make characters, each player gets a pool of 100 points, and they hold an auction to determine who gets the best rating in each of the four attributes (Psyche, Strength, Endurance, and Warfare). There Sampleare a few other things in the system, but the core of it is thatfile when two characters are at odds, the GM just compares their attribute ranks. The one with the higher rank usually wins, unless someone has done a better job of doing stuff to get an ad- vantage. When I went and bought a copy of ADRPG because I was intensely curious

5 about how a diceless RPG would even work (Real Answer: There are lots of possible ways actually), I was initially disappointed at what I found. I’ve come to realize that the system is uniquely suited to the particular source material, and while it’s not im- possible to adapt it to other settings, it would require a very particular kind of setting, hence Steve Russell’s spiritual successor game Lords of Gossamer and Shadow is also about epic struggles across a multiverse. Understanding all that about Amber Diceless, it’s easier to understand that Mark C. MacKinnon essentially meant the rules to be a guideline and a set of tools you could fall back on when your freeform role-playing left certain questions unanswered. From the direction that the game went from that gray book, it seems like MacKinnon him- self didn’t really realize that was what made his game work, so he failed to articulate it to anyone. Before long MacKinnon brought David L. Pulver onto the team. While everyone concerned was happy with this arrangement, the idea of having the author of GURPS Vehicles (the only RPG book I know of that involved using cube roots) work on a super-light game like BESM was a little weird. That said, Pulver was definitely a su- perior RPG designer to MacKinnon. He’s something of an industry veteran, having written numerous supplements for GURPS and done freelance for TSR, White Wolf, West End Games, Game Designer’s Workshop, and Iron Crown Enterprises. His first work for Guardians of Order was the Big Robots, Cool Starships BESM supplement, and he was a vitally important part of the team moving forward. MacKinnon and his various collaborators revised and expanded Tri-Stat over the course of several supplements, standalone games, and new editions. BESM 2nd Edi- tion came out in 2001, and it integrated a lot of those developments, while making some several changes and additions. One important change was making it so that Stats came out of the same pool of Character Points as Attributes (and hey, remember how in the rest of the RPG world “attribute” and “stat” are basically synonyms?), but at a rate of 1 CP per Stat point. (In contrast, 3rd Edition would bump that up to 10 CP per stat point.) Given that in BESM 1st Edition there were a bunch of Attributes and Defects that let you trade between Stats and Attributes at a 1:1 rate, it made a certain amount of sense to just cut out the middle man and no longer have six extra traits (Fortified Body, Powerful Mind, Strong Soul, Delicate Body, Empty Mind, and Hollow Soul) for what amounted to shuffling numbers around. On the other hand, the 1:1 rate made it relatively cheap to make your character both succeed at most checks and boost their base Health and Energy really high. The random roll for starting stat points went away, and the GM set a poolSample of Character Points ranging from 15 (for really low -poweredfile games) to 60 (for really high-powered ones), though for example the Tenchi Muyo! RPG had characters from the series get as high as 90 points.