Well, That Didn't Take Long

Just last week I was mourning the loss (for around 18 months) of fresh episodes of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

Not that I'm short of shows - and movies - to watch, both new and old, but I turned to Crunchyroll to see if there were any fantasy animes that could help fill the Frieren-shaped hole in my heart.

I watched a couple, but they didn't really get their hooks into me.

Then I realised that Witch Hat Atelier had just begun, literally a couple of weeks ago. This was another manga that had been on my godson's Christmas list... and this one I actually got him the first volume of.

So, I was inspired to check out this new anime (to date, now, there have been three episodes released).

And it didn't take long for me, once again, to fall in love. This is a simply gorgeous anime, incredibly Ghibli-esque in its design.

It turns out that Witch Hat Atelier is the third pillar of current "fantasy big three" for manga and anime, along with my other favourites: Frieren and Delicious in Dungeon. So, I really should have been all over this before it even began on Crunchyroll.

So far, this is a brief my understanding of what's going on in Witch Hat Atelier:

In an exquisite fantasy world where only witches can cast magical spells, and must be unseen while doing so, young dressmaker Coco discovers she has this gift... as a result of a tragic accident. She is taken under the wing of visiting witch Qifrey, who seems to believe his new apprentice has a grander role to play in the future of their world.

The story hasn't yet quite gripped me in the same way Frieren did straight off the bat, but there is an elegance and beauty in Witch Hat Atelier that is incredibly mesmerising.

Additionally, as a bonus to ignoramuses such as I, Crunchyroll has released all the episodes dubbed, so far.

To be honest, I don't mind subtitles, but I find sometimes when I'm reading the subs I'm miss something happening elsewhere on the screen. 

There was also a massive issue with the release of the later Frieren episodes from season two where the episode would drop (with Japanese dialogue) on a Friday afternoon, but then the English subtitles would randomly appear some time later... sometimes immediately, sometimes two or three days later!

For those, like me, that instantly didn't grok the name of this new show: "witch hat" is because witches wear stylish conical hats as a sign of their status, and "atelier" is a French word for a workshop or studio. In this case, it refers to Coco's new home, the small training facility that Qifrey runs for handful of other aspiring witches.

And Now We Wait A Year-And-A-Half For More Frieren

Macht of the Golden Land, season three's big bad,
the most powerful member of the Demon King's Seven Sages of Destruction

It's been two weeks since Crunchyroll aired the final episode of season two of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, and I'm still thinking about it all the time.

An incredibly intelligent and nuanced anime, it blends long tracts of cosy, lyrical, slice-of-life storytelling with sudden bursts of - usually magical - fantasy violence.

I'd only really heard the name of the series late last year when I was talking to Clare about what manga Alec (her son, my godson) would like for Christmas. She gave me a list of titles and asked me to "report" back on which I thought would be appropriate. Top of the list was Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

At the time, the first volume of the manga was out of stock, but it looked suitably fantasy-orientated that when I saw the anime was on Netflix I decided to check it out... and the rest, as they say, is history.

I didn't really know what I was getting into when I started season one, but I was in love with the show by the end of the first episode.

Like Delicious in Dungeon and the classic Record of Lodoss War, Frieren's approach to swords-and-sorcery is clearly influenced by Dungeons & Dragons (our inquisitive heroine's passion for collecting magical tomes often sees her accidentally diving headfirst into treasure chests that are actually mimics!).

Frieren in mimic, Fern - her apprentice - being all judgy

In fact, the anime is pretty much a template for a dream character-driven campaign, interspersing dungeon crawls into an epic overland quest.

One of the aspects that really spoke to me was the story's main theme, a fascinating meditation on the different approaches to life between immortals and mortals, different perceptions of the passage of time and so on.

For those not au fait with this incredible Japanese animation, here's my - off the top of my head - summation of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End's general story (I might have some bits wrong and this certainly doesn't cover everything... not by a long chalk):

Immortal elf mage Frieren was part of a small adventuring party that undertook a 10-year mission to slay the Demon King. Then they all went their own way.

Fifty years later, Frieren discovers her former colleagues - including human fighter Himmel The Hero, who she was possibly in love with - are all dead or on the brink of death.

She wants to commune with the ghost of Himmel but the only place she would be able to do this is at the northernmost tip of the continent.

So, she sets out on this new adventure, on the way picking up a pair of young companions, former wards of one of her old party members, including Fern, a stoic mage, and Stark, a cowardly fighter.

On their journey they undertake a number of side quests that earn Frieren magical Grimoires containing seemingly useless spells... which will surely have some pay-off down the line.

The first - 28 episode - season of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is available on Netflix, while season two, which is only 10 episodes, is - currently - only on Crunchyroll.

Season three is slated for October 2027 and was announced at the end of season two. Production has begun and a teaser visual (at top) of the powerful demon Macht of the Golden Land was released on the day the final episode of the current season dropped on Crunchyroll.

Such a layered and beautiful work, understandably, provokes a lot of discussion and analysis online and below are just some of the short videos examining aspects of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

Early Thoughts on Personalising The Twilight Sword Setting

As a youngling I had this Pauline Baynes map of Narnia on my bedroom wall

With the impending release of the beta PDF of Twilight Sword, I have begun to noodle around ideas for "personalising" the lands of Radia - the game's default setting. 

World building from scratch is one of my weaknesses as a gamesmaster: all my worlds created whole cloth tend to end up as simply reskinned versions of real lands from Medieval(ish) Earth... and not in a clever, Robert E Howard Age of Hyboria way.

I also have a tendency to "Game of Thrones" things up before the first die is slung, by which I mean I overcomplicate and hyperdetail the setting way beyond anything the players will probably ever have any interaction with.

This is because I tend to fall in love with my settings and then mistakenly believe I'm the next JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis or George RR Martin! When all I'm really doing is creating a backdrop for some wonderfully silly elfgames.

Aware of this fault in my planning process, I'm approaching Radia - which we know is inspired by video games and anime - with broader strokes.

At the moment, clearly, I know almost nothing about the actual, 'official' setting, so am just scraping together notes and bullet points of ideas, locations, names (for places and people) etc that - hopefully - veer away from the usual Western/Tolkien norm of fantasy settings.

For the anime influences for Radia, I shall be looking to pick up cues from my beloved Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Record of Lodoss War, and Delicious in Dungeon.

My knowledge of anime is limited (although greater than my knowledge of video games), but I remain firm in my belief that these three serials have the best resources in the pure fantasy (Dungeons & Dragons-inspired) genre.

Beyond anime, I'm looking at established settings such as Narnia, Wonderland, Oz, Neverland, Eternia, and Arduin, and films like Labyrinth, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, and so on, rather than my usual inspirations, for example Hawk The Slayer and Lord of The Rings. 

Don't get me wrong Hawk The Slayer remains the definitive old school Dungeons & Dragons movie in my book and Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings trilogy is simply the greatest movie of all time, which I ensure I watch at least once a year from start to finish.

But, in my experience, the thing I find about such intricate settings as Middle-Earth and Westeros is that they are 'fragile'. If you mess around with them too much they break and are no longer the setting you fell in love with in the first place.

Now, I know you can say: but it's your game, you can do what you like with the setting, who's going to know?

But, besides the fact that I would know, it's my belief that these settings are so intricately interwoven that if you mess with, or change, one bit it will have a cascade effect further down the line so that something else isn't going to make sense (just look at George RR Martin's anger with The House of The Dragon tv show because characters were cut out who actually have an important role to play in the story at a later date).

Hence, why I'm shifting my focus to loosey-goosey, weird and surreal settings that are governed by more fairy tale aesthetics. I believe these will gel more with my vision - and understanding - of how Radia (and Twilight Sword) is supposed to operate.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. But I hope not.

I'd really like to run a setting that was, at once, familiar to the Tuesday Knights but also fresh and original, and not just another Middle-Earth/Forgotten Realms/Medieval Europe retread. 

And has talking animals.

RPG Lessons Learned From Delicious In Dungeon

This neat little feature is from a YouTuber I was previously unaware of, Beghast, but I thought they raised some interesting points.

Before I went all-in on anime earlier this month, Delicious in Dungeon was already one of my favourite shows because of its obvious Dungeons & Dragons connections and inspirational scenarios.

I'm On A Crunchyroll

As well as helping me get my Christmas shopping finished nice and early, this year's Black Friday also saw Amazon  offering some cut-price Prime Video subscription deals for the many, many channels available through its central hub.

So, I got myself a sub to Crunchyroll, which I'd been circling for months.

But what is Crunchyroll, you may ask?

Google summarises it as follows:

Crunchyroll is a streaming service for anime and other Japanese entertainment, owned by Sony Group Corporation. It offers a vast library of anime series, films, and manga, with content available to stream both with original Japanese audio and subtitles or with English dubs.

I had two main reasons for this subscription: (a) I was fed up waiting for more episodes of My Hero Academia to be released on blu-ray and wanted to see the final season and the spin-off series, Vigilantes; and (b) I wanted to see what other fantasy anime were available that gave off similar vibes to my new favourite shows: Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

Now, I knew there were a LOT of animes out there, but I don't think I was fully ready for the full Crunchyroll library (and this is nowhere close to all the animes, as there are several other streamers offering similar content, such as Prime Video itself and Netflix, the home of the Studio Ghibli movies).

The first thing I did was finish season seven of MHA, but then I wanted to save the show's final season and spin-off, allowing myself time to explore what else there was in Crunchyroll's portfolio.

I make no bones about the fact that I suffer decision paralysis when being faced by too many options, but endlessly scrolling through the shows and movies I now had access to nearly melted my little brain.

I watched the first episodes (or two) of several almost random choices that looked like what I was looking for - which is really easy when episodes are a little over 20 minutes long - but found myself being extremely persnickety. They were good, but not EXACTLY what I was hunting for.

One thing I did quickly learn though is that I much prefer anime that's dubbed into English. When I was watching Japanese language shows I found the subtitles were changing much too fast and I couldn't keep-up and was also missing the visuals while trying to read.

This is odd because I watch subtitled movies and a lot of Japanese documentaries on NHK World-Japan and have no issue with their subtitles.

I've currently settled on The Water Magician, which is - so far - an easy-going isekai serial with 12 episodes in its first season.

Being a lifelong fan of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, I'm interested in the the isekai genre as it's something I've often thought about introducing - somehow - into a roleplaying game set-up. A number of recent Japanese-inspired systems I've been looking at fully embrace the idea of "people from our world finding themselves in a fantasy world".

Of course, I've now found my own fantasy world - Crunchyroll - and may be lost for some time as I ferret around to find the magical MacGuffin that will solve all my problems... or give me the inspiration I need for my next roleplaying campaign.