Wuxia
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Recently my new playgroup asked me to run a high fantasy, over the top Wuxia game for them. I've been pretty detached from the genre outside of the first 2 Kung Fu Panda movies, so I have no idea what I'm getting in to. My understanding basically revolves around famous dojos, animal themed martial arts, ancient techniques, long moustaches, and a golden emperor of the land of heaven. My playgroup is five people, and I'm having trouble coming up with different encounters and plot hooks, and really nailing the theme and setting. Any advice would be appreciated.
>>47352192
Legends of the Wulin or Weapons of the Gods might work, OP. Good luck with it.
Legends of the Wulin is literally built for this, and it does a damn great job once you get past the unnecessarily steep learning curve. The system is fantastic, but the editing of the book is so bad it can be hard to figure out.
When it comes to general Wuxia theme and tone, it has a lot of advice, references and recommendations for GMs, as does Weapons of the Gods. Even if you don't use the systems, they're well worth looking at for ideas.
Also interested in Wuxia. Can you recommend a few films/shows to get me started?
>>47353337
The Forbidden Kingdom(2008) is a retelling of one of the most famous Wuxia stories and features Jackie Chan and Jet Li. It's not bad, serves as an okay intro to the genre. It's also on Netflix.
Create kung-fu versions of classic fairy tails.
Such as which is the better martial art? Tortoise-style or Rabbit-style?
If your game is high-fantasy, perhaps the more one masters a martial art, the more that they begin to resemble the school's namesake.
Now you have kung-fu lycanthropes of any species/style.
>>47353534
>kung-fu versions of classic fairy tails
So.. samurai Erza?
A drunken monk who spits fire Natsu?
Now.. if we were to go after the kung-fu version of fairy tales.. That might be different
>>47352192
Wuxia keeps itself very separate from proper society. Except to punsh the most heinous and foul crimes, Wuxia and governments do not work together. Think of it as a layer of Wild West simmering below the surface of society, where justice and retribution is meted out on an individual basis rather than through courts and judges.
>>47360584
The LotW book actually explains this well, describing it as two different worlds that just happen to overlap geographically, but were still treated as completely different places. The Shan Li, or Mountains and Forests, is the world of ordinary people, of social order and the rules of society. The Jiang Hu, the Rivers and Lakes, things are much less structured, where power is measured by your will and personal strength rather than your position in society, where people break out from their cultural strata and beggars might mix with nobles if they walk the same path.
