This is a review of Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate by Bedrock Games.  Written and designed by Brendan Davis, William Butler and Dan Orcutt, Edited by Nick "Zepo" Seidler.  It's a role playing system and Setting for Wuxia and Kung Fu adventures in a Fantasy medieval China.

   First off, this is a massive book, 469 numbered pages and then the charts start.  Character sheets, NPC sheets, charts for tracking the players and how the NPCs feel about them, and a full calendar complete with horoscope.  Those are the extras.  The book includes everything you need to build a character and play the game.   Plus everything a DM needs to run the game, plus an incredibly detailed description of the world, plus monsters, plus a fully detailed sample adventure.  Plus a treasury, NPCs, Factions, possible quests linking to the fully fleshed out NPCs and factions, two or three more dungeon maps, not related to the sample adventure, plus plus plus.  This is the Players hand book, the Monster Manuel, the DMG and at least on adventure splat book rolled into one.

   It's also a very pleasant book to read and use.  It has a full color cover and black and white pictures on the inside.  It has a very helpful table of contents which is something I always look for but no Index.

   The book starts with a preface and introduction, how the book came to be, what it's for, what is Wuxia, the importance of Fate, as well as literary influences and movies and TV shows that inspired the work.  After reading those few pages I know what I can run with this system.  I can run, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, or I can run Kung Fu Hustle provided I update the costume department.  They also have a long list here, and though out the book, of other Wuxia movies and TV shows they recommend.  

   The next 3 chapters are Character creation, rules, and Kung Fu techniques.  To build a character you first assign your skill points, (well first you pick a race, but since the Non-human races are not well integrated into the initial setting I am going to skip that, they are perfectly well developed but they aren't where the core of the story is).  There are 6 types of skills, Defense, Combat, Specialist, Physical, Knowledge, and Mental.  Some of them, are pretty simple, for instance, Combat has all your attacks, arm strike for punching, medium melee for swords.  But at this point you can either keep reading how to build a character, not knowing what any of it means or you can flip a head to the chapter on rules and find out what these numbers do.  

   The basic mechanic of the Wandering Hero's is a simple skill check.  You have ranks in a skill ranks correspond to the number of d10s you get to roll on you skill check.  If any of your dice beat or match the target number, you succeed.  If not you fail.  The target number is set by the DM depending on circumstances.  It gets a little more complicated with combat, but not much.  Your target number is determined not by the DM but by the enemy's defensive skills. If you are trying to stab someone with a sword, your target number would be determined by their parry.  Then once you hit, you would roll for damage.  You would roll a number of dice based on your weapon and maybe another skill, for instance muscle, against a target number determined by the opponent's defensive skill "Hardiness". It's possible to hit with an attack and do zero damage.  If you succeed you do one damage.  Even if you have two or three success with your damage roll you still only do one damage.  There are some exceptions to that, but they come from special weapons or Kung Fu techniques.  

   Which leads us to our 3rd chapter Kung Fu.  There are 60 pages of techniques. In four different schools, Waijia, that's the hitty one, Qinggong, lightness Kung Fu (or the wire work from the movies), Neigong, Internal Kung Fu or using your Qi mastery for Hadoukens.  And Dianxue, pressure points.  You can use these techniques as normal, or you can use them "cathartically" which means you tap into your inner strength or Qi and get attentional effects.  Including often the ability to do more than one damage at a time.  However this has a risk, not a cost, you don't pay points and run out, but when you tap your Qi you can unbalance yourself leaving you open to possession by dark spirts.  

   60 pages of kung Fu is a lot to go through usually four per page.  How do you choose?  Well you don't get to.  Or at least your choices are severely limited.  By level, (level corresponds to qi rank, which also determines hit points) by first by Sifu and sect.  You can't learn a technique unless you have someone to teach it to you. A big part of the game and motivation for the players is looking for new techniques some of which are clearly and deliberately better than others.   After you assign your skills in character creation you choose a Sifu or master.  Who taught your Kung Fu?  You can make something up, or you can choose from existing and well developed sects.  There are 22 sects detailed in the book, each with the name of the leader and important members, total numbers, titles, allies, enemies, beliefs, reputation and History and organization and Kung Fu techniques.  As well as goals and obsession for some of them.  

   This is where you see how detailed and deep this setting is, the writers lived here for a little while, even if it was only in their mind.  It's all connected it all makes sense, but it's also messy, you can't grab one thread and unravel the whole cloth, I would like to play in one of their games.  They make the world come alive and while they have adventures planned for the players, the players can also just head off over the horizon to see what's there.  The book doesn't tell you, but it gives you enough to figure it out, as well as a few random encounter tables so you can be surprised as well.  

   I've skipped the section on equipment and rituals/magic.  There is a fully fleshed out history better than my study notes for my Ancient Chinese History class.  Five maps showing shifting political boundaries over time. Rulers, gods, generals, foreign powers, heroes living and dead.  The section on running adventures and how to manage your NPCs is great.  There are dozens of NPCs full fleshed out and ready to use right out of the box.  

   I've skipped a lot in this review. I have also only spoken the positive.  There are parts I don't like, I think the Cosmology is dumb, I won't describe it, it didn't grab me so I'm not going to use it.  It's also a complicated system. It has a combat system, with attack and defense, a skill system, and magic, then it has KungFu on top of that, plus a grudge system,and a push your luck element.  Like I said it's a monstrous book. I normally want a simpler game.  But I want to play KungFu, this game has grabbed me. It has everything you need to go from watching the A-team, to playing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  Or dial up the fantasy and play Princess Mononoke. Or dial it back and play Enter the Dragon.  I'm looking forward to running something.

Having made a couple charcters now I will say it reads easy but isn't as well referenced to use.  Any book like this involves flipping.  This one is no exception.  The character building section is well layed out step by step.  But step 2 is pick skills.  You then need to read the skills descriptions later in that chapter, see where they relate to specilizations and expertise even later and then see which kungfu techniques use them in chapter 3 (hint its athletics).  

The other think I really want is a quick chart of kung fu by level.  When making first level charcters especially 4-6 of them, I don't want all the techniques.  And I don't want to have to look up which sects no which techniques.  I want to pick an attack a stance a counter or 2 and a couple more cool things, which would be easy if it was limited by level.  

I'm sure it will get easier with use, everything does, but it's not easy to use yet.  

Don't get me wrong its not hard, I'm on my second character and I'm already getting the hang of it but its not easy.

Thanks for the review Headless. I appreciate the character creation concern you raise. One person told me the learning curve on that front was like a brick wall. I was talking about this the other day with one of the people who does edits for our books and we were discussing the ordering of character creation steps and placement of chapters. It was originally conceived of as an expansion of the Sertorius game and I think one thing I failed to do when structuring the book was shift gears in that respect (something about the expansion structure remained there a bit). The same editor came up with this tool, which is useful for finding information on Kung Fu techniques quickly: https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AFi3KAgtK4LzvYI&cid=C420BFF019E8C0D7&id=C420BFF019E8C0D7%2130010&parId=C420BFF019E8C0D7%21112&action=locate

I will say, it definitely gets easier with time. Same with running the game and adjudicating Kung Fu techniques. If you are willing to put in the effort on the Kung Fu technique front, I find it is really great at emulating the feel of Kung Fu and Wuxia movies (at least in my experience). But it does take frequent look-ups in play (especially at first). Essentially it is like having a party full of spell casters in terms of needing information on hand.

I'm the editor that Brendan was talking about in the previous post, and it looks like the link he sent isn't public, so here is a link that should work for you.

In the leftmost column, you can either select "All Techniques" or select a particular sect to look just at their techniques. I find it speeds up character generation a lot. Ideally, I'd like to include all the skills as well and hyperlink everything, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I agree that also being able to reference them by Qi level would be handy as well. I'll see if I can add that at some point this week and link it here.

I find this reference very handy during play. As it is web-based, you can use it on a phone or tablet too.

As it is a One Note document, it is easy to customize. My personal copy has tabs for my PCs where I have copied over their list of known techniques, a tab for maps relevant to the campaign, and another tab for campaign notes.

The game does have a lot of moving parts, but it is surprisingly fast in play because the core system (roll your pool and keep the highest die) is very simple.

I've made myself a spread sheet.  I tried the one note document, didn't work well on my phone.  So I made my own excel sheet.  Name, page number, discipline, type (this is a discription that makes sense to me, attack, debuff, jump heal etc) roll(what skill vs what defense or target number), damage or effect, special (special usually includes duration.  I need to add chathartic effects and I'm all set.  But I did all of the first level techniques and there were 71 of them.  

I wish that was in the book, but since I have made tje sheet I know how to use it and also I know the techniques now, or have a rough overview of what they do.  

If my players continue I'll add Qi level 2 to my sheet.

Thanks for posting the proper link Adam.

If you are limited to your phone, it sounds like the one note doc isn't an option. If you end up running it in situations where you have access to a device that can use it, I highly recommend it.

Thanks again for the review Headless.