The Inescapable Green-ness of the Other Grass

Unrealistic RPG obsessions: I have these, i.e.  I would love to run a long campaign of.... (insert game I barely understand)  but I don’t have the time or inclination to learn what must be learned (Glorantha, I am looking at you). I’m currently on gaming hiatus for various reasons and my ASE and Dragon Warriors Yamato campaigns are temporarily suspended. The other group I play in is also halfway-ish through an Alien RPG scenario run by my good friend Alex although that is also on ice until I can return to it. However, in recent times managed to tick off a few games from my RPG bucket list. So on reflection maybe these obsessions aren’t so unrealistic.

I posted ages ago that I wanted to run WFRP, Talislanta and GURPS but probably never would. I have, in fact, run short campaigns of both WFRP 1e and Talislanta 4e since then; and played in a WFRP game as a player exploring Castle Drachenfels and getting beaten up by the furniture. GURPS however, remains on the unlikely-to-play pile for the next foreseeable lifetime. Probably a good thing. I dislike rules heavy systems these days.

WFRP is a lot of fun and I thoroughly enjoyed GMing it.  Critical tables and careers doing the heavy lifting in conveying the setting here. I find it a little hard to prepare for though because IMO it requires a careful hand to keep the aesthetic straight without it becoming too predictable. There’s probably some Chaos cult at the root of these problems, whatever they are, and if there isn’t what are we doing playing WFRP instead of something else? That sort of thing. 

Talislanta was also fun in a free wheeling Sword and Sorcery type of way. The rules worked out different in play to how I imagined. Magic in particular was less effective than I thought it would be. Also the combat specialist character was disproportionately tough and effective  compared to his more generalist associates (we had an Ur Renegade, a Cymrillian Swordsmage and a Yitek Tomb Robber as a collection of archetypes.) It was however a good time as the PCs became embroiled as amateur agents of the Cymrillian secret service, carrying out operations abroad in Sindar. I’d revisit it for definite. 

I did think Dragon Warriors set in Yamato would never come to pass either but we’re about ten sessions into that with no sign of slowing down. It’s probably a more magical version than my usual depiction of Legend but hopefully not by too much. This is something that first captured my imagination when I first read about the possibility in Book 6 back in the eighties, so it’s nice to finally get to it nearly forty years later. 

I have plans to run Marvel Superheroes for the Saturday group, once we’re done with Alien and it’s my turn to GM once more. D6 Star Wars needs to feature at some point also but I think I can manage that once I return to some vestige of normal gaming. 

That leaves the White Whales: Tékumel (probably using Empire of the Petal Throne,) Runequest and The One Ring. They probably need their own post for discussion. Largely because they’re campaign games or I think they would work best in that format. I’m not really a one shot sort of GM either. Although I can manage it at a push, I prefer a longer form game. One where the setting and characters have time to grow. Those are the games that fascinate me the most. 

Then there’s my own Grim North setting which I continue to beaver away on now and again despite it not getting any play...

Essentially this is about time management. I could play anything really, I just need the time to prep and run it. At the moment (always?) that means dropping something else to find space in my schedule. Having too many cool games to run and play is one of those good problems anyway.

DW Yamato: Ki and Sumo

 I have, so far,  added two house rules for my Dragon Warriors Yamato campaign. DW is such a light system that it’s easy to modify to your taste and there’s nothing unified about the rules, so changing one bit isn’t going to affect anything else. As we’re going for an pseudo Japanese feudal feel I’ve gone for some basic Ki rules and a bit of sumo. 

Now these are both complex and interesting subjects that definitely deserve a more in depth treatment than I’m going to give them but this is two small adaptations to an old rules light system for my home game so I’m not prepared to massively go to town on this. 

Ki

For game purposes this is grossly oversimplified as spirit energy and quantified by Ki points. Player Characters have a pool of these, starting with one, that they can spend to gain Advantage on a dice roll (ie roll twice and take the best result.) Characters who entirely deplete their Ki reserves will recover one following a good night’s sleep. Otherwise Ki is awarded by GM fiat for positive supernatural interactions and play rewards. Eg all my players revived a point of Ki for freeing a lake spirit that had been imprisoned by someone believing themselves to be the servant of a demon god. 

In narrative terms this represents a character’s ability, through martial/meditative/magical training, to focus their spirit into mundane tasks to achieve exceptional results when the pressure is on. As a feature they are required to state they are spending Ki before they roll.

Sumo

Dragon Warriors has no official rules for grappling or wrestling of any kind so in order to resolve a bout of sumo with a boisterous Yamawaro (a type of mountain yokai) I dug into my memory for old rules from other systems that I might be happy with. In general grappling is hard to get right in RPGs. Either the author of the rules doesn’t understand it or they understand it too well giving rise to the situation that grappling is usually abstracted too much or present led in unnecessarily granular detail. Also a sumo bout has very specific rules that don’t necessarily apply to wrestling with an opponent under life and death conditions. Sumo rules therefore do not follow the standard combat rules of DW but instead I settle for the following gross oversimplification of this ancient and complex martial sport:

Each participant calculates a sumo score. This is the average of their Strength, Reflexes and Attack scores. To simulate the fast pace of a sumo bout an opposed roll under the sumo score is made with the highest success on the die showing an advantage. Two consecutive advantages result in victory, and you can narrate this however you like such as pushing your opponent directly out of the competition ring or throwing them to the ground in spectacular style. Any roll which is exactly equal to the sumo score is a critical and results in instant and overwhelming victory, unless the opponent also rolls a critical in which case there is a tie....

In my game Khasan, a shipwrecked Khanates barbarian, was soundly thrashed by the one eyed, hirsute mountain spirit but did earn a point of Ki out of it. 

Dragon Warriors: Yamato

 I may have mentioned this but Book 6 of the original Dragon Warriors is the best book. It has all the top quality Legend content and atmosphere that can be fitted into one small paperback.

In addition to quality information about Legend, the setting devised by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson, it discusses the possibility setting your Dragon Warriors games elsewhere. The options presented are feudal Japan, Pre Colombian Mexico and Roman Britain, as well as a discussion of various settings from fantasy literature. In typical Dave Morris fashion the reader is encouraged to look beyond Tolkien and Robert E. Howard to Leiber, Vance and MAR Barker. It was my first introduction to a lot of these authors and first exposure to Barker’s world of Tékumel (perhaps more on that later.)

For many years it was this that occupied my mind....

So when our Sunday night Dragon Warriors campaign came to a somewhat fitting, downbeat ending (with the PCs all dying while attempting to put to rest an ancient evil they had accidentally awakened several irl years earlier) something was required to fill the void on Sunday nights. We switched to Talislanta for a change of pace and enjoyed a short 12 session campaign of freewheeling sword and sorcery mayhem. It was a lot of fun by heart yearned for the dank forests and crumbling castles of Ellesland. 

However, the players began to generate characters that didn’t really fit with what I had planned. A khanates barbarian and his wise, wandering, Mystic friend... So I suggested we transpose the game to the east, to Yamato, a land of warring clans, spirits and demons.

And thus began our Yamato campaign, now a few months old. The PCs being a samurai, the aforementioned barbarian and their comrade who is an adept of Zen. They have been sent North by their daimyo into an isolated mountain valley cut off from the rest of his lands. With war brewing in the South, no larger force can be spared. Their mission is two fold: To bring the rogue minor clans of the valley back into the fold and to investigate the apparent disappearance of one of his generals who ventured into the same valley with a force of four hundred men and had not been heard from since. The idea behind this set up is the PCs have a set of problems and obligations to negotiate but also the autonomy to deal with them how they see fit. They carry letters of authority from the daimyo but have no further support from outside the valley

Running a game set in an analogue of medieval Japan has some challenges but is so far turning out to be very rewarding.