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. 

VENGEANCE OF A SNOWGIRL REVIEW

Vengeance of a Showgirl is a 1971 Lo Wei film, starring Li Ching and Yueh Hua. It is a very interesting movie. The protagonist is consumed with plans to avenge the killing of her parents in an attack that left her legs disabled. She is practically a villain at the start of the film, and the movie follows her path to redemption after she falls in love with the son of a man involved in the attack on her family. The opening sequence sees her stalking the halls of her enemies like a ghost, taking pleasure in killing and taunting her enemies. As the love story becomes the focus, she goes an adventure with her lover to restore her legs, but must travail fire and ice to do so. It is a film with tremendous scope and one I highly recommend. The sets are gorgeous, the story is solid and the sets are magnificent. You can see more of my thoughts on it at easternKicks HERE. Be sure to check out my other reviews there as well. 

THE TATTOOED DRAGON REVIEW

I am on a Jimmy Wang Yu kick. Check out my review of The Tattooed Dragon at easternKicks. It is a 1973 film directed by Lo Wei. In it Jimmy Wang Yu plays a mysterious hero who helps villagers that have been exploited by a shady gambling hall. You can also see my recent review of another Lo Wei film starring Jimmy Wang Yu, A Man Called Tiger, here on the blog. 

Jimmy Wang Yu rose to fame in Chang Cheh's One Armed Swordsman. He also starred in a number of great Shaw Brother productions like the Temple of the Red Lotus trilogy, The Assassin and The Chinese Boxer (the latter he also directed). He left Shaws and had a long career as an actor and director. A Man Called Tiger and The Tattooed Dragon are examples of films he starred in with Golden Harvest. He also starred and directed in other Golden Harvest films like One-Armed Boxer. And made several moves with other production companies like Master of the Flying Guillotine. 

A MAN CALLED TIGER REVIEW

This is a casual review of the Lo Wei Film, A Man Called Tiger, released in 1973 and starring Jimmy Wang Yu. For this review I watched the Eureka Blu-ray version that contained the restored uncut original Hong Kong release (more on this later) and the shorter version that has been more commonly available. It is loaded with extras as well and I might do review focused on those if I have time. 

Jimmy Wang Yu is always entertaining. He often plays men who are tough, prickly and driven by a singular focus. Watching him on screen, you almost get the feeling that he doesn't like you very much or is even contemplating punching you in the face. And while he isn't a martial artist in the cast of Bruce Lee, and his movements sometimes lack precision, he brings a powerful presence to all of his action scenes. If you doubt this, watch him in the 2011 film Wu Xia, where even as an old man, he seems as dangerous as a lightning storm. 

There are two versions of A Man Called Tiger on the Eureka Blu-ray and my advice is to watch both. I think the opening of the original international cut, which is shorter, actually works a little better and ties together with the end well, but the restored original Hong Kong release, provides more context and character development. A number of scenes don't make it into the former version. But the international cut has a real kinetic flow to it, and is an easy watch as it only clocks in at about 80 minutes.

The martial arts direction was done by Han Ying-Chieh, who also stars in the movie as Lin Mu-Lang, the number two to Boss Shimizu who gets pushed aside in favor of Jin Hu. Ying-Chieh is a solid martial arts director. Just to name a few of his better known movies, he served in that role on Come Drink with Me, A Touch of Zen, The Big Boss and Fist of Fury. Here the combination of his style and Jimmy Wang Yu delivers. There is a real sense of trembling shock to the punches, and the fights never lose clarity or feel confusing. And there are some wonderful set-pieces, like a fight in an aerial lift. 

As I said in the introduction, Jimmy Wang Yu wasn't a martial artist like Bruce Lee. And people will often note this in reviews. I've noted it myself, but I think it can be unfair to compare him to Bruce Lee when there were so many actors in this genre who similarly came from more of an acting background and weren't dedicated martial artists. What makes Jimmy Wang Yu exciting in a fight is the explosiveness of his movements, the sense that he is unleashing barely contained rage and the ferocious expressions and poses. There is a quivering quality to his movements that makes him feel unpredictable and savage. His kicks might not be perfect his whole body is alive with agitation when he lands them. And he has a real sense of brawling in his fights. And it should be noted that Jimmy Wang Yu essentially started the Kung Fu blueprint that was later employed in films like Fist of Fury. 

In 1970, he directed and starred in the Chinese Boxer and many people consider this ground zero for the shift away from swordplay towards unarmed fighting in movies like King Boxer and The Big Boss. That he directed it is notable because it is his vision, and the DNA of that movie is present in many of the Kung Fu craze films that came after it. Many of the main tropes begin there. And like Lee or Cheng Pei-Pei, he is the kind of actor whose name on a movie will draw fans regardless. You track down Jimmy Wang Yu movies the way you track down Clint Eastwood, Michelle Yeoh or Arnold movies. 

In A Man Called Tiger, its balls to the wall Jimmy Wang Yu. There is plenty of story but the fights are ample, and have tremendous variety from a tussle with guys on motorcycles to the aforementioned aerial lift and a showdown with axe wielding gangsters in a private gambling tournament. And in the original Hong Kong cut there is a stellar opening montage of fights as well. 

A Man Called Tiger was a script originally intended for Bruce Lee, as Lo Wei had previously directed The Big Boss and Fist of Fury. But they had a creative falling out and Wei reworked the script. It seems like the final result was quite different from the screenplay intended for Lee. 

In A Man Called Tiger, Jimmy Wang Yu's thorny traits are on full display. He plays a man who infiltrates the Yakuza in Japan to learn who killed his father. Once inside the organization, he embraces his role as gangster, helping the boss regain lost territory, extorting local businesses, and even enforcing the mob's will against a fellow student of his father. 

There is also drama to carry the fights. It isn't as laden down with plot as a movie like The Tattooed Dragon. That is also a good movie but here the balance of story and action is better. The surrounding characters all add something to the movie too. He meets a number of people on his path to revenge, mostly women, and all of their narratives come together in the end.

Also this coming together of threads, provides plenty of stakes in the climax. Because we have all these women he has different types of relationships with, and at least half of them are have fathers somehow involved in the tournament, there is a real sense of peril and cost when things go down. I also just liked the individual characters and people who played them in the film. It is all fairly simple but it works, which I think is a Lo Wei hallmark.  

There is also something stylish about A Man Called Tiger. Plenty of movies from the 70s have a sense of style. Here it's perfect. Jimmy Wang Yu extorting money in a checkered suit just feels right. And the Japanese setting is also a nice change of pace.  

If you haven't seen it, definitely check out A Man Called Tiger. And if you can obtain it, I recommend the Eureka Blu-ray.