Orientalist Fantasy Settings

[maglag]

Now a more important question is how "hands off" the Emperor is. Obviously you want Dukes to lead military campaigns against each other, which implies the Emperor is dead or missing or just too feeble to stop that from happening.

A dead/missing/weak emperor means it's Civil War o'Clock a la 3 Kingdoms or Nobunaga as the different clans aim to become the new emperor.

Or instead you can have a strong emperor with a "might makes right" policy. If you can't protect your domain, you don't deserve to keep it, and if you can take your neighbour's domains then you deserve to keep it.

As long as the taxes are paid in time that is. If a war drags on for too long or the emperor doesn't get his due, then he'll get directly involved, so the challenge is making sure clan fights are solved as swiftly as possibly.

Which is also good since you probably don't want months/years-long military campaigns.

[Blade]

Now a more important question is how "hands off" the Emperor is. Obviously you want Dukes to lead military campaigns against each other, which implies the Emperor is dead or missing or just too feeble to stop that from happening.

Or he might be "corrupted by his courtiers/enuchs" forcing the "loyal" dukes to turn against the capital.

But there could still be infighting even with a powerful Emperor. If the Emperor dislikes the dukes, he can let them fight each other for a while, wait for the population to grow weary of the battles and then intervene and be seen as the good guy. That was a typical move from the Chinese Emperors.

[Grek]

I would personally like to throw my hat in for the Shogunate model, wherein there is a well-respected Emperor who serves as the ceremonial head of state, but where one or sometimes multiple powerful warlord(s) dictate policy and control (portions of) the military. Membership in the Imperial Family is acquired either by birth or marriage and comes with a certain degree of prestige, but does not let you give orders or ignore the law. Being Shogun is decidedly not hereditary and requires that each new potentate demonstrate their legitimacy by obtaining the support of a plurality of the major Sects and the acknowledgement of the Emperor. This can happen upon the death of the current Shogun (effectively replacing them) or in response to an unpopular Shogun, resulting in there being more than one Shogun and probably a brief civil war.

[Username17]

This underlines a big difference between modern expectations and historical feudal realities. Today the concept of Yorkshire and Leicestershire going to war sounds completely insane. Perhaps the premise of a surrealist political satire. And yet, during most of feudal periods for most of the world, that kind of shit was completely normal.

Anyone who has ever played Crusader Kings can tell you that it actually takes quite a lot of centralization before a ruler can successfully impose a restriction on their vassals invading each other. And such restrictions were historically pretty rare. Counts fought other counts within the same duchy. Dukes fought other dukes within the same kingdom. Kings fought other kings within the same empire. And that's before we get into the fact that the maps weren't colored in to everyone's agreement and satisfaction. The King of England was also the Duke of Normandy and had feudal obligations to the King of France while at the same time being the co-equal monarch of a rival kingdom. This shit gets weird.

There is thus an inherent tension between setting realism and the feeling of setting realism. Actual reality, unlike fiction, doesn't have to make sense. Historical attitudes are not the same as modern ones, and that has consequences.

It is desirable, not just from the standpoint of an armchair historian but also from the standpoint of the game designer, to have it be acceptable and reasonable for dukes and marquesses to go to war with each other. Firstly, because player characters want to be involved in wars sometimes and L5R showed how fucking terrible it is for the Empire to be constantly and exclusively fighting external threats. But also because sometimes the players are going to be playing in a province that isn't on the fucking goblin frontier or whatever, and they also need to be able to do war stuff.

I believe that what you want is to have laws in place that allow internal warfare under certain circumstances. Because that lets you have various wars that don't require anybody to be skullfuck childeater, but also because that lets the player characters investigate fake war justifications. Because I'm not sure I can imagine a more appropriate samurai mission.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, if you want people to wrap their minds around the clan concept I think it'd be helpful to emphasize that you're not guaranteed to keep appointments in the family forever. It should be normal for the regional governor to have a different accent and funny hat than many of the locals precisely because he is a conqueror or was the least controversial pick for Warden of the West or whatever the fuck you call your tippy top tiers of the bureaucracy.

[maglag]

I believe that what you want is to have laws in place that allow internal warfare under certain circumstances. Because that lets you have various wars that don't require anybody to be skullfuck childeater, but also because that lets the player characters investigate fake war justifications. Because I'm not sure I can imagine a more appropriate samurai mission.

Bandits, bandits never change.

[Lokey]

As an emperor, having your daimyos feud is a good control mechanism, less time and resources they have to knock you off your throne

L5R had a few things to keep a weak emperor on the throne:
- The capitol was sacrosanct. Maybe blockade or siege was acceptable.
- There were some orders from the throne you couldn't ignore, like an Imperial summons where you might find better armed than usual bandits on the way to the capitol or poison in your tea.
- Of course the clan feuds and such.
- The Imperial services like the magistrates and something else I forget.
- Belief/tradition: if things are good for the emperor, things are good for the empire.

Something from last page: L5R dragons were pretty much plot device, not sure if the RPG made the mistake of statting them. There were various grades of Oni, the top tier ones should be similar, at the power levels the players are expected to attain they're just you lose. It doesn't have to be that way, but seems like a lot less work to builid a functional game within the parameters of an L5R (though there's lots of reasons to not use that as a guide anyway).

[Omegonthesane]

As an emperor, having your daimyos feud is a good control mechanism, less time and resources they have to knock you off your throne

L5R had a few things to keep a weak emperor on the throne:
- The capitol was sacrosanct. Maybe blockade or siege was acceptable.
- There were some orders from the throne you couldn't ignore, like an Imperial summons where you might find better armed than usual bandits on the way to the capitol or poison in your tea.
- Of course the clan feuds and such.
- The Imperial services like the magistrates and something else I forget.
- Belief/tradition: if things are good for the emperor, things are good for the empire.

Something from last page: L5R dragons were pretty much plot device, not sure if the RPG made the mistake of statting them. There were various grades of Oni, the top tier ones should be similar, at the power levels the players are expected to attain they're just you lose. It doesn't have to be that way, but seems like a lot less work to builid a functional game within the parameters of an L5R (though there's lots of reasons to not use that as a guide anyway).

Round these here parts, plot devices of the form "fellate the GM to survive" aren't held in high esteem. To say the least.

[OgreBattle]

I understand the mechanical role of clans where you can have a party of multiple clans and even fight one's own clan, but I'm not really sure how story wise they come about

When I hear 'Clan' I think...

Naruto: Uchiha is one family clan, Hyuga is a clan with lesser branch families
Yakuza games: Clan, feuding families vying to be next clan head

There's some infighting, but there's hierarchy and organization to it.

The current discussed 'clan' feels like what I'd call a 'guild' in other games or shrine/sect/cult affiliation like "Oh you worship Inari fox god too I'll shelter you at my home which is also a Fox shrine" (like in https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... .01474_2.x )

[deaddmwalking]

I'm with OgreBattle. The 'clan' as it is being discussed is creating a lot of cognitive dissonance. It doesn't do the types of things I think of when someone says 'clan'.

Would 'banner' make a more appropriate term? That was (at times) a hereditary obligation that included a lot of geographic diversity.

[Yesterday's Hero]

What if there are "Alliances" that hold territory and are themselves composed of multiple clans (whose members can transit peacefully among its lands). That way the Green Dawn Alliance occupies a coastal province and is composed of the Rabbit Clan, the Tortoise clan, the Stork Clan and 3 or 4 other clans. So Turtle Clan characters can only be Samurai or Druids, but if you want to play a ninja you can be Rabbit clan (who also has bards or whatever). Clans can defect from these alliances to join others, so that you have a good way of advancing the metaplot. You’ll have to add an additional layer of complexity, but you’ll be able to give each clan a more definite personality. “All samurai have these features. All turtle clan characters have access to Turtle Shield proficiency and the Get in the Shell maneuver”

[Username17]

I'm with OgreBattle. The 'clan' as it is being discussed is creating a lot of cognitive dissonance. It doesn't do the types of things I think of when someone says 'clan'.

Would 'banner' make a more appropriate term? That was (at times) a hereditary obligation that included a lot of geographic diversity.

No. "Clan" is a real word. It has real meaning. It refers to things in Asia, but it also refers to real things in Europe. It's a Gaelic word, and is most often used with respect to Scotland. There have been times that Scottish Clans had specific leaders and direct chains of command, but that hasn't been a thing for hundreds of years. Under Scots law, we're talking about Armigerous Clans, but that's what most people think of when they think of Clans because that is how most people interact with Clans today.

The big difference between the Clans we are talking about and Clan Stewart of Scotland or Clan Jiang of China is that they aren't specifically patrilineal. That is, you can have a female Boar Clan magistrate whose daughter is also Boar Clan. But that's because Game of Thrones style realistic medieval sexism is really brain breakingly awful and people don't like it. Other than that, we're using the word "Clan" literally exactly for what the word "Clan" actually means in English. So coming up with a different word would be stupid.

Or to put it another way: if you think it's hard to accept that writing "Raven Clan" on your character sheet doesn't make you specifically owe fealty to some hypothetical "Raven Clan Clan Head," that's on you. Because there are real people in Clan Stewart and Clan Jiang today who don't have any particular loyalty to a Clan Head because there fucking isn't a Clan Head. And calling the Clans something else wouldn't change that expectation from you, because the expectation has literally nothing to do with the word being used. Your expectation is that the choice of character background thing should come with faction loyalty like a Bloodline in Vampire or a Nation in 7th Sea. And we aren't doing that because that's terrible for an RPG.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

This brings us to the Man with the Iron Fists issue:



Whatever you think about the film as a movie, it is certainly an Orientalist fantasy set ostensibly in China with an Emperor, imperial bureaucracy, and British agents, and the Shaolin temple...but it is also set in a fictional hinterland village ruled over by "many savage clans" who are inexplicably animal-themed in appearance, gear, temperment, fighting style, etc.

This works. It isn't necessarily realistic, because while you do have clans named after or themed like animals in Southeast Asia, they aren't all Black Widow prostitutes or whatever. But they are competing groups with distinct themes that have a degree of local autonomy - the provincial governor (and, presumably, the emperor if not a figurehead) can totally send in an army with a gatling gun to go and kill everybody under the auspices of "no kill like overkill" and "no power like firepower" - but for the most part they're a modestly sized village far from the capital and ability to project power is limited by distance and loyalty.

Which is something that games like Legend of the Five Rings sort of struggles with, even if they have the same kind of animal-clan theme going on. The logistical realities of a lot of realistic settings are that a lot of authority is only centralized theoretically in a king, emperor, pope, or other monarch - being able to enforce that authority, especially the farther you are from their main sphere of influence, is really difficult, and if there's any sort of balance it's probably a constant struggle between local authorities at all level vs. the "central" authorities far away.

Which is why you can escape the baron/satrap's vengeance if you can only cross the border from their principality, where they can no longer project force without tripping over their neighbor's authority.

[deaddmwalking]

Or to put it another way: if you think it's hard to accept that writing "Raven Clan" on your character sheet doesn't make you specifically owe fealty to some hypothetical "Raven Clan Clan Head," that's on you. Because there are real people in Clan Stewart and Clan Jiang today who don't have any particular loyalty to a Clan Head because there fucking isn't a Clan Head. And calling the Clans something else wouldn't change that expectation from you, because the expectation has literally nothing to do with the word being used. Your expectation is that the choice of character background thing should come with faction loyalty like a Bloodline in Vampire or a Nation in 7th Sea. And we aren't doing that because that's terrible for an RPG.

-Username17

Maybe I'm dense, but it still isn't making sense to me. If I don't owe fealty to anyone in my clan, why do they owe fealty to me? If I'm not expected to be part of an army sometimes, how come the other members of the clan are expected to fill out my army when I need them?

This really strikes me as a 'PCs and NPCs have totally different rules, and it only makes sense in a narrative sense because fuck NPCs, you aren't playing one anyway'.

From a verisimilitude perspective, I don't really like that.

[Grek]

Honestly, OgreBattle is probably right about the Clan nomenclature. No matter how much ink you waste on trying to explain that Clans Don't Work Like THat, half the players are going to assume that Clans are insular things that work like they do in L5R and Naruto. It's a dumb hill to die on.

[Whipstitch]

Maybe I'm dense, but it still isn't making sense to me. If I don't owe fealty to anyone in my clan, why do they owe fealty to me?

They don't owe fealty to you unless you're their liege or something. Just like peasants don't owe fealty to other peasants despite wearing the same type of hat. You still need to acquire social rank and prestige to get shit done. Clans are largely a matter of flavor. They're just different sub-cultures within the empire that can have different ancestors and martial/magical traditions. That's not a small thing a setting where ancestor worship is likely a thing.

half the players are going to assume that Clans are insular things that work like they do in L5R and Naruto.

Then come up with something better. Seriously. Because in this case I'm the other half of the player base that doesn't know how Naruto works. You will in fact have to explain this shit at some point. Acting like people know exactly what you mean is lazy and self-defeating no matter how you slice it.

[deaddmwalking]

Maybe I'm dense, but it still isn't making sense to me. If I don't owe fealty to anyone in my clan, why do they owe fealty to me?

They don't owe fealty to you unless you're their liege or something. Just like peasants don't owe fealty to other peasants despite wearing the same type of hat. You still need to acquire social rank and prestige to get shit done. Clans are largely a matter of flavor. They're just different sub-cultures within the empire that can have different ancestors and martial/magical traditions. That's not a small thing a setting where ancestor worship is likely a thing.

I guess I'm confused why you're going to have an army of Boar Clan warriors if the point is that if you're anyone's liege, you're going to have retainers from EVERY clan.

Either clans are insular and you get a group of clan warriors from your clan or clans aren't insular and you become a duke and you get warriors from a bunch of clans. I don't understand how they're both supposed to work at the same time.

If clan is access to specific traditions, sure, that makes sense to me. To me that's more like 'school' and not everyone has to have one, and clearly the setting HAS to have schools with rivals and such but I'm not sure you're getting much flavor from clans at that point. If clans are NOT regional NOT exclusive NOT strictly hereditary NOT feudal WITHOUT agendas and WITHOUT leaders, I'm still confused on what they're adding that you wouldn't get more strongly with a school or other devotion.

If the Shaolin monastery has people from every clan, and the evil Death Strike monastery has people from every clan, and you are kill on sight to each other, it seems like School supersedes everything that clan is supposed to do.

[Username17]

Maybe I'm dense, but it still isn't making sense to me. If I don't owe fealty to anyone in my clan, why do they owe fealty to me? If I'm not expected to be part of an army sometimes, how come the other members of the clan are expected to fill out my army when I need them?

Every time we talk about "other Wasp Clan people" think "your cousins." They aren't inherently your boss, and you aren't inherently their boss. But you do have a persistent social connection to them and you always have a reason to go work for them and they always have a reason to go work for you. But that doesn't mean that you or they don't also have reasons to work for other people. It's just that whatever else you are doing or have done, you still always have those family connections because factually your dad's sister had three kids and you used to play with them during the honey festival every year.

From the standpoint of a player character, the fact that you're Wasp Clan means that regardless of what else you do or have done, you have some Wasp Clan contacts. And those contacts can be sources of information, or they can also be quest givers, just like Shadowrun contacts. Obviously you're never going to go join the army of a Wasp Clan Lord and fight as spear catcher #3,784, but that's because you're a player character and are only going to take jobs like "supernatural event investigator" and "monster hunter" that can be performed by a small ensemble of skilled protagonists. You might very well get the mystery of the week by being told about rumors of a monster threatening a mountain village through one of your Wasp Clan contacts.

Further, once you become powerful enough that you start hiring your own staff, some number of your minions are going to be from your immediate area or attracted specifically from whatever adventures you happened to have. Maybe you conquered a Bakemono village from its oppressive Oni leadership and now you have a bunch of goblin minions. Maybe you did something else entirely and have different quest related minions. But some of your minions are going to be various Wasp Clan people that come to work for you.

Either clans are insular and you get a group of clan warriors from your clan or clans aren't insular and you become a duke and you get warriors from a bunch of clans. I don't understand how they're both supposed to work at the same time.

Imagine that when you get a bunch of warriors you buy them with prestige points from the available marketplace. Because game mechanically, it might literally work like that and it's not a terrible metaphor. What's available on the marketplace is going to be:

• Whatever is in the province you happen to be in (hope you like the taste of MC's cock).
• Whatever was unlocked by previous missions (hope the other players agreed with you to go do favors for the northern eagle riders).
• Whatever is available through family connections (which is 100% under your control since you selected your own clan during character generation).

Yes, obviously you're going to end up with some special troops related to earlier major missions - or at least the opportunity to hire some. But the troops you can get through family connections are the ones that as a player you have full control over. The MC can't tell you that you can't hire Wasp Riders because there aren't any Wasp Riders in the province. You're fucking Wasp Clan, and you can hire Wasp Riders rom another fucking province by writing a letter to your cousin.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

If the European word for clan has too much baggage, and you are doing Chinese clans, wouldn't using a Chinese word for clan be better? If you know about Chinese clans it's not a problem, if you don't you're starting from a blank state.

[Whipstitch]

If clans are NOT regional NOT exclusive NOT strictly hereditary NOT feudal WITHOUT agendas and WITHOUT leaders, I'm still confused on what they're adding that you wouldn't get more strongly with a school or other devotion.

Culture.

Vampire was successful in large part because they could concentrate on outlandish shit due to all of the mundane world building being handled by the fact that the game took place in a contemporary setting that defaults to realistic assumptions whenever all the boogeymen are off-screen. That's not a luxury a XXth Century Fantasy Asia enjoys and even thinly sketched out descriptions and replacements are better than nothing. For example, it's nice to be able to say that your mysterious rescuer was a red-haired woman in traditional Spider Clan mourning garb since that gives people a lead while still being generic enough that it doesn't actually imply that she must have gone to Fighter College.

[Grek]

I kinda like Family as the alternate name for Clan. Because the assumption is less that you can call upon the fealty of your clan vassals and more that rising beyond a certain level of personal success results in people from your home town turning up out of the woodworks and asking for you to hire them, help them get a meeting with your boss, get good trade deals or otherwise help them out because nepotism. And you, as a starting member of your family, can ask for jobs, meetings, gossip, a place to stay and other help from more successful relatives the same way, also because nepotism.

[Username17]

I kinda like Family as the alternate name for Clan. Because the assumption is less that you can call upon the fealty of your clan vassals and more that rising beyond a certain level of personal success results in people from your home town turning up out of the woodworks and asking for you to hire them, help them get a meeting with your boss, get good trade deals or otherwise help them out because nepotism. And you, as a starting member of your family, can ask for jobs, meetings, gossip, a place to stay and other help from more successful relatives the same way, also because nepotism.

Clan literally means the same thing as family, in the sense that "Family" is the first synonym given for "Clan" in the Thesaurus. However, to the extent that they mean different things...

1. a group of families or households, as among the Scottish Highlanders, the heads of which claim descent from a common ancestor

Which is strictly more appropriate than "family" because it implies more than one family.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Kin is what’s used to describe Chinese lineage associations
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese ... sociations

Usually have an ancestral home and ancestor shrines. Based on last names so of course you can have Li’s all over serving different political interests

On clan autonomy within the clan, we do have an example of the Sanada clan splitting between loyalty to Iyesu or Ishida because of marriage alliances

https://thesengokuarchives.com/2017/05/ ... a-yukimura

The Sanada’s on the losing side were exiled from the clan, the winner Sanada’s got new territory.

With schools... the students of Confucius were free to choose what lords to serve, maybe some ended up on different sides of wars.

With Naruto you have ninja teams made up of different ninja clans because they serve the same feudal lord. There’s a greater authority above the clan, teams made up of different clans also discourage clans from becoming autonomous again

[Username17]

Kin and Clan are both used to discuss Chinese Lineage Associations. Personally, I would not use the word "Kin" for this, because while "Clan" has as its most common definition the exact thing we are talking about, "Kin" is used in this context as its third definition.

Linguistically, I would expect "The Carp Kin" to refer to people who are not in the Carp but are in some way related to it. In the way that "Kinfolk" in Werewolf are not Werewolves but are 1st and 2nd degree relatives of people and dogs who are. It's not literally wrong to use the word Kin to refer to people who are related to and also included in the group under discussion, but it's not the first or second thing I'd think you were talking about when you use the word.

And yes, I know that in general "dictionary" arguments are invalid on the internet. But in this case, the discussion has gone off the rails entirely into discussing what the most commonly used definitions of words are, and that is where the dictionary is the arbiter.

-Username17

[Grek]

The dictionary definition doesn't map to the word's usage in the context of Eastern fantasy RPGs. In the RPG context, Clan has been used to mean a particular sort of heredity-based political unit, as seen in Vampire and L5R. In eastern fantasy genres, Clan has also been taken to mean a particular sort of heredity-based political unit, as seen in Naruto and, again, L5R. All of these organizations have a very similar structure and narrative function, with specific Clan Leaders who are Author/DM penis extensions and where worries about someone betraying their clan for their friends or betraying their friends for their clan is a common plot point. Using the word Clan is going to bring up those associations, and your heartbreaker probably won't have the cultural inertia to overcome them. It's better to dodge the issue entirely by using literally any other word.