I need to pray to the dark lord more often. :3

I'm glad Lennon was man enough to take the plunge and sell his soul for a new book translation. If only the other forum members were so devoted.

Samwisel88 said:

You might consider just importing some source material from another game. One that comes to mind is Dragonquest . This game included a lot of material that was derived straight from legends and lore from the real world just like Anima does (hello Christian church!). Aside from a variety of creatures and monsters, one section of interest in Dragonquest is their catalog of summonable demons, which is straight out of the Goetia (King Solomon's demonic contacts). If you want a historical basis for evil spirits to ride along side Anima's historical basis for holiness, this might be an interesting way of doing it

Of course, you'd need to convert your stats, but the value here is 'source material'.

Just out of curiosity, what books are not translated exactly and what did they contain? I remember seeing a list of them before but I can't remember where.

I don't know if you have searched this much, but there are some bits and pieces of Gaia book 1 translated into English from the French version, and some fantastically detailed maps from the Spanish version. Definitely not a replacement for the published volumes, but they will put some extremely useful details into your toolbox that might help prevent your campaign from having to be heavily ret-conned when the cat is finally out of the bag.

Check the wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima:_Beyond_Fantasy

I hope they translate all the new books. I have them in spanish, but it's really not my favorite language...

I don't know really how many books of Anima has been relased in English, but the last one that has been released in Spain is the Monster Bestiary and it adss some new bunch of mosters (some of them are just unplayable due their power level) and I can told you that even with this book I feel that I don't have enought.

I don't know when FF is going to release it, bt if they are making in the same way as in Spain, the next one should be Dominus Exxet (Ki powers).

Here has been announced for the next one in a few months the Magic/Psionic power book.

Kagesama said:

This is not helpful, or even accurate. Just because you don't like a game, doesn't mean its bad. Not really on topic, but i couldn't help myself

I'm curious how many of you play the game as written? i have a (bad) copy of this book that i inherited from a friend who declared the game so unplayable it made him wish we were playing Champians 4E again. I'm not worried about a rules intensive game, my group plays a lot of GURPS which is about a rules intensive as you get, but if this is a game i'm gonna have to spend weeks building NPCs and monsters for because there isn't enough provided for me to take and re-skin, i'm really not interested, especialy if the books are coming out at the rate of one or two every 8 months or so

Here's a poorly translated french bestiary

Bestiary.rtf - https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1v97MvYC8mm3FqX2ezkX8-Eu62l_bTI42YrhFOXsWNcU&hl=en

here's the original link
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/jerome.regad/Anima/Bestiaire.pdf

If anyone can figure out how to do a better translation.. Please post it.
Also feel free to edit that one that I posted..

Is that the official bestiary, or a fan project?

SprainOgre said:

Fan project (I know 'cause I made that file)

talsine said:

I'm running a campaign and we play mostly as written. We only made two or three clarifications where the rules are ambiguous and invented one additional skill so far. The campaign started in Americh, and since it seems, that there is no detailed description of the city (other than the short abstract in the core book), we flesh out the city by ourselves (and put these descriptions into a game wiki).

Now, with the Gaia book in my possession, I start to introduce more and more of the official game world into the game.

wow. Ok on the note of the creature book iv herd people whine about it before, and the reviews for it said it was pretty terrible. As for a setting book that would be pretty neat.

But common, most games dont use 20 diffrent creatures. Its called themes! Your players wont care if you only toss 3-4 diffrent monsters in a well made themed game. Also it only takes about 10-20 mintues to create a creature. Mabye more if its a boss or heavy plot encounter. Even so thats not a lot of time for well made game. If you really are that lazy hears a simple trick to get you by.

For a basic run of the mill monster just make its attack and defense equal to the avg score of the party. Give it enough health to survive a few hits of your players. (40-80). And give it like 50-60 damage. There you go, that took me 10 seconds to create a basic monster. Just change its apperence to suit your needs.

commanderq said:

the thing is - what's a good encounter? Sure, if you want to run a beer&brezzels game, you can just do that. But in my opinion, combat isn't all about attack and block/dodge. This is even more true for real enemies.

Even in Anima, there are few creatures purely breed for combat. Most creatures have instincts and features, which help them to survive and reflect there preffered habitat and hunting method (if predatory). So, before assigning stats, it's important to know, where the creature lives, what it eats, how it hunts etc. With this, you can model a distinctive appearance and add features which really makes sense. If the creature hunts in the night, it will have a way to percieve it's prey in the dark. If it stalks it's prey, it will be silent, strong and have some terrible claws and teeth. But maybe it prefers to build traps? Or it's so fast, it doesn't need to be silent? If a creature hunts in packs, the individuals doesn't need to be that big and armed than a single hunting creature. Also, most creatures will try to save their lifes instead of fighting to dead. But some may be caught in a frenzy. And so on. This will also have a crucial impact on skills a creature needs to have. And if you read the Anima combat rules, you'll see that you may have much fun i.e. with acrobatics.

If you keep this in mind, you create monsters and encounters which will be rememberd, instead of creating just another random creature to kill. Creating such a creature takes way much more time than sinply putting together some attack and dodge values. But I think it will make most games richer. also, you'll need fewer combats to keep things interessting and can limelight oder themes, moods and concepts... like actual role playing interactions between characters and npcs

Therefore I appreciate descriptions of creatures... if they are well made.

Honestly with the matter of new books. It can't be helped that Edge isn't helping in the effort to help make an English Version of the books (I believe), and FFG has people spread thin enough as it is.(So many games!)

I honestly would like to see them keep up with the product line, but lets look at the reality of it. The books would not only be expensive to print, sell, and send. But paying people for a refined English volume might not outweigh the profits. Not sure how the sales are doing, but I doubt it is enough to rush out new books and pour staff into.

The only option is to have a third party try and help. Some one who works for peanuts, to retype the pdf files and convert the system. The only bad thing is that we the community can't be the ones to do it, mostly because it would mean us getting the PDFs for cheap or free (which is risky as we could leak, sell, or do worse), and then trying to sell an unprofessional copy of something that is strictly copyrighted.

Best to just sit back and keep buying products and trying to drive sales of the game to help get the attention we need. Get some friends into it, throw a game day with people at your campus/work/school. It is a good system and we need to show it off to the English speaking people. I already have a done a good share of that and had friends buy at least 2 or 3 copies, and had a few strangers in a game store buy one as well. That on top of a GM Toolkit and Gaia book, I know I have bought my share as well.

Best of luck

~Tigbun

Tigbun said:

That's part of what I wrote. The slow releases are bad for selling and slow selling is bad for more / faster books. It's like a chicken-egg problem.

Tigbun said:

I think that's not true. I know that some publishing houses - at least in Germany - are doing this (since I am involved) and that this can work. You need one person who coordinates. Then you can recruit active members of the community who get paid a free copy and a small fee depending on the amount of work they provide. They write text only, layout and graphics is done by the company. And since writers who do a good job and don't leak information a hired for next projects, there are few problems. Also, even if a text leaks out... people will still buy the book, since they want the books, the graphics, ...

I think it's worth a though. Maybe someone from FFG is reading this

Well no doubt we would still buy the books, and if the people converting are even decent FFG could put a much smaller team onto the finishing project of refining and layout. (Quality Control)

It is nice to know that there are options at least, just an issue if they are not jumped on. I know a lot of people are sitting on their hands and being polite, but are very angry and willing to do a lot for an English copy of the books.

I actually fell in love with the game the first day I saw it. It's beautifully done and deep without being oppressively rigid as is common when a game acquires so much material that it hampers an individual game masters creativity.

Reading this thread has caused me to consider recommending the following: as there are several of us concerned with expanding the material available to English audiences have we considered as a community collaborating on the matter? Games such a burning wheel thrive on community expansion and contribution and perhaps the same could go a ways for Anima as well.

I thought we were already talking about community contribution

But one important thing - as well as we are willing to do things to have faster access to english copies of the books, we shouldn't do this without involvement of FFG, And this means that FFG has to start something we could contribute to. It won't help if i.e. some spanish and english speaking people would start making a fan-translation of the spanish books, since this would be negative for selling and marketing.

So, it's good to know that there are people who want the books badly and who are willing to help. No it's the turn of Fantasy Flight Games to play the ball... or not.

Speaking as someone who has done a great deal of translating various elements of the Spanish books in various snippets to the forum, and who uses the Spanish material in his campaign

I agree with what has been said on one aspect - A full on fan translation is flat out illegal. It gets a great deal of people in trouble, and it steps on the toes of the people who have legal, binding contracts to do the work. I'd personally love to make my services available, but there's a business side you can't ignore.

Also, in terms of releasing more books -

1) Anima is written by ONE person. Source material for other RPGs (To use as an example, WoTC) often have multiple contributing authors. Not so here. You see that 300+ page Gaia book? All of that is Carlos' work.

2) FFG is a business, and has to put their money where they get the best return. Right now, as you can see, in the RPG department, that happens to the Warhammer 40K IP and all the spin offs (Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and now Deathwatch). That existing IP has a huge fanbase, and the books have had a significant community response. Anima can't compete with a decade+ established IP. Anima is a niche product, unfortunately.

Also this part of the community really needs to make itself more known over at the Official board -

www.cipher-studios.com/index.php

Forum interface is much cleaner there.

Ok I know I just bashed DND 4.0, but to be honest it IS fun to play in, it just gets tire some to DM. Its almost like wizards is trying to get rid of the DM altogether. Every thing is balanced out so that the players have a fair fight. (in theory). But I grew tired of the 4.0 MM because it didnt make any sence. lv.18 minions with 1 hp could kill an entire party because its AC was so high. So I guess im jaded against MMs from that, and even in 3.5 I found myself cobbeling together monsters from scratch because nothing in the book fit what I needed at the time.

I think what im trying to get across is that I like anima BECAUSE there are so few books. It does not seem like a money making scheme that DND has turned into. It has everything you need to run a game in 1 book, rather than forcing you to buy 3 books just to play.

All that said I would love a book that provided detailed maps of the cities, but that is the complaint of a greedy bear with honey.

I like Gaia vol.1.

When will we see Gaia vol. 2?

I need the last 10 principalities!

See the World of Anima needs a Library of books just as vast as the "World of Darkness"

-Not going to say DnD, since really isnt a library its just more tools to play with.-

I have ALOT of Books from WoD and I would LOVE for FFG to release more Lore and Rules about this game. Every time I create a campaign I mix these Anime's together

Claymore, Pandora Hearts, Senjou no Valkyria: Gallian Chronicles and Queens Blade.

I want to read more about the world of Anima, so i can get a more Original feel of the game.

I agree with what Sebashaw I like Gaia Vol:1.

And NEEDS the LAST 10 Principals!!!!

Sebashaw said:

Gaia 2 was planned to be released after Secrets of the Supernatural (which comes out in Spanich on the 22nd)