I'm pondering to get into Anima Beyond Fantasy after having played Anima The Shadow of Omega. After researching a bit, I found that the game has a Core Rule book, a game master's toolkit and two suplements(Gaia Volume 1 and Dominus Exxet).

But I'm from Europe and stumbled across the spanish website of Anima and the spanish version has allot more content than the english one.

Anima: Beyond Fantasy Core Exxet (Core rulebook)
Pantalla del Director Edición Revisada (Game Master's Toolkit revised edition)
Gaïa: Más Allá de los Sueños (Gaïa Volume 1: Beyond the Dreams 1)
Dominus Exxet: Dominios del Ki (Dominus Exxet: The Dominion of Ki )

Now for the content not available in english:

Carpeta del Jugador (Player's Folder)

The player's folder is a supplement for Anima: Beyond Fantasy that includes:

- 40 specialized player sheets with four different special ability models, ideal for characters capable of magical, psychic disciplines or Dominion of Ki skills.

- A folder to transport all your character sheets with a small guide inside with reference tables for the player.

- A big poster of the old continent in full color where all the most relevant locations are included.

Los que Caminaron con Nosotros (Those who walked alongside(with? among?) us)

Los que caminaron con nosostros is the ultimate creatures and monsters of Gaia book. In it's pages you will find the most amazing beings and an infinity array of unique abilities to customize your characters or create your own entities. With your power you can open the doors to a new dimension of unlimited fun, mistery and challenges to the world of Anima.

The book contains:

- Bestiary
- Being creation
- The lost souls (Rules to incarnate new playable races)
- Game ideas (Settings for game sessions and campaigns)
- New combat systems (Alternative combat system who allows players to fight massive battles of hundreds of foes or the dramatic combat system who spectacularly increases the proportions of a battle)
- Forgotten Tales (Ancient lore, creatures, misteries, foes etc...)
- Unique Entities (Face the unleashed power of the most powerful creature of legends.)

Diario del Jugador Masculino (Player's diary Male)

The player's diary is a small book designed to document the exploits and adventures of your favorite characters of anima. Doesn't replace the character's sheet but complements it, offering you a place to increase your characters in depth.

Contains a space for general character data, a page for illustrative notes and a diary with details of origins, possessions, to do tasks, projects and memorable quotes.

But the bulk of this book consists in the special objects list, list of contacts and logbook, the perfect place to write down the details of your everyday's adventures. Not only you won't forget about previous session's details but in the end of the campaign you will be able to save your character for further use in posterior campaigns or future stellar(?) appearances with all the details that it deserves.

Diario del jugador Femenino (Player's Diary female)

Same as above only for a female character.

Arcana Exxet: Secretos de lo Sobrenatural (Secrets of the supernatural)

This book contains:

- New spells and psychic powers.

- Metamagic spheres: A complex system of mystical powers that will allow characters to completely customize the supernatural abilities of their spells.

- Unleashed Magic: A new system of magic that allows characters to recreate reality using their own existential power without the need to cast spells.

- Arcane Rituals: Rules to perform occult rituals who allow to perform magic on individuals without the don.

- Summoning: New invocations and rules to perform reincarnations, the power to impersonate a being of legend who resides in the soul of the summoner and it will possess unique abilities.

- Much more: New supernatural and psychic advantages, optional rules to change the mechanics of magic in different ambients, nexus of existential power or how to create Sanctrum Sanctorums.

There are also T-shirts on sale and a visual artbook.

Despite not being Spanish I am able to read Castellano and talk to a certain degree, but I'd prefer the english versions, do you think FFG will release the same content in english? Should I wait for it? Or should I go ahead and get everything in Spanish? The only place I found that ships the spanish version to Portugal is the offical store but it has an expensive shipping rate, whereas The english version can be purchased at many other shops and some of them, like amazon.co.uk, ship to Portugal for free.

My understanding is that FF is rather slow in translating new books. And the ones that are translated aren't great translations.

I only read English, and despite these dissadvantages, I love Anima.

Hrathen said:

Are they really that badly translated? From what I've seen anima seems to be a great and fun RPG. But I'm still deciding to buy or not to buy...

Anyway, as long as they release the Anima books I'm ok with it. I was just afraid that they would cease to support anima and I'd be stuck with half collection in english and the other half in spanish.

The Spanish Anima: Beyond Fantasy Core Exxet is currently not the same as the English one, but a revised version.

Here a list of changes and improvements:

- change in the secondary skill system allowing players to be more flexible while investing less dp. Also they included several tables describing (ruleswise) what exactly every skill does.

- characteristic checks have been simlified

- the magic system has been completly changes, it's now easier to see how much you can currently do with a spell and less calculativ - it moved from added effects into five predefined grades per spell

- Combat table is no compleatly gone - only a dmg reference table is still included to speed up calculations (x% of xdmg can be looked up there) - speeds thing a bit up in combat situations

- Weapons have been slightly reblanced and additional attack give now penalties depending on the size of the weapon used to attack (smallers give less then bigger ones)

- and a few other minor changes

In addtion, the layout as been overhauled and there are new and (for me) even better graphics in there - there's also an index now (which isn't in all english and spanish books)

There are also three web supplements on the Spanish publisher site that correct some stuff gone wrong - naturally, they are in spanish.

If FFG stays with it's "one book per year"-policy you can guess how long it will take to catch up to the spanish books =(

I for myself bought the english books and the spanish pdfs and translate them for my group (will problably still buy the english books when they come out, it just feels better to have them in hands then stare on my laptop) - the additional content is it well worth

Hope this helped you, bye!

oh forgot something:

Yes the translation is bad, you can read it all right but the used scales are all over the place, some rules have translation errors giving them a wrong meaning and stuff like this - if you are carefully you still can mangae to use them thought.

(scales are all over the place: some tables use meter other inch and feet and stuff like this, in the spanish books everything is in meters and kilometers)

Lagnalok said:

Lagnalok said:

Well, that settles it, I'm going for the Spanish editions spanish isn't hard to understand for a portuguese, now I just have to find a store that ships it here without being to expensive.

Also, one book per year? Really? Wizzards has loads of D&D books to be released through all the year.

By all accounts the translation is actually very good. It is the underlying text that is the issue and so Spanish editions are unlikely o be much help.

However, Core Exxet, which is slightly cleaned up, is only available in Spanish.

Irxson said:

Are you comparing D&D, the world's best selling RPG, with Anima? Did you really expect the comparison to be helpful?

FWIW the Corebook and Gaia provides you with many options and years worth of play. I expect that the releases though slow will add more per page than most RPGs.

I have to agree with you there on the enjoyability of Anima, even though I never got a chance to play it yet, because of the back-story.

Also... what the hell does FWIW mean?

I would like to point out, that I only read English, and though there have been times when I found the wording of the rules confusing, being active on the forums has pretty much cleared up all of my questions. I have no doubt that this forum will help me with future problems that I can come up with.

Xamusel said:

For What Its Worth

Ah, thanks, I didn't know.

Has anyone tried ordering a Spanish edition, scanning it with text recognition, and running it through a translator? If so, how is the error rate, and does it come out in a form that is usable?

hellgeist said:

On different forums, the cipher-studios.com ones, I've heard that if you can read at least some Spanish and if you run it through a translator line by line with already having some clue what the line is suppose to say, then you can get a fairly nice translation. If you don't know what it is suppose to say before hand or you attempt to translate a whole bunch at once, you get a lot more errors.