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What's the best system for running an oriental campaign?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanman
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I ran one of the oriental adventures modules in 5e, it worked out pretty well. Aside from a party member being killed by a ninja.

Is there much oriental 5e support yet? Vanilla 5e seems like it would really be the wrong flavour for that kind of adventure.

depends on what king of oriental campaign you want to run. That depends on setting and theme. To me most important thin is that my players or me as a player can feel the setting atmosphere. There is nothing worse than playing different settings or systems and just playing the same type of story. Don't know if this will help you but if you are looking for oriental inspiration these are some rpg books

There is:
legend of five rings - AEG and d20
forgotten realms - oriental adventures Kara-Tur - china, japan, mongolia, tibet etc inspired countries
legend of wulin
GURPS sourcebooks about japan, china etc.

Feng Shui

Tokyo Black, of course!

I mean, when it comes to fantasy adventures in an oriental setting (from a western perspective), getting killed by a ninja seems like just an occupational hazard if not so common as to be considered a natural cause of death.

Not really but items and classes and lore fluff can always be refluffed. I think in my opinion pick a game system that you are comfortable with and refluff a lot of the items like Spear into Yari or Longsword into Katana.

Oriental adventures acualy seems really weird class wise since it just treats all of Asia as one country. Why is Samurai the fighter equivalent, where are our Chinese foot soldier class? It seems like a missed opportunity to design a fighter class with a few gunpowder weapon abilities splashed in since China was using them in warfare since the Song Dynasty.

F.A.T.A.L.

Dude, you have no idea how bad the ninja infestation is. Shake a tree and ten ninjas come flying out. Thankfully, they're easy to kill in groups larger than 5. It's the solitary ones you have to look out for.

Qin the warring states is great.

Please don't listen to this person. Every time somebody forces D&D to do things other systems do better a piece of the earths soul turns to rot and suffering.

pls no

FATAL if your campaign is to be judged by the pic you posted

L5R, really is the best system for it.

What's the best system for running a European campaign?

MYFAROG

Mostly if you like samurai intrigue, sure.

Not really a fan of L5R combat.

Probably Legend of the Five Rings.

Pendragon.

Refluffed D&D4

Do you mean Japan or like, genuinely oriental?
It actually doesn't.
Everyone in Faerun THINKS it's one country but it's actually quite a few.
The actual problem is that in most cases they just lift up actual periods of Far East history and drop them next to each other with relatively few changes rather then try to draw from different sources. Half of the time they even use historical names of the countries.
There's TWO separate Japan's for instance, one for the Sengoku Period and another for the Edo Period immediately afterwords.

Genuinely oriental. While I wouldn't mind running a Japanes campaign inspired by James Calvell's Shogun, if my group ran straight Japan there's no way it wouldn't immediately fall into pure weeaboo territory.

>Genuinely oriental.
L 5 R
5
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Then yeah, rules aside D&D's Kara-Tur setting is pretty multi-cultural Asian and actually even explores different time periods within the same country when it was different enough to matter.
Probably would work best with 2e or 5e though, 3e and 4e lack a lot of the flavor flexibility in favor of giving everything hard rules and selling more splat books.
Speaking as someone who's parents are not native English speakers and who has relatives STILL IN Japan, L5R is Japan, straight-up.
Japan filtered through an idealized and very Generation X-ish storytelling mindset (thanks for that Wick) and a failure to understand the cultural underpinnings and then most of the fantasy elements resembling more LotR rather then actual Japanese mythology, but there's barely anything of China or Korea or Vietnam or anything other then Japan in there.

Maybe I'm just biased because I've only ever read the 3e support for oriental adventures. I'll give the setting and the 2e support a glance over along with Qin and L5R.

The 3e stuff is L5R's Rokugan setting.

>Probably would work best with 2e or 5e though, 3e and 4e lack a lot of the flavor flexibility in favor of giving everything hard rules and selling more splat books.

4e is a very reflavorable thing. Heck the DMG does a lot talking about doing that for PCs and monsters alike.

L5R is only partially influenced by Japan. Rokugan itself is very clearly China, and their colony is obviously India. Some of the clans are more Japanese than others, and in some time periods the political system is more like China's than Japan's.

"Not including" Korea in a fantasy Asia is like "not including" Brandenburg in fantasy Europe. Its most distinct feature was its status as an actual kingdom, but it was still a vassal of China which parroted Chinese culture and religion.

Vietnam is not part of NE Asia, but I believe one of the minor clans who fight with Crabs are supposed to represent the jungle barbarians of SW China.

4e is easy to flavour because it's just rice. Most of the power descriptions are incerdibly vague about what your character is actually doing and what the effects look like. You're just throwing numbers st other numbers.

There were jungle barbarians in china?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanman

I can't tell if you're saying that's a bad thing or the opposite

>What's the best system for running an oriental campaign?

The system you're most comfortable with, obviously.

That's because describing what makes it good for reflavouring makes it sound plain by itself. If rice had a flavour it wouldn't go with damn near anything, but if I just served you rice it would leave something to be desired.