Sword World & What Is An RPG?

 So this ad for the English edition of Sword World has been slamming my Facebook:

What is best in business?
To crush Backerkit,
 to see other FRPGs driven before you,
 and to hear the lamentations of gamer wallets.

Just like the Seven Part Pact, this really stretches the definition of what an RPG is. The ad picture has books, a book case, cards, special dice with trays, art prints, and plushies. It seems to be 50/50 playable game and art collection.

To be fair, if anyone can do it with the right attention to detail, it is Japanese creators.

But the whole 'kitchen sink' approach to crowdfunded RPGs has got me thinking - what exactly IS an RPG?

Let's do a little flashback.

RPGs At The Start of the Hobby

All you got were a book and some dice. This is the bare minimum of what you need.

Then came minis, useful but not necessary. This was followed by gameboards and dice towers. As these extensions proliferated, gameplay became more like a boardgame, with smaller battlefields and a higher financial buy in. Roll20 has brought all this online, saving your shelfspace but not your pocket book.

The big difference for me is, back in the day, we bought a game to PLAY it, not just COLLECT it. More and more games are collector's items, and the Seven Part Pact makes you wonder is it even playable? Could you figure it out, and could you get 6 people together for enough time to give it a fair shake?

I dunno.

I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, but my platonic RPG ideal is gamebook + dice, pencil, paper, Pringles and let's roll.

What Is Sword World Like?

I had Sword World 1.0 and 2.0 in Japanese. It reads like a math text. You roll 2D6 plus mods (from classes that act like skills if I recall), then refer to a Results Table so long you had to unfold it.

I had 2.0. They doubled the artwork (including cute rabbit characters), but still very mathey.

Aside from the charts, it is no worse than say Barbarians of Lemuria.

Is It Worth It?

If you have money and shelf space, why not? I'll be giving it a pass, might just pick up 2.0 again next time I visit Japan. Second hand shops are lined with them.

Is it playable?

Japanese people I knew played it for years and liked it better than D&D, which has always trailed behind Call of Cthulhu in Japan. Is this pride in a homegrown RPG, or is it really better? From the art and what I recall of the rulebooks I read, it is closer to Final Fantasy with mechs and artificers, so seems to have popular appeal.

But honestly I dunno.

The FRPG space is totally flooded with competing and indistinguishable games, and has been since the OSR started. Maybe this is the shake up it needs.

I'm Alive & Three Things

Hello all,

I am alive. Reduce salt, avoid those kidney stones gentlemen. Mine was an 11mm banger, needed explosives to clear my pipes.

In intense pain but still voted

Anyhow...

1) Review of the Skraeling Tree

I had this written up ages ago but may have deleted it during my deliriums.

TLDR review:

The Good - More Elric! He doesn't do much, but good to hear his insights on dream couches and other lives lived on them. Reminds me of how the throw away reference to the Clone Wars ballooned into its own saga.

The Bad - Not bad per se but a big swing by MM that doesn't always pay off. First, there is the tripartite structure, starting with Oona as protagonist, then switching to Elric, then to von Bek. There is no sense of urgency or danger in any of it, and of course Elric outshines the other voices. Also, the revelation that Melniboneans are related to real dragons is a bit ho hum Mary Sue, although I can see it as a counterpoint to their devolution to Oleb in the books. Richard Miller has hinted at incorporating this into the new Stormbringer game, so we will see what he makes of it.

The Ugly - As an Indigenous artist in residence, the depictions of indigenous people kept hammering me as all flat or just wrong. I understand that Moorcock was pulling an Alain Moore and using literary indigenous figures, such as Longfellow's Hiawatha, and not depicting 'real' indigenous peoples. But making young Elric into White Crow as an equal to Hiawatha, having the baddies insect-related indigenous who kidnap Von Bek, and the mystical mumbo jumbo talk just seems to be playing with tropes best left alone.

2) NUNA Developments

NUNA final rules are coming along. Characters are MUCH more robust than vanilla BRP characters, probably closer to Cthulhu Pulp which I have glanced at. For example, Hit Points are CON + SIZ, and all characters have Cultural Abilities that don't require rolls to work. This fits the post apocalyptic Arctic survival vibe so next round of playtests should be fun.

3) Don't Tell Your Dreams

Lots of pipedreams in the works - a better job to support the work, some travel. As soon as it becomes reality I will let you know.

Nuna Art Test

 

GREAT Horror Writing Advice

 Right HERE

Real life update

I have never felt this sick in my life

On the plus side, a laser destroyed a stone deep inside of me so it was kind of like playing asteroids while asleep

I have a shelf full of opioids covered with warnings that I’m too scared to use and now I see why there is an opioid crisis

Another plus side, Canada‘s bill 37, Or as we like to call it rape the land bill, puts the Canadian government in the running for the big bads of Nuna

Back to sleep

Oh wait my son just stogged the toilet back to work

Blog Hiatus Incoming

Hi all,

Between the new job, raising sonny, and a sudden health emergency (11 mm kidney stone), I will be tapping out of this blog for a while to recuperate and work on NUNA.

Take care

Avoiding Orientalist Adventures

So, I lived in Japan 22 years, mastered the language, published research about Japanese culture, and learned to navigate their social rules enough to get a position as a tenured professor teaching Japanese Society & Culture classes.

You can believe me when I say most Japan-themed roleplaying misses the mark in depicting Japan. When I first started this blog over a decade in Japan, I wrote a series of blogposts on this subject called The Weird in Mystic Japan that became a 'hit' on Reddit and garnered me my first monster viewer number, over 5000 for the first installment.

(You can jump to Part One, Two, Three, Four, and Five here).

Although I am proud of those posts, they were ways to adapt Japan to AD&D in a satisfying way (to me). Ultimately, they are still 'D&D in funny hats', so for people wanting to make their Japan based game more authentic on a deeper level, here are a few suggestions.

1 READ THESE

Although it is fun to read Lustbader novels and watch movies with ninjas, the large majority of it is derivative and an exaggerated, fictionalized Japan. The following works will give you a more grounded view of Japan.

The Idea of Japan by Ian Littlewood. No other book peels away the layers of western (mis)conceptions of Japan and identifies all the tropes mapped onto Japan in response to world events (WWII, postwar slump, Bubble economy). This book is the first step in stripping away the western prejudices and Orientalist images you may have picked up from pop culture depictions of Japan.

Musashi's Book of Five Rings: The Definitive Interpretation of Miyamoto Musashi's Classic Book of Strategy translated by Stephen Kaufman. I have read early versions of the Book, but always found them short, almost unfinished. Kaufman's work builds on recent scholarship to provide the most complete text plus a few other of Musashi's lesser known works. He also debunks the samurai as national identity myth that started in the Edo period, was used during the war, and continues to this day. If you want to inject the true spirit of swordsmen into your game, this is essential reading.

Daibosatsu Toge (The Great Buddha Pass) - English versions of the first three books are available on the U Washington server HERE. This is the quintessential fictional representation of Edo samurai, as written by a Japanese watching his country slide into nationalism and militarism. It was serialized in newspapers from 1913 to 1944, and is the bedrock of samurai fiction. The books contain TONS of adaptable material, from sudden murders, to ninja-like thieves, lost children, dishonest merchants, physically strong but good hearted simpletons, etcetera, and you will be nodding your head as you encounter the originals that inspired everything up to Blue Eyed Samurai.

2 WATCH THESE

Although I have some fantasical suggestions such as Dororo a few years back, here are some more nitty gritty depictions of Edo Japan.

Sword of Doom - I am cheating a bit as this is a film version of Daibosatsu Toge above. But Sword of Doom is an electric, violent 1966 film starring Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune. Akira Kurosawa reportedly called The Sword of Doom (1966) the darkest and most psychologically complex samurai film ever made. There were two other serviceable films made from Daibosatsu Toge, but Sword of Doom is a special experience that shows the brutal truth about Japanese swordsmen.

47 Ronin - The story of 47 samurai who sacrifice their lives to get vengeance on the crafty Lord Kira whose taunts caused their beloved master Asano to draw his sword before the Diamyo and be forced to commit seppuku. The 1941 Kenji Mizoguchi is an expansive version (it has been remade many times on stage and screen), and Mizoguchi was filming at the height of Japan's wartime samurai fetish, so it really encapsulates that uniquely Japanese prioritizing of duty over humanity. Over 3 hours long, possibly on YouTube (cough cough).

Ballad of Narayama - 1983 film by Showhei Imamura, detailing the lives of mountain farmers who must make cruel life and death decisions for their village to survive. One of the two films that inspired me to go live in Japan (the other was Tanpopo). A must watch for capturing that desperate sense of being caught in Japan's vertical society and ironclad traditions.

Jidai Geki (Historical dramas) - There are a TON of these out there, from the Golden Age of the 60s in 70s with names like Mito Komon (1969) and Ooka Echizen (1970). The Hissatsu series with its myriad of spinoffs is probably the most useful for RPGs, as it shows a group of Edo citizens from various ranks working together to right a wrong or solve a mystery. Watch it to understand the invisible walls of Japanese social interaction, but also be inspired by 100s of eminently stealable plot points. There is a Jidai Geki channel on YouTube that has many of these. 

3 GET GIRI-NINJO

My game Giri-Minjou (義理人情 or Duty & Humanity) is a rules light, storytelling game of being Edo period Japanese trapped in a rigid vertical society. Coming out next year.