I've been running a dnd 5e campaign for my friends here in china that takes place during the Ming Dynasty.
While the west has tolken, canterberry tales, and whatever Appendix N material that the classic Gygaxian dnd is based on, china also has a very rich history of fantasy fiction such as Jouney to the West, Water Margin, the Classic of Tricks (骗经), and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Whenever I'm reading these there's always a great setup for an encounter in a campaign. There's poisoned yellow wine, magical chinese medicine, fornicating buddhist priests, clever battle maneuvers, bold tales of fighting monsters, etc. It's all already there in shenmo and wuxia fiction.
As students of chinese we are all familiar with these settings and themes and it goes pretty well. In our game, we had a monk that was secretly an alcohol-dependant rogue, who took on the disguise to solicit donations and sympathy. We traveled to the forest to rescue a fat fire-breathing hermit monk in the woods so he could make an NPC some of his famous hot-pot, and travelled to a town where shengshengs were being preyed on for their meat (which allows one to run faster if eaten) by a local medicine tycoon among other things. The setting fits so well with tabletop role-playing I want to write up a sourcebook and introduce this to my friends and others back home, and there's enough interest in the country nowadays in the US for an audience I think.
The problem I'm running into now is fitting this into 5e or another system. While I'm up for writing a short book that creates the setting, some monsters, and an adventure or two, but creating a whole new system would be a lot of work. The races have no map to Chinese mythology, the classes have a little connection but needs work (druids - daoist priests, paladins - fighting for a court, monk - typical wuxia wukong sort of thing, fighters/rangers - martial classes, warlocks - channeling ancestors Confucian-style?, etc.) The combat rules and spells seem OK, but messing around with the classes/races would be difficult.
So I want to know from you guys (especially since the other chan's tg won't let me post on the china ip range or behind by vpns) if you have any thoughts? Is there any ePost too long. Click here to view the full text.
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