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.
Tetsubo is indeed Very Good Stuff. Cracking source material for Dragon Warriors shenanigans.
ReplyDeleteI 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)
ReplyDeleteAfter 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.
ReplyDeleteHad 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?
ReplyDeleteCultural chauvinism is the term I would use.
DeleteSorry to necro this post, but does your "Kwaidan" variant exist anywhere?
ReplyDeleteNot 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.
Delete