It'd Take A Miracle: Magical Girls at the End of the World

It’s not like it’s all gone now. Back before, when you first made your wish and received your Heart Gem, times were simpler. You’d transform in a flashy sequence and go off to fight Monstrosities, physical manifestations of negative emotions that preyed on vulnerable humanity. Your magic was hopeful, almost poetic in how it would cut through the darkness and bring hope for humanity’s future.

But it’s not like you were fully human. You traded something for that power. It took a while to figure out, and cost a lot of trust, but you didn’t need to eat anymore. You stopped growing. Well, aging in general. Your body was just a perfect vessel for fighting Monstrosities. Maybe you didn’t even feel the pain. That perfect vessel of yours would keep on going as long as your magic was flowing, you just had to keep your hope up. But then you failed as a magical girl, and the world ended. But you didn’t. Now you wander the ruins of that city you defended. What could bring things back to the way they were. It’d take a miracle…

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In It’d Take A Miracle, you play as a group of magical girls who failed to save the world. Those who granted your wish, the Contractors, always gave half-answers that wish-energy came from hope, so maybe if you gather up enough of it, you can make a wish that can undo all of this and go back to the way things were.

Will the bunch of you manage to completely fill up your Hope, or will you fall into Despair? Play to find out!

You’ll want a group of 4-5 players. One of you will be the Contractor, whose role is to bring enemies and drama to the barren city you inhabit. The others will play as Magical Girls who respond to the world before them and find what it means to save it.

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It’d Take A Miracle is heavily inspired by the dark magical girl anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica and a fantastic tabletop RPG that was also based on it, Magical Burst by Ewen Cluney. Additionally, mechanical DNA has a wide spread of sources of inspiration from games like Pendragon, Lancer, Lancer: Battlegroup, Flying Circus, Beam Saber, and Gubat Banwa.

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It'd Take a Miracle was originally developed between April 4th and April 30th 2022 for the CMU RPGA Game Creation Month