How many clans is not enough? How many clans is too many?
In the past I've been an advocate of
less clans on the grounds that players can't possibly be expected to know what the various clans do if there are a lot of them. But now I think I favor a metric shit tonne of clans on the grounds that players can't possibly be expected to know what the various clans do if there are a lot of them.
Much of course depends on what we mean by "Clan." And what we are constrained for Clan to mean is "An identifiable facet of a character's identity that in no way makes it difficult for the character to work closely with other characters who are a different Clan."
During the Sengoku period, there are over two hundred clans. And the Chinese equivalents of
those kinds of "clans" are the warring states "Duchies." And it's literally inconceivable that an RPG setting would detail all of them. The player characters would by default be in the employ of a Duke (or
Duke Equivalent Minister), and there would be enough of those fuckers that the setting information would not define all or even most of them.
Now the Clans need to be more fleshed out than that. They can't
just be "there are over two hundred of these and we aren't going to even try listing them all." Because they are a player character option. There does in fact have to be a list somewhere. But that doesn't mean that all of the Clans need to have a lot of ranting about them. In fact, having some of the clans be largely a blank slate where people can write in whatever kinds of fashions, foods, and social foibles that they personally want in an Orientalist Fantasy Setting is a
feature.
I had been thinking about it from the standpoint of what the minimum number of clans to get in all the Asian Fantasy Tropes you want so that everyone could remember what all the clans did. But then I realized that people are going to want to add stuff to the setting and bring in additional Asian Fantasy Tropes and you need that white space for that to happen. You can still have a few clans that you keep going back to in fiction pieces and examples to reinforce the brand, but you're actually looking for the
longest list of clans that you can still fit into the clan chapter without having people give up during character creation. As such, I'm not looking for "How can we cut down to six?" I'm looking at "How can we pad the list out to twenty-four?"
The Zodiac is a good place to start. Every Zodiac animal has a huge amount of Asian art dedicated to it and you can see parades in the animal's honor once every twelve years. So that's pretty cool. The biggest drawback of course is the existence of the Dragon. Dragons are a bullshit Clan totem in a fantasy world where Dragons exist and talk and probably aren't literally members of your Clan. It's super confusing. The second issue is Tiger. Tiger is actually a pretty cool Clan Totem, and it's a good excuse to say
Tiger Style like the RZA. But there are also several other "cats" that people want to totemize - namely Lion and Cat. The argument for having two or three feline clans is pretty strong and is basically "Cat Girls!" and then dropping the damn mic.
The main things
missing from the Zodiac are Fish and Bugs. There are no Fish or Bugs in the Zodiac. Birds get only one thing (Chicken) and Reptiles only one example (Serpent). But it's important to remember that the Five Kung Fu Animals have Crane and Mantis. But there are a
lot of animal forms. Ones that could make a decent clan include:
- Bear
- Boar (equivalent to Zodiac Pig)
- Bull (equivalent to Zodiac Ox)
- Centipede
- Chicken (equivalent to Zodiac Chicken)
- Cobra (equivalent to Zodiac Serpent)
- Crab
- Crane
- Crow
- Deer
- Dog (equivalent to Zodiac Dog)
- Duck
- Eagle
- Elephant
- Fox (semi-equivalent to Zodiac Dog)
- Hawk
- Horse (equivalent to the Zodiac Horse)
- Leopard (semi-equivalent to Zodiac Tiger)
- Lion (semi-equivalent to Zodiac Tiger)
- Lizard
- Mantis
- Monkey (equivalent to Zodiac Monkey)
- Python (equivalent to Zodiac Serpent)
- Scorpion
- Swallow
- Tiger (equivalent to Zodiac Tiger)
- Toad
- Turtle
- Wolf (semi-equivalent to Zodiac Dog)
Now to that, I would say there definitely also needs to be Carp and Eel despite there not being any martial arts styles called that to my knowledge. And the following Zodiac animals don't have martial arts styles but are still obviously pretty major:
So that's a total of 34 completely reasonable clan names. And I think you'd want to cut no more than like ten of them. Some of them seem pretty redundant. Fox, Dog, and Wolf all seem pretty interchangeable. I don't think you need Leopard, Lion, and Tiger. Some of them seem pretty forgettable like Duck and Swallow. But it's a good starting point.
-Username17