Zelda-inspired tabletop RPG Break!! is the next big crowdfunding hit

polygon.com:

Tabletop role-playing games are all about fantasy. Inside the magic circle of the dining room table, you can be whoever you want to be — a powerful wizard, a streetwise cyberpunk hacker, or even a smarter-than-average bear. One of the reasons we buy TTRPG books is to validate those fantasies. It is inspiring to pick up a copy of Dungeons & Dragons’ Player’s Handbook and find that fantasy version of yourself rendered on the page. But for Reynaldo Madriñan, co-creator of the Break!!TTRPG, it was always hard to see himself inside those books.

Like many players of a certain generation, Madriñan grew up playing Japanese RPGs, like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy, and watching anime. Rarely, if ever, did the heroes he enjoyed as he was growing up appear in the pages of Western TTRPGs.

“It was almost like the old Simpsons gag — Why doesn’t mine look like that?” Madriñan said in a recent interview with Polygon.

So, Madriñan decided to do something about it.

Break!! is the culmination of a decade-long effort to get what was inside his head down onto the page — a fully-featured, pen-and-paper experience designed and written with his style of fandom in mind. The secret sauce, Madriñan said, is his close collaboration with co-creator Grey Wizard. The anonymous “hobby artist and information design nerd,” as they describe themselves, has gone several rounds with Madriñan to get the look of the game just right.

At first, Madriñan thought he’d found the right angle for the project in an early version of D&D that was released in Japan — a three-volume set known as the Rules Cyclopedia series that was first published in 1994. That original set was designed and built with Japanese aesthetics in mind, including brightly-colored,