A Mischief of Maidens
By Eric R. Ashley

An Anime world for  Multiverser: The Game®


In some versions of Anime, a poor clueless young guy has five or so beautiful girls running about trying to be his boyfriend.  Often such girls are extra-dimensionals, or extra-terrestials and/thousands of years old, or otherwise insanely gifted...etc.   This comedic sub-genre is the basis for this world, along with facing a person who wants to play a pschyopathic character (often of the younger set)...y'know...the type that says "I kill it!" More frequently than any other statement, and has enough skill to make that a serious threat.

The set of characters surrounding such a verser player character is unabashedly bizarre and hopefully humorous make running this character more fun for a GM (such characters are NOT fun for me as GM--very boring to me.)

One character is a goddess who occasionally incarnates, and tries to charm/seduce verser to the Light and her worship...and also resurrects and mindwipes of the tragic event anyone he kills.

Another is a cyborg super-commando from the far future who can benchpress a main battle tank, and catch bullets with her bare hands. So she would be JUST SHOCKED, shocked I say at any meanness from her 'boy'.  She is the younger sister of his future variant’s wife, and she really likes his future variant, but is noble enough not to go man-stealing.  And she figures from the time travel experts that they are creating a new timeline here, so a new guy to pick up…Yippee! Ahem, (now return to proper military formality).

Probably have to pick him up, and carry him away to lecture him...although she would not believe any 'gossip' such as police reports, but only her own eyes since she is more than familiar with how disinformation is created.  And this is one of her side abilities…she can hook up to a computer terminal, and create false stories and false files that make the truth seem ridiculous.  This allows her to squash the occasional media uproar created by ‘our hero’, or save him from an honest mistake.

In that future he is fighting on the side of the Great, but there has been doctrinal schisms so that the Super-Commando and the Alien Missionary don't quite see eye-to-eye even though they both agree on venerating the Great. The Great is a pantheon, and they venerate different members, and the goddess is a junior member of the Great....the one in charge of watching over Earth until the rest show up.  Let us go deal with the Alien Missionary now.

The goodie is an alien missionary sent to tell the people of the Earth about the coming of the Great. She's so kind and sweet that flowers bloom to protect her feet from the rough grass. And seeing her cry would make a confirmed hitman repent.  The goddess is forbidden from telling or showing that she is a goddess of the Great to the Alien Missionary, and a delusion is laid upon the Alien Missionary such that she is intensely skeptical of any of her friends telling her this.

She has considerable powers of persuasion, can cause miracles by prayer, and is intensely kind and generous, but she is by nature quite a bit more violent than the goddess.   She comes from an alien race that fights all the time, but she has mostly become super-kind. However, when infuriated past even her formidable control, she can transform into her MegaBattleForm, which is a ten story tall humanoid slug with a nearly invulnerable shell, and start to whomp on whoever annoyed her.  She always feels immensely guilty about this, and the goddess is trying to convince her that its okay to get mad occasionally at evil people, even the Great get mad.  But the Alien Missionary is not listening.

Also, the MBF is capable of interstellar travel, and FTL flight, and has space inside her shell where she can carry passengers, and provide a small ship-like atmosphere with monitors, and chairs, and …the wonders of polymorph.  But the technology that backs it up is all biological, so her monitors show what she can see on her eye stalks.

Incidentally, only on Earth are snails slow.  Elsewhere in the rest of the universe, snails are some of the fastest creatures around.

The girl next door to the hero (who also attends all his classes) is actually a super-spy from S.P.Y..Central who is trying to understand what's going on (and is deeply in the dark about who all these strange people are), and has been so busy learning all this stuff that she hasn't had time to go on a date since...well never.

She is equipped with dozens of micro-devices which take perhaps fifteen seconds for her, an expert, to use, and considerably longer for others who are bumbling their way through things, and these allow all sorts of astounding effects ranging from holograms to boot jets to laser torches to cut into lockers to robotic snakes that follow the hero stealthily to force field generators to power quarterstaffs.

Naturally, she is on the school gymnastic team as a star player, and she has the most in-depth answers to her geography and current events questions when asked by the teacher.  However, her answers don’t necessarily relate to what the Lamestream Mediots Service is providing as its highly questionable, inaccurate, and slanted, and let us not forget, most definitely lurid ‘data’.  Instead, she gets her data from her daily briefing from her Spy Computer.

Lastly, the way friendly girl in Rocket Science High School (which they go to, and  which allows them to occasionally make rockets, high-energy devices, and teleporters and stuff in shop), who should be ignoring him since he is in the class beneath her is the EVIL Dark Dragon whose mission is to turn everyone with wolf-like instincts on the Earth into Dark Dragons and slay the Great and then farm the non-wolf-like humans as a food source, but my oh my, our hero is soooo cute, that she'll get to that later, or at least fit it in between attempts to play kissie face with the hero.

She can transform into a monstrous purple and black (which are her favorite colors in her human form) Dark Dragon which probably could flatten the MBF, unless the MBF gets a surprise attack and grapple in first.  Sadly for her, while the DD form can fly in space, it cannot go into FTL flight.  So its bound in this solar system.

She is a samurai, but not a very good one.  More like a ronin, but her lord, who occasionally appears in puddles of water to talk to her, to berate her,  doesn’t realize that yet.  She tries to be a good samurai, but she so weak, and the verser pc is soooo cute, and the ice cream looks awful nice…

Her lord is trapped inside a pocket dimension along with the rest of his court from the time of the coming of the Great last time (at the fall of Atlantis) when these gods imprisoned them.  They are Dark Dragons like she is, but she is The Dark Dragon of myth and legend because she has been the only one that can escape the prison even for a time.

Yes, that makes her thousands of years old.  The other Dark Dragons are conspiring against her because they tell her she is the lowest of them all, but in actuality, she is their queen.  They tell her that the least of them is stronger than her, but she is stronger than even her lord (although he is vastly more experienced and wily).  She is the daughter of the last True King of the Dragons, and her ‘lord’ is actually the steward of the King, who murdered his liege, and assumed control, and then told the infant daughter that she was the nearest thing to a peasant, but still way above the humans.

The future that the Battle Commando comes from where the Dark Dragons and the Great openly fight (with most of Earth under the Dark Dragons’s control, and thus thousands of Dark Dragons available to fight instead of the current dozen in the prison), occasionally sends back small Dragonbots.  These robot miniature dragons are about as tough as a large dog to begin with, but as time goes on they learn new tricks, become smarter, and bigger, and can become exceedingly dangerous.  They often are sent in small swarms of four to a dozen at a time, with one pack leader, and given a simple task.  One task is to kill our hero,  another task is to move the binding stones that lock the Court of the Dark Dragon inside its prison.

S.P.Y. has temporal sensors which can detect the location of an “Arriver” when it enters our time, but these main sensors don’t work for tracking them.  However, there are sensors which detect low-level chroniton decay, and are hand-held.  However, these sensors have a range of no more than thirty feet.

Usually SPY sends out a strike team with Decay Sensors to track the “Arriver”, and deal with the situation.

One other character is the hero’s doppleganger.  This non-verser character is just like the hero, only worse in sense and morality and skill, and younger.  And he totally worships the character when he does something insane.  So have the dopple be a completely insane pschyopath killer perhaps, but also so totally clumsy when he’s about to do something evil and apt to lose any sense in the presence of a female that he's not managed to actually hurt anyone yet.

This is called laying on a guilt trip.  And it also offers possibilities with the ‘hero’ doing something whacked out, and his younger self getting picked up, and sent to jail for his crime.  More guilt.

Or his younger self tries to do something and fails, and gets hurt badly.  Cue the hospital visit scene with dopple in a coma, and weeping pc vowing to be a better person, and then the goddess doing a miracle as she listens from afar off…

One of his dopple’s characteristics is the ‘loses sense in presence of a female’.  The dopple is easily starstruck, falls in love at the drop of an eyelash, and then stumbles all over his words, and turns red in the face, and often rushes off to do something crazy to take away the embarrassment.

The hero also has a mentor to train him.  This is the Annoying kid who talks funny who is our hero's ancient master...reincarnated in a new body who talks in a mixture of attempted teenybopper slang and Ancient Japanese terms, and flip-flops in personality from "hey man" to "bow before your sensei, stupid student."  His personality shifts based on what he is doing, and on his irritation level.  If he is doing martial arts training, he’s likely to be more fully ‘Sensei’.  If he’s playing hopscotch, then he’s the kid.  If the hero bugs him for training (which the hero will have to do since no other sensei will take him on when he is the Ancient Master’s student), he will get irritated, and more ‘Sensei’.

He is superhumanly good at martial arts, but he would rather spend his time playing with his Xbox....

He is also at least four years younger than the hero, but he can whale the tar out of the hero while yawning.

You may not wish to introduce all these characters at once, but pace them out slightly.  Let the hero just grasp that he’s got one weird friend, and then introduce another.

Once you’ve got the group set up, you can work on perhaps introducing a master villain who occasionally shows up.  That would be the astral form of the “King” of the Dark Dragons, who has telekinesis, and solid body form, and would usually appear to the hero in the dark, in a human body, and try to scare or corrupt him.

This allows the King to escape his prison temporarily, at least with his mind.

Another character is for when the Dragonbots manage to move one of the binding stones a bit.  There is a field of stasis between the prison dimension and ours which serves as the bars for the cage.

Once one of the five stones is moved, which is enough to free the astral self of the King, it is also enough to free the physical body of the Ninja Girl.

The Ninja Girl went on a holy quest back in ancient feudal Nomorkia (which is the ancient feudal name of the country the characters live in.), and tried to sneak into the cave which led to the prison dimension to assassinate the lot of them.  Instead, she got caught in the stasis field, and has not moved, breathed or thought since that moment.

Now she is released, and she is totally unfamiliar with modern life.  But, she is a very good ninja with ancient ninja magics, and she is a young girl who will naturally fall into a crush on our hero as soon as she sees him.  And she will have to go to high school because that is what is expected of her by authorities, and she being a ninja is good at blending in.

She’s also good at forgery, and voice mimicry so she convinces the authorities she is living with her parents, when she is alone in her own apartment.  She has wealth because she has an ancient, very well preserved list on a scroll that she sells to a scholar for lots of money.  Its her shopping list from ancient feudal Nomorkia.

She wants to slay all the evil Dark Dragons, but even after she realizes the villainess lives, she wonders if she should because it might be more useful to watch the villainess, and learn.

In this game, lots of embarrassment should ensue.  Lots of coincidences.  He stumbles into an all-female bath, or he is about to play kissie face with one girl, and then two of  his other girlfriends show up to stop it.  And so forth…

Thanks to Avahur, Malachai, McCallister, Misty, and Kate of RPOL.net for their most useful assistance.

(I hope I got the credit line right..of course if you want your real name in there, we can do that as well.)

(And any other comments...well, I know I need names for my people, and perhaps a bit more of a description of the land of Normorkia.)

(And thanks much for all your help.)

Playtester