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.