Oh, ‘recent’ is the topic for Day 23 of the RPGaDAY 2025 Challenge. I think I’ll talk about a one-shot RPG session that I participated in for a friend who wanted to try out a new game he picked up from Kickstarter.
The game is called Gates of Krystalia and it is set up in the sub-genre of fiction called “Isekai” (which for some reason I keep wanting to pronounce it as ‘ee-seak-ay-al” which is completely wrong). The word is Japanese and means “different world” and the stories involve a person or persons who are transported to/reborn/reincarnated into a parallel universe or fantasy world. It’s a fish-out-of-water set up where the characters must survive in their new-found environment. One of my kids explained to me that Alice in Wonderland is an early example of Isekai storytelling. We were all regular humans on the same bus when it crashed over the side of a ravine and died. When we woke up, we were quickly pushed into our new fantasy bodies by an over-worked angel. We didn’t play long enough to find out how our previous human lives (and knowledge) interacted with our new bodies and environment.
So, Gates of Krystalia has an interesting RPG system. Instead of using dice, we had a regular deck of 52 playing cards. I hadn’t brought my special RPG dice deck with me which would have been perfect, so I borrowed a set from one of the hosts that had neon cats on it (or Tron Cats as my kids put it). As first-level characters we only had 25 of the 52 cards face down. Any time we had to randomly generate a number, we pulled a card. Ace had a value of 1, Jack had a value of 11 and it kept rising for each face card up to 13. There were ways that the numbers could be doubled, or certain attribute adjustments made to the pull. When we were in combat, we pulled five cards and could choose which card we wanted to play in combat. There was also the possibility of having a special hand (like two of a kind, all of the same suite, etc.) that would give us bonuses in that combat round. If we were damaged in combat, we had to reduce that amount from our draw pile into the discard pile. Cards could be returned to the draw pile when the character was healed or rested.
We didn’t get very far in the one-shot, but my tactical mind was starting to click when I tried to strategize. I’m not much of an Isekai fan to know if I’d want to play in a full campaign, but I’d like to see the system in action a little bit more. I guess to keep it Isekai for me, it would have to continue to be a fish-out-of-water scenario. And I don’t know if that concept would last longer than a session or two before the character had adjusted themselves to their new world or body. Then is it Isekai anymore? I was trying to suggest to the GM that he run Gates of Krystalia as a one-shot at an upcoming SaltCON. I know that there would probably be a few interested parties who would want to check it out.
Feedback on my challenge post for ‘Enter‘ from LexTenebris on Mastodon.
What he posted was really long for me to cut and paste here, but he liked to hack at examples like getting past the door. He referenced a game that he has really enjoyed, Ironsworn (https://tomkinpress.com/pages/ironsworn). I think the key thing he stated in his post was this: “Every time you go to the dice, you take the risk of introducing complications, which may be as simple as harm to yourself in a mechanical sense, but also very well could be a complication introduced in your fictional positioning within the narrative. You’ve taken too long with the door, and guards are coming around the corner right now. You’ve shorted out the panel and set off an alarm that your character is not aware of, which is going to increase the difficulty of things going forward. Fictive positioning is just as important as mechanical tracking in this case.”
Am I missing the point on Isekai storytelling? Is there a recent gaming event that you enjoyed? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.