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Tenra Bansho Zero: Heaven and Earth Edition

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Almost a decade ago, Japanese artist and game designer Junichi Inoue sat down to create what was, in his own words, a uniquely and unmistakably "Hyper Asian" Japanese world: a world of magic and technology, of samurai and Taoist sorcery, of powerful mecha and cultured geisha. The world was named Tenra, and the game was named Tenra Bansho, or "Everything in Heaven and Earth."

With a rulebook dripping cover-to-cover with high-quality anime-style art, a setting rich in culture both real and fantastical, and a revised and simplified rules system that focused with precision on roleplaying and character drama, this game took the Japanese tabletop RPG market by storm and spearheaded both a renaissance and revolution in the Japanese gaming industry.

Years later, this unique and revolutionary game has finally been painstakingly translated into English for play in the West!

TENRA BANSHO ZERO

Tenra Bansho Zero is a unique tabletop roleplaying experience, and it features the following:

PDF Optimization

This product contains two versions of the game:

  • The original high-quality art-filled, full-color setting and rules books, together in electronic tablet-optimized US graphic novel size (700 total pages)
  • A text-only indexed version of all of the content of the setting and rules books at US Letter/A4 size for easy reference and printing (510 total pages; with large font and spacing for readability; effectively 150 pages of text for normal book proportions)


Breathtaking Art

Over 300 unique pieces of art appear throughout; there are 33 full-color manga story pages that introduce players to the world and setting features, and ten rules explanations, also in manga form, assist with fast rules retention. The art is done by the formidable hand of Junichi Inoue, the fine brush-work of Hiroyuki Ishida, the comical impact of Hayami Rasenjin, and more!

With layout for the English edition by industry expert Luke Crane (Mouse Guard RPG, Burning Wheel RPG), you've never seen a game like this.

Incredible Content

Two books: A full-color Setting book and a black-and-white Rules and Play book. The books together boast a page count of almost 700 total pages! The huge amount of art, combined with the detailed deep-dive explanations and play advice, will give you your money's worth in usable content.

Incomparable Richness

A rich Japanese setting involving a planet in a constant state of war, where magic fuels technology and the culture is an analogue of the "Warring States" (Sengoku) era of Japan. Mecha, sorcery, samurai, geisha, monks, cyborgs, annelid-users, and more make this game a truly unique - and deeply Japanese - experience.

Quick to Learn

A simple-to-understand rules system utilizing regular six-sided dice, cleverly explained in both detailed text examples and amusing full-page manga art. On top of a woven system of skills, attributes, action, and combat is overlaid a deeper system of kabuki theater-style play: Focusing very specifically on play through Acts, Scenes, and Intermissions, the players of this game are both the actors and audience: As actors, they focus on roleplay in a scene with other actors; and as audience (much like the audience of a kabuki play), they focus on the drama that unfolds, rewarding the players for dramatic actions and cool ad-libbed lines. 

Speed

An entire campaign, a story from start to finish, can be told over the space of one to two sessions! You can then choose to play the same characters in another tale, or perhaps retire them to look at another facet of life on Tenra.

All-in-One

The original Japanese game had a core rulebook, a supplement, and later several mail-order-only mini-supplements. The data/rules content and much of the art has been ported and folded into the English book set (originally $145 USD for all of that material if you were to buy it when it came out), including errata and designer suggestions.

This is a truly updated version of the game!

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Reviews (7)
Discussions (6)
Customer avatar
William A July 26, 2022 2:59 pm UTC
PURCHASER
What happened to Kotodama Heavy Industries. Are they still around?
Customer avatar
Adam L October 23, 2020 1:25 am UTC
PURCHASER
I too would like an update on this. I've read over in forums that the guy working the kickstarter promised the dlc stuff by 2016......... never did.
Customer avatar
Zarion B February 04, 2020 8:19 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Any plans to ever release the promised content that many people have already payed for? The same question for Ryuutama as well. I just feel like the Tenra content is more overdue, since it's been 8 years already.
Customer avatar
Tim P June 21, 2017 6:19 am UTC
PURCHASER
I recently found mention of a number of small "free DLC" expansions for this game, which came out of the Kickstarter. Some new archetypes and something to do with cybernetic dogs, where might one find these?
Customer avatar
Kevin H January 23, 2017 2:05 pm UTC
PURCHASER
The full-art PDFs are not readable on my iPad Air 2, either in the Dropbox app ("This file type can't be viewed") or in GoodReader ("Error: PDF file format is not recognized"). The text-only PDFs are fine, and all other PDFs are fine. Any ideas?
Reply
Customer avatar
Kevin H January 23, 2017 2:23 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Same thing on the desktop using OSX's Preview. I tried redownloading it but no luck. Help!
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Product Information
Mithral seller
Pages
696
Publisher Stock #
TBZ1
File Size:
273.32 MB
Format
Original electronic Click for more information
Scanned image
These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.
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Original electronic format
These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.
File Last Updated:
February 24, 2013
This title was added to our catalog on February 25, 2013.
Publisher
KOTODAMA HEAVY INDUSTRIES
Publisher Average Rating