THE LADY HERMIT REVIEW

I have a new review of The Lady Hermit HERE at easternKicks. The Lady Hermit is one of my favorite movies. We've covered it on the podcast, I have covered it here, and I talk about it in Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. It is a great Cheng-Pei Pei movie, and a wonderful Ho Meng-Hua film. There is so much in it that echoes in later wuxia, and it has a truly satisfying story, filled with great fight choreography and performances. It also marks the end of an era, because this is Cheng Pei-Pei's final swordplay performance at Shaw Brothers before her first retirement (she would however return to make movies later in the 70s for other production companies). This review is part of a series of reviews for Imprint Asia releases I am doing at easternKicks. The first is for The Lady Hermit, and the next one is The 14 Amazons. I have a lot of thoughts on both. I hope you enjoy this piece on The Lady Hermit. 

THE BLACK BUTTERFLY

I have a new review up at easternKicks of The Black Butterfly. This was a very interesting Lo Wei film, with a very classic feel. It stars Lisa Chiao Chiao as the titular character who robs from the rich to give to the poor and prioritizes story and characters. There is still plenty of action, but it is placed patiently, where it needs to be, throughout the film. The result is a captivating tale of intrigue that gets into themes of family and loyalty. It is also one of the more optimistic and fun wuxia films I have seen in a while. I loved the sets and thought Lisa Chiao Chiao was great as the lead character. There are also lots of things in this movie, that people might recognize in later wuxia films. You can read it HERE. You can also see my review of another Lo Wei film, Vengeance of a Snowgirl, HERE. Look for my upcoming review of Death Valley as well. 

ALL HAIL WEB OF DEATH

I have a review of The Web of Death up at easternKicks HERE. It actually was posted in July but I forgot to mention it to my readers on the blog (Hopefully I will start posting links to the easternKicks reviews in the sidebar to make them easy for readers to find). I realized recently that I did not have an actual written review or post on the blog about The Web of Death. While I have done a video review and covered it on the podcast, there isn't a wuxia inspiration entry on the blog. It is an interesting oversight because it is a film that has had such a profound impact on how I run Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate, and it always gets a very positive response when I share it with anyone. I wrote the review for easternKicks after watching it with a friend as part of a double feature that included Come Drink with Me, the aim of which was to give him exposure to the classic era of wuxia movies. The Web of Death got a resounding response and so I decided to finally write about the movie. It is a great Chor Yuen film, released the same year as Killer Clans in 1976. Definitely worth checking out. Read the review to see my full thoughts on it. 

WANDERING HERO ENCOUNTERS

I have been working on a small supplement for Zhang Chang prefecture in Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. This is more of a horror themed region and will put greater emphasis supernatural elements than the Sons of Lady 87 Book. I also want to connect it to the Bride of Liao Manor adventure I am working on (which was originally written for Strange Tales of Songling, but will include WHOG conversions). One concept I developed that will appear in the supplement, mostly in response to players becoming more villainous, is the Wandering Hero Encounter. I want to share this here because I think it will be useful in general to Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate gamemasters. 

I am most likely going to release this supplement on the blog. I was originally going to have it be one of my small 30-page PDFs, but it is simply impossible to flesh out a region like that in under 30 pages. If I can find another way to get it in print or PDF I will, but in the mean time, the plan is to make it a blog entry like the War of Swarming Beggars. 

Here is the wandering hero encounter: 

WANDERING HERO ENCOUNTERS

When characters perform misdeeds such as attacking or robbing the wea or bullying the local population, they should make a Survival Roll TN 7 to avoid an encounter with a wandering hero or band of wandering heroes. These are figures, almost reaching the status of legend who roam and use their martial arts to protect the weak from the strong. While this encounter type is being introduced in the present supplement, it is a new concept in WHOG that can be applied to all regions and campaigns. It emerged the more I ran campaigns where players shifted towards dark and evil characters. There is nothing wrong with player characters going down this path, but it opens the door to them being villains and threatened by heroes. 

DUEL FOR GOLD REVIEW

I recently reviewed one of my favorites Chor Yuen movies, Duel for Gold, over at easternKicks. I am very excited about this review because Duel for Gold has been so hard to find in recent years. But it is now presently available in in Blu-ray in the Shaw Brothers Classics Volume 6. I am hoping this means it will be available for individual purchase in the near future (boxed set are great, but pricey and I think this is a classic film that really stands on its own). What is great about Duel for Gold is it is a kind of wuxia heist film, where the characters are almost all terrible people at each other's throats over the score. Like The Black Tavern, it will remind people of The Hateful Eight, but also Goodfellas. It has a great cast that includes Lo Lieh, Ivy Ling Po and Wang Ping, and has plenty of gruesome action. For me Duel for Gold is one of those wuxia movies that breaks out of the genre and feels more timeless. You can check out my review of it HERE. 

WUXIA DESIGN: SECT HEADQUARTERS DEFENSES

I was watching the film The Black Butterfly recently and in that movie, Lisa Chiao Chiao plays a masked heroine who robs from the rich and gives to the poor. She finds herself, along with her father and a local official named Xi Lang, plunged into a conflict with the Five Devils after stealing treasure from one of their vaults. When the Five Devils steal an official stamp from the court that Xi Lang is attached to, they must sneak into Five Devils Rock to find it. But Five Devils Rock is is littered with traps and has well planned defenses. One character falls victim to a pit trap slide that drops him into a chamber filled with water, another is caught in a cage trap as he tries to take the stamp from a rope suspended on the ceiling. And when they make full their attack against Five Devils Rock, they must pass through several gates, each one with men in organized formation ready to deal with attackers. 

This got me thinking about sects in Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate and how headquarters can utilize different defenses. These sorts of features are very common in wuxia, particularly wuxia from the period when Black Butterfly was released (it came out in 1968). So they are perfectly at home in a wuxia RPG.

I have been working on a sect building and management book, a small PDF that will probably be thirty pages, and it includes a number of tools for making the GM and players lives easier on this front. One of my frustrations when I run a wuxia campaign, is sects can be difficult book keeping. When players start a sect of their own, you have to track funds, projects, etc. I am trying to come up with a a way to make this simpler to handle. I am also trying to develop a method for building up a sect that can abstract some of the more granular elements which make book keeping such a challenge. I will get into that process in a later post, but today I want to talk about headquarters and defenses. 

Players always like building defenses in my experience. And they can be very inventive as well. I am accustomed to making rulings on this matter. However I realize that having a formal system in place can be very helpful. I don't see it as a requirement but I do see it as something that will enable some groups to better manage this aspect of play. So in the sect management book, I am including sect stat blocks that have space for "Defenses", and these can be modified in a variety of ways (the default approach is to have sect defenses that are a d10 dice pool from 0d10 to 6d10). I am experimenting with having this be layered as well. So an assassin trying to enter the sect headquarters and reach the master, if that HQ has three layers of defenses at 2d10, 1d10 and 0d10, would have to make three rolls, one against each layer. If they succeed, they would reach their intended target (once they reach the target, that would need to be resolved as a regular combat or, if it something happening far from the players and the GM wants to keep things moving, with an opposed roll between both sides, which typically would be dice pools based on Qi rank). 

The defense system is meant to be loose, but as a baseline we are taking certain types of headquarters and assigning them default Defense ratings. For example, a courtyard house has a base defense of 1d10 (and if you are building a sect using the sect building system would cost 6 points). A temple has 4d10 (temple is an HQ we have had many debates about because they can take so many forms). And a temple costs 18 points. These can always be built up as projects. And the numbers here are very early in development. They will likely change as we do more playtests, but this gives the general idea. 

I also want to be able to capture elements like the pit trap and cage trap I mentioned. And one idea we are toying with is using them as a modifier. So if the player puts a cage trap in their bedroom, and the sect HQ has a Defense Rating of 2d10, this might be expressed as Defense Rating 2d10 or 3d10 against Theft and Assassination. So it functions similar to an expertise in the Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate skill system. Another possibility is keying the modifier to a particular layer of the defenses (perhaps the cage trap modifier only kicks in on the third layer, as that represents the inner chambers of the sect). 

One thing to keep in mind is this stuff is not generally for things happening on the ground. If players sneak into a sect HQ the expectation is you play that out normally. But if the players have a squad of thieves and want to send them into a rival sect's HQ, the GM would assign them a dice pool value, for example 3d10, and this would be rolled against the opposing Sect's Defense Rating to see if they succeed. 

Again this is all quite early. We are play testing it pretty rigorously which has meant we make incremental tweaks each session as we find issues in the system. We are also providing many different methods for resolving sect conflict to choose from (and so part of the trick is ensuring all these different methods still connect with the core sect stat block and building method). As we work on it more, I will post updates.