Girl by Moonlight Preview

Welcome to the Preview for Girl By Moonlight! This game takes inspiration from many sources, from Sailor Moon and Steven Universe to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Diebuster, The Vision of Escaflowne and more. But at its heart Girl By Moonlight is about characters overcoming alienation to find friendship and defying the compromises of their day-to-day lives to transcend and embrace their true selves.

This preview showcases some of those major themes and provides a snapshot of the ways designer Andrew Gillis has tailored the fundamental mechanics of the Forged In The Dark engine to reflect and underline those themes.

Specifically, inside this Preview PDF you will find:

• Introduction and Why Magical Girls? The game uses ‘magical girl’ as a shorthand, but your magical girls need not be girls, necessarily, but people whose identities put them at the margins.
• How Do We Play? The Protagonists and The Director: Roles and guidance for both players and GMs.
• Series Playsets: An overview of the four different Series Playsets included in the game, which each embody a different subtype of the Magical Girl genre.
• Playing the Game, Safety, and Setup: A brief discussion of what you’ll need to prepare to play, plus an example of a group choosing a series playset.
• Cycle of Play: A breakdown of the four phases of play that make up an episode of Girl By Moonlight: obligation, downtime, mission, and fallout.
• Player Agenda: The major guideposts to bringing your character to life in Girl By Moonlight.
• Transcendence: A deep dive into the pivotal shift in your hero’s identity and power.
• Stress and Eclipse: Instead of Trauma, Girl By Moonlight employs a special mechanic called Eclipse which comes into play when your PC reaches the limit of their Stress track.
• Consequences and Harm: What happens when the dice fail you.
• Choosing Your Playbook: Guidance on picking a character archetype.
• The Enigma: A mysterious ally and dramatic hero.
• At The Brink of the Abyss: A framework for building a game centered on redemption and heroism, in the style of Steven Universe and Sailor Moon.

Please note that this Preview has been extracted from the full text of Girl By Moonlight. It’s not a complete quickstart package you can use to play. It’s designed to showcase some of the major highlights of the game. Because it’s not a complete re-edit of the material, occasionally you may see a reference to a page that isn’t included.

See also our Roll20 Quickstart!

If you’d like to get the full, text-complete PDF, you can back the current crowdfunding campaign here on Backerkit: https://backerkit.com/c/evil-hat/girl-by-moonlight. All backers instantly get access to the full file (although final art is not yet available).

Defy the world, embrace your fate, and let your true self shine brightly in the night. Girl By Moonlight.