Big Eyes Small Mouth, or BESM as it is commonly known is the RPG designed for anime as a role playing genre. It was designed by Gaurdians of Order's Marl C. Mckinnon using his TriStat rules system. First distibuted as a small 96 page book at GenCon in August 1997. The rules became popular and at the time, the realm of anime, or Japanese animation, was all but untouched as an RPG genre save for a few worls like the legendary Teenagers From Outerspace RPG by R. Talsorian. BESM quickly became popular as did the idea of anime role playing and Guaridans of Order be came a successful company. THey did their first liscensed work with the Sailor Moon RPG and Resource Book which was very successful. It featured the Tri-Stat rules system (The name of the rules system used in BESM.) and was noteworthy for the level of detail that went into the presentation as well as amount of background information it presented.

Guardians of Order has since become known for their emphasis on providng a great amount of background information in their products. BESM has become anime RPG and thanks to the high quality of it's books, simplicity of it's rules, and ability to truly capture the feel of the anime genre, it looks like it will be so for a long time. It was so successful that Guardians of Order, in July of 2000, released BESM Second Edtion, a larger, expanded work offering rules revisions, clarrifications, and expansion to the original.



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