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View Full Version : DM Help Romance of the Three Kingdoms Campaign Suggestions



SleepyShadow
2019-07-19, 07:59 PM
I'm interested in starting up a campaign based on the Chinese epic "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", and I was hoping to get some input on how to handle such an undertaking. I'm planning to start during the Yellow Turban Rebellion, and hopefully go from there with all of the mass combat and political scheming along the way. I know it's going to be a really big project, but I'm willing to put in the effort. I just would like some advice on what to do and what pitfalls to avoid. Thanks in advance!

Mechalich
2019-07-19, 10:38 PM
Without knowing what system you're going to use it's hard to get a handle on how you intend to work with this, however, the most important thing about ROTK is that the overall storyline is incredibly dependent on a specific and shockingly unlikely chain of events unfolding in a specific way and that once you start deviating from those events you can no longer hold the narrative structure together. This is actually how the ROTK video games work, they take a standing start point, key in the initial goals of all the various factions from the start point and the overall intent of the leaders, and they just let it run and things unfold however they happen to fall out in the sim, often without any resemblance to the novel (Liu Bei, in particular, tends to get crushed, he had a string of narrow escapes that boggle the mind).

I'd actually suggest starting significantly later than the Yellow Turban Rebellion because of this. The Three Kingdoms period doesn't really get revved up, with the majority of the big players on the stage somewhere, until after the death of Dong Zhou in 192, and arguably none of the players of Shu or Wu are really a big deal until Red Cliff in 208, as the principle conflict prior to that was Cao Cao versus Yuan Shao.

More generally, if you're GMing this you need to make all your players pick a faction and stick with it (though this could include usurping control of said faction), and that faction needs to have a plausible 'win condition' that it could reasonably achieve by the time the characters end their careers ~50 years after they begin. 'Reunite the Empire under our rule' is a viable objective for Wei, Wu, and Shu, of course, and also reasonably plausible for Yuan Shao and Dong Zhou (in a scenario where the PCs continue to work with his faction following his death), and for Jin from a very late start point, but that's about it. Any other faction would have to settle for 'preserve our territory' or 'negotiate preferential assimilation' or something similar. Also note that the various factions are in no way equal, it's fairly easy for a PC group to tip the scale in favor of Wei and unleash a cascade of conquest that never stops (in most ROTK games if you manage to take and hold one city south of the Yangtze post Red Cliff as a Wei player you're going to win), but winning as Shu would be a colossal uphill undertaking.

Resileaf
2019-07-19, 11:12 PM
Well there's not much more that I can say that Mechalich didn't, but it would be helpful to know the theme you want the campaign to have. As in, what are the players. Who are they, who do they follow, and why, and how important are they. How fast are they going to integrate themselves to the important historical figures, and are they going to be pivotal to setting up their kingdom.

There are plenty of interesting storylines you can follow, such as having them start off as peasant followers of Liu Bei who follow him on his escape from Cao Cao, or new officers in Cao Cao's army who help him rise to dominance after the Yellow Turban Rebellion.

SleepyShadow
2019-07-21, 12:21 AM
@Mechalich: I'm going to use the Legend of the Five Rings system for the game; seemed a good fit for a more wuxia flavored game, though if you have a suggestion for a better system then I'm all ears. I had planned to start at the Yellow Turban Rebellion because I liked the idea of having the players go from that point through to the Battle of Red Cliffs, then switch to the PCs' children/heirs for the remainder of the campaign. Just an idea, though, and it may prove too cumbersome to implement when the time comes, but it's a notion I like in theory. As for the factions, I was planning to let my players choose for themselves what faction they want to support.

@Resileaf: The theme I'm going for is a grand scale wuxia-style drama. My plan for the players is to let them be really influential to whomever they ally with after they prove they aren't going to just jump ship at the first opportunity. I'm pretty open to letting the players call the shots with their historical figure of choice acting as the public face, so long as they don't do anything drastically out of character. Y'know like, "Hey Guan Yu, let's eat babies!" or something like that lol. I want my players to be pivotal to the plot. I like your idea of starting them off as followers of Liu Bei :smallsmile:

Mechalich
2019-07-21, 03:55 AM
@Mechalich: I'm going to use the Legend of the Five Rings system for the game; seemed a good fit for a more wuxia flavored game, though if you have a suggestion for a better system then I'm all ears. I had planned to start at the Yellow Turban Rebellion because I liked the idea of having the players go from that point through to the Battle of Red Cliffs, then switch to the PCs' children/heirs for the remainder of the campaign. Just an idea, though, and it may prove too cumbersome to implement when the time comes, but it's a notion I like in theory. As for the factions, I was planning to let my players choose for themselves what faction they want to support.

The thing about the Yellow Turban Rebellion start is that the early timeline is very jumpy, and most of the factions that will later matter essentially do not exist. Liu Bei and Cao Cao are both fairly minor officials with relatively tiny followings - Cao Cao doesn't seriously begin recruiting until he rebels against Dong Zhou in 190, Liu Bei not until much later in 194, and the Sun family not until Sun Ce's conquests in 195. If you are going to have the PCs start at the Yellow Turban rebellion, I'd suggest having them serve as officers loyal (nominally anyway, they don't actually have to be loyal) to the court and then have them join the anti-Dong Zhou coalition under one of the lesser coalition figures (there's quite a few to chose from) and only have them declare their service to their chosen faction until after the coalition fails and some time has passed - 196, when Cao Cao takes control of the Emperor, is probably a good year.

Going from there though, you have to accept that you really can't script out future events, it's too easy for PCs to change outcomes. For example, it's relatively easy for PCs serving Yuan Shao or Liu Bei to tilt the Cao-Yuan conflict to the Yuan side, at which point everything plotted thereafter unravels entirely. Likewise, if PCs serving the Sun family manage to save Sun Ce's life around the time of Guandu and this would have allowed him to attack Xuchang and take control of the emperor, at which point the story again moves into completely different territory. To use Red Cliff as an example, the narrative is sufficiently complex that, if you want to make sure Red Cliff actually happens, you can't start any later than the beginning of Cao Cao's southern campaign. Otherwise there's just too many variables.