Finally going to make a Wuxia RPG (talk about it here: http://thebedrockblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/wuxia-rpg-legend-of-ogre-gate.html). I am connecting it with our other game Sertorius,so i want to use the same base mechanics, but need to update and tweak them to fit the genre.

Right now my biggest hurdle is what do with the four emotions form Sertorius. Spells are going to be changed into powers for this game, and in Sertorius they were keyed to one of four basic emotions (love, anger, fear and pain) which you had a rank of 0-3 in. So all of our powers are going to need to fall into one of four categories (because these games while different are meant to be compatible). Right now i am thinking of dividing them into things like neigong (internal, use of chi, etc), qinggong (lightness and gliding), weapons and limbs, and accupuncture/pressure point. Some cross over though and not sure i like that grouping very much. Another possibility is combing neigong and qinggong, and opening up a new category for spirit magic. I like this better a bit, but it will probably fit the particulars of the setting more. I am picturing these as disciplines, with your rankings possibly being malleable and reflecting your current daily training regimen. One top of this, there will be more specific styles of martial arts achieved by taking sets of powers. The focus is going to be more on replicating the powers you see in wuxia movies, than replicating a real world belief system.

I have also decided to change the way health works. Characters will have a Chi rating and as this increases, their health will too (right now, it is two points of health per rank in chi----there are 1-6 ranks in chi).

It is still very early. I have a handful of powers down in noteform, just to have stuff to try in a live campaign. For the most part though, i want to design around the needs that emerge during play. So intend to go in with some really basic elements and then build and change as we find we need more or things don't work.

I'd suggest the elements of Daoist alchemy, but (1) they're five, not four, and (2) I'm fairly sure Qin already does this.

You could maybe reskin these emotions as the Four Symbols, but I'm not quite sure how they'd map to each other.

EDIT: Hey, guess what. Centuries of traditional Chinese medicine have already mapped the elements to emotions. Wikipedia is like, our best friend or something.

Wood - Anger
Earth - Love
Water - Fear
Metal - Grief (Pain?)

The odd man out is Fire (happiness), but there you go.

You know, all this talk of East Asian myth and magic reminds me that I have yet to find a jidaigeki/chanbara game to my tastes, but I've had a few sparse ideas. Since it's a different genre, I'll get a different thread going. But anyway, thanks for reigniting the spark.

Quote from: The Butcher;718453I'd suggest the elements of Daoist alchemy, but (1) they're five, not four, and (2) I'm fairly sure Qin already does this.

You could maybe reskin these emotions as the Four Symbols, but I'm not quite sure how they'd map to each other.

EDIT: Hey, guess what. Centuries of traditional Chinese medicine have already mapped the elements to emotions. Wikipedia is like, our best friend or something.

Wood - Anger
Earth - Love
Water - Fear
Metal - Grief (Pain?)

The odd man out is Fire (happiness), but there you go.

You know, all this talk of East Asian myth and magic reminds me that I have yet to find a jidaigeki/chanbara game to my tastes, but I've had a few sparse ideas. Since it's a different genre, I'll get a different thread going. But anyway, thanks for reigniting the spark.

We thought of that, but the idea is more about having these represent disciplines or areas of focus for wuxia characters. There is an alchemy skill though, and the five elements will likely make an appearance there. So the five elements will be a part of the game.

What I am trying to do is basically carve up into groups the powers you see wielded by characters in wuxia movies like hero, come drink with me, detective dee, and butterfly and sword, etc. So i am thinking things like wirefu, shooting energy beams, deflecting impossible numbers of arrows by twirling your sword, stopping a sword strike with your inner strength (or just damn good core strength i suppose), etc.

That bit about the the elements mapping to emotions is interesting. It almost makes me want to split the game into two types of characters: sorcerers and martial heroes. I could basically port in a lot of the sertorius style magic using the elements-emotions for sorcerers, and then go the other route for martial heroes (with each group reflecting different areas of martial arts).

Quote from: The Butcher;718453) I'm fairly sure Qin already does this.

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Qin does a lot of things well, and looks good while doing it. The modular design if Qin is quite brilliant and the look of the game is gorgeous. I am not even going to try going over the same ground they do unless it naturally overlaps because of genre. Going to take inspiration from later periods. Ours will not be historical though, but set in a fantasy setting to connect it with sertorius. So the starting point is the Sertorius cosmology and some of its underlying assumptions. Even though I rarely run pure sandbox for fantasy rpgs, when I run wuxia it ends up being quite sandboxy, so the setting area offered up in this one is going to be a small region with 10 mile hexes that have a definite sandbox edge.

This is also going to be a much more modest effort than Qin, since it initially will just be a free PDF ad-on to Sertorius. After that we'll see. If people like it, I may make a more robust game and release something in print (but right now the focus is to just do something fun and relatively small scale).

It's a pitty cubicle 7 has pretty much dropped Qin translations as the later books covered unarmed martial arts and shifted the timeline further along...pitty they seem unable to get more than 1 book out every other year atm

Quote from: Broken-Serenity;718557It's a pitty cubicle 7 has pretty much dropped Qin translations as the later books covered unarmed martial arts and shifted the timeline further along...pitty they seem unable to get more than 1 book out every other year atm

I find it is such a niche genre for rpgs, I'll bet it only brings in enough profit to justify releases every other year. That is my main reason for doing this as a free PDF initially.

I have decided to do more tweaking to the underlying system from sertorius to better fit the genre. Magic is going to pulled into the skill system, mainly using the ritual skill, which will be expanded and its power level increased. Still focusing on things like external, internal, lightness king fu etc, to replace the four emotions but increasing the number of individual powers you can take. Also wounds will now be linked to Qi. All other characters can take a single hit, while others add two wounds per qi level (Qi goes up to six).

Working on rules for stances. Trying to make sure anything that was doing in stuff like Condor Heroes is doable in the game.

Also, the working title has changed to "Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate"

You might actually equate the traits to the standards of wuxia heroes

 The Chinese Knight-Errant, eight common attributes of the xia are listed as altruism, justice, individualism, loyalty, courage, truthfulness, disregard for wealth and desire for glory.

Quote from: Silverlion;723230You might actually equate the traits to the standards of wuxia heroes

 The Chinese Knight-Errant, eight common attributes of the xia are listed as altruism, justice, individualism, loyalty, courage, truthfulness, disregard for wealth and desire for glory.

I think that could totally work in a game like this, but for the system i am useing it is probably going to be an akward fit (though i would have to think about it).

What i ended up doing, at least for now, is dividing it into four areas of kung Fu:

Lightness Kung Fu (qinggong)
Internal Kung Fu (neijia)
External kung fu (waijia)
Pressure Point Kung Fu (Dianxue)

As i have started to make my powers, this division seems to work for abilities modeled after film and television shows. So i just watched all of return of condor heroes and noted all the powers as i was watching to see what categories i might fit them in and it seemed to fit.

In addition, everyone has a Qi rating that goes from 1-6. This improves your wound total, opens you up to certain kung fu techniques and affects the effectiveness of your techniques.

The only wild card is the stances, which occupy an odd space mechanically. Stances in wuxia also seem to be a little different than stances as i understand them from my own experience doing martial arts (so i think my actual experience is interfering with me implementing them well). Right now I have stances as techniques exisining inside those four categories but they are techniques you can freely use and maintain. So if you go into dragon diving stance, you can do so as a free action and remain in dragon diving stance while using other techniques. Still fiddling but right now we are experimenting with having stances do things primarily like affect initiative for certain types of attacks. So if you go into a kicking stance, you get a bonus on initative when kicking, but a penalty if you are trying to do something else. Still rough though.

For supernatural stuff, I decided to expand the ritual skill and shift it onto that. That also seems to work pretty well here. It will require i come up with a ritual list. But i have been meaning to do something like that anyways with this system.

Yeah. Stances are an interesting thing--partly because I think that in film wuxia there a bit of posing done via the stances. So they don't quite work like they do in real world martial arts, because they're a way to get camera shots of the person.

Quote from: Silverlion;723258Yeah. Stances are an interesting thing--partly because I think that in film wuxia there a bit of posing done via the stances. So they don't quite work like they do in real world martial arts, because they're a way to get camera shots of the person.

And I really want to capture how they are in the shows and movies, more than real world martial arts. I have a feeling the stances will get more reworking than other parts of the game.

I have a pretty solid core list of Kung Fu techniques. Have started to incorporate things like venom techniques in there as well. In addition I tweaked the existing Restrain rules so they work better with the setting. Also have a bunch of sects and clans. Basic map is done for the local adventuring area. Will do a meet-up playtest later in the month to see how it goes.

Do you have poison sand as a weapon?

Just pondering!

Quote from: Silverlion;728294Do you have poison sand as a weapon?

Just pondering!

No poison samd. I have venom techniques that require daily exposure to small amounts of venom, which are then absorbed and enhanced by the practitioner's body so they can be delivered with something like a palm strike.