Running an Isekai Game

We’ve long had stories of people from our mundane, humdrum world being sucked into fantastical realms of fiction. Even within the space of games, 80’s cartoons like Captain N: The Game Master and Dungeons & Dragons have featured people being ‘sucked into the game’, and using their knowledge and skills to save a world they once believed was simple fantasy.

These works are sometimes known as “Portal Fantasy”, a term which also includes classic works like The Wizard of Oz. These days, though, you might know them by a specific Japanese term: “Isekai”. Isekai has become a whole genre of anime and manga unto itself, inundating bookstores and magazines to the point where it seems ubiquitous.

Reclaim the Wild, by virtue of being based directly on a popular video game, is well-suited to running a tabletop Isekai campaign. After all, part of the appeal of an Isekai work is applying the heroes’ knowledge of ‘how the game works’ to solving problems great and small in their new home! But how should you go about running a proper Isekai campaign?

Below, we discuss some ideas for doing just that. Check it out below!

The Two Types of Isekai

Most Isekai stories approach their subject matter in one of two ways. As a GM who wants to run an Isekai campaign, you should decide which of these better describes the game you want to run.

1. A power fantasy. The Heroes of the story will be powerful, fated, or otherwise blessed. Any items or knowledge they bring with them from their old world serve to further elevate them above other people, or to make them powerful enough to handle whatever that world’s Heroes could not.
2. A struggle to adapt to a dangerous, unknown world, where all the rules they knew are thrown out the window. In these stories, the Heroes are usually no more special than anyone else; any additional blessings or knowledge they bring with might be all that’s keeping them from dying to the things they don’t know about.

If you intend to take the “Power Fantasy” tact, we recommend focusing on game knowledge as the main ‘extra blessing’, plus or minus your Heroes being fated to save the world (or whatever task you place before them). Don’t give them super-powerful stats or equipment, as Reclaim the Wild functions best when Heroes earn that kind of power over the course of their adventures. However, granting them some special Magical Tool to help them solve puzzles, and to serve as a ‘reminder’ of their Isekai origins, is not out of the question.

In a Power Fantasy, some important figures may know about the Heroes, their origins, and their purpose in Hyrule – in short, your players may already have allies that they just haven’t met yet.

If you go the “Struggle in an Unknown Land” route, we recommend popping your Heroes in a dangerous place right from the start: an abandoned temple in the middle of the woods, for instance, or even deep within a villain’s dungeon. Any ‘starting’ equipment might instead be found shortly after the adventure’s beginning.

The Heroes begin with little to no knowledge of how to get home, or even why they’ve been brought to Hyrule; instead, that knowledge will be a reward that they have to seek out. This would be well-suited to a hexcrawl adventure, where the Heroes have to uncover the secrets of their new world while they also search for a way home – they have no guides beyond their own knowledge, what they see, and whomever they can convince.

Now We’re In Another World

Regardless of which type of Isekai game you run, the main thing that differentiates an Isekai adventure from any other fantasy romp is exactly how out of their own element the Heroes are: not only are they in a whole new land, but a new world with new rules, foes, cultures, places, and abilities.

As such, be sure to play up the roleplaying opportunities inherent in being a fish out of water. How strange Rupees are as a currency, how liberating (or terrifying) Magic can be, the new cultures, foods, and experiences your Heroes can enjoy as they adventure.

Home is Where the Heart Is

Often, Isekai works will quickly wave off any concerns about their protagonists going home. After all, they want to explore their fantastical realm, and having a Hero go home simply puts an end to that. However, there’s plenty of room to explore the tensions between the call of adventure, and the desire to return to one’s comfortable origins. To that end, we can look at some other Isekai works to highlight some ways to do that!

The old 80’s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon features Heroes who want to return home, and this highlights an easy way to get your Heroes to bite on any adventure lead: simply mention that it might offer a way home, and they will jump at the chance. Obviously, this requires your players to agree to want to go home – or at least, to agree to have reasonable, roleplay-able discussions about it in-character.

The original Digimon anime is a great example of an Isekai game where the Heroes’ return home results in new stories to tell, rather than simply being the end of the story. There, allies and enemies from the Digital World follow the protagonists back to their (and our) reality. This give them an opportunity to ratchet up the tension (by putting the Heroes’ families and homes at risk). It also lets them reverse the Isekai structure, by letting their fantastical elements (Digimon) be the fishes out of water, exploring and learning about our world.

Regardless of if and when your Heroes return home, they should need to explore your campaign world and undertake plenty of adventure before they can punch their return ticket. Be wary of letting your Heroes pop back and forth between the Isekai world and their home world too easily! If they can just nip home to see their family and pick up modern equipment, it can remove your game’s tension and seriously derail the plot.

Zelda Specifics

With all that said, there’s one thing left to address: not about running any ol’ Isekai game, but about running a Zelda Isekai game, specifically.

Races. A Hero’s Race is an important part of who they are and what they can do in Reclaim the Wild – and preventing players from selecting a Race may hamper their ability to play the way they want to. Consider allowing your Heroes to begin with one of the Races presented in the rulebook, even though they’re coming from a humdrum, human-inhabited world. Perhaps they’re transformed into their new Race as part of their summoning, or their new body is somehow based on a person in the Zelda universe (somewhat like the heroic masks in Majora’s Mask).

Traits and Magic. Similarly, just because we don’t have magic in our world, and don’t often find cause to unsheathe a sword and fight to the death, doesn’t mean your Heroes should be limited by those same concerns once they arrive in the land of Hyrule. Much like the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, they might be gifted their starting Traits, Spells, and Techniques to better suit their new heroic destinies upon arriving, or be empowered by the Goddesses as they are flung from one mortal coil to another by the likes of Truck-kun.

Which Zelda game? You may want to decide if your Heroes are being brought into a specific Hyrule (that is, a single instance of Hyrule as presented in just one of the many Zelda games) or whether they’re being brought into a Hyrule that represents an amalgamation of them all. You don’t even have to limit yourself to an existing game’s design, if you choose the first option; you may wave your hands and say “this is the exact same game world as this wholly fictional Zelda video game” – rather like how the matter is handled in the beginning of Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced.

NPCs. There are a fair few fan-favorite NPCs who have recurring roles in multiple Zelda games; moreso than in other Reclaim the Wild campaigns, you should try to include these NPCs as people in your game world. You may want to ask your players who they’d like to run into on their Isekai adventure, and what they’d like to do with them, especially if you’re going the Power Fantasy route. It’s okay to take suggestions from the crowd!