Why aren't there more settings in or based on China?

I'd do it if good sources on their arms, armor, and day to day society were available in English.

If anyone has such things, can you please point me to them?

Censorship, probably.
Also, a major portion of chinese games are stolen western games. Literally, assets and all. Tencent has a TF2 clone that was literally built from TF2's files. which has the added benefit of making chinese citizens who encounter western games think the west is copying them.

medieval europe sucked dick. It was a bunch of barbarians living in squalor among the ruins of the roman empire. It's called the dark ages for a reason.

So China is the reason there is no Ancient China based Tabletop Game? It falls upon another country to bring this setting to life?

If the Metal Gear franchise can perfectly capture the essence of America I have faith this can be done. Only issue is that not a whole lot of people are even aware of Ancient China, it be a niche market in an already niche market.

...

They probably respect their own history too much and don't want to mess with it. It's different from Americans whose portrait of the Middle Ages is the most lighthearted and theme park version possible.

Because China is too busy copying everybody else's shit to write their own campaign setting.

Being on this website, we can assume we all have plenty of exposure to Japanese culture. Maybe not a terribly deep or broad one, but at least enough to make dank maymays about. We just don't have nearly as much exposure to Chinese stuff. For example, I know the silly Japanese video game version of Lu Bu rather than the Chinese popular culture's version.

Yeah. Modern China hates the existence of anything before Mao. Except when they need easy nationalist pride distractions, then it's all 'China has great traditions'.

Just don't forget that the party is what really makes China great, not the long history and amazing bureaucratic system that held it all together and curbed corruption better than any other system in history. That's not saying too much, but still.

Pictured here; the last emperor. he died in obscurity as a gardener with no children. His mother was bribed 1700lb of silver to sign abdicating papers on his behalf.

The Chinese government is currently engaged in falsifying and modifying the last few thousand years of Chinese history for ideological and economic reasons. If you want a theme park history, go see the Great Wall.

This is the wrongest possible post you could ever make. Everything about it is wrong. You're the new mayor of Wrong Town.

It is true, however, that Americans corrupt everything they touch.

I honestly sneak in a lot of references to Chinese history into fantasy or extreme sci-fi settings.

Gormenghast is a great fantasy series that did exactly this by the way. It's basically just a rip off of the motif of the Forbidden City, at least at first.

After watching a bunch of historical dramas from Hong Kong, I'd love to run a short game where the PC's play as eunuchs in the Imperial Palace. Their goal will be to ruin everything for everyone forever, but they have to do it before the Emperor's mother and/or uncle does it first! Seriously, eunuchs and the Emperor's relatives are always suspect.

>Gormenghast is a great fantasy series
Gormenghast is not a fantasy series, its just Gothic Romance.

Tomato, tomato. My point still stands either way.

Korea is better. Best admiral, best ships, best court, best writing, best Samsung

>post apocalypse scenarios aren't cool
What

Can I lean more about chinese heavy calv/knights/lancers/whatever the fuck that guy is

As awesome as having a China/Mongolia based game would be, I'm burnt on gaming for a while.

>Gormenghast is not fantasy

Do you not realize how colossal that house is? There are entire fortresses that are smaller than that thing. It's almost an indoor city.
Also causality seems to do some really weird shit in Gormenghast.

China still cool

to be fair=
puyi was a fucking idiot

Every chinese leader since Deng considered the cultural revolution a mistake

>Modern China hates the existence of anything before Mao.
This isn't true. The three kingdoms era is often dramatized and people love it, even if it's pretty much common knowledge that much of it was different than the popular perception of it nowadays. Even before that, the Spring Autumn and following periods are pretty popular as well.

Tabletop isn't a big thing in China in any case. You get your fair share of card games and whatnot, but tabletop roleplaying isn't as big of a thing in general.

We mess with our history all the time, that's pretty much the whole wuxia genre, a spoof of what actually happened during different periods. Heck for a while the whole "go back to a certain period and change shit" thing was a hit theme for dramas in China.

Because I don't know enough about to avoid a game becoming trite, cliched, racist, and only filled with stereotypes.

"So what sort of game do you want to run?"
"All the players are Chinese and have no dicks. Also everyone hates them"

Mao himself fucking adored the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and took a lot of inspiration from it.
He also banned it.

That last bit really got my attention because the Japanese and we Americans both like to do the same thing. Granted, for the Japanese it's more like a fix-fic, like, say, Admiral Yamamoto going back in time with sick submarine designs. (And somehow winning Japan the war, despite the return of Admiral Yamamoto through time and a sick sub design don't really address what lost the war for them.) And we Americans tend to write a shitload of bad self-insert fanfiction, which is kinda similar and not really any worse. But I'd never, ever heard of the Chinese doing this, or this being a thing in Chinese entertainment.

The stuff that I find interesting honestly doesn't have enough written about it to make a cohesive setting, like the An Lushan Rebellion or even specific parts like the Battle of Suiyang where the defenders killed and ate 20,000 - 30,000 civilians.

That, or it's a setting futuristic enough that there aren't games I find appealing that would work in it, like the Taiping Rebellion or the Warlord Era.

Period dramas seem to be more of a thing in the past decade or three. I think as long as there's a strong emphasis on UNITED CHINA, STRONK CHINA, and other CCP friendly messages, they're not opposed to the past being depicted in a positive light. If I recall correctly, they were pretty keen on Zhang Yimou's Hero.

To be fair, every Chinese dynasty tends to demonize and shit on tbe previous one as a way to legitimize their rule.

>There's like one game, and it's more based on Hong Kong style martial arts movies

How about you do some fucking research?

Theres two of those dickwad. Feng Shui and Hong Kong Action Theater.

Also The jist of it is theres really no point. The Wuxia games are the only ones with enough mass appeal to make it on their own accord, kind of like samurai games.

It's the same reason there is no there isn't enough carry over between people with the knowledge, passion, game design talent or market to appeal to.

Lets be honest theres not enough people interested in that product to make any money. And you chinkaboo nerds would probably be satisfied with a reading list of historical books.

The asian pastiche thing has already been done with L5R and Qin covers enough ground for those interested in a lighter historical interpretation.

There is no need or really room for a game system just to support the setting, unless it's really fucking good, but then why waste it on a setting that isn't going to sell? If you just make a good setting book how are you going to balance it between the fantastic and the historical. May as well just compile the historical reading list at that point.

I'm to tired to clean this up and make it more coherent, but it's just the same answer for any time period that isn't represented.

tl;dr No one cares enough: prove me wrong.

Historically plenty of Chinese authority figures have had a habit of drawing on things from the past to rally the people, then immediately shunning them the moment an opportunity arises to "bring about change". It probably didn't help that RotK subtly carried a message that sometimes, the very people in charge are fucktards and need to be replaced, and being virtuous and loyal doesn't mean you'll win out in the end.

How many HK dramas do you watch? They show up more in HK dramas than mainland dramas, especially if you're looking at dramas from back in the early 2000s. The mainland generally loves historic remakes over the whole sci-fi time travelling thing. There aren't even that many notable sci-fi authors from the mainland to be honest. More fantasy/historic/wuxia than anything.

I'll admit, I don't watch a lot of Chinese dramas. I love me some wuxia films (and I see what you're talking about with some of those) but don't really get into dramas because I can't even get into my own feels, let alone anyone else's.

That might be for the best anyways, most Chinese dramas are excessively long and long winded, with a good portion of them reusing the same storylines, character archetypes, and core concepts. If you grew up watching them you might not notice it, but for a lot of foreigners it can be a tedious affair compared to what Western dramas are like.

>the west is so clueless about Chinese culture they think the country is homogeneous except for Tibet and Hong Kong
No one ever wonders why Cantonese exists or what the country's massive diversity of climates did to change the people who lived there.

Well the fact that most people think there are only two dialects of Chinese in the forms of Mandarin and Cantonese is generally more than enough to give the impression that outsiders are pretty clueless about the country as a whole.

>hat the country's massive diversity of climates did to change the people who lived there.
It changed 99% of them all into Han.

Amazing, isn't it?

Cause chink armor and clothes looks like ass.

China doesn't have any great epics like LotR of the Rings to draw inspiration from.

I fucking love that show.

What a piece of junk.

It's true, no one likes chinks in armor.

...

I was supposed to play Qin. Didn't like the worldbuilding and the character creation system

Song was only good for first 3 emperors then it when downhill very painfully with constant threats from emerging powers like Khitan, Jin, Dali, Tibet, Xixia and lastly Mongol. Hell, Liangshan rebels (@ Water Margin 108 Heroes) also threatened this dynasty!

>It's called the dark ages for a reason
Yeah, because there is a lack of primary sources not because le savage whyte devils

>responding to bait

This guy gets it.

South Korea is Tier 2 beneath China and Japan.
Best Korea is Tier 7 below all the rest of the trash in Asia.

Because we Westerners don't know much about of its lojg history.

At the same time Chinese masturbate over and over to the Three Kingsoms period and don't produce anything interesting about their own history. Hong Hong martial arts movies and Jackie Chan at least cover period of the Republic of China.

Declining empires with advanced sciences surrounded by ambitions expansionist military powers they are constantly fighting off and while dealing with internal corruption and resistance against needed reforms is GOLDEN story fodder though.

Stories of demise and inevitable fall, not very fun stories to play and engage in.

Untrue, they just focus on the wuxia genre.
The Condor Trilogy is THE defining work of the genre, and in the way everyone kinda sorta copies Tolkien at least in small ways when it comes to the sort of fantasy Tolkien did, Jin Yong/Louis Cha's novels have much of the same affect on the wuxia genre as a whole.

If you mean why it doesn't look like traditional fantasy?
Well, traditional fantasy as we currently understand it was written from the point of view of a relatively well-off British landowner who was something of a Luddite after his brutal experiences during the First World War and his works are heavily influenced by his culture and experiences. Hell, the entire thing about Hobbits is that they were an active commentary on the sorts of people he met back in England after coming home to in the 1920's; ignorant of the dangers of the wider world, deeply concerned with social status (but not noble rank), petty about the dumbest things, loving their history (but only as it applies to themselves) and their genealogies, but good-hearted with the spark of heroic greatness in some if pressed and dragged from their comfortable, ordinary lives. Hell, even his mythology was heavily influenced by his own Christian beliefs even as he mixed Norse and Finnish mythology into it.

China has neither the cultural base, religious base, or same experiences to draw from because they were undergoing a completely different series of events on quite literally the opposite side of planet Earth with a different culture and different set of religions.

Wuxia IS Chinese fantasy, just done in different ways; there's "xianxia" which is wuxia but with immortals and gods and monsters, "modern" wuxia (urban fantasy), semi-historical wuxia (stuff taking place in the 1930's and so on) and all the kinds of differences you see in fantasy but filtered through a different cultural lens.

Pshaw! Interesting times are always interesting to play and engage in! You just need to not see "preserving the empire" as the end-all of your goals.

Hell, in the end the Mongols didn't change all that much anyway; China instead changed THEM and they just turned into a different ethnic group ruling the Han in the style and fashion that the Han lorded it over other ethnic groups like the Hakka or Miao before them.

>preserving the empire
I can empathize with regular Chinese guy and his family struggling in the time of need. At the same time I don't share your cultural background and don't see preservation of corrupted alien empire as my end goal. Empire will survive and assimilate its conquerors as it did many times, I don't feel pity or pride towards it.

>I can empathize with regular Chinese guy and his family struggling in the time of need.
That isn't usually how fantasy of any kind works. Almost always the protagonist is somehow out of the ordinary. Not necessarily a hero or hyper-competent, but the story will pretty much never have anything to do with an everyday life peasant or serf or commoner or townsman even in fairly down to Earth settings.
I was just pointing out that the Han frequently look down on the Yuan Dynasty for more or less being better at conquering shit then they were then anything they actually did; the Yuan's government was certainly a bit odder, especially at first, but they didn't run around randomly butchering people because they were kind of hands-off as overlords went and just used the Han prefecture and law methods because the network was already there and that was easiest.
Hell, arguably the Yuan Dynasty was better off then the Song which was constantly falling apart at the end and could barely keep itself together well before Khublai Khan took it over.

Even the third Condor Trilogy novel pokes fun at the bullshit behind the cultural disdain towards the Yuan Dynasty in many subtle ways; after accidentally (sort of) inspiring a mass-revolt against the Mongolians, the protagonist sort of takes a look at himself and realizes that the Yuan really isn't doing anything that the Song Dynasty wasn't already doing, and that everyone is just mad at them because they aren't Han Chinese.
He ends up deciding to just drop out of the martial society rather then lead this revolution that he isn't sure is particularly justified anymore.

Like, one of the Ming Emperor's wrote about how totally unfair it was that the Mongols discriminated against the Han in the Imperial Examinations, but then went and discriminated against non-Han in the Imperial Examinations during the Ming Dynasty right back, with absolutely zero irony or self-awareness about it. I guess the only people who are allowed to use the Mandate of Heaven to justify racist exclusion of folks from the government are the Han or something.

It didn't help that the Ming was basically this super-conservative Dynasty culturally speaking and kind of took some cultural steps backward.

There's plenty of that material, and it's so easy to find I'd rather send you to sources.

You can start with Veeky Forums. I've seen Ancient China threads pop up every now and then and they're usually golden, with plenty of the material you're asking for and much more.

The next thing is to go throw a search on Google or visit your local library.

I've always been fascinated by the Kowloon Walled City ever since I played Shenmue 2.

It'd probably make a good setting and I think I've seen it mentioned on Veeky Forums once or twice.

>China has the coolest and most varied goddamn history in the world. it's got a period for everything you could want, like 50 different sub-climates, and a wide variety of weapons and martial practices.
Second best. Best is Africa. China's got too many world-spanning empires.

Europe comes third, because it's just a worse Africa.
Literally everyone knows about China.

>Africa

I'm not sure here. Africa's got plenty of little, but they've barely had any big things.

Most of their interesting stuff is North of the Sahara, and that's already included in European settings as the far South.

They had plenty of big enough empires. The fact they didn't have many massive ones is why they're better than China to begin with.

>Why aren't there more settings in or based on China?

IRL? Because Americans don't care and writings on history are being tightly controlled in China itself, with alt-history apparently being outlawed.

Yeah, everybody know that China exists, that its in east asia, and that they like to build walls to keep foreigners and their influence out and their people and culture inside.

>not as good
>better

What the fuck are you getting at?

Do you think people just don't learn about the Mongols, Qing, Three Kingdoms &c.?

And Mao's on the standard school curriculum.
What the fuck are you talking about?

Yes, but they weren't different enough because it's mostly tribes with tribal stuff. And when there's actual significant and cool differences and you actually have a cool setting, then it's in areas and points of History nobody knows anything about unless they're also History or Africa junkies. In the end, the setting ends up as a generic low fantasy place with a different color.

If your players are cool with going through enough lore before the game, then it'd probably be fairly cool, yeah.

Still I've always found Subsaharian Africa to be extremelly uninteresting and underwhelming in almost every area. If you want to go low structure with few little kingdoms, go to Polynesia.

>Do you think people just don't learn about the Mongols, Qing, Three Kingdoms &c.?
They know that mongols were a rampaging asshole horde.

That's the extent of it.

Yeah, Benin's exactly the same as Aethiopia, which was indistinguishable from the Zulus.
>nd when there's actual significant and cool differences and you actually have a cool setting, then it's in areas and points of History nobody knows anything about unless they're also History or Africa junkies
What's your point? That's the whole argument re. China, isn't it?
>In the end, the setting ends up as a generic low fantasy place with a different color.
Anything can end up as generic low fantasy. Wuxia, Aztecs, Africa -- it's on the GM. But Africa gives the best material.
>Still I've always found Subsaharian Africa to be extremelly uninteresting and underwhelming in almost every area.
Is that an aesthetic thing, or is there something more?

no anime
no pig iron sticks

I've never found anyone who knew about Qing or the Three Kingdoms. That's at the very least hobbyist territory.

The average person knows China was big, had a lot of people and rice, they made a massive wall, and their neighbors the Mongols loved horses and were a massive horde.
The next step is knowing they started gunpodwer stuff and they had cool repeating crossbows.

That's about it.

Mao probably too, but because Communism. And it's not really Ancient/Medieval China anymore.

Still more than the average knowledge of Africa. Egyptians who were making pyramids for thosands of years then suddenly become modern world, tuaregs in the Sahara and tall black guys who love to jump South of the Sahara.
The next level is knowing about the existence of Carthago, but that's already somewhat advanced. Even if you learn it in school, they stopped being relevant so long ago that everyone forgets them by the next school year.

I'm not attacking Africa per se, but Africa as a setting. And I'm talking more about what people already know than about the potential as a whole.

I mean, a friend of mine organized a pretty damn cool game about Roman politics, following the major families and starting at the early Republic, right after the fall of the Monarchy.
But we're a group of nerds who went to the University to study History, Classic Philology and similar things.
We ended up getting recked by Carthago in the second Punic war because everyone was corrupt as fuck and our whole government fell appart with everyone trying to use the war for their own advantage instead of focusing on getting rid of Carthago.

The game was a fucking blast. Brutal potential, great execution. But how many people do you know who could play something like that and make it good? It'll alway ended as a cheap generic Game of Thrones clone with Roman colors.

That's what I mean with Africa. It's got plenty of potential, but it's just too fucking unknown.

Everyone I know has at least heard of the Qing, and they definitely know about the Three Kingdoms -- if, only because of Kung Fu movies and Dynasty Warriors. As for the rest -- well, that's about the extent of popular knowledge on medieval Europe, isn't it? I agree that people definitely know more about Europe than China (for example, people know about antiquity, and the Greeks -- not just the middle ages), but it's not fair to say that China's an obscure, popularly unknown historical area.

>I'm not attacking Africa per se, but Africa as a setting. And I'm talking more about what people already know than about the potential as a whole.
But I am saying Africa, as it actually was, is the best place to use as a setting, i.e. its potential as a whole. I'm not saying that Africa as a concept is what random people on the street would make into the best setting. That was never the argument, not even in the OP.

Kublai sends his regards

No one wants to playas pin-dick, dog-eating scum

It's a huge goddamn mess which the vast majority of us have very little cultural connection with. Throwing yourself into the long history of a huge area with very little prior knowledge is a daunting task and not something most GMs or game makers are willing to go through when they could do something more familiar. And besides, murderhobos gonna murderhobo, no matter what culture, so why go through tons of extra trouble for the same outcome?

Because as far as the west is concerned it was exactly like the Era of the Three Kingdoms until the Mongols conquered it, then some muddy period where they weren't the Mongols and there was Opium involved, then the Boxer Rebellion that had something to do with boxers going on strike, and then finally Communism.

I read that Chinese censors don't allow overtly supernatural elements. So no magic, ghosts or gods healing your party.

If that's true it might be a factor

>Stories of demise and inevitable fall, not very fun stories to play and engage in.
Holy shit

We've found him

The legendary Ultrapleb.

>It's a huge goddamn mess which the vast majority of us have very little cultural connection with
Exactly.

>muh revisionism

Because of the Cultural Revolution, mate. Chinks fought so hard to get rid of 'ancient superstitions' and suppress their own history as Japan began to export theirs through anime that Japan became the 'default' setting of the 'mythical far east!' in the cultural zeitgeist.

I won't cry for China. They fucked up hard.

Precisely. A little something called 'The Cultural Revolution."

>It's called the dark ages for a reason.
Is this some new pasta?
I've been seeing it everywhere lately

Chinese stuff is cool. The big problem is nobody likes the Chinese.

As far as I know, and someone feel free to correct me if it's just my own ignorance, there is no PPRPG industry in china. I've certainly never heard of any Chinese PPRPGS.

There are certainly plenty of Chinese computer games set in ancient China or ancient China inspired fantasy settings. There are also Japanese and American computer games inspired by it as well, such a Jade Empire and Dynasty Warriors.

Oh no, not the culture. How horrible, all this dead culture.

>pretty keen on Zhang Yimou's Hero.
Yeah, it's common rumour that Zhang Yimou was being politically expedient with the plot of Hero. It's of note that the kung fu film industry is based in Hong Kong, and Hero came out just a few years after the transfer back to China.

Because china is a total creative void thanks to the systematic erasure of culture and independent thought over the last several decades. There's a reason basically fucking nothing is invented by the chinese anymore, they just shit out a million half baked copies of whatever is popular elsewhere and tweak it to make it appeal to the chinese audience.

>this is what Ching-Chong nationalists really believe