Night Wizard 3rd Edition Roleplaying Game
by Kikuchi Takeshi, FarEast Amusement Research (F.E.A.R), and Kadokawa/Enterbrain
not by the anon who translated this


"What is this I'm reading, anon?"
-- You are reading a partial translation of the Night Wizard 3rd Edition Roleplaying Game, or just NW3.


"What's Night Wizard?"
-- Originally published in 2002 by the same people written up above, Night Wizard is a "modern magic" world in which magic-using teenagers known as Wizards fight against invading demons called Emulators. It spawned an anime, manga, some light novels, and other things as well. The anime is probably available online somewhere, even though it was made in 2007. It's worth a watch.


"Okay, why is this 'partial'?"
-- I began the project in May 2015 because I wanted to improve my Japanese skills. That's to say that my Japanese isn't that great. While I'm better than Google Translate by a long shot, I'm still not that great at it... so translating not just one, but three entire books packed to the borders with Japanese text is a little beyond me. Since I did this out of my own time and effort, I just stuck to what was useful to me--which meant, since I know what Night Wizard is, and I know how to play TRPGs, I only needed to know the mechanical information.


"Gotcha. So what if I don't know Night Wizard?"
-- Watch the anime.

But I'll give you a bit more on the setting: basically, the world is "normal". Everywhere you look, you see modern day Earth. However, that's only because the world is encased in what's called the World Barrier. The World Barrier enforces what's called "common sense". If something happens in the world that many (read as: more than a few) people recognize as "something that should not exist", the World Barrier kicks in and literally rewrites reality so that thing no longer exists--it's erased and forgotten. This makes life hard for Emulators, who are basically shapeshifting demons that need "prana"--the energy of life itself--to survive. If they ran out and drained prana willy-nilly, they'd quickly become common knowledge, and the World Barrier would erase their ENTIRE SPECIES. Sucks.

So, Emulators developed "Gekkou" or Lunar Caskets. These are micro-realities, basically. You see them all the time in anime--the "closed space" alternate dimension stuff that allows people to fight without destroying the surrounding area. If left alone, these Lunar Caskets would overwrite the World Barrier, imposing themself over that space. So the park downtown would suddenly turn into a weird, reality-bent area where literal demons could exist. It'd be bad news. That's why the Wizards exist! Their entire job is to go into Lunar Caskets and destroy the "core", undoing the overwrite process. Of course, Emulators are wise to this shit, so they often erect Fortresses within the Lunar Caskets. In short: modern day dungeon diving.

And that's the core conceit of the setting. Wizards are at war with the Emulators. Mind you, Wizards are no more "out of bounds" than Emulators are--they can't use magic in sight of Innocents (non-Wizards), or magic itself will be erased. So it's a secret war, and it's anime as fuck.


"That sounds cool. But what if I don't know what TRPGs are?"
-- Then, I'm sorry, but this won't help you. There is information in the book to help newbie GMs and players get in on the fun, but plainly, I don't care to translate it. You can try asking people for help, get an experienced GM to run it, or any other thing you can think of to help you get in on the fun. Or just cuss me out on the internet, that's fine too.


"What else do I need to know?"
-- While it's a partial translation, I've tried to make use of word technology to make reading this rules shit as easy as possible. It's all text files, because I'm shit at PDF making. If you are not shit at PDF making, please feel free to make a cool PDF and let me know.

That said, I did not try to keep the translation 100% accurate to what the book says. While it's not incorrect, or changed, I simply am going to try to reword things to make it easier to read. That's all. I hope this doesn't turn you off--after all, this is all free!


"Uh, what's with the flavor text?"
-- Remember when I said I wasn't that good at Japanese? Yeah... it takes me like five times as long to translate the flavor text, compared to the crunch text. Therefore, I only did it when the whim struck me to do it. Sorry.


"What else is missing?"
-- I didn't translate the advanced Fortress rules from the advanced book, which provides for random events and random creation of Fortresses. I also didn't translate the Demon Lord contract/seal stuff from the third book, which let you enter into an old school demon contract with one of the top ten well known Emulators from the series (Bel Zephyr, Lion Gunta, etc). I did not translate a lot of the enemies included with the books. I didn't translate any of the world info.

If I missed anything else... sorry! Here's some pictures I scanned from the book: http://imgur.com/a/27vqz#0