How To Play Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls game at home. I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category D3 minus 1 Stats Checks Abilities Empowering abilities Perks Moods Movement rules Combat Going all out Status effects Temporary hit points Dying Healing Daily routines Clubs Building a character Game category. Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls is a tactical grid tabletop roleplaying game themed around the topic of magical girls. Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica are some examples. Although the genre is called magical girl, you don’t have to role play as a female character to play this game. Sailor Moon has Tuxedo Mask, Cardcaptor Sakura has Syaoran Li, there is even Magical Girl Ore. The genre is about how a regular school kid meets a small cute magical creature such as a cat, a winged bear, et cetera, which leads to her ability to transform and use magical powers. Like how glasses prevent people from realizing Clark Kent is Superman in the superhero genre, the costume change into her magical girl alter ego protects her secret identity, letting her keep her daily routine of a normal school life. Fighting evil by moonlight, attending classes by daylight. In Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, each magical girl has an aspect, sort of like a class in other games, and your specialized abilities from that aspect let you do different things in combat than your team mates. To play this game, everyone should have some sort of way to look at a grid that is twenty squares left to right and fifteen squares top to bottom. When combat starts, magical girls draw half as many cards as their smarts stat rounded down. You spend cards to use and then further empower your abilities. To use an ability, roll as many six sided dice as you have in your stat, dividing the result by two and subtracting one. So ones and twos give you plus zero, threes and fours give you plus one, and fives and sixes give you plus two. To empower your ability, spend additional cards. Empowerment gives a bonus to the ability’s number of dice rolled, area it effects, or duration, based on the value of the card you spend. Apart from combat, there are also mechanics for your daily life, where how you roleplay to balance magical girl combat with attending classes and extracurricular clubs will affect your mood and your report card. D3 minus 1. This game uses standard six sided dice to generate zeroes, ones, or twos, to use from each dice rolled. To get a zero, one, or two from a six sided dice, you will roll the dice, divide by two, then subtract one. So if you rolled a one or a two, the result is zero. If you rolled a three or a four, the result is one. If you rolled a five or a six, the result is two. The game calls this the three sided result. In this game, every time you round a number, round down. Numbers can’t go negative in Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, including hit points. Stats. Each magical girl has stats you will use in checks to see if your character accomplishes or fails at what they try to do. These stats are power, style, smarts, guts, and spirit. Power is how strong you are and how much damage you do. A jock who plays sports is an example of a high power character. Style is your speed, agility, and if you can succeed at things that need finesse. Style is your movement speed, unless it’s less than four, and then your movement speed is at least four. Smarts is how intelligent your magical girl is. The honors student is a good example of a character with high smarts. Each magical girl can use their smarts stat number of abilities from their aspect and from the non-aspect abilities list. At the start of combat, each magical girl draws as many cards as half their smarts score rounding down, with a minimum of one. Your smarts number is also your maximum hand size, how many cards you can hold before discarding. Guts is how much damage your magical girl can take. Guts tends to be a higher number for no-nonsense type characters. Each magical girl starts with ten plus one half of their guts score of hit points. When you gain milestones, guts determines how many hit points you gain with the milestone. Spirit is the range of your magical abilities. You can affect things as many squares away from yourself on the battle grid as your spirit number. A moody sullen character might have low spirit while a cheerleader might have high spirit. Checks. When succeeding or failing at what your character is trying to do would have an important impact on the story, your game master will ask you to check to see if it works. Roll as many dice as your have in the appropriate stat. For example if you’re trying to leap a long distance, you would look at your number in the style stat, three, and that’s how many dice you would roll, three dice. Because Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls uses a d3 minus one system, your result from rolling dice could range between zero and twice the number of your stat. For example if you roll three dice and get one, two, one, that’s a result of zero. If you roll three dice and get four, three, four, each dice contributed one so that’s a result of three overall. If you roll three dice and get five, six, five, each dice contributed two so that’s a result of six overall. So you can see how the highest result you can get is twice your stat number, and the lowest is zero. Some dice will be zero, some dice will be two, some will be one, so the average result will be around about the stat number. Abilities. Magical girls can do three types of magical abilities. Universal, aspect, and non-aspect. Abilities can be attacks that reduce the target’s hit points, buffs that apply a positive status effect to a target, debuffs that apply a negative status effect to a target, environmental abilities that impact the battlefield, healing abilities that restore the target’s lost hit points, move abilities that change the target’s location, AoE area of effect abilities that affect multiple squares on the battlefield grid, self abilities that impact only yourself, and team abilities that affect the allies close enough to you. Action abilities can be used on your turn. Reaction abilities are used on someone else’s turn after being triggered by the other person’s action, like by them attacking you. If an ability says the word target, that can mean any character, object, or empty square on the grid that you can see. If it’s blocked and not in your line of sight, you can’t target it. If an area of effect ability would hit allies, you can’t selectively exclude them from the damage. Areas of effect, such as cones and circles, can extend outside the range of your spirit number of grid boxes of influence, as long as they start within it. Every magical girl can do the universal abilities, which are listed on pages 37 through 39. These univeral abilities include things like a costume transformation into a magical girl, a basic attack, a basic block, a basic dodge, et cetera. All magical girls know all the universal abilities, and can use them by simply spending their action or reaction doing that universal ability. You don’t have to discard a card to do a universal ability. Your magical girl’s number in the smarts stat lets her know that number of not-universal abilities. These not universal abilities can be either in their aspect or from the non-aspect list. Non-aspect abilities is a list on page 35 and 36 that can be learned by any magical girl. They don’t require your magical girl to take a specialization, called an aspect. But non-aspect abilities do take up one of your finite number of known abilities, and they do need you to discard a card to use them. You can know as many non-aspect and aspect abilities as the number you have for your smarts score. Any magical girl can learn a non-aspect ability, but they aren’t automatically known like the univeral abilities are. Some example non-aspect abilities are shields up, decoy, healing touch, spin attack, and surprise. Non-aspect abilities are different than universal abilities because they take up one of your finite number of known abilities and cost a card to use. Each magical girl has an aspect, which is sort of like a class in other tabletop roleplaying games. Aspect abilities can only be learned by magical girls who have that specialization. The aspects are fire, ice, water, lightning, earth, wind, time, and butterfly. Each aspect has seven or so abilities in that category. For example the fire aspect has abilities like cauterize, rocket jump, the floor is lava, etc. The ice aspect has abilities like chill out, snow cone, swirling bizzard, snow clone, etc. The water aspect has abilities like fog, mistform, tsunami, osmosis, etc. The lightning aspect has abilities like chain lightning, energize, lightning bolt, flash bang, etc. The earth aspect has abilities like entomb, stone skin, earthquake, avalanch, quicksand, etc. The wind aspect has the abilities wind blast, aerodynamic lift, draft, air wall, etc. The time aspect has rewind, hurry up, stasis, time jump, etc. The butterfly aspect has abilities like mesmerize, iridescent wings, metamorphosis, butterfly swarm, etc. To use an aspect ability, you first discard a card from your hand. Empowering abilities. Some abilities have text on them that says they do more wh
