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Thursday 30 August 2012

The Land Below the Sunrise

Want to pick up a big, sumptuous full-colour map of Akatsurai to go with the newly reissued FL Book 6: Lords of the Rising Sun? Thought so. Well, hit the link and it's yours. Mythic cartography courtesy of Russ Nicholson as usual.

While you're at it, and if that low, low price of free appeals, why not grab a copy of Tetsubo, the Oriental-themed RPG that Jamie and I wrote originally as a Warhammer supplement. We delivered our first draft the day the commissioning editor left Games Workshop, so it ended up cast into the oblivion of a Nottingham filing cabinet. (Or so I like to think. More likely it just lay on the floor under a desk for a year.) It's only a work-in-progress, and it's full of all that Dungeons and Dragons stuff like alignment, ho hum, but there's enough there to get an Akatsurai role-playing campaign going if you're so inclined.

The Oriental RPG I'm really waiting for is Paul Mason's Outlaws, based on the exploits of the Water Margin heroes. I ran my own Kwaidan variant of Outlaws at just about the time I was writing Lords of the Rising Sun, so (as usual) a lot of the ideas for the gamebook came from our role-playing sessions.

7 comments:

  1. Tetsubo is indeed Very Good Stuff. Cracking source material for Dragon Warriors shenanigans.

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  2. I agree; I compared it a few months ago with the "Oriental" supplements for D&D and Rolemaster and it holds the distance (of course, some parts are lacking)

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  3. After GW declined to take it, we offered it to a well-known games publisher in the USA. Their reply: "We would like to do a Japanese-themed RPG at some point, but not something like this that goes right down [sic] to the level of the Japanese people themselves." As I see it, they wanted a version of Japan populated by Anglo-Saxons, so it's rather a compliment that they rejected Tetsubo.

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  4. Had you changed the maximum height allowed, or imposed a Charisma modifier for inscrutability but maxed out Int and Dex? Or were they just being plain r*cs*st?

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    1. Cultural chauvinism is the term I would use.

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  5. Sorry to necro this post, but does your "Kwaidan" variant exist anywhere?

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    1. Not so far. I'm currently adapting Tetsubo, which Jamie and originally wrote as a Warhammer supplement, to use the Outlaws rules, but that's set several hundred years after Kwaidan.

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