What do folks want out of an "Oriental Adventure"?

[maglag]

Politics, politics never change...

Isn't there already at least one Gits rpg already anyway? But yeah, makes for a nice setting.

Also a bit late but

Guns are big shoulder mounted things that are used by peasant soldiers on the battlefield.

Samurais totally used guns too.

[Username17]

We can also have guns used by female samurai governors like in Princess Mononoke. But I would argue that those kinds of guns aren't strictly necessary. It is in fact OK if you don't have "gunner" as a badass protagonist archetype for player characters to be.

Now, I definitely wouldn't say that gunners are an unreasonable character archetype. I expect that a significantly non-zero number of players would like to play a character like Lucca, Lady Iboshi, or Vincent Valentine. And that's reasonable! But I don't think it's wrong to sideline all those characters and say that guns are battlefield weapons and PCs won't bother.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Having guns with alchemist powders and shot as an alternative to a scroll or wand of fireball and wahtnot is cool.

Scrolls of summoning arguably fit better into a Japanese Fantasy setting than medieval europe:



...the Body Mods of Ghost in the Shell kinda echo the novel/anime Koga Ninja Scroll where freaky ninja bloodline powers and body beehives fight

[maglag]

Speaking of oriental guns



Outlaw Star has the main protagonist use both normal guns and a single-shot pistol that fires ancient magic bullets. There's quite a lot of different magic bullets, but they're in limited supply since nobody can craft craft them anymore (magic fading) so the protagonist saves them for special situations, although in the other hand you can find some magic bullets for sale in flea markets and pawn shops if you look hard enough. They're basically antiques, with the constant subplot of the protagonist looking around every stop for extra magic ammo.

It's technically sci-fi with the party riding along in a space ship but there's also plenty of classic oriental stuff like shinto priestesses/magic, a alien catgirl humanoid youkai with superior physical abilities and a samurai/assassin following the way of the sword (a wooden sword so it doesn't trigger metal detectors).

Thinking about it, Outlaw Star would also make a nice RPG with a diversified party where each character gets their own distinct abilities/weapons.

[Username17]

Scrolls of summoning arguably fit better into a Japanese Fantasy setting than medieval Europe.

There's real significant East Asian support for calligraphy based magic. Much more so than in European traditions. But I don't think it's a deal breaker either way. In any particular fantasy setting the magic works however the author says it does, and there is "power word" and "living paintings" in European stories at all. So if you want or don't want people to be making Sailor Mars style paper seals to fight demons with, it can justify that whether your fantasy is nominally Eurotrash or Yellowface.

But I happen to think that calligraphy magic is cool, and I would suggest including it in kitchen sink fantasy. And in Oriental Adventures, you have access to terms like Onmyoji and Miko that genuinely imply that writing and drawing on paper is going to be a big part of magic. So that's cool.

Thinking about it, Outlaw Star would also make a nice RPG with a diversified party where each character gets their own distinct abilities/weapons.

Sure. I'm going to invoke the Thundercats principle. There basically isn't any real difference between science fiction and fantasy. Might and Magic has laser guns and technically the whole world is actually a space ship or something. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has the entire dungeon be a crashed alien spacecraft. The whole Final Fantasy thing where it's "fantasy" but also there are mechs and some of the characters have guns? That's just a thing the genre does. There is absolutely a reason that libraries have a "science fiction / fantasy" section - because the distinction is totally made up.

It's completely reasonable to have guns in your fantasy and still have swords and shit. Many of the things people want in their fantasy stories were actually factually invented well after handheld gunpowder weapons. And I'm not just talking about how the "iron ration" was invented for the Napoleonic Wars. But of course, it's also totally fine to have a fantasy story where no one has guns. People do plenty of that, and it's fine.

I would say that the argument for inclusion of gunpowder weapons is stronger in East Asian Themed Fantasy. But it's not "must have" or "red line" or whatever.

-Username17

[maglag]

There is absolutely a reason that libraries have a "science fiction / fantasy" section - because the distinction is totally made up.

There is a distinction (or at least was at some point):

Science Fiction: You make up only one thing, and then work the rest from there. Like "what if people could learn how to teleport on their own? How would that affect society/work/war?".

Fantasy: go wild, make up as much as you want.

Now I've read a lot of old science fiction that follows this rules, but nowadays it seems to be mostly forgotten. Outlaw Star should definitely qualify as fantasy and it was wrong of me to address it like science fiction.

In the other hand there's been kinda some ressurgence of prope" science fiction where they do try to keep "science" bits in check. Dr. Stone comes to mind with "what if there was this superweapon that can petrify humans" and works from there. But Dr.Stone would probably suck for a cooperative RPG.

I would say that the argument for inclusion of gunpowder weapons is stronger in East Asian Themed Fantasy. But it's not "must have" or "red line" or whatever.
-Username17

While gunpowder weapons did appear in Asia first, for a lot of time they were prototype stuff like fire lances that just weren't that effective, not what most people imagine what they think of "gunpowder weapon". It took gunpowder reaching Europe and meeting bell technology (aka a really solid metal tube with just one opening) for people to come up with cannons and from there primitive guns as we know them. And although the combo did make their way back to Asia, for whatever reasons gun tech kinda just stagnated there while Europe kept researching up shootier and moar dakka.

And now I want RPG stats for primitive rockets and fire lances and all that prototype shit that China came up with first.

[Username17]

And now I want RPG stats for primitive rockets and fire lances and all that prototype shit that China came up with first.

I think that would be pretty cool. If your hypothetical Oriental Adventures game had alchemists who made rockets and firelances and such, that would be a thematic character. It's also a pretty good in-world explanation for abilities that work like spell preparation.

But of course, I think there's clearly more available archetypes for Asian themed kitchen sink fantasy than any particular game would need. Ultimately a lot of potential concepts are going to be left for expansion material or cut entirely. But the "Alchemist" character has a lot to recommend it. The argument to include such characters is very strong.

Science Fiction: You make up only one thing, and then work the rest from there. Like "what if people could learn how to teleport on their own? How would that affect society/work/war?".

Fantasy: go wild, make up as much as you want.

The point you're getting at is actually called "speculative fiction." Where you have a minimal number of premises and extrapolate. But far future science fiction often isn't like that at all. Any stories set in the 25th century probably don't have one neat trick that's been developed but a whole lot of world building based on a lot of technological inventions in a host of fields - probably every field that the author bothered to think about.

-Username17

[Orion]

"Speculative fiction" also gets used as an umbrella term encompassing all of fantasy, science-fiction, horror, and all other fiction based on deviations from observed reality.

[OgreBattle]

Adding to the fun...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utsuro-bune

The Utsuro-Bone 'hollow ship' was said to have washed up in the 1800's and was sent drifting back with it's foreign looking lady occupant. So the Edo news that reported on yokai sightings also reported on unusual floating objects.

[Libertad]

I haven't watched it yet, but I found this courtesy of an RPG Discord server.

[OgreBattle]

That bit on the samurai INT requirement is interesting, Hayao Miyazaki likes to rant about how some Japanese creators spread a myth of wealthy samurai vs peasants when most samurai were peasant farmers that just inherited a title obligating war service. He says Kurosawa's samurai were more about popular Marxist struggle from post WWII generation than 'historic' samurai.

That's why in Princess Mononoke he has the samurai farmers fight Iron Town, 'cause Iron Town's polluting the water that flows downstream to their crops.

[ETortoise]

Japanese creators spread a myth of wealthy samurai vs peasants when most samurai were peasant farmers that just inherited a title obligating war service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizamurai

The land for military service deal of feudalism can often lead to "middle class" landholding warriors. Early modern Poland had a large number of petty nobles who got fun nicknames like "hreczkosiej – buckwheat sowers – those who had to work their fields themselves because they had no peasants." wikipedia.

[Username17]

I haven't watched it yet, but I found this courtesy of an RPG Discord server.

I haven't gotten very far into it. They. Go. Really. Slow.

Also they get caught up into weird asides where they try to shove things into boxes that they don't fit in. The point of the Orientalism triad of "Violence, Fanaticism, and a Need of Salvation" is that the salvation is external. Namely that the implication is that they need intervention from the West. They kinda lost me trying to fit the Sohei into that box - having local heroes save the day is not a "need of salvation" in the Orientalist sense.

Also they didn't seem to grasp that the terms "Asian" and "Oriental" don't have constant meaning through time and space. The people in the podcast aren't considered "Asians" in British English today, and are considered "Orientals" instead. Because in British English right now "Asian" means South Asian and "Oriental" means East Asian.

-Username17