# Tenra Bansho Zero ![[Tenra Bansho Zero - Rulebook (cover).jpg|300]] ![[Tenra Bansho Zero - Worldbook (cover).jpg|300]] Tenra Bansho Zero is the tabletop engine that runs like a Kabuki play: you and your friends stage one self-contained story, burn through it in a single four-to-six-hour sitting, and then set the characters aside and start another. Jun'ichi Inoue's original Japanese hit, brought into English as the two-volume **Heaven and Earth Edition** by Kotodama Heavy Industries, it's a "Hyper-Asian Fantasy" — a blender that shouldn't work and absolutely does, dropping Sengoku-era samurai, Taoist sorcery, parasitic worms, and piloted war-mecha into one gloriously unhinged feudal sci-fi romp. The machinery that makes it sing isn't the dice, though; it's the emotional economy that decides who burns bright and who burns out. ## Setting The planet **Tenra** is a world in the grip of endless feudal war — the book calls it "wars upon wars, lasting for over 400 years" — a near-future super-Japan where the culture mirrors the Sengoku "Warring States" era and everything is on fire. The setting is a stylistic statement that does not care about your need for internal logic: gunpowder and mecha sit alongside brush-and-paper spirit summoning, and the technology is largely warfare-shaped magic by another name. The power structure sprawls across it. The **Shinto Priesthood** split into two rival **Northern and Southern Courts**, each with its own capital (the flying capital **Genshikyo** and the fortified **Ouga**), their schism pulling the land's lords into a holy civil war. The **Oni** — Tenra's native people, in this telling — were driven into the **Land of the Oni (Kikoku)**, while the ruined capital **Jinrai** and the **Digger Clans** who salvage its old tech add a post-apocalyptic underlayer. Against this, the player characters are the genre's full roster of freaks and heroes: **samurai** who trade their humanity for soulgems and bound shikigami, **onmyoji** sorcerers who summon spirits with paper talismans, **armour-riders** — often sequestered children — who pilot towering yoroi war-mecha through soul-link mirrors, **kugutsu** puppet-masters, **annelidists** who weave parasitic worms into themselves, **kijin** cyborgs, shinobi, budoka martial artists, and more. The characters are a walking circus of anime archetypes, and the world is a war they keep making worse. ## Mechanics ### The Emotional Economy: Aiki, Kiai, Karma, Fates The heart of the game is a cycle of reward and ruin. Acting out your character's **Fates** — the 1-to-5-rated relationships, obsessions, and grudges written on your sheet — earns you **Aiki chits** from the other players, the "audience," just as a Kabuki crowd rewards a striking pose. Aiki converts into **Kiai** (spendable power: extra dice, stat boosts, interrupting action) via Fate Rolls. And here's the trap: every point of Kiai you spend becomes a point of **Karma**. In Buddhism, the book notes, all karma is "bad" — attachment to the world binds you to it. Cross 108 Karma and the character warps into an uncontrollable Asura; hit the extremes of zero, and they flip to an NPC. Managing Karma means deliberately letting go of Fates, so the emotional pressure rises all session toward a very Japanese, very fatal climax. ### Resolution Actions are resolved with pools of six-sided dice equal to your **Attribute** rating; you count a success on every die that rolls equal to or under the relevant **Skill** rank. The GM sets a target — the number of successes needed to succeed at all, or an opposed pool in combat. It's a clean, fast engine, deliberately built to get out of the way of the drama. ### The Session: Scenes, Zero Act, Moment of Truth The structure is pure Kabuki. The game opens with a **Zero Act**, where each PC gets a solo introduction scene and is handed a **Destiny** — a GM-given Fate that states their role in tonight's story. Play then runs through **acts** of hard-framed scenes and **Intermissions** (where spent Kiai hardens into Karma and Fates shift), toward an endgame. The **Emotion Matrix**, a 6x6 grid of 36 dramatic emotions, dictates how characters initially feel toward major NPCs and each other — roll a pair of d6s, find your reaction, and roleplay from there, nudging the grid with Kiai if you'd rather feel something else. Near the end, a player may call a **Moment of Truth**, burning the audience's last Aiki to amass Kiai for a final, desperate push. The whole thing is engineered to produce a complete, satisfying arc (and a memorable death) in one sitting. ### Combat and the Dead Box Combat is crunchy but forgiving — and famously hard to die from by accident. Damage spreads across **Vitality** and **Wound** tracks, and you choose how much you suffer. But then there's the **Dead Box**. Checking it is a voluntary declaration: you ignore all the damage from one blow and gain a permanent +3 dice on every roll from then on, in exchange for flagging to the GM, "My character is willing to die to win this." While the Dead Box is checked, if your Vitality drops to zero you die, truly and forever. The Dead Box is the game's way of saying you get to choose the hill your character dies on — and that the most dramatic fights come from people who have decided to end themselves spectacularly. ## Editions - **Tenra Bansho** (天羅万象, Jun'ichi Inoue, [[F.E.A.R.]] / ENTERBRAIN, 2000) — the original Japanese "Hyper-Asian" science-fantasy RPG, a landmark release credited with helping ignite a renaissance in Japanese tabletop RPGs. - **Tenra Bansho Zero: Heaven and Earth Edition** (Kotodama Heavy Industries, 2012; first printing Winter 2013) — the English deluxe edition, a two-volume set (a 240-page Worldbook and a 400+ page Rulebook, ~700 pages total) that folds the original core, a major supplement, several mini-supplements, and errata into one package; translated by Andy Kitkowski and others. *In the library.* (Rulebook and Worldbook, plus the Simple Text Rules/Setting text-only PDFs — alternate layouts of the same edition.) - **天羅万象 ビジュアルブック (Tenra Banshō Visual Book)** — the Japanese art/visual companion by Jun'ichi Inoue & FEAR, a showcase of the game's illustration. *In the library.* ## References - [Official Tenra Bansho Zero site - tenra-rpg.com](http://www.tenra-rpg.com) - [Tenra Bansho Zero: Heaven and Earth Edition (Buy) - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/111713/tenra-bansho-zero-heaven-and-earth-edition) - [Tenra Bansho Zero: Heaven and Earth Edition (Buy) - itch.io](https://kotodama.itch.io/tenra-bansho-zero-heaven-and-earth-edition) - [Tenra Bansho Zero by Doresh (Review) - RPG Writeups](https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/doresh/tenra-bansho-zero/)