a good start

When  I was a kid all the coolest swords & sorcery books had art like this on the cover.  Naked or nearly naked people are just as important an element of the genre to me as blood-drenched swords and dark pacts with infernal intelligences.  So for my next campaign, set in ancient Japan, I kind of want to get some of that sword & sorcery mojo going, so instead of this sort of thing:

I sort of want the visual aesthetic to be more like this:

I've been scouring the internet looking for Frazetta style S&S art depicting Japanese people, but so far my results have been limited.  If I settled for 'big eyes' style anime art, I could easily come up art, but that's not what I want. So the search continues.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to use a new house rule for the next campaign.  I'm already leaning towards Lamentations of the Flame Princess as the system, and its use of an ascending AC system actually makes this idea dirt simple:

The Frazetta Nakedness Rule: PCs (and key NPCs) use their Dex score as their unarmored AC, or the normal unarmored base, whichever is higher.

Even with 3d6 in order, that ought to get a few people running around without armor, especially if the price for decent armor is kept high and magical armor of the plus variety non-existant. One of the ways LotFP cleverly avoids a lot of bloat is by keeping all ACs low and eschewing plus weapons/armor.

initial thoughts on classes of the Saikaido Campaign

So I'm working on this mythic/faux-historical Japanese campaign.  Today I wanted to talk about classes.

Bujin (fighter) - Well-heeled samurai, wandering ronin, or desperate peasant-turned-bandit, all these fall under the bujin class.

Sohei (cleric) - You're a monk so into Buddha you can drop miracles. PC sohei are probably troublemakers kicked out of respectable monasteries.  The cops and/or monks from a rival temple may be looking for you.

Onmyoji (magic-user) - Ancient Japan actually had a government bureau of magic-users.  Most onmyoji stay in the capital and draw decent paychecks for little work.  PC onmyoji tend to be unlicensed renegades and/or power-hungry maniacs. Female onmyoji operate as a sisterhood outside the legal sanction of the bureaucracy, but since their order was founded by an imperial princess they have a certain romantic cache that makes them less spooky to the common people.

Ninja (specialist/thief) - I got nothing more to say about this class other than "Yes, you can play a ninja."

Wo (dwarf) - Not as beardy as their Occidental cousins, most Wo go for neatly trimmed facial hair, maybe just a moustache or even -gasp- clean shaven. Many have facial tattoos, looking a bit like an actor in a kabuki play. The Wo try to participate in mainstream Japanese culture, but because of their long lifespan and tendency to sleep for Rumple Stiltskin lengths of time, they can't keep up.  Like if in a modern setting game you had a short dude in your party that dressed and talked like William Shakespeare. The Wo aren't quite over the fact that suddenly (in their terms) some emperor living on another island is in charge around here and tend to be skeptical of imperial officials.

Korrobukura (halfling) - These hairy little people live in holes in the ground and generally try to stay out of everyone's way.  Their numbers are dwindling in the south (where the campaign is set).

Spirit Folk (elf) - Mostly human in appearance, every spirit folk has some sort of 'tell' that distinguishes them: odd colored hair, a tail, animal ears, impossibly long elf ears, a third eye that opens when casting spells, a long lizard tongue, etc.  The clans of the spirit folk claim descent from old imperial lineages on one hand and various kami (spirits) on the other, making most of them hella arrogant.  Since I envision spirits in this campaign as tending to be inhuman and weird, the Spirit Folk are kind of like what if happy shiny half-elves really had the Innsmouth Taint.

Why 13th c. Japan?

Gameblog reader Quibish asks:

I'm curious why the time around the Mongol invasions appeals to you more as a campaign setting. Were you wanting to avoid the firearms of the later years, or is there something going on in 1274-1281 that is just too good to pass up?

This question is in response to the chart I posted last week listing possible pseudo-historical campaigns to run.  I've settled on 13th century Japan, particular the southernmost of the 4 big islands, as the site of my next campaign for a couple of reasons.  I've picked Japan off of that list because I'm hoping to lure my nephew into a game or two and at any given time he's obsessed with Naruto, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Bleach, etc.

The Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 make interesting bookends to a campaign, especially if you center the action on Kyushu, where the Mongols actually landed.  Any political equilibrium on the island is disrupted by the first invasion.  This attack on the status quo creates a space for PC action (and by action, I mean "bad behavior").  The second invasion was seen as inevitable.  You don't send the troops of the grandson of Genghis Khan packing and expect that to be the end of the affair. That means official attention was directed more towards preparing the coast against a new Mongol landing and less in the direction of protecting tombs and ruins from PC predation.

The firearm thing Quibish raises is another issue.  Gunpowder is rare and mainly takes the form of Dodongo-disliking Batman-can't-get-rid-of anarchist-flinging bombs. Most days I'm just not keen on arquebuses in my D&D.  Ray guns, yes.  Historical firearms, not so much.  That's just the way I feel about these things.  Though there is this one great scene in a Zatoichi film (I forget which one) where some peasants want to rescue their friend from the cops.  They're peering over a ridge and one of them says the equivalent of "Holy crap!  They've got two guns!" That amused me.

Also there's a bit of an advantage to picking a more obscure period. You aren't going to find a ton of players with fixed opinions about the Anarchy, the way you might by running a game set in the War of the Roses.  Running a game set in the same period as James Clavell's Shogun creates a set of expectations.  I'd rather spend the campaign filling in a relatively blank slate than fighting preconceptions.

Finally, I'm enchanted with the idea of ending a campaign with the PCs giving Kubla Khan the finger or dying in the attempt.

irons in the fire

I'd like to offer a big thanks to everyone who has purchased my silly little book. I had a great time making it and the meager income from the sales so far almost covers the cost of my own next lulu.com order. Right now I'm eyeing three shiny new items from Matt Finch/Mythmere Games: The Spire of Iron and Crystal, Knockspell #2, and the Eldritch Wizardry Compilation. When Swords & Wizardry first came out I wasn't as enthused about it as Labyrinth Lord, but S&W is slowly winning me over with its awesome support material.

Anyway, today I wanted to list off some of my other projects I've been kicking around.

• A small numbered hexmappy sandbox for Mutant Future, that I plan to submit for a future issue of Fight On! The hardest part is a map that I can live with.
• Conversion/adaptation notes for using stuff from Tom Moldvay's Lords of Creation in Encounter Critical, as suggested by Mike David Jr. This would go into the files section of the EC yahoo group.
• A Holmes Basic D&D adventure based upon the works of Tom Wham. This would be run at the next Winter War, then posted as a free PDF.
• A non-Vanthian outerspace adventure thingy for Encounter Critical based upon a "planet of the week" format. Either run as a mini-campaign for the Lords of Awesome players or a similar group, as a Winter War outing, or both. Then posted on the internets.
• Issue #2 of phasic, my one-man two-page Encounter Critical fanzine. Another free download in the EC yahoo group file section. This one is maybe 50% written at this point.
• Tackling my Saikaido ideas as a mini-gazetteer series for Mike Davison's Ruins & Ronin.
• For over a year I've been kicking around ideas for an article on mystic tomes in the Wilderlands, with the idea of selling it to James Mishler's Adventure Games Publishing. I don't have any real desire to be a freelancer, but he seems to be the best outlet for such a project. And James is cool.

Crap on a stick! I didn't realize that list was so long until I typed it all up.

Saikaido: Island Between the Winds

So remember that google map of Kyushu island I posted a while back? Rob Conley very kindly overlaid a couple of standard Judges Guild hexgrids onto it and emailed me the results. I then took that and divided the map up into 'subsectors':

The names for the subsectors are just working titles at the moment.

The subsector size was determined by Grim's Blank Hex Sheet. My plan is to map and key one subsector at a time instead of trying to lay out a whole JG regional map at one go. For those times when I want to zoom in further than the 1 hex = 5 miles scale I plan to use either the Judges Guild campaign hexagon system map if I need to zoom in on just one hex or one of Lord Kilgore's maps if I need multiple adjacent hexagons.

My plan is to start in the northeast corner with Choshu. Since that's part of Honshu, the biggest of the Japanese islands and home to the imperial court, I plan on making that into starting area for new PCs. Sort of an Basic D&D region for Oriental Adventures, targeted specifically at character levels 1 to 3. Once you leave that map all the normal non-scaled hazards of sandbox play would kick in.

I'm still musing over the rules. On the one hand, this campaign concept began as "what if I actually did something with Oriental Adventures?" So my first inclination is to run those rules straight. On the other hand, some of those rules are a big pain in the ass. I'm thinking particularly of the extra little fiddly bits of chargen, such as generating a family, selecting proficiencies and buying equipment when both the money and the pricelists are totally different. Mike D's Ruins & Ronin is an obvious alternative, but I actually like all the different crazy class and race options in OA, as well as the spells, the rules for honor and families, and the charming if broken martial arts system.

Maybe the correct solution is to hack the OA rules to make them more friendly for newbies who just want to sit down ad roll up a character. In particular:

• Random charts for assigning proficienies to starting characters
• Pregenerated starting equipment
• One-throw birthrights chart
• Pregenerated clans
• Pregenerated starting spell lists for Wu Jen

The real issue as far as the rules probably comes down to figuring out which is easier: starting with Ruins & Ronin and adding OA-like elements or starting with OA and adjusting to taste.