The Gaming Den

So various editions of D&D have supplements that add in a far eastern setting, usually as an add on to the default tolkein fantasy setting, and you have the L5R card game that turned into an RPG. Sometimes you have Ninja and Samurai added in as character classes or Honor Points as a mechanic that aren't attached to any particular setting.

If you've played in one of those Far East themed games, what was your motivation to do so instead of a 'default western fantasy' setting, what did you want out of it?

Or if you think all of the published settings and card games are terrible, what are their shortcomings?

And aside from your own personal opinion, what do you think 'the market' wants out of a Far East setting?

Court stuff. I'm fine with using the usual rules for fighters and rogues to represent samurai and ninja. What I need though is rules for all the elaborate gift giving and letter writing and subtle snobbishness of samurai courts.

I originally bought into it because I was a massive fucking weeaboo. Before "weeaboo" was a word, when we laughed at mainstreamers for liking DBZ (as opposed to now where mainstream scrubs like, what, Naruto and Bleach? I don't know). So I just wanted MOAR JAPAN, HNNNNNG.

These days what I want is for it to incorporate various Asian/Oriental mythology and folklore to the same extent that the "standard" setting does to European mythology and folklore, and to show not just a different culture and society with different rules, but also how that works given some of the conceits of the setting.

Like the whole "You can resurrect the king, who needs wars of succession, assassination attempts and all that?" that plagues "It's totally not ancient England (but it is)", I want to be able to know whether actually being an actual snake demon lets me own land and people, and whether the daimyo is using divinations to know who he can trust. And for that matter, if you can actually be a literal fox spirit, then I need to know if it is different enough from history that I can be a foreigner with more dignity than a bucket of shit, if I can play a female samurai, and if people can still do the Hideyoshi thing where they start as a commoner who fetches sandals for you, then becomes a warlord then basically rules the lands for a while.

Oh and also, how any of their supernatural stuff fits in with the established supernatural stuff of the bigger setting, what relations they have with the rest of the bigger setting and so on. All the things where you really can't just go "It's like actual China/Japan".

In other words I'm asking for a fucking lot of actual thought and work from them.

To never use the word "oriental."

I think the 3.0 OA should have just been called the Legend of the 5 Rings campaign setting because that's what it was.

I'd like to see more division. Instead of blurring it all together, maybe distinct sections on ancient China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia/central asian steppe cutures, Viet Nam/southeast asia, Himalayan nations, etc.

Also yeah, "oriental" refers to rugs, not people. It would be best to avoid using that word.

Inuyasha

Also rat-people.

Most of the Western public seems to want an East Asian setup that invokes China and Japan, and maybe Korea and the Mongols as well. Exposure to Anime and Wuxia is high, while interest in, say, Southeast Asian fantasy environments is very much lower.

People also seem to want East Asian settings to mechanically model cultural features that differ from the West - like honor systems, and different magical systems. If you do that, then you generally prevent any sort of Marco Polo-esque adventures where characters go from one setting to the other, because the rules don't match up even if you're both using d20 or something. ex. you can either have four element theory or five element theory, you can't have both at once.

There's also a motivation issue in many East Asian settings. The standard D&D style adventuring party wanders around killing evil and taking its stuff and eventually foils the plans of the BBEG, and standard Tolkien-esque storytelling at least kind of supports that model. Standard anime and wuxia fantasy doesn't do that. Heck, even Nobunaga gets to be the good guy sometimes (looking at you Kessen III).

Most people might only want Japan and China, but having fantasy counterparts for southeast Asia, Mongolia, and Korea would help your product stand out.

Kung-fu monkeys.

Everything I'd want out of a "normal" adventure, but with different art and names.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Also yeah, "oriental" refers to rugs, not people. It would be best to avoid using that word.

You can use it, but only if your other book is Occidental Adventures.

TiaC wrote:

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Also yeah, "oriental" refers to rugs, not people. It would be best to avoid using that word.

You can use it, but only if your other book is Occidental Adventures.

This has been my favored nickname for Forgotten Realms for quite some time now.

As for OP's question:

this

Tenra Bansho Zero has a good distribution of archetypes. While it has its share of basket weaving, the concepts it supports with actual phlebotinum are:

* Samurai
* Ninja
* Cyborgs (in this setting hihi-irokane "red steel" is used to make magitech)
* Giant robots(the souls of Buddhist-style Asura who have been bound to bodies of metal and made to serve the Shinto court)
* Mecha pilots
* Shinto priests/miko
* Buddhist monks/nuns
* Onmyouji (see: Shonen Onmyouji, the witch from Spirited Away, here they play out sort of like pokemon trainers)
* Youkai (you can point-buy various features for them
* Oni (in this setting, noble savages who have hearts made out of pure phlebotinum, so as a PC you have some cool superpowers. These hearts are also what makes a lot of the magitech possible, so watch out for miko)

Going towards China, I'd probably want to see shit along the lines of Journey West, unless someone comes up with a good enough Logistics & Dragons system to make Three Kingdoms more interesting than a Pendragon reskin.

The real problem in my mind with 'Eastern Settings' is that they're forced into an Earth analogue. You get fantasy China and fantasy Japan, and since they're based entirely on stereotypes, you end up with something that ends up seeming racist and lacking substance.

If you're making a setting from scratch, every culture should be considered from the beginning. It's okay if you have fantasy Vikings and fantasy Mongols, but you can create them with unique flavors and put them in different places. As soon as you have a 'Far East', you might as well play on a real world map.

So what I'm looking for is a fully integrated part of the setting. It's great if we have samurai, bushido, and wire-fu, but those elements should be reflected in other parts of the setting, too. In short, the Asia analogue shouldn't be a whole stack of 'alternate rules' - those alternate rules, if they exist, should be integrated into the non-Asian-themed areas, too.

By way of comparison, magic usually works the same in the 'middle east setting' and the 'Europe setting', but you may have difference concentrations of particular classes that represent those differences pretty well. Even if you have 'unique classes', they should be available outside of that particular region.

How acceptable it is to use the word "Oriental" is primarily based around how British you are. In the United Kingdom, the word "Asian" refers to South Asians, that is people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, or the Maldives. And since Cambodians, Thais, Vietnamese, Mongolians, Chinese, Laotians, Koreans, and Japanese people exist but are not called "Asians" in Britain, they need another word for the East Asians, and that word is "Oriental." It's not pejorative or weird, that's just the word. Like how people in the UK don't get in trouble for referring to cigarettes as "[EDITED]." But if you're not British, you should probably refrain from using the word "Oriental" where and when you can, which should be most of the time.

I want a number of fantasy cultures from my East Asian themed fantasy, and I want them to draw heavily from different East Asian cultures. Basically the minimum I want is Tarkir's Khanates:

Abzan are Timurid themed, but also have giant beasts and wheeled cities.


Jeskai are Shao-lin monks. And they are also a bunch of djinn and efreeti and bird people and stuff.


Temur are yak-riding Yakut who also include goblins and dog people.


Mardu are Mongolian themed nomads who also have orcs and goblins and fire magic.


Sultai are Khmer who are naga worshiping necromancers with rakshasas and Diablo II style crumbling jungle temples.

For an RPG, I would like at least that. Preferably more. An RPG can support a lot more interactable groups than a card game can, and therefore it should.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:How acceptable it is to use the word "Oriental" is primarily based around how British you are. In the United Kingdom, the word "Asian" refers to South Asians, that is people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, or the Maldives. And since Cambodians, Thais, Vietnamese, Mongolians, Chinese, Laotians, Koreans, and Japanese people exist but are not called "Asians" in Britain, they need another word for the East Asians, and that word is "Oriental." It's not pejorative or weird, that's just the word. Like how people in the UK don't get in trouble for referring to cigarettes as "[EDITED]." But if you're not British, you should probably refrain from using the word "Oriental" where and when you can, which should be most of the time.

Speaking as a British person I have never heard "oriental" used in a contemporary source to describe people from east of India. This may be more indicative of how narrow my reference material is than anything.

In any case, Like-Rokugan-But-Not-Shit is going to want to appeal to more than the UK so should not use the word "oriental" regardless of whether it's OK to a meaningful demographic in the UK.

TiaC wrote:

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Also yeah, "oriental" refers to rugs, not people. It would be best to avoid using that word.

You can use it, but only if your other book is Occidental Adventures.

I would buy a book called Occidental Adventures.

deaddmwalking wrote:So what I'm looking for is a fully integrated part of the setting. It's great if we have samurai, bushido, and wire-fu, but those elements should be reflected in other parts of the setting, too. In short, the Asia analogue shouldn't be a whole stack of 'alternate rules' - those alternate rules, if they exist, should be integrated into the non-Asian-themed areas, too.

Making Western style sword & sorcery play nice with Wuxia is mechanically challenging though.

I mean the historical reality is generally that when two cultural groups with wildly different combat methods and capabilities encounter each other one simply crushes the other. If you're going to have knights and samurai under the same rules you have to make them equal, at least if you want people to play both.

I think it's probably easier to make an East Asian setting where the West either doesn't exist or is too far away for you to actually get to - though the latter choice kind of precludes teleportation and such.

Making Western style sword & sorcery play nice with Wuxia is mechanically challenging though.

I mean the historical reality is generally that when two cultural groups with wildly different combat methods and capabilities encounter each other one simply crushes the other. If you're going to have knights and samurai under the same rules you have to make them equal, at least if you want people to play both.

No, it isn't challenging, it's pretty trivial actually. And that is because historical reality can go take a hike, we're dealing with heroic fantasy here.

Samurai and Knights are simply two different full-BaB classes with different fighting styles and different superpowers at high level.

Schleiermacher wrote:No, it isn't challenging, it's pretty trivial actually. And that is because historical reality can go take a hike, we're dealing with heroic fantasy here.

Samurai and Knights are simply two different full-BaB classes with different fighting styles and different superpowers at high level.

Right, because existing full-BaB classes in published games are balanced against each other, oh wait...

Yes, better design could lead to better balanced East vs. West classes, but that potentially imperils the balance of East vs. East classes and, more importantly, developing your East Asian classes (or skill sets or whatever the system uses) into something that no longer feels like an East Asian setting.

Not that d20 actually produces anything that feels like a Tolkien-esque fantasy world of course, but presumably a good East Asian setting would resemble some form of fantasy East Asia and would actually function as a world. The last bit being important - Frank mentioned Tarkir, which is a setting that looks really, really cool in terms of card art, but I have no idea how you'd actually turn it (or pretty much any other MtG plane) into a functional fantasy world. Though Tarkir is pretty awesome-looking and it would be a great Asian setting to try to build into an RPG, but of course WotC won't let anyone try.

Did someone say this and I missed it?

K-A-T-A-N-A-S

EDIT: I should mention I am at work and cant see images.

Casual racism?

Megalich wrote:The last bit being important - Frank mentioned Tarkir, which is a setting that looks really, really cool in terms of card art, but I have no idea how you'd actually turn it (or pretty much any other MtG plane) into a functional fantasy world.

Tarkir has a lot less problems in that regard than most MtG planes, and I suspect it started off as the D&D homebrew campaign world of one of the designers. Doubtless various nations were added and subtracted to make the requisite 5 to be a Magic set. The Jeskai Monks are thematically more of an organization than a nation, and the Sultai have a lot less Chinese influence than the others, so I could believe either or both were brought in by other authors to fill out the color wheel that the card game demands.

But basically you have a list of playable races and a list of playable classes, and mostly it's D&D standards for both lists. There are a few weird ones, like how I think you'd want to have playable Djinn, Bird People, and Efreet, but that's a trivial game design issue if you're writing a ruleset from scratch. Only a bit harder if you're insistent upon using a pre-existing D&D edition (in that you have to specify that Tarkir Efreet have way less base power than the thing listed in any edition of D&D's monster manual). You very specifically can have Abzan warriors and Mardu warriors fighting side by side, so the thing where L5R clans are supposed to be no-cooperation zones doesn't apply.

You'd want and need a map of course, and it would need to have a lot of places made up for it. Even if every card with a city in it is a different city, that wouldn't be enough places for a campaign world. And most of those places are not named. And you'd need a bigger bestiary. That's probably the biggest hurdle. There were three Tarkir sets and between them there are over three hundred creature cards - but most of them are Humans and Orcs with character classes. Krotiks and Colossadons are neat and all, but the card sets are like a hundred monsters short of providing a complete monster hunting experience.

-Username17

Schleiermacher wrote:

Making Western style sword & sorcery play nice with Wuxia is mechanically challenging though.

I mean the historical reality is generally that when two cultural groups with wildly different combat methods and capabilities encounter each other one simply crushes the other. If you're going to have knights and samurai under the same rules you have to make them equal, at least if you want people to play both.

No, it isn't challenging, it's pretty trivial actually. And that is because historical reality can go take a hike, we're dealing with heroic fantasy here.

Samurai and Knights are simply two different full-BaB classes with different fighting styles and different superpowers at high level.

Yeah, the historical reality is that dragons didn't exist, and yet we expect our fantasy games to have dragons we can shank (and if they don't, we expect a compelling reason for that). So provided you can make you fantasy martial combat system function at all, you should make Europeanesque knights and Japanese-esque samurai work within the same system.

Fuck, I'd even be ok with a game that said, basically, "Knight is a fifth level concept, samurai is a tenth level concept. When a samurai and a knight fight, the samurai will probably win because of level."

JigokuBosatsu wrote:Casual racism?

You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.

For my answer to the original question-
Um... if you let me play a kind of unsavory crow-dude swordsman, with a few minor tricks, and otherwise write a game that allows me to continue along in play envisioning everyone in proper outfits and shit, I'm cool with that.