Alternative TTRPG’s: Nechronica

Author: Lilith

About The System

Nechronica was developed by the Japanese game company Incog Labs and designed by Ryo Kamiya, also known for designing Golden Sky Stories, Maid RPG, Ventangle, and more. It features a robust combat system with adequate roleplaying hooks for dramatic scenarios. While the original game is no longer actively developed, it was translated to English, received its own fan splats, and still has a decent following to this day.

A system where you get to play as magical undead mutant cyborg girls, venturing to survive, scavenge for memories, and build relationships along the way. In Nechronica, death is not the end. If your leg is gone, crawl with your shoulders, if your sword is gone, bite with your jaws. Struggle with all your strength, hover at the edge of sanity.

Complexity: (★★★☆☆)

System Strengths

The game has a lot of crunch and strong thematics. It is incredibly intuitive to both run and play, and presents abundant options and interactions.

Nechronica has deep, complex, and expressive characters

One of Nechronica’s most captivating features is its potential for complexity and the multitude of interactive possibilities it presents during combat, all seamlessly delivered through an intuitive interface.

Furthermore, your character’s Position and Class provide additional skills that are always available. These skills offer added synergy for various gameplay archetypes. In terms of flavor, your Position defines your role within the group, while your Class dictates the methods you employ to fulfill that role.

Each individual body part or skill serves a distinct and discrete function. Together, they create a diverse array of fighting styles with high potential for synergy both internally and between party members.

Nechronica adopts a diegetic approach to its character system, where nearly every action, referred to as a ‘maneuver’, is intricately tied to a specific part of your character’s body. Any damage you sustain is linked to the parts on your body, and the loss of these parts directly affects your character’s capabilities. As a combatant becomes increasingly wounded, they grow weaker in distinct ways, and victory is not solely achieved by reducing an opponent’s hit points to zero, but by rendering them incapable of harming or hindering you. This aspect of injury and combat dynamics makes Nechronica incredibly immersive and interactive, where every participant fights with everything they have in a literal sense.

Each maneuver in the game comes with a timing and an action cost. For standard maneuvers with an ‘Action’ timing, you’ll simply need to have the highest action points to use them. This makes tracking initiative a straightforward process – just identify the combatant with the most action points at any given moment (the left-most or top-most token on the map). Reactive maneuvers offer ways to respond to other maneuvers and effects – interrupting an opponent’s move, blocking an incoming attack, modifying a dice roll, or swiftly repositioning on the battlefield. Either way, most maneuvers will influence damage, rolls, or position of characters. Everything is visible on the table or the character sheet, and competing effects are ordered in sequence like how a card game would.

Nechronica promotes complex strategy with minimal bookkeeping

Almost every roll in Nechronica is handled by the d10, with a 6 and above being a success. Bonus modifiers are either constant or fairly uncommon. In combat, this also determines hit location, 6 being any that target chooses, 7 is leg, 8 torso, 9 arm, 10 head, and any more than 10 is a critical hit which can target any location. The game’s battle map has only 2 dimensions, one for position, and one for action points, but don’t mistake this for a rules-light, highly abstracted system, since the potential for interactions lie heavily within the characters themselves.

The complexity of Nechronica shines through the nuanced decisions players must make—setting up plays with other players, balancing between risk and reward, managing resources of action points, parts and abilities as these elements are constantly in flux, disrupting the enemy’s synergy to defend against their threat. Use your reactive maneuver now or save it for a better time? Which part to sacrifice when you take damage? Target the enemy with supportive abilities or aim straight for their weapons? Spend action points to defend or take the hit to finish off the target sooner?

Initiative in Nechronica is dynamic and ever-shifting. It hinges on how each combatant chooses to spend their action points. With numerous moving parts constantly in play, Nechronica’s combat keeps players engaged, presenting them with a wealth of strategic options and tactical decisions. This system ensures that every moment is an opportunity for meaningful involvement and interaction and players will never sit idly waiting for their turn.

Simultaneously, its user interface, featuring character sheets and battlemaps, minimizes any potential barriers to gameplay. Taking action is as straightforward as selecting a body part and employing the corresponding ability written on it. When a character sustains damage, it’s a matter of crossing out the affected parts and no longer benefiting from their associated abilities. Initiatives are smoothly managed by moving tokens from left to right until every participant reaches the endpoint to commence a new round. This streamlined interface ensures that players can focus on the rich decision-making aspects and character development that Nechronica offers.

Nechronica packs both flavor and crunch

Roleplaying, adventuring, and out of combat challenges all use a lightweight system similar to many other JRPG. D10 to resolve, 6 is success, evoke a relevant bond, skill or part to gain bonus to the check. Make conversation checks with each other to reduce madness from a fetter.

Of course, combat takes center stage and is where the system shines. There’s a satisfying relation between mechanics and flavor for many parts of Nechronica. The game takes the rather simplistic base mechanics and remixes them to their full potential to create many unique parts that can satisfy different character concepts: the Jet Nozzle that lets you damage one part to increase the damage you deal by one, growing an extra head that lets you start a fight with more actions, the giant scissors that can easily dismember foes, or the self-destructive zombie bomb that detonates for wide range devastation. In many cases, you don’t even need to employ “Flavor is free” because how something looks in Nechronica often matches quite well with how they feel in play.

Some of the parts and skills with their dramatic, evocative flavor texts:

Tuning: allow a broken part to be used for the round

You know the art of forcibly moving a broken [weapon].

Drama of Death: bonus to roll when making attacks on same count, same enemy with an ally

Even with breathing stopped, bodies that observe timing and maximize effect with simultaneous attacks. It is meaningful to breathe together.

Meat snake: can reroll the attack once, and can attack an extra time on a hit, up to three total.

Countless ugly horrors are hiding inside you! Even if you attack the enemy by yourself, they devour it.

Animal ears: +1 maximum action point

Your ears were torn off and the ears of a beast were put on your head. The perceptive power of a destroyed beast. It is an organ that enables rapid reaction. Cute.

Remain dead: regenerate a basic part

Wherever there is a lost part, by reconnecting it is restored. Your body will not stop being you. Surely, forever.

Combat encounters are easy to design

Crafting a combat encounter is as simple as basic math. Pick out enemies and sum their threat levels up to your desired difficulty, then place them in the map. You can create custom, thematic enemies from scratch, or modify existing templates by adding, subtracting, and swapping parts. Each part has its own threat rating to help you calculate the threat amount easily. And since enemies don’t always require the humanoid form that players have, there is even more variety in the ways one can construct their own abominations with different themes, aesthetics, and strategies.

System Flaws

The game’s eccentricities and potentially heavy themes can make it a quite difficult pitch to some groups. It’s also not officially released yet in English, so translation flaws can be found. Nechronica also supports a more action-oriented gameplay, so it’s not as viable to run the game as a purely narrative experience.

The madness system is not very tightly balanced. For some groups, it could be a constant, debilitating affliction, for others, they might forget about it once they’ve recovered enough madness points. The game master needs to do some fine tuning for the types of threats in their adventure if they want to keep madness a persistent, but not too overbearing threat.

In later stages of the game, characters become more distinctly powerful as they acquire more parts and class skills, transitioning from the oppressive and disempowered feel of the early game into more of a power fantasy. The gap between optimized and unoptimized characters can grow quite large. Unlike DnD, you can’t arbitrarily ““fix”” this by handing out magic items, so it’s best to discuss this matter between players and get everyone on the same page.

Example Games

The game naturally lends itself to action and horror themes, making it an ideal choice for classic zombie survival narratives, whether you’re embracing the hero’s journey or focusing on character-driven drama.

Alternatively, you can embrace its splatter-punk sensibilities to craft a grim dark horror experience or go all-in on slapstick adventure comedy for a lighthearted and humorous twist.