Wednesday, May 27, 2015

WUXIA IN GAMANDRIA

While Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate is focused entirely on wuxia, there are elements of it present in Sertorius as well. We were influenced by a range of martial arts movies when designing the Gamandrian setting. This included classic wuxia like Come Drink With Me and The Bride With White Hair; newer wuxia films like House of Flying Daggers and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate Inn; martial arts fantasy movies like Painted Skin; and Thai films like Ong Bak 2. If you look at places in the setting like Phra Goa or Khata you can definitely see traces of this (The Monks of Isharna for example are inspired by Madame White Snake). Even a few of the spells are meant to lightly emulate the wuxia genre (Dancing Steel and Flying Steel for example). 

Illustration by Jackie Musto
from the Sertorius Rulebook
Gamandria is a big world though and wuxia, while influential, was a small part of a much larger foundation of influences. One of the reasons I wanted to do Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate in the first place was to make full wuxia campaign possible in Sertorius. This is why it was originally going to be a book of new spells inspired by martial arts movies (in Sertorius a lot of spells enhance your combat abilities, so it was certainly doable). However the more I worked on it the more I wanted to do a complete wuxia game and setting on its own. So the project evolved into something else, connected to the Sertorius cosmology but very much its own thing. 

Still I plan on including a section in the appendix explaining how to use the Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate rules in Sertorius. Right now we have three methods and we are trying to refine them a bit. 

The first option is to add Martial Heroes to the setting as distinct character types. This means that players can choose to be a Martial Hero, a Sertori, an Ogre or a Mundane at character creation. Martial Heroes exist alongside Sertori as an option in this method. This does require some flexing of the setting assumptions but mechanically works fine (though you do need to adjust the Sertori as well to make things smooth). 

The second option simply treats the Kung Fu Techniques as spells available to normal Sertori. This is probably the easiest one to implement, requiring the least amount of changes. 

The third option makes it possible for Sertori to learn Kung Fu Techniques in addition to their normal magic. This one makes the most sense for the setting. Qi energy in Wandering Heroes is the same substance that gives Sertori their powers, but it operates very differently in Gamandria. In Wandering Heroes, Qi flows through everything, it is unbound. In Gamandria it is contained in Sertori. This means it makes a lot more sense for Sertori to be the ones who can master Qi based Kung Fu techniques in the Gamandrian setting. 

We are still reviewing these adaptation and need to test them out so they are subject to change.



2 comments:

  1. I think the biggest problem is that a fully "leveled" Martial Hero would seem to have far more Wounds than a fully leveled Sertori, so I'd assume new rules would have to apply to Wounds in the third option. It seems easier to just call Martial Heroes Sertori!

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  2. That is definitely a big difference that comes up. We did that for option one because side by side, the martial heroes would start to overshadow the Sertori with wounds. But we haven't yet for option three (still looking into other possibilities there). The big issue it creates with #3 is Sertori with certain Kung Fu Techniques might be doing damage on the 1-12 scale rather than the 1-6. Scaling the Sertori health in this method is one possible option. Eliminating the techniques that do that much damage another. A third possibility is to allow it.

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