Zelda-inspired tabletop RPG Break!! is a hit, co-creator has big plans

Fantasy is the main theme of tabletop role-playing. Inside the magic circle of the dining room table, you can be whoever you want to be — a powerful wizard, a streetwise cyberpunk hacker, or even a smarter-than-average bear. We buy TTRPGs to confirm our fantasies. It is inspiring to pick up a copy of Dungeons & Dragons’ Player’s Handbook You will find a fantasy of your own face on a page. But for Reynaldo Madriñan, co-creator of the Break!! TTRPG was always difficult to imagine himself in those books.

Like many players of a certain generation, Madriñan grew up playing Japanese RPGs, like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy, and watching anime. Madrinan rarely, if at all, saw the characters he loved as a child in Western TTRPGs.

“It was almost like the old Simpsons gag — Why doesn’t mine look like that?” Madriñan said in a recent interview with Polygon.

So, Madriñan decided to do something about it.

Break!! is the culmination of a decade-long effort to get what was inside his head down onto the page — a fully-featured, pen-and-paper experience designed and written with his style of fandom in mind. The secret sauce, Madriñan said, is his close collaboration with co-creator Grey Wizard. The anonymous “hobby artist and information design nerd,” as they describe themselves, has gone several rounds with Madriñan to get the look of the game just right.

At first, Madriñan thought he’d found the right angle for the project in an early version of D&D that was released in Japan — a three-volume set known as the Rules Cyclopedia series that was first published in 1994. This original set was created with Japanese aesthetics, featuring brightly colored cartoon characters.

“I remember seeing that and going, Oh, that’s perfect! That’s what I want!” Madriñan said. “It actually turned out it wasn’t perfect, because when I got into it, I was like, You know what, I think? What do you think? Here is the Secret of Mana. You could try a small amount of The Past is a LinkSort of things.”

Image: Grey Wizard

Image: Grey Wizard

Image: Grey Wizard

Image: Grey Wizard

It’s clear that the result of all this tinkering was a big hit among consumers. Madriñan’s Kickstarter campaign was fully funded shortly after it launched, and it’s cruising along toward $400,000 in its final few days — quite the sum for an unproven franchise. It also doesn’t hurt that the entire gaming world is waiting with bated breath for the release of Tears of the Kingdom: The Legend of ZeldaThe second Zelda game to hit the Nintendo Switch. Break!! This particular audience is a rabid one.

“Regardless of exactly how it happened,” Madriñan said of the Kickstarter’s success, “I’m really humbled by it.”

‘The core book has been completed to a large extent,’ he stated. The digital version will be delivered in June after the end date of the crowdfunding campaign. In November, backers will receive the physical book. This is just the beginning, though, as Madriñan has plans to support the system long after its release.

What? You can also read more about Long, you will not forget.

“I just want to start doing free stuff for the game every couple of weeks again,” Madriñan said. “We’ve already planned it out. We want to do supplements, and we’re gonna go for smaller books and modules and stuff for supplements that are things that Grey and I can turn out and still be high quality, but also not take years and years.”

More information can be found on Break!!You can get a copy of the game at Kickstarter for about $25. A physical copy costs around $57. This campaign will run until May 17.