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Narrative
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alt title(s): BESM In retrospect, men appreciate that it was a colourful apocalypse.
— Uresia: The Grave of Heaven, S. John Ross
Big Eyes Small Mouth is a multi-genre roleplaying game created by the now-defunct Guardians of Order. Conceived as a system to allow people to play out games in the style of anime series, it was first released at Gen Con in 1997. The name comes from a common generalization of the typical anime and manga character designs, which have proportionately large eyes and small mouths.
A number of supplemental rule books have been released, with additional rules and character creation options to provide specific advice for running games in a certain genre. For instance, the supplement Hot Rods and Gun Bunnies contains information on running a Gunsmith Cats or Riding Bean-style game, while Big Robots, Cool Starships has rules for designing Mecha running Space Opera-style games. Most of the extras in the supplements were folded into the second edition of BESM.
There are two other kinds of supplements produced by Guardians of Order. Stand-alone game worlds such as Uresia: The Grave of Heaven and Centauri Knights, and licensed supplements based on various anime series, such as Slayers, Serial Experiments Lain and Sailor Moon.
BESM uses Guardians of Order's Tri-Stat system, and was their flagship product for that system. Characters are defined by three statistics: Body, Mind and Soul, as well as a number of Attributes and Defects. Tri-stat is a Point Buy system. A d20System version of the game has also been released. Guardians of Order had a third edition of BESM ready when it collapsed. The rights were sold to the game company White Wolf, which published it and now provides what support remains for the Tri-Stat system.
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