Jade Regent and Wuxia

[Cardea]

Hi there. So I'm about to start running a game of Jade Regent, and my players don't like playing spell casters that much. The only one in the party is a Bard, who is more interested in throwing knives than focusing on magic. So I'm left with one option: Wuxia.

Now I am going to be using Path of War material, but I'm hesitant to believe that my solution lies in simply/only going through and changing NPCs to having levels in Path of War classes.

What I'm looking for, out of this thread, is to hopefully get some tips on how to run a Wuxia game, and what all I could do to adjust Jade Regent to feel more like one, both story wise and mechanically.

[Red Fel]

What I'm looking for, out of this thread, is to hopefully get some tips on how to run a Wuxia game, and what all I could do to adjust Jade Regent to feel more like one, both story wise and mechanically.

In terms of the genre's storytelling, there's a great deal of romance and tragedy, peppered with some solid slapstick elements. I really don't know how else to describe it short of giving illustrations, but the general feel of it is "larger than life." Romances are grand and sweeping, rivalries burn brighter than the sun, bumbling bureaucrats and hysterical drunks are in abundance, and every duel has something greater than life on the line.

In terms of mechanics? Work on your improv. Basically, if a player says, "Can my PC do this?" Be prepared to say, "You can try. Why don't you roll..."

Wuxia, in terms of all of the stuff that characters do, is so wildly divergent that even PoW, which does an awesome job of giving melee nice things, barely scrapes the surface. The basic idea is simply to take any ability to its logical extreme, and then past that. Are you good at balancing? Now you can try balancing on a leaf. In midair. And leaping from one to the next as they fall. Great with spears? Why don't you take this bundle of spears, toss them all up into the air, and grab each one out of the air to swing at an enemy. And then leap from one to the next as they fall. Good at jumping? Jump up to the top of that tree. And then land on it.

Swing your sword and cut down seventeen trees from thirty yards away! Toss a pair of daggers and have them switch directions in midair! Play a drum with your sleeves, from across the room! Engage in a bareknuckle brawl with six opponents, all while balancing on your head!

The sky is literally the limit.

[Felyndiira]

The wikipedia article on Wuxia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxia) has a very detailed explanation of the genre.

Wuxia (in terms of combat styles and such) is a slightly narrower genre than what Path of War covers. There are some staples to it, like martial artists flying, climbing walls, scaling buildings, or borderline supernatural swordsmanship, but it rarely gets into outright supernatural martial arts in terms of throwing energy. The broader fantasy genres with taoist elements and people throwing around energy or commanding supernatural water dragons (like a lot of Western portrayals of "Asian martial arts") are components of a much broader genre called Xuanhuan (magical fantasy). While they might appear in limited forms in Wuxia stories - in the form of witch doctors or occasional special effects being used to denote qi, the truly supernatural attacks you see in Path of War generally goes above this genre and into straight magic.

In terms of Martial Arts, Wuxia is as Red Fel says - it's about taking things way past the limit of human capabilities, but not so far that it could actually be defined as magic. A wuxia specialist might throw a bunch of spears into the sky and toss them all at an enemy, but he will never turn the spears into fire. A wuxia specialist might move really fast, but they don't usually teleport. A wuxia specialist can walk on water, but he usually cannot command it to directly attack his enemies. And usually, wuxia has a lot of emphasis on finesse; very rarely will you see people cutting down mountains or slicing caves into the earth - that's an act of strength rather than skill. Rather, xia might instead cut down a rain of arrows, or even aim attacks right at metaphysical concepts like your qi or your lifeforce.

If you are applying Path of War to wuxia, there are some disciplines that fit perfectly and some that do not. Veiled Moon, for instance, is rarely seen in the genre. Elemental disciplines like Solar Wind and Elemental Flux are also rare in the genre. On the other hand, Eternal Guardian fits almost perfectly, with 'battle of wills' representing the intimidation aspects of the discipline. Mithral Current and Riven Hourglass similar fits, while Shattered Mirror and Cursed Razor (and Undefiled Grave) steps a bit too far into the magic territory. Both Black Seraph and Silver Crane works, as long as you distance the maneuvers from objective good and evil.

But honestly, that's not the most important part of the genre. If your players do want to throw Fire Dragons via Elemental Flux like you might see in the Jade Empire RPG, that's not really a big deal; Xuanhuan and Wuxia is very commonly agglomerated in the West, and adding taoist magical swordsmanship doesn't impact the feel of the genre.

The most important part of Wuxia is the concepts. The concept of "Jianghu" as a collective term for the society of wanderers is nearly universal in the genre, as is the concept of "honor" as it applies to the "Xia." Wuxia tends to have broader focuses on freedom and ideals over the traditional Western sensibilities of "doing good for others". While a lot of traditional Xia are relatively noble, and oftentimes humble and kind to others, it's not a requirement (in fact, many modern YY novels from China subverts this concept entirely, with protagonists that are outright power-hungry, selfish, and willing to go to extremes for power).

It's actually hard to describe the "feel" for Wuxia. Traditional wuxia stories tend to have clearly defined protagonists and antagonists (not always good/bad in the Western sense, but the line is either drawn or will be drawn at some point in the story), though this - along with pretty much everything else about the genre - is being massively subverted by the web novel industrys in China. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that Wuxia is that it's often about maturing, developing one's own ideals, and perhaps a little bit of "freedom", "art", and "responsibility". Powerful enemies tend to be driven by ambition rather than religious fanaticism, greed, or general evulz; heroes tend to be driven by revenge or responsibility, or sometimes be brash at first and mature throughout the story. There are frequent clashes of ideas and worldviews even among honorable Xia, with metaphorical concepts of honor and righteousness being thrown around as much as swords and spears, and the ideals themselves are often larger than life; clashes aren't about beliefs or the capacity of economic works in the local government, but about the nature of people, about unification and war, the ways of humanity and what is acceptable in pursuit of greater ambition, and about what it means to fail as a person and what it means to fail as a "hero".