HEAVEN AND ESCAPE FROM HELL

There is a wonderful film by Chang Cheh called Heaven and Hell. It isn't good in the standard sense of the word, and a it isn't a good-bad movie either. It is just a very unique film and a strange blend of styles and tones. I love this movie. When I first saw it, I wasn't quite sure what to think, but with each viewing my fondness for Heaven and Hell grew. I have given my opinions on it HERE and HERE. I also wrote a halloween review for it some years ago for Shaw Brothers Universe (but if my memory is correct it was swapped for another topic I wrote about and slipped through the cracks). 

I like escape from hell scenarios in RPGs. And I think Heaven and Hell is probably the best example of how to run one successfully. I talk about this a bit in Strange Tales of Songling, and I mention the movie Heaven and Hell in one of the adventures in the book. 

Escape from Hell adventures are a great way to turn something like a character death into something much more interesting. Better yet, they are a great way to follow-up an instant party kill. I like lethal games, but I also have no problem with players earning their way back to life if they are up for a whole campaign devoted to it. 

I think there are some basic rules worth considering. I generally follow there rules. First, it shouldn't be easy to make it back. Second there should be ground rules to making it back. Third, failure should have significant downsides. 

If a single player character dies, the escape from hell scenario is easiest to do with them storming hell and helping the other player escape. Exactly how that plays out will be somewhat dependent on the kind of afterlife you are dealing with. If there is a total party kill, then it is very easy to center a whole campaign around escape. This can be as surreal or literal as you want. You can even start a new campaign, with a whole different system if you like, and slowly reveal this is an afterlife and the characters are the spirits of the player characters from the previous campaign. This is one way I began using Strange Tales of Songling, as an afterlife for my Ogre Gate campaigns.

There are lots of movies, legends and stories to draw on for escape from hell. But Something about Chang Cheh's Heaven and Hell seems to line up most with how it would work in practice in a typical RPG. Here is my original Halloween Review of Heaven and Hell (which I think gives an overview of what to expect from it): 

TRAPPED IN HEAVEN AND HELL

Heaven and Hell provokes different reactions in viewers. I avoided watching Chang Cheh’s divisive delve into the afterlife for many years because I had heard many negative remarks about it. When I did finally watch, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about the movie. Only a few films have had this effect on me. Soon after, I began to think about Heaven and Hell a lot. I began obsessively reviewing the scenes in my mind. I wasn’t sure why, but it clearly had a large impact on me. So I watched it again, and again, and again. I came to love its surreal and experimental approach. It is somewhere between My Young Auntie and Ashes of Time with a dash of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory thrown in. It takes you on a dream-like tour of a genre-splattered cosmology with weird musical interludes, kung fu and dancing. This movie quite literally has everything, but it won’t please everyone. And I think that is why it is so good. 

Heaven and Hell is divided into three parts. It begins in Heaven, in the court of the celestial bureaucracy. We are soon plunged to earth, where the celestial guard, Xin Ling (Li Yi-Min), is banished for helping a heavenly couple escape. There he’s a cigarette smoking taxi driver who dies and goes to Diyu (Hell) after trying to once again save a pair of star-crossed lovers. 

Watching Heaven and Hell, for me, is like going to a concert or a magic show. It is an experience. It is a movie you feel. The plot is fairly crazy, made more strange by some of the aesthetic choices along the way. For example, the earth sequence, which features Alexander Fu Sheng and Jenny Cheng as the star-crossed lovers in question, utilizes intensely minimalist stage design at times and incorporates more than one musical number as well as dance fighting in the manner of West Side Story. This is one of the aspects of the movie that I couldn’t stop thinking about. A lot of people don’t like the minimalist sets and are equally put off by the dancing. It is true the sets can be bare-bones but they create a sense of theater that works and actually immerses me in the experience more deeply by focusing my attention on the essential elements of music and image. I also find it intoxicating. The dancing and the total commitment to a certain feel heightens my experience of the movie. Visually it is impressive and also adds to the atmosphere. Watching it is like being slightly drunk, which is how Ashes of Time always makes me feel.

Most of the film is taken up by the third portion: Hell. We get a tour of Diyu’s gruesome punishments as people are formally judged and assigned an appropriate sentence. This is where the movie feels a little like Willy Wonka to me, with the elaborate props and creative punishments in a psychedelic hellscape. But the exploration of Diyu works and Cheh succeeds in creating an entire world with memorable characters and places. 

In Diyu, Xin Ling meets a woman named Red Dress (Lin Chen-Chi). After a trippy flashback sequence we learn she died on a misadventure involving alcohol, pills and a hypnotic shuffle off of a window sill. They travel the underworld together before being separated and then re-united at Plow Hell. 

Red Dress and Xin Ling are able to appeal their case to the Buddha of Mercy, who tasks Xin Ling with finding men wronged like himself to form a team that will break out of hell. The assembling of the team of heroes affords an opportunity for a series of smaller stories as we learn about each of their tragic backgrounds. They all have been betrayed or done a significant injustice. And what a team. It includes Sun Chien as a Taekwondo expert killed by robbers, Lo Meng as a brash youth with terrific kung fu who got shot in the back, Philip Kwok as a wuxia hero betrayed by his sworn brother, and Bruce Tong as a vengeful son done-in by corrupt magistrates. 

By this point in the movie, there have been so many genres touched upon, and here is where the it feels a bit like My Young Auntie to me. Not only are the heroes all from slightly different genres, they are in many instances from different periods in history. The world created, flattens everything and allows for all these things to exist side-by-side. It is the kind of movie, where you feel like you’ve seen every movie by the end. 

Heaven and Hell has a star-studded cast. Because it is broken up into three parts and each sequence has a largely different cast and title card, it is easy to overlook how many notable actors appear in Heaven and Hell. Everyone from David Chiang to Philip Kwok and Alexander Fu Sheng are present. My understanding is part of the reason for the wide-ranging cast is due to stop-and-start production issues, but I think it just gives the film a larger scope. 

This is, in my opinion, a very compelling movie to watch for Halloween. It is not as scary as some of the other Halloween offerings out there, but it is so strange, dark and surreal that it is worthy of the season. It is inherently divisive. Not everyone feels the same about it. I can’t promise that you’ll love it. I can’t promise you will like it. I can promise it will be a unique experience. I find it impossible to predict how people will receive Heaven and Hell, and that is one the things that makes it so exciting. Watching this film is a roll of the dice, but if you like to gamble, there may be a place for you in hell.  

BURN!!!

Been working on something a bit different lately, that arose out of a conversation I had on the podcast with Joel Clark, where we tried to design a game on the air. 

We came up with a concept called Schlock, a one-shot emulation of straight to video movies (and films of that caliber). The system is extremely simple, character creation literally takes a couple of seconds, so its easy to get characters in after player character death (we figured a lot of Schlock is high body count, so that is going to be important). The rules themselves are just a page and will appear at the start of each adventure. There are core rules that cannot be altered, but each adventure can add rules to create better genre emulation. For example, if we make a Kung Fu module, that would feature additional mechanics for martial arts (but they would still be simple in nature in order to preserve the feel of play). 

A key part of the game is a figure named Ricky Vibrato. He berates the GM in the sidebars with insulting, but good advice, and is the fictional publisher of the Schlock line. He is intended to come across a bit like the Larry Bishop character in Kill Bill Volume 2. 

The first adventure is called Burn, and it is inspired by the Deep Purple song of that name. It leans full tilt into my interest in hard rock and heavy metal. I have wanted to do something musically inspired for a very, very long time. I always throw in lots of easter eggs in games that are musical references, and occasionally it serves as inspiration for content (a lot of Ogre Gate was inspired by Dio lyrics for example), but this is the first time I've found a way to make it the foundation of the adventure. The whole adventure really is built from music. I've played guitar since I was 11 or 12 and this was a chance for me to bring some of that into the game. 

Burn is one of my favorite Deep Purple Songs. I recommend checking it out if you have never heard it (and especially paying attention to the guitar solo and organ solo in the middle), but the lyrics suggest an apocalypse where a female figure descends and lights people on fire. That seemed pretty gameable to me, it fit the Schlock concept well, so I turned it into an adventure. 

We play tested about a week ago and it went well. We are planning another playtest soon. After that I will complete my revisions and then run it myself (so far I've been functioning as a player in the playtests so I can see how other GMs handle the content first). 

The plan is to have Joel write the other adventure and we might do it as a double feature. We haven't quite decided how this is going to be released. Those details are still being worked out.

WHY STRANGE TALES?

Art by Jackie Musto 

Since Strange Tales of Songling was released in PDF yesterday, I'd like to talk about why I made this game in the first place. I only put out about one game a year or two (Bill and I made the decision to shift to a slower production schedule in order to improve quality and allow games a more natural time to develop). 

Horror is the genre that I connected to most as a gamer, and particularly as a GM. The first campaign I tried to run on my own was a Ravenloft Campaign. Knight of the Black Rose came out, piqued my interest in the setting (I had grown up on universal horror movies and hammer films), so I picked up the black boxed set and Feast of Goblyns. That was the setting that always resonated with me. And if I wasn't running Ravenloft, I was playing in a horror setting like Orrorsh.

My interest in Strange Tales started when I was working on Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. I had a number of sources of inspiration for that and one of them was Pu Songling's Tales from A Chinese Studio. This is a collection of anomaly accounts (reports of strange events) and many of its key stories are well known and been made into movies (A Chinese Ghost Story and Painted Skin being two big examples). I liked Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio because the entries were relatively brief, but provided great fodder for adventure ideas. You could sit down in the morning before a game if you didn't have anything planned, and reading a handful of the entries would quickly inspire gameable content. The stories themselves are quite compelling and span a range of styles. But many of them feature ghosts, scholars and fox spirits. 

I was so fond of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio I decided to a blog entry for every entry in the Penguin translation of the book. I chose penguin's version because I like the prose of the translation, but also because it is a condensed translation. Other versions are multiple volumes and it would have taken me a very long time had I used those. I do recommend the multi-volume translations, as you get a lot more content, but for my purposes, the Penguin edition was fine. 

Map by Francesca Baerald

I decided to have each blog entry turn one or two of the Strange Tales into material for Ogre Gate. It worked so well that I began writing a new game (which became Strange Tales of Songling). This was going to be a much simpler system with four character paths, because I felt for horror that would work better. I even timed all the character creation to make sure it wasn't taking too long because I wanted players to be able to get back into the game fast after their character died (and in horror I am a believer in character death being on the table). 

I also wanted Strange Tales to take more of a monster-of-the-week approach because I think that works well for horror games. My regular games are often sandboxes, but I tend to run horror in a different way. 

The book structure was something I wanted to approach differently as well. I decided to include four adventures in it, rather than one, and have the adventures serve as a guide for what the game is all about. Because the mechanics are simple this made it easy to devote a large section of the book to adventures (and to include a robust monster chapter). 

Working on Strange Tales was great. I had a terrific time developing the game, researching the genre and history. It was also a good excuse to watch a bunch of horror movies over and over again. I became a bit obsessed with picking up every multivolume translation of Strange Tales from the Chinese Studio I could. Because of the language barrier, I wanted to get as many different translations and explanatory footnotes as I could. 

In the end Strange Tales emulates Pu Songling, Yuan Mei and a number of movies in the genre or near to it. I kept the genre boundaries porous enough that I could also incorporate movies like Heaven and Hell or Killer Snakes as sources of inspiration. 

The book is out now. It has wonderful art and maps (Jackie Musto did the cover and interior art, and Francesca Baerald did the maps). If you like horror, if you like movies like A Chinese Ghost Story, definitely check it out: HERE. 

STRANGE TALES AVAILABLE IN PDF

Strange Tales is finally available in PDF (and will be available in print in the next month or two). You can find it HERE. 

A Horror RPG Inspired by Chinese Ghost Stories: 

Adventure in worlds haunted by fox spirits, hopping vampires and ghosts. Strange Tales is a Chinese horror RPG inspired by the supernatural accounts of Pu Songling and Yuan Mei. Players confront the supernatural as demon hunters, scholars, wandering swords and dangerous ritual masters. 

Strange Tales provides a streamlined and easy system for quick play and comes with four complete adventures. It also includes a selection of monsters based on Chinese anomaly accounts, folklore, and horror movies. The GM section provides a number of approaches with a focus on monster-of-the week style play.

STRANGE TALES PREVIEW

Strange Tales is in layout and getting ready for release. It is a Chinese horror-inspired roleplaying game, based largely on Strange Tales from the Chinese Studio (and the movies that drew on it). The system is a simple but deadly version of the one used for Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. Everything has been stripped down to its essentials, for a much more basic and fast approach. I love how the game runs and feels. The book comes with a bunch of monsters, four adventures, and a lot more. 

All of the interior illustrations are by Jackie Musto. She also did the marvelous cover art. 

Character creation is very fast and divided into Paths. You can select from Demon Hunter, Scholar, Ritual Master, and Wandering Sword. Each path has its own set of abilities it gains with each level. 

This isn't a tome like Ogre Gate though, it is leaner and meant to easily be run after an initial read (the rules chapter is only 4 pages long). 

Each character path has its own abilities. The entries are kept simple and characters don't have to worry about juggling a ton of them. These include everything from Rituals that allow for spiritual combat to amazing feats of martial arts and talismans to control hopping vampires. 

The monster chapter has tons of entries inspired by material from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio and other anomaly accounts and tales. There are also original monsters made in the spirit of the genre and monsters taken from other styles of Chinese horror (for examples movies like Killer Snakes). 

The book has four complete adventures, all with maps by Francesca Baerald. These range in style from exploration to mystery and more. 

WE ARE REVITALIZED

It has been a while. But I am learning to speak only when I have something to say. 

There will be more in depth updates soon. I can tell you that Strange Tales is in layout and just about ready for printing. So it will be out in January as expected. Most of my attention now is on the Lady 87 Campaign Sourcebook. 

In podcast news, Wuxia Weekend, Metal Workshop, Bedrock and Baulderstone, and Wuxia Workshop all have new episodes. Check them out at the Bedrock Podcast. This week on Wuxia Weekend we talked about True Legend. On B&B we discussed Kill Bill Volume 1. Jim and I complained about a list that shall not be named on Metal Workshop. And we recently discussed Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan at Wuxia Workshop. 

DARK WUXIA RPG READING: THE ELEVENTH SON PART TWO

I'm re-reading the Eleventh Son as I work with Deathblade on a new Dark Wuxia RPG. I already posted PART ONE where I discussed Chapters 1-5. Here I talk about chapter 6- 

Shen Bijun, Lian Chengbi, Xiao Shiyi Lang and Feng Siniang
From the 2016 Drama Series

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Chapter Six (The Heart of a Pretty Woman): In this chapter, Feng Siniang and Xiao Shiyi Lang go to a teahouse in Jinan, where the patrons shift their ogling from Feng to a carriage outside carrying Shen Bijun. An old man with a hunchback explains that Shen Bijun is now Mrs. Lian, having married Lan Chengbi of Flawless Manor of Gusu. She was married two years ago and has come back to Jinan to visit her family at Shen Manor. Feng and Xiao later bump into Yang Kaitai, a genteel swordsman who seems awkward with women and is clearly in love with Feng. He is also owner of Yuanji bank, and very good with money (though Feng finds him annoying an overly frugal). Feng Siniang uses his admiration for her to get him to cover their meal costs at a fancy restaurant called the Guest Pleasing Chamber. Yang says he and the other Six Ideal Gentlemen (Li Gang, Lean Chengbi, Liu Seqing, Zhu Baishui, and Xu Qingteng) were invited by Master Xu Luzi, the maker of Deer Carver, so he can give the sabre to one of them. He has yet to decide who to give it to and has two conditions: the person who gives Deer Carver to must always carry it, no matter what & they must agree to kill the world's most notorious bandit; Xiao Shiyi Lang. Xiao continues to talk with Yang, who doesn't realize he is Xiao Shiyi Lang, and learn about the fighting styles of the Six Ideal Gentlemen. Yang agrees to take them to Shen Manor. 

Chapter Seven (Awe-Inspiring Lady Shen): Xiao, Yang Kaitai and Feng all go to Shen Manor. We learn that Shen Bijun's parents were killed trying to wipe out bandits at battle of Jiayi Pass. Lady Shen, Shen Bijjun's grandmother, is now in charge of the manor and highly respected in the Wulin. Lady Shen tells people that Shen Bijun has morning sickness. Zhao tells Lady Shen that the Deer Carver was lost to Xiao Shiyi Lang. Everyone agrees that Xiao Shiyi Lang must die. Xiao departs quietly, leaving Feng behind with Yang and a note telling her to Marry Yang Kaitai. 

Chapter Eight (Hawk King's Secret): Xiao encounters injured Hawk King. Hawk King asks for help but attacks him, then flees. Xiao sees three figures in the woods come upon Hawk King's body: Hai Lingzi, Tu Xiaotian and a mystery person named Little Mister (who has the Deer Carver). Little Mister cuts off Hawk King's head and tells the others that it was Xiao Shiyi Lang's doing in an effort to frame him. Little Mister writes a poem on the tree claiming responsibility for the killing in the name of Xiao. Then he tells the others to cut out the section of tree and deliver the message to Lady Shen. It is revealed that Little Mister is working for a great master and has been tasked with obtaining the Deer Carver and abducting Shen Bijun (who Little Mister describes as the most beautiful woman in the aylin). They intend to use Xiao Shiyi Lang as bait, so he will be distracted while they go after Shen Bijun. 

Candy Wen as Little Mister (AKA Little Lord)
From the 1978 film Swordsman and the Enchantress

Chapter Nine (Beauty of Beauties): In this chapter, Little Mister tries to waylay Shen Bijun's carriage, but Xiao also arrives at the spot. Little Mister kills Shen Bijun's retinue, and Shen Bijun dramatically exits her carriage and attacks using needles. Little Mister stabs her with a poisoned boot knife and she falls asleep. Little Mister is revealed to be a woman (up to this point the character was presented as either an effeminate man or a boy) and uses this distraction to scratch Xiao's neck with poison in order to make an escape. 

Chapter Ten (A Murderous Look in the Eye): Xiao isn't harmed by the scratch after all (calling it a mere cat scratch) and goes after Little Mister, rescuing Shen Bijun and taking her to an abandoned temple. Before the rescue, Little Mister seems jealous of Shen Bijun's beauty and even on the verge of harming or killing her (for fear that her master will shift attention away from her and onto Shen Bijun). 

THOUGHTS

Chapters Six through Eight feel like the point where the plot really begins to take shape. I completely forgot how important Lady Shen is in the story. 

Deer Carver is described as a "Blade like a blue rainbow" (page 95). The poem Little Mister writes is:

Carving the deer is nothing
Compared with carving the head
Pare off everyone's head, if I can
Wound't that be a thrill!

I forgot how delightful Yang Kaitai is as a character. Gu Long does an especially good job breathing life into him and laying the ground work for he and Feng Siniang's future. 

Little Mister is also a very good villain. The way the character is described provides plenty of hints about her true nature, but cleverly done. I didn't realize Little Mister was a woman the first time I read it until the reveal and when you go back it is interesting to see the trail of hints. I also realize that in a novel, the trope in the genre of women passing as men by simply wearing different clothing makes more sense than in movies. Partly because you can see the other character's thought process (where they think she is just a boy or an effeminate man). 

Shen Bijun has a defense called Cloud Wrapping Shooting Stars (which protects her against needle attacks). 

One thing that I hadn't noticed before as much was the way the context of the story shifts and Xiao Shiyi Lang's personality feels different because of the contrast. Initially he is quite playful and seemingly carefree. He remains this way, but as it becomes clear there is a division between the more lofty and reputable members of the Wulin and the less respected characters within the broader Jianghu, this gives him a much darker shade. Much of the book is about this division, and about Xiao's inability to fend off accusations of wrong-doing because of his lower reputation (he is both lowborn and a notorious bandit, so people like the Six Ideal Gentlemen naturally assume he is guilty. 

This has given me a lot of fodder as well for thinking about wuxia RPG design. Particularly around building of the jianghu.