Tenkaichi: The Strongest Under Heaven is a tabletop role-playing game, written and designed entirely by myself for a Tabletop Game Design class, about climbing an ever-shifting tower to attain Heaven by destroying everything in your path. The game is heavily inspired by Tom Bloom’s Kill Six Billion Demons (the iconic phrase “Reach Heaven Through Violence” is directly quoted in the game) and Daniel Bayn’s Wushu. The main rule is simple: when a player takes a turn, they have to say every action that they would do in a single move, with each action adding a six-sided dice to a pool that they will roll. Higher numbers are successes, while lower ones are failures.

The main focus for this project was “style over substance.” It still has substance to stand on its own and be a fully-fledged game. I just wanted to focus on the “Rule of Cool,” the one instance where everyone at the table playing the game agrees that it’d be better to just have fun rather than focus on the actual game rules. Like with HalfMoon, I felt as if specific classes would be too limiting and restrictive if I wanted to let players make whoever they wanted. So instead, I focused on creating “Archetypes” that describe how they solve problems or what broad abilities they could be capable of. The abilities affect game mechanics rather than affecting the overall aesthetic of a character.

I also wanted to make a game that really captures the spirit of intense, action-packed anime and online animations that I always keep going back to, with players always teetering on the edge of feeling unstoppable or having the rug swept from under them at the drop of a hat. This is why I made the “HEAT” system, a number that players assign themselves that “explodes” a die and lets them roll an additional one, directly inspired by the “Black Flash” in Gege Akutami’s Jujutsu Kaisen. The mechanic is supposed to represent a flow state that enhances one’s strength to an absurd degree, with more and more dice exploding the more HEAT is rolled, which is interpreted as something like…doing multiple of the same actions at once or doing one action really well. Along with this, I added “Overwhelming Successes” and “Catastrophic Failures,” successes so good that they carry a small negative consequence and a failure so bad that fate itself will throw you a bone. Why? Well, when you do something so well, sometimes people start getting scared or envious of you, right? And when you do something so terribly, sometimes one might let their guard down or other people would be more willing to help someone in trouble. I wanted to capture those experiences.