And Now For Something Completely Different: Why Madoka Magica is OSR

I swear I haven't lost my mind! Come back!

I don't just post about learned and erudite things like history and medieval folklore on this blog, you know. Yes, I watch anime. Call me cringe all you want, but let's not deny that at the end of the day, the world of RPGs owes just as much to pop culture as it does to "serious" literary tradition. Anything can be a font of inspiration to make our games, and our lives, a little richer. And today, I'd like to explore one such example.

Besides, if you were really paying attention, you'd know I already dropped a few in-jokes to the subject of today's post back in one of my first posts on this blog. Purely because it referenced the same Germanic traditions I did. That's just what I do. Like some sort of enigmatic trickster god, my players never know if I'm referencing some obscure 13th century epic poem or some internet meme. You might not know either.

Anyway, today I'm going to talk about the anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica. What makes the series notable for me is that it was the first anime - really, one of the first TV series in general - that I actively followed as it was being released (as it was being released in Japan, no less). It debuted in early 2011, while I was in high school, and I happened to become aware of it when it was freshly three episodes in (if you were there, you know). I proceeded to follow new episodes as they released week to week, and that was a kind of experience I had never really had before. Or, really, since, given the changing landscape of streaming and whole series dropping at once.

Rewatching it a few years back, I don't think Madoka Magica is a perfect series. I wouldn't even call it a great series. It settles for being merely good, but not without its flaws, and they only grow more apparent with age. The pace vacillates between being agonizingly slow and breakneck fast, but rarely settles on a comfortable middle ground. So many characters are frustratingly underdeveloped, and I've come to see the effective protagonist - one of the few who isn't - as the kind of person I would probably punch in the face if we were locked in a room together for long enough. The Watsonian lore and the Doylist themes of the show both raise all kinds of fascinating ideas and implications that feel like something could be done with them, but they never are. The individualist philosophy the series takes on the question of self-sacrifice never sat well with my utilitarian socialist self, and in light of the sequel movie (which split the fanbase in two - I'm solidly on the "it sucked" side of that rift), there's an unpleasant undertone of Objectivism that I can't help but pick up on whether intentional or otherwise. But there's something that makes the series hold a place in my heart.

And I suspect that something may just be how the setting seems to resonate so well with the ideas of a tabletop RPG - particularly one of the Old School ethos.

In the rest of this post, I'm going to give a rundown of Madoka Magica lore with a focus as to what aspects of it are gameable, and summarize how they abide by OSR principles. If you're already familiar with the series, you can probably skip this next part (though I recommend you at least give it a look because there's some things that never actually happen in the series but are totally missed opportunities, and you may not even know about them). If you aren't, please be aware that this discussion will contain spoilers if that matters at all to you - but for what it's worth, I wouldn't have gotten into the series at all if I didn't have it spoiled for me back then.

More under the cut.

What the Hell am I Talking About?

So, the basic conceit of Madoka Magica is that it deconstructs the tropes of magical girl anime (think Sailor Moon) as a vehicle for psychological horror. As someone who has never really been all that interested in magical girl anime, but did have a fascination with J-horror like the works of Junji Ito at the time, that was the elevator pitch that got me invested to begin with. I say this because a lot of the fans are really insistent on newcomers going into the series blind and how anything else isn't the "true experience." Spoilers aren't always bad, people!

That aside - the central characters are Magical Girls who gain their powers through making a contract with Kyubey, a cosmic entity with the face of a cat, the tail of a fox, and the philosophical outlook of Hari Seldon. They are granted one wish, unbound by the limits of physics or plausibility (refreshingly, this is never twisted or executed to the letter rather than the intent - everyone gets exactly what they want, it's just that this often has consequences), and in exchange for this, they are given magical powers they must then use to fight Witches.

A Witch, in the context of the series, looks more like some sort of abstract Lovecraftian psychedelia. Each of them is unique, typically posessing a theme (like gardening or sweets) and a personality trait (like "distrustful" or "tenacious") that informs their design and behavior. Though they have their own unique attacks and abilities, they (at least most of them) can't influence the physical world, instead acting to amplify negative emotions and behaviors in humans to cause them to act irrationally. They inhabit Labyrinths - subdimensional spaces only accessible by other magical beings, each posessing different traps, hazards, and Familiars, which are more numerous but less powerful entities that act as servants and minions to carry out the will of their Witch. According to supplemental material, a Familiar that harvests enough negative energy from humans, left to its own devices, will evolve into a Witch of its own with its own Labyrinth. This never happens in the series, but put a pin in that thought, we'll come back to it later.

As part of their contract, each Magical Girl obtains a Soul Gem, which allows them to transform into their powered form in addition to being used to track Witches, Familiars, and Labyrinths. These literally contain their actual souls; separating a Magical Girl from her Soul Gem causes her to go catatonic, and destroying one kills the user instantly. As such, they are influenced by negative emotions, and expenditure of magic or excess negative emotion will cause the Soul Gem to "go dark." In order to stave this off, they must be regularly purified by consuming Grief Seeds, which are obtained by killing Witches. Speaking of stuff the series never did anything with: there doesn't seem to be any need to use Grief Seeds immediately, and they can be saved for a time, but apparently they can draw in negative energy from the outside world, and if this happens they also create new Witches.

If a Soul Gem completely goes dark, then it becomes a Grief Seed - the user's physical body dies, and a new Witch is created, usually bearing some thematic link to the Magical Girl that created her and vaguely sharing at least some level of her consciousness. This supposedly can happen from overuse of magic, but more commonly it comes from the user giving up all hope and embracing despair. Going Hollow in the Dark Souls games is probably the best comparison here.

It's all, essentially, a very fucked up life cycle, and on a greater level, the process of creating a Witch generates energy that is used to power the continued existence of the universe itself. Basically, if the cycle doesn't keep going, everyone else dies.

So, that's the background you need to know for my next point:

Wouldn't this make a great setting for a sandbox/West Marches-style RPG campaign?

I'm not talking in terms of themes or content. The way the setting functions maps almost perfectly to Old School RPG play.

Think about it. You could get plenty of campaign material with just a map of a city, a couple of Witches to sprinkle across it, and some rumors to seed investigations - just let the players loose from there to pursue what leads they will. Because of the cyclical nature of the Witch ecosystem, you could easily keep introducing new threats from session to session to keep things fresh, or even bring back old ones that proved fun by having a stray Familiar survive. Hell, imagine how much more impactful it'd be if the next Witch turns out to be a fallen NPC the players recognize, or even a player character. That already makes them so much more memorable and integrated with the game world than any throwaway monster could ever be.

In fact, there's many topics frequently discussed and proposed in the OSR blogosphere that Madoka slots into perfectly:

• You already have dungeons as mythic underworlds - explicitly extradimensional spaces where the laws of reality don't have to follow the same rules as the outside world. Witch Labyrinths are pretty much the Gloamings that the sadly-defunct Way of the Waysider talked about here.
• In Madoka Magica, the series isn't really about the Witch battles. They quickly become more of a framework to explore the interpersonal dramas of the characters - in my opinion, this actually works against the series somewhat when it leaves some potentially cool ideas unexplored, but it also provides precedent for the sort of emergent storytelling that can arise in an OSR campaign where the DM isn't trying to curate the plot and is letting the ways in which the PCs interact with the world drive things forward.
• In fact, despite the similarities to the superhero genre, the nature of Witch labyrinths manages to completely sidestep the "villains act, heroes react" paradigm that Knight at the Opera cites as a hinderance to running superhero OSR campaigns in this post. If your villains are acting but no one can tell that they're there, and it's up to the PCs to investigate where the threat is coming from and what its nature is based on how it impacts the world before they can pursue it, player agency is restored. And the issue of needing to replenish magical energy using Grief Seeds gives PCs a constant motivation to keep looking for Witches, which brings me to my next point...
• You like resource management? Being meguca is resource management. The necessity of Grief Seeds combined with their scarcity, and the dangers required to obtain them, would make players think about how to use their treasure - do we use this Grief Seed to purify our heavy hitter's Soul Gem after she used too much energy to safely use her strongest attack again, knowing that we might need it for the next expedition, or do we feel we can risk letting her sit on the sidelines when another party member might need the healing more? Furthermore, if you actually use the idea of Witches regrowing from Grief Seeds, players can't just stockpile them, or they'll have more trouble to deal with.

• 

  It's also better than the original.
  Fight me.

  You like faction play? Just because Magical Girls have common goals doesn't mean they're all working together. The original series touches on the idea of different Magical Girls with different pursuits, sometimes coming into conflict with each other. The prequel series Magia Record is basically all about this. One could easily create a few
  NPC factions, allowing PCs to ally with some, oppose others, or play them against each other. Certainly it would allow for more encounters than just Witch fights in order to keep things fresh, and would provide a way for the status quo of the setting to evolve as different factions wax and wane. Running a Magical Girl team could even be its own sort of domain play.
• Finally, despite the obvious comparisons to superheroes, Madoka Magica definitely skews on the "heroic, not superheroic" side of things. For as powerful as Magical Girls can be, and for all the abilities they have that regular humans don't, they can and do die, and the world does not bend over backward for them. Even their benefactor isn't exactly invested in whether or not any individual Magical Girls live or die, and - regardless of how often the nuance is missed by both fans and later writers - that's not out of malice as much as it is from how incomprehensibly different in scale his goals are with theirs, in the original series at least.

In its heyday, Madoka Magica had quite a following among the TRPG community, and there's been several RPGs developed that were directly inspired by it, like Magical Burst; while fan-made World of Darkness entry Princess: the Hopeful predates the series, the later editions definitely take a more distinct influence. There's also plenty of general anime-inspired RPGs out there, and it'd probably be possible to work something out of a superhero RPG. I haven't played the new Power Rangers RPG, but it seems popular, and I could see a system meant to emulate one genre characterized by mixing teen drama with episodic monster-of-the-week adventure could work for another.

But regardless of the system, I feel like the OSR framework could fit the mechanics of the setting like a glove. At the very least, there's plenty of lessons that can be taken on how a setting can support OSR playstyles. But despite not thinking the anime is as good as I always did, it's still a setting I would love to play or run a game in - precisely because it's a setting that seems like it would work so well for that purpose.