Three snippets

A few bits of news. First, if you haven't been following the design updates on the Blood Sword CRPG from Prime Games then you're missing a real masterclass in how to create interesting rules mechanics. Fix that, starting here.

Second, I just ordered a copy of The Crowd & The Court, a roleplaying supplement that chucks out alignment and shows how to create believable NPCs behaving credibly. As an advocate for culture gaming and a lifelong adversary of alignment rules, of course I was hooked.

And lastly, Grim Jim Desborough will soon release his Japanese RPG Stray Crows (video above, website here, free preview here). I'm still planning to release Tetsubo, which was originally designed around Warhammer but will now come in two flavours, one using Paul Mason's Outlaws rules (as in the outlaws of the Water Margin), and the other (龍の武士) using Dragon Warriors. But that's taken me thirty years already, so we can thank Amaterasu that Grim has beaten me to it.

Come back tomorrow, when the Muse will be telling us about that man of many ways and wiles, the ever-resourceful, city-conquering Odysseus, king of Ithaka.

Hungry ghosts and dream-eaters

Tetsubo was originally intended to be the “fantasy medieval Japan” supplement for Warhammer, but there were personnel changes at Games Workshop after Jamie Thomson and I were asked to write it. On the week we were due to deliver the manuscript, contacts in the GW offices advised us it would probably no longer fit their publishing plans. And so it turned out. We recovered the rights, and over the years talked about doing it with other publishers, but most of them wanted more of a 1960s Japanese cinema vibe than a Muromachi/Edo style setting.

In lockdown I took advantage of the sudden surfeit of spare time to start converting Tetsubo to Paul Mason’s Outlaws RPG system. I’ll get back to it in the next pandemic, if we haven’t had a nuclear war first. (My backers on Patreon have access to the work-in-progress version of the rulebook.) In the meantime, here are a couple of yokai from the book translated into Dragon Warriors rules – or should that be “Tatsu Bushi”? If you want the original Warhammer stats, they're here.

Baku

The baku is a powerful quadruped. It is called the Eater of Dreams, and people in rural areas sometimes make offerings so that it will devour their nightmares for them. Nonetheless the baku is not a kami but a physical creature, albeit one with myriad wondrous powers. Its ability is not restricted to consuming evil dreams. It can devour any dream, and characters whose dreams are taken frequently can become irritable or enervated.

If a baku takes up residence in an area it may come close to human habitations by night in order to feed. At all times it exudes a narcotic sorcery – characters who are unaware of its approach must resist with a Psychic Talent roll of difficulty factor 16 or else fall into a deep slumber; the roll is made using d20+2 if the character was already recumbent and ready for sleep.

Characters visited regularly over several nights suffer temporary penalties of −1 from PERCEPTION, Psychic Talent and Reflexes for as long as the baku's visits continue. If the visitations persist for more than a week, characters also start to lose 1 experience point per night. (This only applies to experience built up since the last level break; if it goes on long enough the character will not drop a rank, just lose all their unconverted experience.) If the visitations go on uninterrupted for a month, the victim develops insanity (randomly rolled). If the baku is slain or prevented from reaching its victims, depleted characteristics recover with just a few good nights' sleep but lost experience is gone and must be earned all over again. If an insane victim sees the baku’s dead body, he or she loses their insanity.

Baku are semi-intelligent and have been known to speak in guttural, half-coherent tones. It may be that they do not understand what they say but only regurgitate garbled phrases from the dreams they have eaten. Sometimes baku can be controlled by magic, so players could encounter one as the steed or servant of a powerful wizard.

Physique: The body of a baku resembles a tiger as large as a bull. Its fur is slick black and patterned with green circles like staring eyes. Its head has a long snout like that of a tapir or elephant, usually crested with long slender horns. It has a mane, but its domed forehead is bald (or even, in some accounts, fleshless). This is the appearance of a male baku. Females have a completely different physiognomy, but there are no reliable accounts from which any description could be attempted here.

Behaviour: Baku fear daylight and will always return to their lair before sunrise – usually a burrow or cave, sometimes a deserted temple in thick woodland. Although powerful they are not used to encountering opponents who fight back; any time a baku takes a wound it must make a morale roll or flee; deduct the rank of all opponents it is facing from 25, and the baku must roll the result or less on d20 to stand its ground. Sometimes baku will flee without waiting to be wounded, as they are intelligent enough to recognise there is nothing to be gained in fighting against the odds.

Special rules: A baku given an hour to feast on the dreams of a sleeping spellcaster will cause him or her to suffer the loss of d3 Magic Points the following day. Mystics suffer a penalty of 1 to Psychic Fatigue Checks.

When a baku strikes someone in combat it steals some of the strength of his dream-self. This has no perceptible effect on most people, but against a spellcaster it causes the loss of d6 Magic Points; mystics must roll a Psychic Fatigue Check with the damage they took substituting for spell level. Also, anyone injured must make an Intelligence roll (difficulty factor 14) or fall into a deep sleep until the baku leaves the vicinity.

If the baku is able to feast on dreams it fights with an ATTACK bonus of +3. If thwarted, its ATTACK is as listed.

In retreat, this creature can move ‘like the wind’ according to the description given by Kotei in his Bakemonojin. When the baku is fleeing from combat it moves at three times normal speed.

ATTACK 21                                    2 x Claws (d8,4) or 1 x Bite (d10,5)
DEFENCE 10                                 Armour Factor: 4
MAGICAL DEFENCE: 18             Movement: 14m (42m when fleeing)
EVASION: 8                                   STEALTH: 28
                                                        PERCEPTION: 20 (darksight)
Health Points: 2d6+24
Rank Equivalent: 10th

Abilities & Traits:

• Aura of Slumber: Anyone within 10m of a baku who has not already perceived it must make a Psychic Talent check (difficulty factor 16) or fall into a deep sleep lasting 1d6 x 10 minutes unless the sleeper is physically shaken awake.
• Dream Eater: Anyone injured by the baku’s attack must make an Intelligence roll (difficulty factor 14) to avoid falling asleep as above. If a spellcaster, they lose d6 Magic Points; mystics roll Psychic Fatigue.
• Nightmare Parasite: If a baku visits a person repeatedly, the affected individual experiences a penalty of −1 to PERCEPTION, Psychic Talent and Reflexes for as long as the visits continue. If visited for more than a week, they also lose 1 unbanked experience point per night.
• Wary Hunter: Baku are cautious and will retreat if seriously injured. If a baku takes a wound, it must roll [25 minus combined rank of opponents] or less on d20 or flee.
• Windborne Escape: A baku that flees from combat increases its movement to three times normal, vanishing into the night with uncanny speed.

Gaki

Gaki (‘hungry ghosts’) are tormented spirits cursed with an insatiable hunger due to their past sins, resulting in negative karma that means they cannot be reborn. They manifest in different forms depending on their cravings. Someone who stole from the bodies of the dead, for example, might become a corpse-eating gaki.

Bukyo teaches that appetite and desire are the cause of suffering, a doctrine vividly illustrated by the existence of hungry ghosts. For this reason it is sometimes possible for a Bukyo priest to placate a gaki by offering to perform the Segaki rite. This gives the ghost a chance to escape its suffering and be reborn as some lowly creature such as an insect. However, it is difficult for even a devout priest to reason with a gaki in this way because all gaki are effectively insane in human terms.

Physique: Like all ghosts, gaki are not restricted to one form. Sometimes they appear as roiling clouds of black smoke on which their human form is superimposed. This is thought to be a glimpse into Gakido, or the Hell of the Hungry Dead. Sometimes they are reported as having furry limbs or insectoid features, but this may be a subjective impression resulting from the observer's fear of the gaki. More usually, just as a gaki is about to attack, it will take a guise based on its craving. So a ketsu-gaki will manifest a face of wet blood, a chokenju-gaki might wear features molded of clay, and so on.

Behaviour: Gaki find it hard to resist any opportunity to assuage their hunger. To do so the gaki must roll 5 or 6 on d6. If the roll fails, the gaki must feed even if this means putting itself in danger.

Usually the gaki’s locus of haunting will be a graveyard, temple or mansion, and they will not move beyond that, but in some cases it can be a much more extensive area. One notorious gaki that was eventually enlightened by the priest Dogen had been condemned to haunt the entire length of the Shokowado highway, more than two hundred miles from end to end.

Special rules: Gaki cannot be harmed by nonmagical weapons. They can only manifest with any force at night, or occasionally during the daytime if there is a fog, blizzard or thunderstorm.

People surviving an encounter with a gaki commonly develop a phobia – often, strangely, a fear of insects. Any character who succumbs to a gaki’s fright attack acquires a phobia – 50% of entomophobia, 20% arachnophobia, otherwise roll randomly.

Other powers vary according to the type of gaki encountered. The list here is only a framework on which the referee should feel free to build. Many gaki have magical powers as a residue of merit from much earlier incarnations, and no two are entirely alike.

Chokenju-Gaki

The spirits of men who despoiled shrines for the sake of gain, or who took treasure from ancient tombs. They are cursed with a ravenous hunger for grave-clay, funereal offerings and the charred remnants of funeral pyres. A chokenju-gaki will usually be restricted to a graveyard and will not bother anyone who does not intrude on its feasting.

This variety of gaki is prone to taking normal human form by day. Often they will wear the guise of a solitary priest or hermit living in a cottage in the graveyard. They are typically less obsessive and more reasonable during the day, and they may even ask for help if confronted by one who has guessed the truth about them.

At night the chokenju-gaki may take a monstrous form of earth, cerements and mouldered bones, instilling dread in any living creature who sees it. Roll 4d6 for fright attack, and a victim who succumbs will flee in terror or fight at −2 from ATTACK if cornered.

If engaged in combat, the gaki slashes with jagged talons which carry a variant of the Wasting Disease (see The Elven Crystals). Anyone who takes damage must roll Strength or less on d20 to resist the disease, then if they fail roll again each day to recover. Each day of illness causes −1 to both Strength and Health Points. If the character loses a total of half their Strength or more during the whole course of the disease, then even after recovering their appearance will be permanently affected, making their flesh grey and pitted: the character suffers −2 Looks.

ATTACK 20                                Talons (d8,5) and disease
DEFENCE 16                              Armour Factor: d3
MAGICAL DEFENCE: 15         Movement: 10m (15m)
EVASION: 4                                  STEALTH: 10
                                                        PERCEPTION: 10 (darksight)
Health Points: 3d6+10
Rank Equivalent: 8th

Doku-Gaki

The ghosts of poisoners, doomed to thirst for poison themselves. Anyone who is carrying or brewing any form of poison risks attracting a doku-gaki's attention. The creature is likely to begin its attack by approaching the character while he or she is asleep, usually in the form of a vapour with weak (2d6) toxic or deliriant effect.

Taking a more cohesive form if combat becomes inevitable, it strikes with envenomed claws. Each time it hits and inflicts damage, make a roll for poison of normal strength. The first failed roll results in the victim becoming drowsy (−1 from all rolls), the second in partial paralysis (like a Weaken spell), and the third in death. If rescued in time, the victim will recover from the venom after a day’s rest.

ATTACK 18                                Claws (d8,4) and poison
DEFENCE 12                              Armour Factor: 3
MAGICAL DEFENCE: 15         Movement: 12m (20m)
EVASION: 5                                  STEALTH: 20
                                                        PERCEPTION: 14 (panoptical)
Health Points: 2d6+12
Rank Equivalent: 7th

Jikininki

A ghoulish creature, usually the ghost of someone who robbed or defiled the dead. Anyone confronting a jikininki unexpectedly is subject to a d20 fright attack that can result in them becoming awestruck – unable to move, speak or attack, though they can still defend themselves. The character can attempt to snap out of it by rolling Intelligence or less on d20 each round, and once they do so there is no need to check again in that encounter.

Jikininki do not kill to eat. They usually crave the flesh of someone who has died from other means, and will only fight if kept from reaching the corpse. A person eaten by a jikininki can never be restored to life.

In areas where a jikininki is known to haunt, some families have acquired the habit of murdering wayfarers whenever someone in their household dies. This ensures that the jikininki's hunger will be assuaged by eating the wayfarer instead of the family member on the first night, allowing the householders time to arrange a cremation the next day. Of course, people who do this kind of thing are only ensuring that they will return as gaki in their next life.

Encounter with a jikininki

All then left the house except the priest, who went to the room where the dead body was lying. The usual offerings had been set before the corpse and a small Buddhist lamp—tomyo—was burning. The priest recited the service and performed the funeral ceremonies, after which he entered into meditation. So meditating he remained through several silent hours, and there was no sound in the deserted village. But when the hush of the night was at its deepest there noiselessly entered a shape, vague and vast, and in the same moment the priest found himself without power to move or speak. He saw that shape lift the corpse, as with hands, and devour it more quickly than a cat devours a rat, beginning at the head and eating everything, the hair and the bones and even the shroud. And the monstrous thing, having thus consumed the body, turned to the offerings, and ate them also. Then it went away, as mysteriously as it had come.

– Koizumi Yakumo, Kwaidan

ATTACK 19                                   Claws (d8+1,6)
DEFENCE 13                                  Armour Factor: 4
MAGICAL DEFENCE: 16             Movement: 12m (25m)
EVASION: 4                                      STEALTH: 18
                                                            PERCEPTION: 15 (darksight)
Health Points: 2d10+9
Rank Equivalent: 8th

Ketsu-Gaki

A Yamatese vampire, this is the ghost of a murderer or an excessively cruel and violent person. The presence of a ketsu-gaki induces dread in living creatures: d20 fright attack to induce −2 ATTACK, −1 damage for the duration of the battle. In combat, the ketsu-gaki can either strike normally or else grapple. It will usually do this only when fighting a solitary opponent. A character who is grappled must make an immediate d20 roll trying to score equal to or under the average of their Strength and Reflexes score; if this fails they are paralysed and unable to act for 2d6 rounds. The gaki will make use of this time to drink the paralysed character's blood, extruding a proboscis or long needle-like teeth with which to do this. Each round it spends drinking will drain the victim of 1 ealth Point. When HP reach zero, the victim is discarded and must roll Strength or less on d20 or die at once. If the roll succeeds, the victim is incapacitated and may suffer from recurrent bleeding; assuming they survive, they recover as from normal injury but only get back half their rank in HP each day.

Ketsu-gaki can sometimes appear during the day wearing the appearance they bore in their previous incarnation. While in this manifestation they are able to control their hunger and are effectively just ghosts passing for living people.

ATTACK 22                                 Claws (d10,4) or grapple
DEFENCE 12                              Armour Factor: 3
MAGICAL DEFENCE: 16         Movement: 12m (25m)
EVASION: 4                                  STEALTH: 13
                                                        PERCEPTION: 13 (darksight)
Health Points: 3d6+10
Rank Equivalent: 9th

Kwa-Gaki

Arsonists, particularly those who have set fire to Bukyo temples, are reincarnated as kwa-gaki, or ‘fire-eating ghosts’. All forms of heat and light are consumed by this goblin, including spells such as Dragonbreath and Dazzle as well as the light of lanterns and candles. Such attacks are neutralized within a range of fifteen metres of the kwa-gaki and light sources automatically dim in the same region, with bright firelight guttering to the level of a candle and ordinarily dim illumination dropping to pitch darkness.

The creature’s touch draws heat from the target's body, causing the loss of an additional 1d3 damage from any successful attack.

A kwa-gaki which comes across a sleeping character may try to possess him or her in order to steal bodily warmth over a long period. This process takes 2d6 minutes, but works automatically if the gaki is not interrupted during this time. The character will begin to develop a chill as the gaki first feeds on their body warmth, interspersed with periods of burning fever when the gaki is satiated. This causes the character to be temporarily at −2 to all rolls most of the time, and totally incapacitated while the fever is on them. Normal medical treatment is ineffective, and the character must guess that they have become host to a gaki and seek the aid of a Bukyo priest. If and when the gaki is exorcized, the victim recovers almost immediately.

ATTACK 12+d10                            Claws (d8,4) but will usually attempt possession
DEFENCE 12                                  Armour Factor: 2
MAGICAL DEFENCE: 16             Movement: 10m (20m)
EVASION: 4                                      STEALTH: 22
                                                            PERCEPTION: 14 (darksight)
Health Points: 5d6
Rank Equivalent: 7th

Yokushiki-Gaki

Demonic spirits of carnality, corresponding to the incubi and succubi of Occidental myth. These beings were driven by overwhelming lust when alive, or else acquired bad karma through unnatural sexual practices. By night yokushiki-gaki are able to appear as preternaturally attractive individuals, but this is only an illusion and if encountered at all by day it is in the form of one made hideous by age and depravity.

In its night-time form the yokushiki-gaki can seduce characters of either sex. If the intended victim chooses to resist (they might not even try) roll 4d6 for the force of the attraction, subtract the victim’s rank, and the gaki must roll that or less of d20 to seduce them. If a yokushiku-gaki succeeds in coupling with a character, it drains them of their vitality, and they will awaken the next morning with their Health Points permanently reduced by 1.

A yokushiki-gaki will usually retreat if threatened with combat, though if interrupted in the throes of lovemaking (perhaps by the comrades of its victim, belatedly coming to her assistance) it will lash out violently. If its claws inflict damage on a character it will infect him or her with a disease (roll Strength or less on 3d6 to resist) that causes no HP loss but applies a −5 penalty to Looks for the 1-6 months that the disease lasts. At the same time the gaki will discard its comely appearance, the repugnant sight of its true face instilling dread (2d6 fright check; those succumbing are unable to act for 1-6 rounds) in everyone present. If someone who has had sex with a yokushiki-gaki sees its real face, he or she immediately acquires a form of insanity (randomly rolled).

ATTACK 18                                    Claws (d8,4)
DEFENCE 12                                  Armour Factor: 2
MAGICAL DEFENCE: 18             Movement: 15m (25m)
EVASION: 4                                      STEALTH: 18
                                                            PERCEPTION: 13 (panoptical)
Health Points: 2d6+8
Rank Equivalent: 7th

Adventure seeds

The gaki make for fascinating antagonists because they aren't simply monsters to defeat; they have tragic backstories and represent moral lessons about greed, lust, and violence. This provides referees with opportunities to create encounters with ethical dimensions beyond simple combat.

1. The Hungry Road: A notorious ketsu-gaki haunts a stretch of highway. Fearful locals have developed the terrible practice of sacrificing travellers whenever a villager dies, to distract the gaki from feasting on the remains of their loved ones.
2. The Beautiful Stranger: A yokushiki-gaki has taken up residence in an abandoned house. Several young people from a nearby village have fallen mysteriously ill after reporting encounters with a beautiful stranger.
3. A Pious Caretaker: A chokenju-gaki haunts an ancient temple, appearing as an elderly keeper by day, in which form it is unaware of its true nature, but transforming into a monstrous guardian by night to ward off looters and defilers.

If you decide to use any of these hungry ghosts in your campaign, they could lead to interesting scenarios where players might need to:

• Investigate the gaki's origin to properly exorcise it
• Navigate difficult moral choices when encountering villages with disturbing practices
• Help a gaki that appears human by day but struggles with its nature
• Perform the Segaki ritual to give a repentant spirit a chance at rebirth

Don't call them rappas

There’s new news about Tetsubo coming soon. That’s the Japanese-styled RPG that began as a Warhammer supplement and then began turning into a much more authentic game of its own during lockdown. I have been adapting it to work with Paul Mason’s Outlaws RPG. Also, he has lived in Japan for over thirty years so is ideally qualified to advise me on both the rules and the culture.

I began by asking Paul about kusa, a group of medieval Japanese saboteurs-cum-mischief-makers that I read about in a martial arts magazine. The kusa were a sort of precursor to ninja, but I also wanted Tetsubo to dispense with the notion of ninja as feudal-era special ops that was popularized after World War 2. And the best way to go back to the roots of the profession (if indeed it has any that we can isolate from all the modern myths) would be to ditch the name “ninja” in favour of something more historically accurate.

Paul responded: Wikipedia has kusa as another term for ninja, but unfortunately no context behind it, whether it's period-based or regional. My source for terms was the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum. It lists shinobi, ukami, kanja/rappa, onmitsu and ninja as the terms used by period (the last is listed for Taisho: ie the 20th century). Regional terms include some of those period based terms as well as suppa, ukami, dakko, kikimonoyaku, and kurohabaki. Interesting that it includes none of the Wiki ones apart from rappa and shinobi.

So in Tetsubo, kusa became the apprentice level of the kanja (not ninja) profession. I then asked Paul about how to represent defilement.

Paul: The term you need is kegare (穢). It would translate as impurity or uncleanness. When you go to a shrine and wash your hands at the little shack for that purpose, it's a ritual washing to rid you of kegare. This obsession with cleanliness (see also Japanese bath houses, and taking off your shoes when you enter a house) is somewhat relevant in the present pandemic. I've even heard it given as a reason why the Japanese never had an industrial revolution -- better hygiene meant longer lifespan than Brits meant there were not enough surplus agricultural workers, a necessity for industry.

Dave: Funnily enough, I’d previously thought of using kegare for bad joss [a rules concept in Outlaws] and immediately rejected it for the fairly daft reason that Tetsubo already has defilement defined as occurring in specific circumstances (proximity to a dead body, fluffing etiquette when addressing a kami, etc).

Paul: That's exactly what bad joss is supposed to deal with!

Dave: The mental process here is interesting because it illustrates why it’s taking me longer to edit Tetsubo now than it probably took to write it in the first place. I’ll think of a way to implement something (kuji-no-in, say) using Outlaws rules. But then I see there are a couple of other ways to do it, and whichever I choose has knock-on effects, so I enter a mental holding pattern where no decision is taken as I move on to another part of the rules. All of which is pretty stupid given that the people who want Tetsubo will mostly be Warhammer players and the people who want Outlaws really want Outlaws, not Tetsubo – so I’m agonizing over choices that might only matter to the handful of people who buy the book and play it as written.

Paul: I can't help thinking that trying to imagine the kind of people who want to play the game is a bad move. Surely you can only say to yourself: what is this game to me? And design it accordingly. In the case of Tetsubo, the answer is clearly: "not Kwaidan". So just go ahead and do interesting things that wouldn't work in Kwaidan.

Kwaidan was/is to be a roleplaying game set in Heian Japan, considerably more culturally authentic and closer to my heart than Tetsubo, which everybody seems to associate with Kurosawa's early "noodle Easterns".  

Dave: At least I’ve managed to break that holding pattern regarding kegare. You are of course quite right – that’s exactly what I needed to substitute for bad joss. And instead of getting hung up on how to square the abstract acquisition of kegare when acquiring motivation with specific in-game circumstances that cause or remove defilement, all I need to do is put numbers to the latter. +5 kegare for touching a dead body, -[degree of success] for a purification CEREMONY roll, etc.

I’m still undecided about how to handle magic. In a perfect world I wouldn’t bother having it as a separate discipline and simply have it bleed into everything else – but that’s Kwaidan, not Tetsubo. I was listening to the Appendix N Book Club podcast in which somebody said we’d had forty-five years of role-playing, and still nobody has figured out a way to make magic magical.

Paul: That's wrong. Plenty of people have figured out how to make magic magical. It's just that however you do it, once you write down rules someone will find a way to suck the magic out of it. My philosophy is that role-playing magic rules are there for people who don't want magic to be magical. For the rest of us, if you are going to allow players to use magic, it's all about trust.

Dave: I really like the Outlaws magic system and it does feel that sorcerers in Outlaws are very different from the usual RPG artilleryman types. But Outlaws magic has a very strong Chinese flavour (not that I know what a Japanese flavour of magic ought to be like) and it’s a mark of its strength that it doesn’t easily lend itself to conversion to a different setting. You could use the core Outlaws abilities system for anything from Tekumel to Ancient Greece – and Arabian Nights and Camelot, as we’ve said before – because people still have to haggle, fight, sneak, impress, treat wounds, sing, make works of art, etc. But the obstacle to any generic system is magic. That’s where GURPS falters: what would “generic magic” even look like?

Paul: Yet another reason why I don't believe in GURPS. But ironically, if you're doing a Japanese magic system, the closest you're going to find is in a Chinese one. Throw away all that stuff about “shugenja” from Bushido. The image of a sorcerer in Japan is the onmyoshi. And the onmyoshi is a hell of lot closer to an Outlaws sorcerer than he is to a sorcerer in any other game. 

Dave: Given that any magic rules must fit the setting, do I retain the leadenly dull spells inherited from Warhammer, rejigged to give them Outlaws stats? That feels like a lazy option, and when I went through a list of the Tetsubo spells crossing off all the boring ones I was left with barely a dozen – and thus glaring gaps in what sorcerers could do. Pretty much the only thing I like from the original Tetsubo rules is that ninja (now kanja) were a type of sorcerer, but then when I read their spells, hobbled as they are by inheriting the magic system of Warhammer, that concept soon dissolves into the mucky residue medieval alchemists were left with in their vain attempts to turn lead into gold. 

What I should do is spend a couple of weeks with Joly’s Legend in Japanese Art really soaking up the depiction of sorcerers in myth, then rebuild from there. It would be enjoyable, too, but at that point I’d really have to wonder why I was investing that effort into Tetsubo when it’d be better spent on Kwaidan. Just this morning I was flipping through the book and M. Joly chastised me with the information that shugendo is not “wizardry”, but a syncretic mystical sect -- in the real-world sense of mystical, that is. And Royall Tyler’s book Japanese Tales mentions that one folkloric power of wizards is “causing the penis to disappear” – again, that’s more one for Kwaidan, I think.

Paul: Spell-lists are one of those soul-sucking things that I don't miss in role-playing games. I switched to C&S because I liked the way it encouraged the idea that sorcerers were almost 'above' spells. One of my players got so into the mindset that his character spent all his time enchanting materials, and he infuriated (and intimidated, as his character became quite powerful) the other players by showing little interest in their schemes, but simply trying to manipulate them to obtain the rare materials he wanted. I think unless magic has that distance, that otherness, it is simply technology: blasters in Traveller.

Dave: That’s what I thought about most of the magical battles in the Harry Potter films. The wands were just phasers. In Chinese Ghost Story or Game of Thrones, on the rare occasions when you get to see magic it does feel magical.

And as for maboroshi – I don’t even know where that came from. Presumably a class of illusionist in Warhammer, and Jamie and I reached for “phantasm” as a plausible equivalent in Japanese? (Or did it come from Lafcadio Hearn? If so hardly authentic, but Hearn I’d accept as valid in the way that Pre-Raphaelite reimaginings of Arthurian myth are valid.) Do I rebuild the class using Outlaws magic, or abandon it and move the original Tetsubo spells for maboroshi (if any are worth keeping) across to whatever I end up calling sorcerers. (My pocket dictionary suggests maho-tsukai or kijutsu-shi, but I suspect they may be thinking of a stage conjurer.)

Paul: Maboroshi means illusion, not illusionist. Annoyingly, Illusionist would be Maboroshishi, which is too silly to use. And Maboroshiya, the alternative, sounds like a shop (remember Mr Benn?). Maho-tsukai is a literal translation of “magic-user”, which was a term I hated in D&D from the very earliest days. I mean, you could use it, and the Japanese term is probably marginally better, in that it is slightly possible that someone might say it, whereas one reason I shacked up with C&S so early was that I could never imagine any story in which someone said, “He is a mighty magic-user!”

Kijutsushi sounds more interesting. The scroll you asked me to research, after all, was from a series called kijutsu no kagami, ie “the mirror of kijutsu”. Strictly speaking, it means “magic tricks”, but it might have more to it, and the scroll suggests that it does.

So this is how the sorcerous professions of Tetsubo ended up:

The generic term for the spellcasters of Yamato is mahutsukai. There are four broad classes:

• Onmyoshi specialize in astrology, divination, protection against spirits, and the study and manipulation of the five elements, with particular emphasis on geomancy and the correct directions and locations to avoid bad luck. By preference they channel magical energy from iyashirochi (ley lines or ‘dragon veins’, natural sources of ki in the landscape) or from the spirit world. 
• Genka are a more select and secretive school of mages who practice spells connected with death, illusion and destructive energy. They have a reputation for drawing magical energy from servants, acolytes or even from unwilling captives. 
• Taoist mages are mystic hermits who develop control over reality and natural forces by means of asceticism and meditation. They prefer to draw their magical force from within themselves, often while meditating under waterfalls, and store it in a focus (often a mirror or gourd) until needed. 
• Kanja are the eerie ‘wizards of the night’ whose study of magic revolves around their activities as assassins, saboteurs and spies. They power their spells with whatever source of occult energy is most conveniently to hand.

But that’s not the whole story. A sorcerer might change his or her school, acquiring spells and practices from several classes. Bukyo priests have access to magic not studied by any of the mahutsukai and that uses spiritual power. Shinto priests obtain boons from kami that serve the same function as spells. And anyone might acquire knowledge of spells from a supernatural being like a tengu or from a book, whether or not they have any formal training in magic.

In any case, ordinary people are unversed in the types of magic and use the various terms for mahutsukai classes as if they were interchangeable. In a state of ignorance, personal prejudice will often serve to supply a definition. Thus a spellcaster who has associated with the speaker's own lord may be described as an onmyoshi, one suspected of working for an enemy lord may be called a genka or kanja, and one known to have come from Huaxia or who refuses employment may be labelled a Taoist. Sorcerers themselves do little to clear up this state of confusion, as each sorcerer knows that his or her power will be greater against a foe who is not quite sure what to expect.

A divine wind

If you haven't followed the Tetsubo saga, it starts here and until recently ended here. The tishatsu version: Jamie and I wrote a Japanese-flavoured supplement for the Warhammer. That's way back in the early '90s. It was never used, the rights reverted to us, and parts of it appeared in Robert Rees's fanzine Carnel.

The rest is told in the links to those two earlier posts, and during lockdown I made a start on adapting it to fit with Paul Mason's Outlaws RPG. If not for the Vulcanverse books it would be finished and on sale by now. Oh, and Jewelspider. And some bits of paid work too. Stuff got in the way, in short, but I'm hoping to get it done sometime in 2023. So, only about thirty years late.

A couple more links. This week I'm interviewed on the Awesome Lies blog about Tetsubo's past and future. My thanks to Gideon of Awesome Lies for the opportunity, and if there are any questions he missed -- well, you know where the comments are. I also enjoyed this article on putting Warhammery concepts of Chaos into a Japanese setting (despite the author's conclusion that "Tetsubo shows that slavishly copying Japanese culture and folklore into Warhammer doesn't really make for a satisfying result") though if and when Tetsubo does get an official release it won't any longer be trying to fit into the Warhammer universe.

The shinpu hits the fan

Back in the 20th century, the grimdark fantasy tradition had its beginnings in Michael Moorcock's Von Bek novels (The Warhound and the World's Pain, etc) which surely inspired Games Workshop's Warhammer RPG. In the early '90s, Jamie and I signed with GW to write a pseudo-Japanese supplement for Warhammer, which made sense given that the Sengoku period makes the Thirty Years' War look like a tussle between two drunks outside a kebab shop. But enough of me and Jamie...

Tetsubo had been commissioned by Paul Cockburn. Unfortunately he left GW the same week we delivered the manuscript. The new people in charge of roleplaying games there didn't have much enthusiasm for an Oriental take on the game -- and possibly not for roleplaying in general, as soon after that I think GW passed the Warhammer licence on elsewhere.

So that left Tetsubo in limbo -- or rather in Yomi -- until 2018, when Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios asked to adapt it as a supplement to his Warhammer heartbreaker, Zweihänder. The good news was the renewed spark of interest drove me to dig out the Tetsubo manuscript and scan it all, most of the book never having even been saved to disk and only existing in a faded dot-matrix-printed box of papers. The bad news: after a burst of activity it sank back into the land of mists, and after a year the contract lapsed.

Daniel Fox got back in touch last month to talk about renewing the contract, but his thinking had moved on. He wanted to bring in elements of 1960s chambara movies. That wasn't in itself a problem. Jamie and I are Kurosawa fans, even though we harbour no illusions about his movies being in any way authentically Japanese. But Daniel wanted to square the circle by meshing that with a real Sengoku vibe, and he had the problem that the book as written was more of a fit with the Bakumatsu -- because, of course, GW had wanted players to be able to bring their Old World characters in.

And then there was the question of who would tackle the redesign and conversion to the new system. Daniel proposed hiring Graeme Davis, who would have been ideal, but he was too busy to take it on. Now, at this point I should probably address the notion of "cultural appropriation", whose proponents (I think; I don't actually know any) might say the game could only be done properly if it had a Japanese designer. But would "a Japanese designer" have to mean somebody born and raised in Japan? Or could it be a Japanese citizen (wherever he or she was born) with a deep knowledge of medieval Japanese culture? Or simply somebody who happens to be ethnically Japanese -- Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, who went to school down the road from me in Surrey? You might have guessed by now that I don't subscribe to the woke obsession with ethnicity, an obsession which is supposedly progressive but in fact quite the opposite; we are all human, nobody owns culture or history, and there's no reason why the world's leading authority on, say, Classical Greece shouldn't be Maori.

But those are all just distractions. The bottom line is, a year on, Jamie and I could see that Tetsubo just wasn't going to happen. At least, it will only happen if we do it ourselves.

Currently we're mulling over whether this is worth doing as a Kickstarter. We'd need to rebuild it around a different game system, of course, and our first thought was Powered By The Apocalypse, which we enjoyed for its simplicity when we played our Sagas of the Icelanders campaign, but the appeal of Tetsubo will surely be to traditional roleplayers whereas PbtA would take it in a whole other narrativist direction. So not that.

One option is to use a variant of my Tirikelu RPG, but I'm not sure that would make best use of the skills and career paths in the Tetsubo book. I intend using Tirikelu for my Abraxas RPG (a good fit, hopefully, being science fantasy) and also Tirikelu isn't GURPS; we can't just tack it onto everything. Jamie suggested using a variant of my currently-in-development Jewelspider rules, on the principle that OSR players and Warhammer fans might have at least a nodding acquaintance with Dragon Warriors.

But then we had a brainwave. Paul Mason is an Anglo-Japanese academic who has lived in Japan for over twenty-five years. He's not only an authority on Japanese culture and history, he's also an editor, author and RPG designer with his own (as yet unpublished) game Outlaws, based on the stories of Liang Shan Po. What if we used the Outlaws system for Tetsubo? Not only would the gaming world get a taste of a brilliant and authentic Eastern-influenced RPG, but we'd get an extremely erudite Japanese scholar on board to consult on the final manuscript.

We asked Paul, he said yes, and that's the plan right now -- unless somebody throws an even better suggestion into the comments below.

 

Further reading, viewing and playing:

• Kurosawa: The Samurai Collection
• Seven Samurai
• Onibaba
• Ugetsu Monogatari
• Kwaidan
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• The Von Bek series by Michael Moorcock
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
• Zweihander RPG

How to roleplay

Paul Mason is famous in roleplaying circles as one of the uber-fans involved with Dragonlords and as the editor of the superb if infrequent imazine, in which he treated us to a stellar series of articles and reviews in his inimitably trenchant and thought-provoking style. He was also for many years one of my Tekumel players and has written Outlaws, a great but so far unpublished RPG of the heroes of Liangshan Po, which I used as the basis of my (also unpublished) Heian Japan roleplaying game, Kwaidan.

These days Paul is too busy with his academic career in Japan to do much roleplaying, but the last time he was over in Britain I asked if he wouldn’t mind me running some of his articles as guest posts, and he gave a kind of oblique permission. That is, he looked at me with an expression that was more 'are you serious?' than 'don’t you dare'.

This piece might strike you as very basic stuff if you’re a roleplayer – but hey, I’ve been roleplaying since the mid-70s and I found it useful. Remember that once you reach 10th Dan you go back to wearing a white belt. Nobody should ever think they’re anything but a novice. Take it away, Paul...


In a role-playing game the rules are details: they are the trees from which part of the wood is composed. So let’s consider a different approach to writing rules for role-playing games. Let’s try to look at the wood.

goal
The purpose of this game is to take part in a story. The story isn’t told by anyone, but is built up from the improvised contributions of all the participants. See the sample for an idea of how this works.

how to play
The game creates a story. Participants in the game all play a part in creating the story, by making contributions. The goal of the game is to make it as easy as possible for participants to act or describe their improvised contributions to the game without spoiling the sense of immersion.

participants
There are two basic types of participants in the game. Players are a little like actors. They will usually act the life of a single person: their character. The referee is more like a director. The referee describes sensory information in the story, and may occasionally act other characters in the story, as needed.

action
A participant who contributes to the game by acting does so by saying what their character is trying to do. So in the sample, Fred says: ‘I climb up the gantry to the deck above.’ If you like, when this action is speech, the participant can act the speech by actually speaking as the character. So later in the sample, when Fred says ‘Set it to stun!’ he’s actually saying what his character is saying. In some cases you might need to check which it is, but usually it will be obvious. Two or more participants can thus act the roles of their characters, conducting a conversation which forms part of the story.

Anything which is acted by a participant takes place as described, unless it is challenged by another participant (usually this is the job of the referee, but other players may also challenge if they like). A participant whose action has been challenged must prove that the character could succeed. To do this, they need to use an agreed game mechanic (such as Outlaws Light, presented in imazine #33). An example of a game mechanic is that you must roll 9 or less on two dice to hit with your phaser. Really skilled characters like Worf need an 11 or less. Other Klingons need 7 or less.

Some complex interactions, such as fights, often involve continual implied challenges, and therefore may require a lot of use of mechanics. Other actions, if they seem reasonable given the character and the story, can pass unchallenged.

description
A participant who contributes to the game by describing does so by talking about something accessible to the senses of characters in the game. This is usually the job of the referee, but players may also occasionally describe things connected with their characters. So in the sample, Sam describes what the players can see once they have climbed the gantry, and what they can feel.

Descriptions, like actions, can be challenged. They shouldn’t be contradicted outright, but senses can be mistaken! A player who describes a scene is speaking only for their character, and other players, or the referee, may perceive things differently. Note that the referee is privileged in description: because they speak for ‘everybody’ a player who challenges a referee’s description is simply describing what their own character perceives, and not what anyone else does.

Obviously, not everything needs to be described, and referees should beware of trying to act events in the story in the guise of description! For example, if Sam in the sample goes on to say ‘When you walk on to the transporter pad, there is an explosion’ this is wrong, because the players haven’t yet said that they are acting by walking on to the transporter pad. Remember, you’re not telling a story by crafting it authorially, you’re creating one by inhabiting it.

contributing
There are no fixed rules governing how and when you can contribute to a story, but there are some obvious guidelines that should be followed. The most important is: take your cues from the story. If you act something your character is doing tomorrow, then everyone else’s actions today will have to be done in flashbacks. This will be difficult, and may even cause a contradiction with what you acted about tomorrow. Challenging other player characters, or getting into conflicts with them, is fine, but blocking the story itself is generally bad form.

A typical sequence of contributions will be:

• Referee describes the situation facing the player characters, and/or uses a character to act a stimulus.
• Players respond by acting their character’s reaction. There’s no fixed order to this, but if a player feels that their character should be able to act first, they always have recourse to a challenge.
• Participants respond to the actions. This may lead to further description—the referee, or a player, may describe the result of actions.
• Out of all these contributions, a sequence of events will soon be evident. This is the story.

Even in your own mind, separate Action from Description. At first it’s tempting to think that your character could do absolutely anything, but soon you find that the limitations are what create drama. Maybe you can’t leap that chasm, maybe you’re not fast enough to outrun the fireball. Maybe the Ferengi saw you pick his pocket. Sometimes you should challenge yourself, not wait for other players to do it.

timing
Time for the characters in the story does not pass at the same rate as it does for the players. At times, it will pass very slowly, if you’re working out something that doesn’t take long, but needs to be explained in detail. At other times, it will pass very quickly, as with a long journey in which nothing much happens. As with most things in the game, time can be skipped over, subject to challenge by any of the other participants.

winning
There are no rules to cover winning. Players can decide on their own ideas of what constitutes winning. However, they may find that other players don’t agree with them. So how do you win? Well, how does a character win in a story?

ending
The game takes place in game sessions. A game session is when the participants get together to play the game. It can end at any time that is convenient for the participants. The end of a game session doesn’t mean the end of a story. The story can continue in the next session. A story only ends when everyone agrees that it’s finished, and you start a new one, or when you stop playing the game entirely!

postscript
Thanks to Dave Morris for providing comments and useful examples based on Star Trek. In writing this, I’ve been particularly inspired by all those games which have started with some vague waffle about how role-playing is like improvisational radio theatre, have followed it with a sample dialogue, without any explanation as to how and why people said what they did, and then plunged straight into tables of character generation. I’m also indebted to my own players, half of whom were complete beginners.

- Paul Mason

How rules shape the game world

Occasionally in comments on this blog I've mentioned the idea of myth levels as a way to represent a step-change in capability between characters in a role-playing game. As a fan of Sergio Leone movies it seems only natural to devise rules like that. In this 2001 discussion (from Annwn magazine, by the way) between Tim Harford, Paul Mason, Ralph Lovegrove and me, we touch on that and other disconnects between how the role-playing world ought to be and how the rules actually shape it to be. I've seen a fair few role-playing games where the designer tells us how the game should be played, and what the resulting game world ought to be like, but the system they give us (when gamed, as it will be) doesn't lead to anything of the kind. Designers, it's like being the Founding Fathers - you want the game to turn out a certain way, you have to do the work.

Tim: The trend throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s was towards more rational, logical, modular and universal systems. The idea was to provide a simple but realistic means of resolving the usual game questions about combat, success rolls, and so on. Some did fairly well at this task, others didn’t. Along the way, something was lost. Perhaps the problem was with the idea of “realism”. Different games have their own reality. A system like GURPS, for example, is necessarily atheistic. Characters are defined in modern terms, and GURPS handles fate, luck, magic and so on rather clunkily. It’s just a patch, and in a “universal” system it’s hard to see any other way of doing that. In DW, we need to capture the spirit of the time and the place and build it into the rules from the ground up. Heroes can wrestle with giants because they have great spirits. Hannibal could freeze a man into an ice statue [a reference to Knightmare 4: Fortress of Assassins], not because he was a sorcerer, but because he was Hannibal. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,” should be in the rules from the start, not as a “Pure of Heart” advantage (gives x10 ST). The best example of this, for me, was the Judge Dredd system. It was simple, it was stripped down, it gave everybody a special angle or talent, and it captured perfectly the “reality” that an unarmed Judge can take out a dozen thugs with tommy guns any day of the week. That’s the advantage of a focused system done well.

Dave: Or another example from Robin of Sherwood... Little John is wrestling with a stranger. It’s an edgy situation, a “friendly” match but not very friendly, as they don’t know who the guy is and they may very well rob him later. Then, angered by something or other, the stranger suddenly lifts Little John clear of the ground and throws him down. A conclusive victory (and very effective visually, as I recall, because of the sun behind them as the stranger lifts Little John aloft). Everyone sees this and, stunned, they go down on their knees, now recognizing the stranger as Richard the Lionheart. At the time, we talked about this kind of thing being represented by “myth levels”. If I’m myth level 10 and you’re myth level 1, you will not beat me in a fight even if you do have a much higher weapon skill. It’s back again to the idea that characters must be able to affect the narrative directly.

Paul: What’s the “narrative”? I think it’s dangerous to refer to characters affecting the narrative, because it seems to get people thinking in terms of manipulating their characters to make a story, which is different from immersing yourself in the character in the setting, and trusting in natural human processes to sort a narrative out of what happens.

Dave: I agree with you wholeheartedly. Instead of “affect the narrative”, I should have said “characters affect reality” – sorcerers and notable or mythic types especially. In fact, one thing we could say is that there is no difference (as Tim pointed out with the Hannibal example) between a mythically important character and a wizard. They can achieve the same results, even if apparently by different means. So maybe all magic-using characters should start at myth level 2?

Paul: Might it not be best to start off by talking about the spirit of the time and place, using whatever metaphors and references we can, before even starting to consider mechanics? To build up some kind of corpus of things we want the game to do before thinking of how to design rules that encourage those things to happen?

Dave: Agreed. Design should always begin with a feature-based description of the end product you’d like to have. Then we can start thinking about the way to achieve it.

Tim: If you look at the sources of inspiration for games like Dragon Warriors, you find that it doesn’t work the way it does in games. The effects are arbitrary, the limitations whimsical. Some great sorcerers never seem to cast a spell, while others never cast the same one twice. To a certain extent that’s inevitable: a storyteller can be creative and never needs to explain. A game designer is supposed to produce some kind of logic behind everything, for the sake of simplicity if nothing else. The lazy way out is to delegate all responsibility to the referee and players. That’s fine as far as it goes: they have far more responsibility for having a good time than any game designer. But professional (!) pride urges me to provide some framework to help this creativity, and to provide boundaries which are there to guide rather than constrain.

Dave:  RPG designers have been trying since 1975 or whenever to create a set of rules from which dramatically satisfying results will emerge. Obviously this isn’t working – for instance, applying D&D experience rules to an online RPG like Ultima has just meant the unbridled massacre of new player-characters for their experience value. Taking Legend: we know we would like a world that is very like the Middle Ages but with a delicate flavouring of magic. But Dragon Warriors played strictly by the books would not deliver that world. Possibly we could get better results from rules that dictate the end result, not the way it’s achieved, as in Maelstrom. The special effects are left to the player and referee to agree. Eg, a wizard can exert an effect limited by distance, duration, and area, the degree of deviation from reality, and the degree to which other people’s wills oppose the effect. The last factor means assigning points from each person’s will into what they care about. Say my will is directed 30% into preserving my own life, 35% into immediate family, 15% into my lord, 10% into my church, 10% into friends. So churches end up very well defended from magic because lots of people care about them, even if only marginally. Subtle use of magic is encouraged – I might wait until you are sleeping, and your will is weaker, or I might find ways to distort your senses so as to trick you into walking off a cliff instead of zapping you directly. Or I might undermine your reputation with illusions so that friends and family gradually turn against you, thus stripping you of your defences. (The way Mastermind manipulated Phoenix in the X-Men, for those comic fans among us.)

Paul:  There is another consideration: there’s little point in reinventing the wheel. It’s unlikely that Dragon Warriors 2 can be the same game Dragon Warriors 1 was, in the sense that it won’t be a mass market paperback converting gamebook readers into role-players. Rather, I would suggest, it might be best to approach it for what it really is: the game intelligent Dragon Warriors would want to be playing, 15 years down the line. Thus the magic system should be an attempt to do something that hasn’t been done before: create a magic system that actually feels like magic. Of the previously published magic systems, I still have a soft spot for Chivalry and Sorcery, simply because it managed to be genuinely arcane. But even if that approach had not already been bagged (and duplicated, by Ars Magica), it would still not quite fit the Legend that Dave described. As I understand it, DW magic should be more Mabinogion than Paracelsus. So it might be worth to start off by bouncing around general ideas about the nature of this framework. Does it involve “spells”, for example, or is it going to involve a more freeform set of magical “skills”? Is there going to be any effort spent on play-balance for magic, whether that be out-of-setting (mechanical) or in-setting (folkloric defences and so on).Another important issue: how homogeneous is it going to be, system-wise? Is there going to be the feeling that magic is pretty much the same however you learn, it, with only the decoration different? or will there be radically different systems to reflect a sense of diversity? That’s assuming there are any systems, of course.

Tim: (I like the idea as magic as a battle of collective wills. It seems to capture a great deal.) Homogeneity is to be avoided. I see a world containing magical creatures - fairies and sandestins, for example. They have their own ways of casting magic, which need not be transparent in the rules. Human magicians can bargain with them, or try simply to compel them to service. So that’s one way to command magic: by proxy. But I could also imagine a highly doctrinaire school which depends very much on ritual and on discovered spells. Here, the very rigidity of the spell system is an advantage: it emphasises rote learning. But such tricks as the “Imp-Spring Twinkle-Toe” seem another way to power; and the use of magical paraphernalia one more again. This doesn’t seem to be a problem. I wouldn’t want to see an attempt to break this down into “character classes”. I picture the “average” wizard in haphazard pursuit of magic in any form. We need to make the following concession to play balance: characters of equal myth level should be on a reasonably even footing. So a Myth 4 knight won’t be overly troubled by the enmity of a Myth 2 sorcerer - unless the knight is unwary, of course. Incidentally, I hate the nomenclature but love the concept of Myth Levels.

Dave: Again, I fully agree. I’m using this nomenclature just as a “developer interface”. And yes, a Myth 4 knight is of course on a par with a Myth 4 sorc. That is tautological - it’s the very thing that Myth levels define - eg, can this jumped-up little git really beat Captain Kirk? Of course not.

Ralph: Magic that feels “like magic” is quite a subjective term, but to me it suggests a slightly more spiritual or academic approach than the exoteric “press this button for fireball” spell system like AD&D. In order for magic to be truly mystical, it needs a cosmology behind it. This doesn’t have to be a defined “spirit world” as in White Wolf’s Mage... it’s more of a system of approach. The best model for magic are the real spiritual systems of the Kabbalah and other esoteric doctrines. The human body is the lowest, most base entity in the hierarchy of the human existence, and married to it is the soul, which (very) roughly equates to the personality and individual consciousness of the body. The soul is then a vehicle for the spirit, which is the “higher man”, the divine spark within a human. (To the more learned scholars out there: please forgive my bumbling through the halls of the arcanum, I’m still learning).Okay, metaphysics aside, what you have is this: the Spirit of a mortal is their true nature on the higher Spiritual plane of existence. Magicians are able to work their magic through their awareness of their higher selves. This is a concept prevalent in all sorts of spiritual teaching, from Hindu Akasha to Hermetic lore and Shamanism (in its broadest sense, encompassing systems such as Wicca and Scandinavian myth). In order to make it useful as a conceptual tool in the game, the “higher self” should have a set of statistics that are analogous to the “mortal self” on Earth - for example (picking a much used stat template) the higher self’s Fire, Earth, Air and Water translate to the mortal man’s Social, Physical, Mental and Magical skills respectively. The upshot is this: as the mortal man’s Myth status increases, it increases one or more of the higher man’s stats. Those Higher abilities might then be interpreted on the Earthly plane as incredible fighting prowess (Earth), the ability to sway enormous bodies of men and reduce a man to a quivering wreck with a glance (Fire), etc. This is not a particularly new idea: Runequest included the shaman’s fetch in its rules for Spirit Magic; Mage has the Avatar; Nephilim made use of elemental “Ka”. I don’t think that any of these games used the concept in quite the same way, however. The whole “Mythical Warrior” game is in many ways about both player and character ego, and the “higher man” literally is the Ego.

Paul:  This also matches some of the early thoughts on the I Ching. Some writers argued that the oracle directly connected with a higher, simplified plane, and because the higher plane was simpler than our own, interactions between cause and effect were more amenable to comprehension and control. Thus, although the I Ching tends to be regarded as a means of fortune telling, to early Chinese theorists it was far more than that: more like poking around with the motherboard of existence. An adept was supposed to be able to use the I Ching to effect changes in reality. All of which suggests that this higher (Platonic?) plane may be a useful concept, if only by analogy, for the working of magic. How, if at all, does it relate to Faerie? It would be nice if not handled directly. In other words, a high ‘Earth’ score doesn’t just represent ludicrous brute strength, but the capacity to affect ‘Earth’ on the higher plane... which will in turn end up affecting the lower plane, in the same way that the ‘myth levels’ that have been discussed before do. Thus, a very strong enemy will be able to beat a weaker (but higher myth level) character if the contest is narrow down to the purely physical. The latter’s advantage would be, however, that their higher myth level enables them to find other ways of winning. This can be rationalised (within the game) in metaphysical terms as being the exercise of a higher, Platonic, potential. It also seems to represent the ‘genre’.

Dave:  I just watched A Chinese Ghost Story 2 and was reminded that it was one of the inspirational sources for the myth level concept. The sword-wielding general in it is no sorcerer, but he is able to hold his own (briefly) against an invisible demon by dint of sheer skill. One idea might be that myth level lets you use the wrong skill for the job and still somehow get an effect.

Paul: I like that idea: presumably myth level is also useful in carrying on after one’s limbs have been hacked off? The danger here is of ending up with something that appears very similar to Feng Shui’s genre convention of “mooks” (whatever the hell that means) and “named characters”. On a very trivial level of course, myth level was something that original DnD level was supposed to represent. I also incorporate the “use any skill to defend against magic” in Outlaws, but without tying it to myth level (which doesn’t exist in Outlaws, except insofar as heroes tend to have higher skills).

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.