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View Full Version : DM Help Daos and Dragons - Blending Wuxia elements with High Fantasy settings



Yora
2016-10-16, 08:49 AM
For quite some time I've been thinking about ways to blend my love for high action Sword & Sorcery with the wish to make a fantasy campaign attractive to people who don't find much entertainment in killing things and taking their stuff. Something that is both character focused with a great deal of social interaction but also includes flashy dramatic actions and fantastical locations. And now I just realized that this is pretty much what Wuxia has been doing for a century.

What I particularly like about wuxia and what makes it perfect for RPGs is the Wulin. The idea that all heroes nd villains are members of a special social class that consists entirely of people with exceptional fighting skill and magical powers. They are few in number but very well connected and many of them travel the world looking for new knowledge and experience to improve their abilities. Most are somewhat famous and have an elevated status that gains them respect from the commoners and either admiration or hostility from the people in power. It's a nice system to explain the presence of these super dangerous people who happen to just be passing through remote towns and are quickly recruited to help with various threats.As adventurers they seem more plausible than the common ragtag bands of murderhobos.
A nice side effect of this is that common mooks like bandits, goblins, or soldiers are very rare, since even the lowest martial arts heroes are already way above them, which leads to much fewer fights in total. In wuxia, the vast majority of fights seem to be boss fights where a lot is at stake and you also have good story progress. I think this is more appealing to people who don't care about combat for its own sake.

But I don't want to run an all human game set in China. I also want elves, giants, serpentmen, druids, and telepathic flying tentacle things. Do you have any ideas how to add some wuxia style to a common fantasy world and how to create adventures with Wuxia like structure?

I think it's actually quite attractive to treat all PCs and those NPCs with above average stats as being supernatural. Fighter characters don't even need any new abilities. In something like D&D, high hit points and saving throws can be treated as not just training and experience, but also having attained a very strong chi. First and second level characters are often treated as weak nobodies with no experience, but in Wuxia every hero or villain is someone well above average, even if they only have basic training.

I also really like the idea of treating elves less Celtic and more Chinese. Those weapons and outfits really go very well together with the common ideal of elves.

gkathellar
2016-10-16, 10:39 AM
As a starting point, take a look at Legends of the Wulin, and its predecessor Weapons of the Goda. LotW does the high-drama martial arts epic thing better, while WotG has more explicitly mythic elements (dragons and whatnot). Both have crazy supernatural wuxia and an extremely faithful take on Chinese folklore and mythology. They also have a concept called Lore Sheets, which can designate destinies, connections, knowledge, special skills, bloodlines, etc - these could be used to do fantasy races without much trouble.

(If you like LotW, also take a look at the "Half-Burnt Manual," an excellent fan supplement.)

Vitruviansquid
2016-10-16, 11:05 AM
You can't just declare that the high fantasy adventurers form a special social class?

Yora
2016-10-16, 11:14 AM
Sure, you can. But I think the explanation that they have special powers and go on adventures to improve their skills is a pretty good and plausible option for why they would be. Or you could make it so that all PCs have to be nobles (as in Pendragon, I believe), or vampires.

It's one option that I like.

What does Legends of the Wulin have in regard to GM advice that would make it useful for playing other games?

I got Wanderers of Ogre Gate yesterday, which is a 500 page beast for as little as you want. It has a decent GM section, a good handful of monsters, and I quite like their ideas for various kung fu factions that are all very suitable for copying.

ComradeBear
2016-10-16, 11:57 AM
If you want the Wuxia feel of the PCs feeling distinct from the world without (necessarily) all of the same aesthetic, I can recommend Dungeon World as a system. Normally i wouldn't, but your stated goals are actually very much in line with Dungeon World's design goals.

I could also recommend Ryutama, though it is pretty weird as far as systems go. (For instance a GMPC is required and often taken-for-granted GM actions require that this GMPC possess certain traits and items! Very odd, but very cool.)

Yora
2016-10-16, 01:47 PM
What aspects of it do you consider worth copying?

gkathellar
2016-10-16, 02:10 PM
I would say the two big things in LotW are the mechanics of loresheets, and the way the game handles injury. Both relate to its focus on Jiang Hu as a social reality.

Loresheets are pieces of setting lore that players can essentially buy options from - mentors, relationships, items, access to special techniques, etc. Some relate to organizations (like the Little Forest Sect, i.e. Shaolin), to places (Sword Hell, for instance, where the Heavenly Sword Brotherhood stashes weapons with evil chi), to religions or philosophies (Legalism, Taoism, or Buddhism, and more), historical events, skills, people of note, etc. The way these are structured helps to make PCs feel like part of Jiang Hu, and gives Jiang Hu a lot of atmosphere.

The thing with injuries is that LotW has no HP system. Attacks instead cause Conditions, which can represent physical injury, Chi imbalances, psychological effects, and more. The same condition mechanics are used to represent beneficial things, from the temporary (visited an acupuncturist to prepare for a duel) to the character-defining (a bodyguard gaining a chi hyperactivity while defending his charge). This helps to prevent combat from feeling like a slog of hurting the other guy until he falls over - Wulin pit true hearts and loyalty against one another, which further enhances the sense that Jiang Hu is sort of otherworldly and emotionally charged.

tl;dr you spend resources on connections to the world, and you can punch doubts into someone.

Lord Raziere
2016-10-16, 02:31 PM
Simple: give different races, different fighting styles.

In Wuxia, your body type matters a lot. Someone who is thin and tall probably fights differently from somebody who is short and stocky no matter how much their individual fighting styles are different, with tendencies like this:

Elves: your typical tall dark flash-step ninjas with elegant precise attacks and lots of dodging.

Dwarves: your typical no-sellers with blunt powerful strikes that break down walls and take tons damage and still keep on trucking

Halflings and Gnomes: Your freaking Yoda. use your speed, mobility and smaller size to dance circles around your opponents and kill them for underestimating you

Half-Giant: Big, stocky, wide and strong and taller than everyone else. Sounds like a wrestler, a grappler who throws people around or breaks their spine

Half-Orc/Orc: likes to fight, eats a lot, is barbaric and rude? Sun Wukong's fighting style. wild, free, improvisational, and terrifying to anyone who faces them.

Goblins: again, Yoda tendencies. but might resort to things like pressure points, snake style, and various other underhanded styles and tactics

Troll: arrogant martial artist who knows that his regeneration will allow him to keep on fighting, uses that as defense while going fully on offense.

Fire Genasi: arrogant martial artist who exploits that his body is literally made of flames to the utmost extent and brags that no one can touch him without being burned.

these are stereotypes yes, but in this kind of fighting, you exploit your body and what it does it its fullest extent. sure you can have somebody who ignores the natural advantages of their body and still be functional, but your still ignoring an advantage.

Fri
2016-10-16, 02:41 PM
An actual general tips I remember from LotW that I think can be applied here.

Give actual concession/running away mechanic, or at least make your player understand that it's part of the game. This is to underline another important thing, fight to the death/to knockdown is actually rather rare. Usually you have a few rounds of exchange, then when it's obvious you're losing, you could concede/run away. You could give actual mechanic, so people would actually do that. What's the mechanic is up to you though, but for example, in LotW the winner could say, make the bandit leader promise he won't bandit again, and if the bandit leader actually try to bandit again, his honor or his memory of being beaten up by you would give him penalties on banditing.

Malfunctioned
2016-10-16, 05:51 PM
I would really suggest looking at Bioware's Jade Empire, it really blends typical CRPG stuff with asian (primarily chinese) folklore.

Main points are stuff like treating magic as just a different kind of martial art, focused on manipulating Chi in the word rather than through the body. I'd also suggest small changes to races, possibly giving more animal aspects to the different ones? From what I can remember, a lot of chinese mythology tends to have animal featured spirits (fox, bear, monkey and all that), and that could extend to the races being mortal versions of them (monkey halflings, bull orcs, rat goblins, fox elves, off the top of my head).

ComradeBear
2016-10-16, 06:08 PM
What aspects of it do you consider worth copying?

Dungeon World is built on the Powered by the Apocalypse engine, so copying/converting it to something else would be really hard.

Ryutama might be easier to do, since it borders on being freeform so it's easier to pull individual rules from.

Fable Wright
2016-10-16, 11:06 PM
So, to get this straight, the key features of wuxia that you wish to import into high fantasy are:
Defeat is a real and common threat, while death and being knocked out are not.
The stakes are personal matters, rather than 'gimme your loot'.
All PC characters are special from the get-go, even if they are untrained.
To make those relatively portable, I would put all the PCs as a special class of character. Let's call them the Destined. These Destined universally share three major traits: First, it is impossible for non-Destined to kill them; no matter what you try, they will always get back up. They can be killed by other Destined, but even this is difficult.

Second, when they defeat an opponent, they are able to weave that opponent's destiny, to an extent equivalent to their victory. Something like inflicting a Celtic Geas upon an opponent—they abide by the restrictions imposed upon them, or risk actual death. Should a Destined break their geas, for example they become mortal until they atone somehow. On the flip side, if you bow out when you know you're outclassed, you have much greater power to negotiate down the terms of their Geas.

Finally, their destinies are tied to something bigger than themselves. Oftentimes, this will be a village, a dojo, or institution; occasionally, for the strongest of warriors, their destiny might be tied into big-picture things like the Baharuth-Slane War. For gods, their destiny might interweave with the sun or the moon.

These three traits come together to form a big picture. When the Destined confront a major threat, like a Destined Warlord attempting to conquer their village, no one involved is likely to die. Instead, the winner of their fight enforces their demands on the loser. 'Your people will pay tribute to my emperor until the end of time', or 'You and the men under your banner will never come near our village again.' This is highly preferable to actually seizing control of the town or killing the attacking band. The Warlord knows that it is the destiny of the town to always pay taxes to the new emperor, so he doesn't have to stay and occupy the village. The Destined know that when they defeat the Warlord, they don't have to worry about reinforcements; either they get someone up the totem pole, or no one from that army threatens their village again. The fact that the PCs can enforce demands like that, even if they are untrained, make them valuable. (Not all villages have Destined tied to them; hence the need for troops to subdue normal villages.)

Common Wuxia tropes, and porting them over to high fantasy becomes simple, now that they're setting independent.

For the sake of easy conversion, I'd rule that snake-men, elves, dwarves, and so on all have their own non-combatant commoners and a few Destined to act as champions for them. I'd rule that every single mythical being, like the flying telepathic tentacle monster, is a Destined that has ties to a greater force. The FTTM, for example, may be tied to the Wealth Of The Underdark. Defeating him means forcing him to give up the gold and jewels in his domain to the villagers, but only those villagers. A rival village trying to butt in on the mining operations will surely have to defeat the FTTM on their own. On the other hand, killing him means that the wealth of his domain is open to all—including your enemies.

Under this system, every fight has a purpose, losing a fight doesn't require losing the character, and you can fit this to whatever system you want with minimal effort. Instant wuxia flavor, just add water.

Thoughts?

Martin Greywolf
2016-10-17, 02:35 AM
First thing first - wuxia is like fantasy in that it's a specific genre, but isn't all that restrictive. A better comparison may actually be noir, since they both are highly stylized. The important part here is that both Hero and Clan of flying daggers are wuxia, but people from Hero could stomp any protagonist from CotFD because their power levels are so disparate. It's kinda like comparing Aragorn to Eragon.

Also, there too is such a thing as terrible wuxia, just look at some of the older stuff from Hong Kong, it's about as entertainingly campy as some of western B-movies.

So, on one hand, you have a setting where getting killed by farmer Li makes perfect sense, and a setting where that's a no-go. You'll need to decide which one you want to run.

Now, to more specific problems.

1) Personal interactions

This is a big part of wuxia, and a reason why a lot of players will struggle with it at first. Your PCs need a goal and they need to pursue it actively. That is a far cry from stumbling on a quest after quest of more traditional style of TTRPG (you can still stumble on stuff, Yojimbo-style, but it will be while looking for a specific thing), and depends a whole lot on your players being invested in the world and NPCs. This is hard to achieve, obviously.

This also means that you need a solid mechanic that resolves social conflicts, and you will need to actually use it, and use it often - many DMs fall into a trap of letting their players roleplay a conversation without making a single roll, despite the PC having top ranks in Diplomacy/Rapport/Whatever.

2) Clash of philosophies

More often than not, your PC ans your main antagonist should have very different opinion on how to do things, their own (may I be forgiven for going to Naruto for this) "ninja way". When they fight, the clash should be about the clash of these philosophies just as much as it is about stabby things. How exactly you achieve this depends, one way is to simply make it a rule that every attack should come with a line (Talking is a Free Action trope in full force) and give a small bonus if you make a good point. Or you could have two sets of actions for one round, one combat and one social.

This may also allow you to do things that you couldn't easily get away with in ye olde style - characters like cardinal Richelieu become much more commonplace.

3) Eastern values or western values?

This one is more open-ended, basically, western culture tends to frame their narratives in a good vs evil framework, whereas eastern tends to be more focused on personal narrative without splitting characters into good or bad. This goes way back into the first religions in these regions (zoroastrianism vs taoism).

You can actually cross-breed your setting without much trouble - Rokugan from LotFR is a nice example of eastern (specifically Japanese) setting that has a western-style good vs bad conflict, Dark Souls are an European setting with eastern-style narrative about life going in circles and if that is a good thing, without a clear antagonist (except maybe the PC when you start killing all the merchants).

That said, keeping this in mind can make for better stories. Using Hero as an example, Emperor there is your usual "conquer the world" type - or he would be if he didn't have a very good point that he stopped a whole lot of violence by uniting the lands, and didn't do nasty things just for giggles, but because he had to. I'd recommend running a first arc that would have an antagonist like this for first-time players, actually.

4) Martial arts

These should be a big part of any wuxia setting, problem is that you want both variety in MAs, and simplicity in their mechanics. Some systems can handle this elegantly and easily (this would be a series of stunts in FATE), some struggle quite a bit (DnD 3.5 needs either a class or Tome of Battle-like system to handle this).

As for the specifics, it's hard to give you any advice simply because how this is handled varies from story to story. Hero doesn't really have several styles, every character has his/her own personal way of fighting, but you also have 36th Chamber of Shaolin where the entire plot is about learning and improving a specific style. Then you have a host of movies centred around proving your style is the best style.

Sometimes the styles are outright supernatural (Bioware's Jade Empire), sometimes they are pretty much supernatural but not quite as overt as fireballs (Hero), and sometimes they are barely above the human ability (Clan of the Flying Daggers).

5) Beware the culture clash

Some players just may not be interested in playing in this setting simply because they want to wear full plate and beat the tar out of orcs. Preferences are like that, so make sure your players are oaky with this setting change.

Thing is, you can take a lot of elements from wuxia and apply them to more traditional fantasy - making conflicts more personal will give you more of a Three Musketeers vibe, adding politics produces something close-ish to Game of Thrones and so on. Even your character's powers can be based on what is essentially European wuxia - go read the insane stunts that are in the old versions of Illiad, Odyssey or Arthurian legend, and you'll find out they're quite at home in the most over-the-top wuxia world.

Fri
2016-10-17, 02:48 AM
On clash of philosophies, even if you dislike traditional alignments, you might want to use alternate alignment system for this. Or to be more proper, use virtues as with LotW used. So rather than chaotic and good, you have virtues like honor, individualism, benevolence, loyalty, and such, and they are independent on how traditionally "good" or "evil" someone is. You can have a villain with high honor and individualism, as much as a protagonist with high honor and individualism.

Basically, have a list of virtues, and have your players put their scores on it, simply so they can more easily visualize their character's philosophies. Also, you don't have to force them to adhere to it (since personal philosophy is mutable), but you can maybe give them bonus if they adhere to their high virtue (like if a character with high benevolence actually acting benevolent).

Anonymouswizard
2016-10-17, 04:44 AM
You can't just declare that the high fantasy adventurers form a special social class?

This won't quite give the same outcome as the Jianghu (which is an alternative name for the Wulin). The Jianghu is a world apart from normal society with it's own rules, it's own organisations which make/enforce them, and so on. You can be famous in the Jianghu and a nobody in normal society. However, the Jianghu also requires normal society to exist, as they create little on their own (especially food and the like).

It's not dissimilar to the world of organised crime (heck, going all the way back to Outlaws of the Marsh/The Water Margin, it basically is the world of organised crime). You can be a hero and a bandit at the same time, although this isn't very common (and depending on the story ranges from 'rob the rich, give a bit of help to the poor' to 'rob the rich, brutally slaughter the poor and loot their pockets for change').


What does Legends of the Wulin have in regard to GM advice that would make it useful for playing other games?

In all honesty? Not a lot. Loresheets have been explained and represent knowledge/ties/affiliations/secret kung fu courtesan techniques, and have been explained better previously in this thread.

Another thing it has is that mook attacks can't harm you, but do make you easier to damage. This is due to the damage system, where attacks can A) inflict ripples and/or B) cause a rippling roll to try and cause conditions. More ripples=more dice on your rippling roll. Mooks can inflict ripples, but cannot cause a rippling roll, which means that any encounter where none of the opposition knows kung fu can be skipped. A standard encounter for a lone Xia might be like the first combat of the 2003 TV series of Legend of the Condor Heroes, a bunch of easily defeated mooks and one or two guys who know enough kung fu to be dangerous.

Oh, I don't like LotW's character sheet though. There's no space on it for Loresheets.

There are another 2 Wuxia games that I know of. Qin: the Warring States is historical and the system could be used for a Western fantasy game with a bit of tweaking (you'd have to drop internal alchemy and maybe refluff lots of divination magic), and I like it a lot despite it being relatively low powered (enough that I made an A4 version of the character sheet). Tianxia is a Wuxia game for Fate, and comes with all the Fate baggage, but is easier to grasp than LotW in some ways and has the benefit of mooks occasionally being dangerous (oh, and it's as customisable as much as Fate normally is, I plan to use the Kung Fu system for western fantasy games).

Vitruviansquid
2016-10-17, 08:55 AM
This won't quite give the same outcome as the Jianghu (which is an alternative name for the Wulin). The Jianghu is a world apart from normal society with it's own rules, it's own organisations which make/enforce them, and so on. You can be famous in the Jianghu and a nobody in normal society. However, the Jianghu also requires normal society to exist, as they create little on their own (especially food and the like).

It's not dissimilar to the world of organised crime (heck, going all the way back to Outlaws of the Marsh/The Water Margin, it basically is the world of organised crime). You can be a hero and a bandit at the same time, although this isn't very common (and depending on the story ranges from 'rob the rich, give a bit of help to the poor' to 'rob the rich, brutally slaughter the poor and loot their pockets for change).

Still don't see how this precludes a western high fantasy setting.

Just exchange the Chinese words with some western words. You could literally replace every time you type "Jianghu" with the words, "Thieves' Guild" or "Murderhobo Association" and it would all still make sense.

gkathellar
2016-10-17, 10:44 AM
So, to get this straight, the key features of wuxia that you wish to import into high fantasy are:
Defeat is a real and common threat, while death and being knocked out are not.
The stakes are personal matters, rather than 'gimme your loot'.
All PC characters are special from the get-go, even if they are untrained.

There are two more things you're missing, though:

Wulin exist in a society parallel to but largely independent from the larger world's, with rules and norms that are very much their own
Joining the wulin is just a matter of getting the training and living by the social rules, which makes it (theoretically) accessible to anyone who's willing to put in the work

Kitten Champion
2016-10-17, 11:32 AM
I would say the most difficult aspect of this is on the player's part, namely Wuxia Heroes tend to have abundantly clear motivations strongly rooted in their emotions - love, hate, loyalty, greed, vengeance, etc. - and they act boldly upon them even if it's to their doom. Passion trumps rationality basically, and Heroes are passionate people. Details about characters specifically can be left pretty vague, but none should be left in doubt what's within the hearts of the characters by the conclusion of the story, and any change in that should be obviously dramatized. That, I think, has to be clearly understood by the player going in.

The second point would be a clear lack of grittiness. Heroes are assumed to be self-sufficient and banalities of life are ignored, villainous hench-people may simply stand around quietly to watch the Hero fight their boss/commander without moving and without any prompting, weapons and gear are far less significant than the Hero's skill that unless it's plot or character-significant what they begin with should be sufficient throughout. Essentially the world is a stage for these larger-than-life conflicts while the logic surrounding them is far less relevant and can be glossed over.

Additionally, a cool aspect of Wuxia movies which can easily be brought into a world of Elves and Dwarves is the use of creative and bizarre weapons - anything can be a weapon, and entire movies can be premised on some odd martial art assembled around their use - strings, fans, beads, bladed spinning tops, flutes, needles, artificial limbs, alcohol-based fire-breath, articles of clothing, convoluted swords that come apart like Swiss-Army Knives, etc.

Yora
2016-10-17, 01:55 PM
To make those relatively portable, I would put all the PCs as a special class of character. Let's call them the Destined. These Destined universally share three major traits: First, it is impossible for non-Destined to kill them; no matter what you try, they will always get back up. They can be killed by other Destined, but even this is difficult.

Second, when they defeat an opponent, they are able to weave that opponent's destiny, to an extent equivalent to their victory. Something like inflicting a Celtic Geas upon an opponent—they abide by the restrictions imposed upon them, or risk actual death. Should a Destined break their geas, for example they become mortal until they atone somehow. On the flip side, if you bow out when you know you're outclassed, you have much greater power to negotiate down the terms of their Geas.

Finally, their destinies are tied to something bigger than themselves. Oftentimes, this will be a village, a dojo, or institution; occasionally, for the strongest of warriors, their destiny might be tied into big-picture things like the Baharuth-Slane War. For gods, their destiny might interweave with the sun or the moon.
At its core this is about making a clear divide between heroes and the common rabble. Which I think is a very sensible thing to do. In a level based system I would make all those minor NPCs level 0, well below even a first level NPC. My rule of thumb is that everyone without a name is automatically level 0. But even named NPCs only get a class and levels if they are meant to be outstandingly heroic.
Not sure about making combat effectively nonlethal. A big difference between fiction and RPGs is that a writer knows that characters won't die until the appropriate dramatic moment but the characters don't, while in an RPG the players control the characters and also are in the heads of their characters. When the players know their characters are not in danger then their characters will also act that way, and I think this is where things get a bit wonkey.


Also, there too is such a thing as terrible wuxia, just look at some of the older stuff from Hong Kong, it's about as entertainingly campy as some of western B-movies.
90% of everything...


1) Personal interactions

This is a big part of wuxia, and a reason why a lot of players will struggle with it at first. Your PCs need a goal and they need to pursue it actively. That is a far cry from stumbling on a quest after quest of more traditional style of TTRPG (you can still stumble on stuff, Yojimbo-style, but it will be while looking for a specific thing), and depends a whole lot on your players being invested in the world and NPCs. This is hard to achieve, obviously.
One interesting technique I've found is to ask the players not to write a long backstory, but simply come up with a few character traits, values, and failings for the character. In my experience players tend to be quite eager to incorporate such things into playing their characters.


3) Eastern values or western values?

This one is more open-ended, basically, western culture tends to frame their narratives in a good vs evil framework, whereas eastern tends to be more focused on personal narrative without splitting characters into good or bad. This goes way back into the first religions in these regions (zoroastrianism vs taoism).

You can actually cross-breed your setting without much trouble - Rokugan from LotFR is a nice example of eastern (specifically Japanese) setting that has a western-style good vs bad conflict, Dark Souls are an European setting with eastern-style narrative about life going in circles and if that is a good thing, without a clear antagonist (except maybe the PC when you start killing all the merchants).
I really like the ambivalence in a lot of East Asian fiction. Often you get something terribly rigid for the sake of excessive drama, but over all I find the conflicts much more interesting that the standard good-evil stuff that we usualy see.
It's also one of the things I like about Sword & Sorcery, which is really a very similar style of fantasy that developed apparently independently around the same time. Once you no longer focus on angels against devils, things get much more interesting since you can have real moral problems.


This won't quite give the same outcome as the Jianghu (which is an alternative name for the Wulin). The Jianghu is a world apart from normal society with it's own rules, it's own organisations which make/enforce them, and so on. You can be famous in the Jianghu and a nobody in normal society. However, the Jianghu also requires normal society to exist, as they create little on their own (especially food and the like).

It's not dissimilar to the world of organised crime (heck, going all the way back to Outlaws of the Marsh/The Water Margin, it basically is the world of organised crime). You can be a hero and a bandit at the same time, although this isn't very common (and depending on the story ranges from 'rob the rich, give a bit of help to the poor' to 'rob the rich, brutally slaughter the poor and loot their pockets for change').
Wanderers of Ogre Gate even describes Jianghu as the world of martial arts and crime


I would say the most difficult aspect of this is on the player's part, namely Wuxia Heroes tend to have abundantly clear motivations strongly rooted in their emotions - love, hate, loyalty, greed, vengeance, etc. - and they act boldly upon them even if it's to their doom. Passion trumps rationality basically, and Heroes are passionate people. Details about characters specifically can be left pretty vague, but none should be left in doubt what's within the hearts of the characters by the conclusion of the story. and any change in that should be obviously dramatized. That, I think, has to be clearly understood by the player going in.
I think this is a good area to focus on when approaching character advancement. XP are a wonderful and very efficient motivator to nudge players into certain kinds of behavior. Rewarding players for dramatic stuff but not for safe and mundane things should help a great deal. Not quite sure what kind of advancement system to use myself yet, though.

Anonymouswizard
2016-10-17, 02:53 PM
Still don't see how this precludes a western high fantasy setting.

Just exchange the Chinese words with some western words. You could literally replace every time you type "Jianghu" with the words, "Thieves' Guild" or "Murderhobo Association" and it would all still make sense.

Note quite. Going with 'thieves' guild' for the moment, the two terms have very different connotations. A thieves' guild is implied to be a local thing, something for the city or the local realm, while the Jianghu is something that covers all under heaven (I'm not terribly widely read in the wuxia genre, but I know that sometimes members of the Jianghu are known by people outside of China). Thieves' Guild and Murderhobo Association also share the problem of being too official, and implying a chain of command. The Jianghuis a society, but it has no leader. People may lead groups, but nobody truly leads the Jianghu, where all are brothers (unless they are your master or student, maybe, someone can be both your brother and your master). Or sister, for female xia.

Good English terms for something like the Jianghu can be found. The World of Warriors/Heroes is a simple one, and fairly close to the meaning of Wulin.

EDIT: to clarify, I never said it precluded a western high fantasy setting, I was just pointing out how the Jianghu is not a social class.

gkathellar
2016-10-17, 04:30 PM
Right, the critical thing about Jiang Hu is that it exists in parallel to regular society, not outside of it or above it. If people in the everyday world go forwards and backwards, than Jiang Hu is a step to the left. Jiang Hu has rules, norms, and customs that are meaningless to regular people, and the rules, norms, and customs of regular people are likewise meaningless to the wulin who inhabit Jianghu.

The two worlds do interact, but only through vague points of contact. This goes beyond individual guilds or groups. Such entities are just a part of Jiang Hu's fabric, which is built upon the intermixture of diverse individuals and organizations - just like regular society.

Noteworthy in this is the way that wulin can and do come from any social class, especially from society's underclass. Likewise, norms of gender and genetic lineage have little traction (lineage of one's training, on the other hand ...). Within Jiang Hu, however, they are judged along wholly different metrics, typically revolving around strength, honor, courtesy, and achievement.

Fable Wright
2016-10-17, 07:03 PM
Not sure about making combat effectively nonlethal. A big difference between fiction and RPGs is that a writer knows that characters won't die until the appropriate dramatic moment but the characters don't, while in an RPG the players control the characters and also are in the heads of their characters. When the players know their characters are not in danger then their characters will also act that way, and I think this is where things get a bit wonkey.

I would dispute that.

First, there's High-Level D&D Syndrome, where character death is a slap on the wrist. The PCs know at that point that their characters are not in danger, because they've already given fingernail clippings to the local priest or whatever and will be brought back if worst comes to worst. Just because death is a possible outcome doesn't mean that there's a threat.

Second, the system is designed to make defeat mean something personal to the character. Being utterly beaten in combat will act as a blow to pride, and will have permanent effects. The Destined of a small village fall to the FTTM—and now they are charged with killing the man who sent them on their quest. Should they refuse, or delay too long, they will lose their exalted status and fall back to normal. They fall to the Dwarven Lord in Halls of Gold, and must surrender their worldly wealth to him so long as they live. There is absolutely danger in every confrontation between Destined—but rather than the risk being abandoning a character, the danger comes from a character's loss. And that's not something you can clean up with a ritual and some diamonds—it's a real, and permanent, character risk.

lukitux
2016-10-18, 05:46 PM
In the Destiny universe (what I'm calling fable wright's setting) what happens if a destined gets two conflicting orders after losing two conflicts? For example, what if the dwarf king is making a destined's town give up all their wealth but the local warlord is making you pay him tribute.

A suggestion that I have is that at the beginning of each combat, each character states why they are fighting, so both sides know what is at stake. This would also help replicate the more personal conflicts in this setting.

Fable Wright
2016-10-18, 06:40 PM
In the Destiny universe (what I'm calling fable wright's setting) what happens if a destined gets two conflicting orders after losing two conflicts? For example, what if the dwarf king is making a destined's town give up all their wealth but the local warlord is making you pay him tribute.

It depends. In this particular case, the dwarf king would take all the gold and luxuries in the town, while the local warlord would take tribute in the form of crops and conscripts. Non-conflicting.

If they are truly conflicting, such as 'protect this person with your life' and 'kill this person', the Destined cannot help but default on one order, and he would be brought down to normal no matter what he chose. They get one final shining moment in which to make their choice, and then lose their powers. It's a bad situation, but it can happen.

Arbane
2016-10-19, 08:15 PM
The Jianghuis a society, but it has no leader. People may lead groups, but nobody truly leads the Jianghu, where all are brothers (unless they are your master or student, maybe, someone can be both your brother and your master). Or sister, for female xia.


Mind you 'taking over the world of martial arts' was a pretty common motivation for the big villains in a lot of the Wuxia movies I saw back in The Day.

I don't think anyone's plugged Feng Shui for this - it's the 'Asian Cinema RPG', focusing on modern stuff like The Killer and period pieces like Chinese Ghost Story or Kung Fu Cult Master, which are relevant to this discussion. ISTR its GMing advice was pretty good, although a lot of it was along the lines of 'strive to emulate the movies, not real life'. (The game was first published in the 1990s, that was pretty groundbreaking then. I haven't read the new edition yet.)

LibraryOgre
2016-10-20, 09:05 AM
Have you considered adapting 1e/2e's Oriental Adventures?

I put some work into normalizing the martial arts styles from OA, and had the idea that ANYONE might choose to study martial arts. A fighter who favors the longsword might use a style that specifically works well with the long sword, with special manuevers that let them exceed the normal "hit, do HP, wait for the hit."

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iRGP2Nc1HW4x9b6nNyc_NySywf5uY41XEsccnsCh_QI/edit#gid=0

Not quite Wuxia, but it definitely lets you include some more mystical elements even into the common classes. You might also look at the various ki abilities in Oriental Adventures... walking on water, getting a temporary 18/00 strength, etc.

Fri
2016-10-20, 09:14 AM
Have you considered adapting 1e/2e's Oriental Adventures?

I put some work into normalizing the martial arts styles from OA, and had the idea that ANYONE might choose to study martial arts. A fighter who favors the longsword might use a style that specifically works well with the long sword, with special manuevers that let them exceed the normal "hit, do HP, wait for the hit."

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iRGP2Nc1HW4x9b6nNyc_NySywf5uY41XEsccnsCh_QI/edit#gid=0

Not quite Wuxia, but it definitely lets you include some more mystical elements even into the common classes. You might also look at the various ki abilities in Oriental Adventures... walking on water, getting a temporary 18/00 strength, etc.

I think at this point Yora's more asking about gming advice on wuxia elements, rather than actual setting or system.

Doorhandle
2016-10-20, 09:52 PM
I think at this point Yora's more asking about gming advice on wuxia elements, rather than actual setting or system.

Speaking of setting...
Wuxia heroes are basically a foreign version of knights errant; wandering vigilantes. In fact, they had their own term for the concept: "Youxia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youxia)." They have a well-recorded place in history, with several Youxia having their biographies in the Records Of The Grand Historian.
Social status was unnecessary to become a Youxia; it was all about the wandering and being willing to fight for what was right, if not always for what is legal.
I thinks it's a good general term for Wuxia protagonists... and a decent term for D&D adventurers, as they're a bit less focused on what right and more on what's profitable.
Consider using the Chinese elements: Metal, Wood, Water, Fire and Earth. They have a huge range of symbols implications in addition to the more literal versions (for example, the First emperor of china was associated with water, and hence the color black and harsh laws. Instant historical BBEG, here we come!)

As for characters
Honor and loyalty is immensely important to most characters in Wuxia, and it is conflicting loyalties or crisis of honor that drive the plot forward.
Thus, you should empathizes this to the players, and use it as a basis for NPC motivations. Of course as it's an individual code of honor, they may consider "getting rich as possible" honorable...
Conversely, it is implicit that the law is unjust, corrupt, or ineffectual: otherwise, savvy martial artist like yourself wouldn't need to take it into your own hands!

As for game-play...

In general, you need to give players a reason to move about in combat, otherwise the'll probably just slam against their opponents and remains immobile like a typical D&D battle.
Maybe a defence bonus for moment or something?
Consider giving everyone a fly-speed, but make it so they'll fall if they don't touch something solid at the end of their moment. This will allow them to mimic the whole "wire-fu" bit.
In combat, the environment is quite important: whether it's areas to stunt off, objects to throw at your opponents to distract them, or bystanders to get in the way.
Try to avoid "straight-up battle on a flat green field."
And finally, makes sure you give every technique a name. You don't need to shout it at the top of your lungs (it's not shonen anime!) but they need to be there.

Yora
2016-10-21, 12:21 PM
Not sure how frequent it really is, but I was just remembering the concept of courts in Red Tide. A court is any type of place where highly influental local people regularly come together. The suggestion for a sandbox campaign is to have two or three such courts in the campaign area and use the tables to create some NPCs and some ongoing conflict between them that is behind the scenes.
I used to think of these conflicts as adventure hooks,but they also make for really interesting complications while the PCs are staying in the area to deal with their main adventure. As famous heroes who fix things they are very likely to get invited to stay at the home of a local leader and while they are resting there they can easily be drawn into things by the NPCs who want their help or exploit them. Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon starts with a court situation in Beijing, and I think Chinese Ghost Story also had some complications going on in the town.
I think it's a neat way to get players involved into the town life and things that happen in town might end up being useful or a burden for exploring nearby dungeons.