So I totally had this post written since I posted the last post here back in February. I held off on posting it because I wanted to post it the next day, but held off for longer after that because I was waiting for players to decide on names. Here we are, I don’t know how many weeks after the first actual game took place and I’ve only just now posted to pre-game write up. Apparently I need to stop lining up posts before-hand. They seem to decrease my chances of getting a post out in a timely fashion, not increase it… Anyway, without further ado…

A Mysterious Case of Misdirection

A Touhou Higashijanai ~ Western Roses test-run

~The Prologue

Wherein we are introduced to our ‘heroes’ and a sheep.

So the time has finally come for Western Roses to get it’s first REAL test-run. I say first because the one I did based on the v0.5 ruleset was a colossal failure due to inexperience with DMing and a poorly thought-out game system. I can only hope that this time will not be so terrible. Anyway, the team has been assembled and shall be beginning their quest this Thursday evening. I shall be keeping up with their progress here on Neko Arrange for your (but mostly my) amusement. The team is composed of 9 members, as follows:

Hitomi, the human Shrine Maiden in worship of Hina Kagiyama. She specializes in keeping her allies alive and being relatively balanced. Her skill-set includes being able to make plants grow and knitting.

Felicity, the tengu Combat-Maid. She specializes in hitting multiple targets with her throwing knives. Her skill-set includes creating fields of impenetrable darkness and has a relatively balanced build.

Siren, the OTHER tengu Combat-Maid. She specializes in AOE coverage with her throwing knives. Her skill-set includes manipulating water and being fast as all get-out.

Haiiro Houou, the magician Librarian. She specializes in BEING MORE BROKEN THAN I HAD ANTICIPATED. Her skill-set includes having tons of spellcards and dealing tons more damage. But with a low HP, she’s a bit of a glass cannon.

Hitsuji the Amazing Alcoholic, the oni Drunken Master. She specializes in absolutely nothing! In spite of it, she has charisma of yes and by extension is both very charming and very stealthy. Her special ability is manipulation of sheep and alcohol and her primary weapon is a herd of metallic sheep that appear from nowhere. She keeps a sheep as a close friend who follows her wherever she goes in spite of not being called Mary. Her skill set is irrelevant.

Nagisa, the fairy Guardian. How a fairy came to have such an important job isanypony’s guess. Her charge is Hitomi who Nagisa is sworn to protect with her life. She specializes in dodging everything and taking the brunt of hits when something actually does manage to hit her in the face. Her skill set includestaunting enemies, blindingponies, and short-term memory loss.

Alice Margatroid the Seven-coloured Puppeteer, the magician Doll Master. Why is Alice accompanying this rag-tag poorly mixed group of unknowns? Who knows! But her specialty is dolls. Her skill set includes dolls, dolls, Shanghai, and more dolls.

Tsuki Uragawa, the lunarian Librarian. She specializes in letting her familiar do her dirty work for her. Her skill set includes having a familiar that she can let do her dirty work for her.

Niana the youkai Carefree Soul. She specializes in not existing yet. Her skill set includes warping reality to her will (hence existing even though she doesn’t exist yet).

An finally Sayuri, the moonhare librarian. Man, there are a lot of librarians. Man, there are a lot of CHARACTERS! I’m not sure I thought this through completely…

Also, a lonely sheep that is quite lonely and would quite like to be married. She’s not important and not a part of the 9 team members, so no I have no idea why she’s being introduced in the prologue.

And that’s the last of them. As their adventure begins, these 10 will find themselves at the gates of Hakurei Shrine as the annual Reitaisai festival is in full swing. Why a human has chosen to join the celebration considering the large amounts of youkai present is a good question, but one that will have to be answered later. Hitsuji is already ecstatic as she has waited her entire life to attend an event such as this so that she can complete her life goal of getting drunk off her gourd. Not that she doesn’t get drunk off her gourd already. However, things take a turn for the strange when the Reitaisai proceedings don’t go quite as planned. Soon the 9 will find themselves swept up in a web of lies and deceit only to find themselves back exactly where they started: the festival where everything went wrong.

And yet already dissent has begun before the adventure has already started. The Drunk-as-all-hell Hitsuji has made it her mission to impede the others’ mission at any possible turn. Perhaps she will be a minor annoyance but as a powerful oni with two tengu companions, who knows where her devious plans will take her so-called friends. In addition, our Lunarian seems displeased to see a Moonhare off the moon and seems eager to see the radical returned to her rightful place.

Hay, it’s been more than a week since I last posted here! Well, we can’t have that. Well, how about that update to Western Roses I’ve been promising? Yeah, that’ll do. I’ve actually had v0.6 done for a couple of weeks now, but I held off on posting it because one of the test players wanted to be Alice which meant I needed to go ahead and write rules for the Doll Master class and I kept putting off writing them until a few days ago. Then I didn’t post about it here because apparently I always have to post about things on Neko Arrange about four days after I finish them or something. Anyway, with the addition of the Doll Master class that technically makes this v0.65. Actually, it technically makes this v0.75 because the system has undergone a near complete overhaul. But it’s still getting called v0.6 because that’s what the file is saved as and we DO NOT argue with the file name. It gets very agitated very easily.

So now you’re probably sitting there in your chair thinking: Well, Ayuka/Neko/Fragile/Lineko/Tiaaaaa/whatever-name-you’re-going-by-this-week, that’s great but why should I care? The correct answer is that you shouldn’t. This is a Touhou tabletop RPG. No one asked for this, no one wants it. Except me. And some of my friends. And some randomponies I met through a student organization that I keep forgetting the names of and ask them to send me e-mail addresses so that I can pretend I knew their names all along. But on the off-chance you do care, here’s some stuff to care about:

-new system in which your stats determine how many dice you roll rather than the number you need to roll under. Rolling higher is now better because that’s easier to remember

-a robust* character creation system that actually lets you create characters for reals this time

-10 unique* shot-types which determine your base stats and give you a passive ability

-8 races, each with their own advantages and abilities including fairies, lunarians, tengu, oni, magicians, generic youkai, and even boring*ponies

-7 exciting* classes (referred to as occupations because classes are too mainstream)

-Choose the balanced Carefree Soul, the magically-inclined Librarian, the tanking Guardian, the healing-based Shrine Maiden, the minion-spawning Doll Master, the ranged assassin Combat-Maid, or the dodging Drunken Master, each with their own capabilities and different spellcards

-An intriguing* spellcard system which allows players to create their own unique* spelldecks lending personal flavor to each character. It’s also complicated and confusing and needs to be rewritten

-Skills and abilities, real ones this time not ones that exist only in my head, I swear!

-A refined item system that is more refined. Also it’s more specific and less broken

-A drinking system so even plain everyday characters can get drunk if they want to

* – all claims are completely Ayuka/Neko/Fragile/Lineko/Tiaaaaa/whatever-name-it-is-this-week’s and do not reflect actual gameplay. This game may be significantly less fun than a certain game involving giant fire-breathing winged creatures and places where you lock up prisoners. Especially if you’ve never heard of Touhou before. Or it might be more fun. We honestly have no idea.

So that’s pretty much it for now. The next version (which probably will be called v0.75 if not v0.8) will likely be another complete overhaul possibly even more complete-er than this complete overhaul. Or possibly not. Either way, the spellcard system will be re-written to be more unique for different classes and more generic for spellcardsanyponycan use. And also there will be more spellcard skills. That too. Current working changes for next version include:

-revise spellcards

-implement the options system (the things you get when you collect little red blocks, not the ability to chose between different things)

-change the way salaries work so that they don’t seem like something randomly tacked on so I could call them occupations rather than classes

-a way to combine spellpower between characters so they can use spellcards that cost more that 400 spellpower

So there you go. Now back to being a lazy lay-about. Stop making me do things!

What’s this, a song that isn’t related to pastel-colored marshmallow ponies?! Yes, I do that to. I used Neko Arrange’s new banner even though the song is only marginally related. I’m not really sure what to say about this one except that I like it a lot less now than when I first made it. I guess time does that to you, but oh well. I guess I could also say that I made this a long time before I posted it, but I waited until long after I put the other songs on youtube to post them here so I guess it all evens out in the end.

Also, new Western Roses ruleset is still incoming. First actual game was supposed to be today, but due to homework I wasn’t able to get everything ready in time. New schedule is for next Thursday which means I need to make final changes to the rules this weekend, so expect the version then (not that it makes much difference to anyone who comes to this site, but at least it shows I’m actually doing something).

Stallion, school has really taken a bite out of my time. I’m supposed to be a computer science student. What’s with all this math?! Yeah, I know computers involve a lot of math, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Oh, but that’s not really what this post is about. See, remember that thing I was working on a while back? Ya know, that Touhou RPG that I said I would probably stop writing and abandon. Yeah, in retrospect I’m not very good at keeping my word, am I? The next version of the rules, v0.6 is coming soon and it’s almost a complete overhaul of the rules, improving them to make them flow a little better as well as to be a more flexible system. Improvements you can look forward to include: A full character creation system, lacking only the ability to create options (ya know, those things that appear when you gain power in the shooters) including 8 races and a handful of classes that will be expanded upon in later rule sets. Also, the base work for the spellcard system which allows players to create spellcard decks similar to the fighting games. And a new system of rolling where a character’s stats determines the number of dice she rolls as opposed to simply trying to roll lower than a certain number (mostly because trying to roll higher than a certain number is sort of easier to deal with).

One way or another, I plan on doing character creation for the local test group this Friday which means the new version of the rules should be out within a week or so (depending on how much I overhaul the fighting system).

Well, actually, credit for the idea of the image goes to my little sister. Although I chose to have Cereal KillerFillystab PIPA since it gets a lot less attention than SOPA inspite of being about as bad.

Anyway, one way or another I won’t do things like this very often.

Anyway, I’ve mostly broken free of it’s evil grasp. In fact, I’ve been completely clean of it for… almost 24 hours now. You will be returned to your (not so) regularly scheduled Neko Arrange shortly.

A little while back I posted a WIP for a song called Lunar Solitude for a game that I ended up not getting done in time for the contest I was making it for because, as I discovered, I hate graphics. Anyway, it was a fairly nice little piece even though it was pretty simple and repetitive. I wanted to make the original sound like it would be at home in a 16-bit game, since that’s what it was going to be used for, but when I decided I wanted to add it to my Youtube I thought I mine as well make an orchestral song out of it. So I redid it. Nothing has really changed much except that it doesn’t sound all synth-y now. This is also the first song that I made with soundfonts rather than preset instruments, and the first song that I’m not completely embarassed to say I made, even if it still isn’t very good.

Also, dear Suwako centering text like I’ve been doing looks terrible. Why did I always do that?!

Well, ended up getting caught up in Christmas celebration and clean-up and not posting for a few days even though I still have stuff to post. Don’t worry though, I’m not letting Neko Arrange die again that easily.

Anyway, storytiem. I ended up being dragged into an on-the-spot two-hour composition the first day I joined My Little remix, and this was the end result. Storytiem over. It was made shortly after Dawn of the Final Day and also used almost nothing but presets in LMMS, so it’s also relatively terrible. Still, I made it so it gets posted here. Um… yeah, don’t really have anything else to say about this piece.

Sort of ironic I’m making my first content post after returning this song considering the title. Still, I wanted to post the earliest (read: worst) stuff first, so here you are!

In case you didn’t know, I’ve been working on music a lot recently and this is the first finished piece I actually put out (the Random piece from last year doesn’t count since it was made of audio loops from Garageband). I originally meant this to be a piece about Nightmare Moon, but the similarities to the music from the final day in Majora’s Mask became very apparent very quickly. And I kind of liked it so I decided to run with it making it about the night before Nightmare Moon’s return instead. It’s obviously not very good as it was the first fully finished piece I did, buteveryponyhas to start somewhere. My start just happened to involve pastel-colored marshmallow ponies and Majora’s Mask.

In site-related news I did some much needed house-cleaning with categories and blog links today. More changes to come, but small steps at a time.

I hope you like the new banner. I actually made an alternate version without a background just in case the current one looked too crowded. Anyway, I kind of like it. It’s nice to draw the Flash Koma characters in a more proportional style every once in a while. Also, the return of Parsee. She no longer has to be jealous of Yukari stealing all her glory. Instead she’s jealous of The Great and Powerful Trixie stealing her spotlight.

I’ve been looking into how to change the appearance of wordpress other than just changing headers, so hopefully there will be more changes soon.

On the topic of posting, as I said before my goal will no longer be to post everyday. Instead I will post when I have something I want to post or to post about. Whether this means several times a day or once a week will probably change a lot based on what goes on in my life, but I am going to do my best not to have another ‘hiatus’ anywhere near as long as this last one.

What I post may change a bit as well. Of course I’ll be posting Flash Koma as always, but I’ve been working on a lot of music recently so there will likely be a lot more WIPs and music sketches from me. I’m not very good yet so I’m sorry if they get to be a little grating. This is your warning, though. I may also start doing little writing pieces, though I’m a bit on the fence about it. I don’t want them to turn into venting and annoyeverypony. I will also still post videos and music, but I won’t be doing it based upon what is new for the most part, just when I run across something I have something to say about or want to share.

I think that’s all for the moment. I hope you all like the new Neko Arrange, I’m certainly looking forward to it.