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Glitter Hearts is a PbtA magical girl (and optionally mecha) pen-and-paper rpg. It's waaaay lighter in tone than something like Magical Burst or Princess The Hopeful, but it's not without tension.

To put it another way, Cute High Earth Defense Club Love is listed as an influence, but so is Sailor Moon.

Glitter's PDF is 138 pages, with great illustrations and a supernaturally perfect layout, and this makes it really easy to pick up casually. 

Mechanically, if you've played a Powered By The Apocalypse game, playing Glitter Hearts will also be super easy. Its biggest divergence is that when you roll a complication, you can simply give up on what you were trying to do instead of getting messed up by it. This sort of pulls the teeth from 'failing forward', but it's also a really nice pressure-release mechanism for the PbtA engine and gives players an optional break from having their lives relentlessly complicated.

Character creation has some nice crunch to it, without getting difficult to manage. Characters are built from three playbooks each: their everyday identity, their Magical Archetype, and their Mystic Connection. Your identity determines your primary stat, your archetype gives you a set of class-specific Moves, and your connection adds tags and modifiers onto your kit. It's really cool, and makes character creation feel very engaging.

Combat and conflict also have solid crunch to them---somehow without compromising the simplicity of the PbtA engine. HP isn't just 1--4 boxes. Tags have mechanical bite. Also, in addition to a full kit of powers, players also have access to a meta currency called Power Pool that can be spent to boost rolls or fuel super attacks. The super attacks do trivialize climactic battles a bit (a 12+ insta-wins, and if you have enough pool you can just boost into that range), so you may want to give significant enemies multiple phases (or make sure their battle is at the start of a session, before anyone has gained any pool) if you want them to do something more than eat an ultra on their first turn in combat. Still, the super attacks aren't *too* easy to charge up, so the GM shouldn't worry about them coming out every battle.

Speaking of GMs, the GMing section is great, and includes a lot of troubleshooting advice for different common scenarios. It also adds a full bestiary and a very short sample adventure, plus some alternate rules for modding the game to run in different genres.

Overall, Glitter Hearts is a fun, really polished game that tells magical girl stories without committing the group to a particular tone or subgenre. It has a lot of fun design, and I'd recommend picking it up if you like any of its influences.


Minor Issues:

-Page 36, Connections, does not specify that you only start with one Move from your Connection. The other sections (archetype and identity) are clear, but Connection isn't.

Thank you!