Varsity!: A Sports Anime RPG (Old Version)
A downloadable game
Varsity! is a new Powered by the Apocalypse ttrpg inspired by the highs and lows of sports anime media.
Included in the game are all of the rules you and your friends need to create and play your own 'Aces,' talented athletes willing to give their all in the all-important GAME. The core pdf includes the following:
- 41 pages of play tested and troubleshot content
- 9 'Break Moves' for halftime and downtime like "Find Your Center," "Reach Out," and "Share a Meal," allowing you and the other Aces to grow closer or farther apart outside of the game
- 12 "Game Moves" like "Passion Play," "Read the Court," and "Flashback," allowing you to emulate the sports anime experience during a tense game match
- 7 unique playbooks like "The Veteran," "The Determined," "The Prodigy," and "The Rival," giving you the tools to live up to (or put a new twist on) your favorite sports anime tropes
- 11 dangerous "Penalties," pushing your team to its limit in tense games
- A unique "Pressure" system, so climactic season finale games feel different from your run of the mill training bout
- Special rules to guide the collaborative creation of your game team (jersey colors, mascot) and game world
- GM facing systems like special game modifiers to make sure that every match feels different from the last
This download also includes two downloadable cheat sheets (one for the players and one for the referee) full of all of the references and moves needed to speed up game play, and one printer friendly document full of blank landscape layouts for each of the playbooks.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Varsity v1.1 UpdateJun 26, 2021
Comments
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It's really not clear to me how you win/lose a key moment, could someone enlighten me ?
Hi! I'm translating to spanish, and I have some doubts. Can I someway contact with you? Thanks!
Mate, i love your Anime can I use it for my sevenxsports website ??????
This game has potentiality, however there are many things that should be playtested more, or plainly fixed.
One of the easiest thing to fix are the Playbook stats: almost all PbtA games have a sort of theme, so a single Playbook usually has a single stat that is "fixed" at +2, reinforcing the theme. Here (v.1.1) the stat lines have few meaning, they are almost random, and they don't reinforce a theme.
Also, the mechanics to advance them are sometime broken. See the Veteran for example.
I hope Rosemary will spend more time polishing the game, it could be very interesting when refined.
If I can, I'll try to give more feedback about it (are you still using Reddit?)
Hi Rosemary, thanks for this game. I contacted you thru Reddit, let me know if you receive the messages.
Andrea
This is an incredible PBtA game!
Really get the feelings and atmosphere of sport anime right through the playbooks, rules and the moves!
I love this game.
I love this game and this Thursday I’m gonna play Basket with this, and the next week Voley. Also, I look forward to your updates, and if you need some layout or something, I’m willing to help. Amazing game.
(reposting my review as a comment for visibility)
Varsity! looks on the surface to be a pretty standard take on PbtA but, like the sports shonen team dynamics it emulates, hides a lot of tidy, cool stuff under the hood. The playbooks and moves are *fantastically* evocative of this specific genre of fiction and it's difficult to read it without immediately thinking of characters, teams and memorable scenes from Slam Dunk! or Haikyuu!!
Without having playtested this at all, I'm a little daunted by the game having twenty one Moves but the fact that they're broken up into out-of-match and in-match surely makes it far more manageable than it seems at first.
The collaborative team-creating section (with suggested styles/reputations/traits corresponding to different colors) as well as the brief but very feature-dense Referee chapter, as well as the Pressure track come together to make this an exciting game that I cannot wait to get to the table. I also want to laud the "Key Moment" mechanic as a brilliant abstraction of the game playing played, allowing players to focus on the characters and their BIG personalities rather than on boring play-by-play scorekeeping.
The layout is functional and simple. It is very easy to read but the game is begging for a full Masks-style layout and art treatment, as well as the fancier bells and whistles of longer books like examples of play and full (maybe community-created?) playsets to laser-focus on specific genres or even specific anime.
In summary I'm incredibly hyped to be able to play or run this and 100% glad I decided to browse New on itch.