The Bardic Inquiry

If you want some persona-like or magical girl narratives in your ttrpgs and like your DnD 5e games, then here are two reasons Magi Knights Awakening should be your next game.

What is Magi Knights Awakening?

Magi Knights Awakening, designed by Derek Salgy and published by Magi-Knights Project LLC, is a ttrpg which builds on the DnD 5e SRD to incorporate many systems and mechanisms to help emulate narratives similar to the Persona video games.

Stress and exhaustion link the school and magi knight personas

Your characters’ school classes brings stress and their nightly Magi Knight patrols and investigations brings exhaustion. The ttrpg represents this with two point pools: stress and exhaustion.

• These point pools can subtract from the rolled result of any d20 roll the characters make, so they’re bad news.
• Gaining more than 6 in one pool will increase the other, so the characters will have to carefully balance how much they exert themselves in either setting.

During the school day, the characters will attend their morning and afternoon classes. In class, each character will have to succeed on enough skill checks related to their classes to avoid gaining any stress. A class can be tied to any of the 6 attributes, so doing well in school can become more difficult as the character becomes more stressed and exhausted.

After school, the characters will go out on patrol, exploring the city and fighting the Invading Evil. Through this physically demanding work and the modification of spells, characters will gain exhaustion points. As a character becomes more stressed and exhausted, casting spells and fighting the Invading Evil becomes more dangerous because the risk of bad rolls increases.

The detrimental relationship between stress and exhaustion inevitably drives the characters to change, freak out, and struggle against the Invading Evil as they try to save the world and maintain a normal school life much like in the Persona video games.

Combination manoeuvres and tactical formations lead to powerful combos between the characters

Fighting the Invading Evil does not seem like an easy task, so to help them overcome this evil, they must foster their bonds with each other so they can use tactical formations and perform devastating combination manoeuvres.

Characters in this ttrpg can develop friendships with NPCs and their fellow Magi Knights. Like in the Persona video games, this is done by spending time with NPC or Magi Knight during free time after school, going on dates, and enjoying the school festivals throughout the year.

The more developed these friendships, the more trust exists.

• Friendships with NPCs help the characters do better at school.
• Friendships with Magi-Knights help the characters unlock combination manoeuvres and better perform tactical formations.

Tactical formations provide passive bonuses to each Magi Knight involved from protecting each other from damage to increasing the amount of damage they can do. Without a developed enough friendship, Magi Knights will suffer stress points.

Like link attacks in the Persona video games, combination manoeuvres are powerful abilities that require Magi Knights to coordinate with each other. The Magi Knights working together must have a strong friendship to unleash these devastating manoeuvres to do things such as take extra actions in combat or deal massive bonus damage to a single target.

Prepping Magi Knights Awakening

The core rule book of Magi Knights Awakening provides a detailed setting and several tables for the various systems to help generate school days and patrol encounters which I would use during play.

Prior to play, I would do the following to prepare my ttrpg session:

• Map a short mystery related to the Invading Evils using node-based design and linking it to locations around the setting.
• Design 2 to 3 patrol encounters relevant node the players have clues for using the ‘Going out on patrol’ table in the core rule book.
• Create at least 1 NPC scene for each character during or after the school day, leveraging questions to help guide the scene.
• Create a Spectral Outsider related to the mystery that uses the environment interestingly to make tactical formations and combination manouevres a little challenging to execute.
• Create an opening question for each of my players for the start of the session.

Final Thoughts

Magi Knights Awakening is a ttrpg based on the DnD 5e SRD with many systems and mechanisms to help emulate narratives like those in the Persona video games series.

The detrimental relationship between stress and exhaustion drive characters to change and struggle, and the combination manouvres and tactical formations ask players to maintain their friendships and also allow for dynamic combat.

If you find joy in the 5e system, would like something with a bit more going on, and enjoy the kinds of stories you would experience in the Persona video games, then you might enjoy Magi Knights Awakening.