Wuxia/Tianxia

Well in one of my games the main BBEG was searching for an ancient jade tablet that contained the knowledge of The Heavens Slaughter style

The game itself started out wuxia and became xianxia as the campaign progressed the Heavens Slaughter style was a combination of Internal Cultivation techniques and External Martial Arts. It was created by a man who was essentially Dugu Quibai but with fists instead of swords

End-of-series spoilers:
The character in question has collected 36 ultra-legendary swords, since people have a bad habit of creating and abusing them, and he wants to get rid of them somehow. He's been travelling because people have been trying to steal his collection and, well, abuse them. In the meantime, he doesn't use a real sword himself; his "primary sword" is a hunk of wood he painted silver.

Ya know it's a shame that Wuxia isn't a more popular genre
And Xianxia seems like something Veeky Forums should be continuously creaming themselves over

It is odd it's not discussed more, because there are a lot of good RPG's for it out there.

I need to find and watch more Xianxia stuff. I've always enjoyed martial arts flicks and always thought of that particular style of south east asian film as 'Wuxia', but the idea of high powered supernatural Wuxia is awesome. IIRC one film I've seen falls into that category, The Sorcerer and the White Snake.

For xianxia I would check out Coiling Dragon, Stellar Transformations, Martial God Asura and Desolate Era all web novels that can be found here

wuxiaworld.com/

Xianxia? What's the difference between it and wuxia?

Wuxia is martial arts bullshit and xianxia is full-on fantasy with all them gods, demons magic and what have you

Pretty much what this guy saidXianxia basically means Immortal Hero and depending on the story can combine Daoist,Buddhist,and traditional Chinese mythology with western fantasy concepts
Xianxia usually focuses on the Path of Immortal Cultivation with the main characters refining their Qi and Souls to achieve immortality or godhood or both
In terms of ability xianxia heroes start off less Crouching Tiger more Exalted and then go from there to full on Tengen Toppa DBZ levels in some works

Wuxia = Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Xianxia = Avatar the last Airbender/Naruto/Journey to the West

"Xia" ~ Hero
"Wu" ~ Martial
"Xian" ~ Immortal

Wuxia is (often super fantastical) martial arts, Xianxia is fantasy based on Taoist philosophy.

Guy's scrolling through his weapon wheel........

No credit to ISSTH man? MGA started out all right, but the quality dropped hard for me.

I started on a setting for a Fist of the North Star type campaign. I wanted to use Legends of the Wulin but I just can't seem to wrap my head around the style creation aspects.

Post-apocalyptic wulin makes my dick diamonds.

ISSTH never really grabbed me but to be fair I never got past book 2

Any chance I can help? I run and play a lot of LotW and do a lot of homebrew stuff.

Sure.

Question 1: Is there any way to make combat not a fucking slog?

Question 2: Styles. Holy man, styles. How do you even start making a style? The rules seem so arbitrary.

>Post-apocalyptic wulin
I've always wanted to run a Fallout/Mad Max/M.D. Geist/GUNM/Fist of the North Star game
This gonzo retro-future setting with cyber soldier martial arts in a post-apocalyptic wasteland

Combat is always going to be relatively slow in LotW, it's a crunchy system, but there are things you can do to speed it up. Part of it is practice, being able to read and assign sets quickly and wrapping your head around the odd flow of the combat.

You can also do a lot as a GM. Having opponents back down after getting a Major Injury or two rather than always forcing it to a Taken Out can help. Going for smaller fights also works, letting PC's engage in duels or facing the PC's down with a single stronger opponent. In the past, I've let PC's run an NPC opponent for another PC to duel, for example, and it can still be fun just for the combat experience.

The Countless Style Manual from 296 onwards in the book is a little loose, yeah. A lot of making an External or Internal style is eyeballing it and testing it.

Stick to the general rules of how to cost Internal and External techniques, and compare things to the styles in the core book or the styles in Wulin Legends. Posting stuff on the wiki is a good idea, too, since you'll get other eyes on it to see if it needs tweaking.

Shit yeah, dude.

There's a character in my setting called The Turtle King. He lords over an area of the wasteland called The Marshes, which, though dangerously radioactive, hold a ton of lost technology that old Turtle guards jealously.

Part of his mystique isn't only that he can survive in such a hostile environment, but also that in 200 years he's managed to defend his Marshes from all attackers with only 100 warriors. His mastery of tactics is so superb that many believe it's the product of an undiscovered Transcendent Style.

Maybe Turtle King is all chromed out with cyberware that hooks up to a forgotten GPS? That would be awesome.

How do you handle Deed awards? Sometimes it feels like you have to just ask "what do you want?" what awarding it

In my group, we tend to do it communally. Just assigning them whenever just didn't work out, so the GM just said 'One Deed per arc, figure out which Deeds each other gets' and it's worked really well so far.

>it's a crunchy system
It really doesn't feel like it. The rules are very easy to understand, it just feels like they're deliberately made to slow down play.

>Major Injury rule
I like this. You could also just replace "Major Injury" with "Taken Out." That would make combat deadlier.

>it just feels like they're deliberately made to slow down play.

How do you mean?

And I wouldn't recommend straight up replacing Majors with Taken Out. That gap is important, IMO, the point where a reasonable opponent will back off but some people just won't give up.

>How do you mean?
Like the Taken Out gap you mentioned. Like the 1:1 attack/defense ratio, where every single attack players make has a chance to be upset against an opponent of even lesser skill.

It calls for a lot of rolling. I love the game and the ideas behind it, don't get me wrong. It's the constant rolling and rerolling for effects that ultimately end up being more or less useless, depending on your GM and the enemies you face.

And now I'm a little confused, although it might just be that it's 4AM and I'm not parsing things correctly.

Each player should only be rolling one offensive Lake per round. They can do a lot of stuff with one Lake, but likewise each opponent only rolls one Defensive Lake. So at most there'll be a number of rolls in the round equal to the number of participants multiplied by two, not counting Area Attacks et al.

But it's every round. Regardless of whether or not your attacks actually succeed, your hits cause Ripples, you start a Wave, etc.

It feels like I'm rolling my dice over and over again waiting for the laws of probability to give me a set that will actually move the combat forward. It feels stymied, is what I'm saying.

Hmm, I'm not sure. I've always felt like rounds in LotW are very active. Lots of things happening on init, people throwing out lots of different attacks and marvels and such. Sometimes someone will roll a great defence and completely no-sell an entire attack roll, but generally, you're forced to choose what to let through, weighing an extra Ripple or a Roll against a nasty Disrupt or other effect.

I guess it goes back to the familiarity aspect you mentioned earlier.

Is LOTW a viable system for a fighting game inspired setting

Not at all. There's another system, FIGHT, that was made specifically to emulate 2d fighting game settings.

Absolutely, as long as you're more concerned with general themes and style than emulating specific mechanics.

I looked at Fight and Thrash and games like it, and their attempts to emulate fighting game mechanics in a tabletop setting just seemed really fucking clunky and unintuitive.

I've checked out Fight but the mechanics are to clunky and involved
I'm looking more at capturing the feel of the genre as well as something that easily allows for one on one kombat instead of group vs group

As I said above, IMO LotW is really, really good at duels.

Would anyone run through a combat on here? Just for giggles and shits?

Sell me on the system. Show me what it can do.

Rolled 5, 9, 2, 10, 4, 10, 4 = 44 (7d10)

I'm not sure about a full combat, but I can give you a few examples.

Please

Rolled 6, 2, 8, 6, 2, 2, 5 = 31 (7d10)

So, take the above roll as our Initiative Roll. In a lot of systems rolling for initiative is annoying, but LotW does a really clever thing with it. Calling it the initiative roll is something of a misnomer, as while you do define your init on it, LotW also offloads a huge amount of in combat utility onto the init roll.

So, looking at our dice, we have two big sets- 24 and 20 (2 4's and 2 10's) plus three singles which evaluate to 19, 15 and 12.

The simplest thing to do here would be to just add our Speed stat to the 24 to get the max possible initiative, maybe River the 0's (that is, store the dice for later).

However, we can do a lot more than that. On any action, your Major Action can always be taken on a single die. On the init roll, that's defining our init. Taking the single 9 for 19 plus our Speed for initiative will still give us a decent result, plus leaving us our two sets free.

Why are sets important? Because they're used for Minor Actions, which you usually can't do on a single. And this opens up a wealth of possibilities.

Low on Chi? Dedicate a set to Breathing, which resolves at the end of the round to get you extra Chi back.

Want to try and figure out an opponent? Assess their style! Almost anyone can do it and most people aren't great at resisting it, and figuring out your opponents Laughs and Fears can turn a fight in your favour.

And then we get to Waves. Waves are wonderful, a simple concept that elegantly covers a huge number of different possibilities. Waves are extended actions, that begin on the initiative roll and resolve on your turn. You might be toppling a table in front of a door to block the entrance, collapsing a wall to let you get through a barrier, or any number of other things.

The catch? Like I said, it resolves on your turn in initiative order- Meaning every person who comes before you has a chance to try and interrupt your Wave, Breaking it and nullifying the effect.

Anyway, onto the attack roll.

Rolled 9, 4, 4, 4, 7, 5, 5 = 38 (7d10)

One thing I forgot to mention, Covering Ground (moving between Zones) is also a Wave, which can be interrupted like anything else.

Anyway! On this roll we got more and less lucky. Only one set, but it's a triple, those three 2's giving us a whopping 32, plus 18, 16, 15 and 12 from our singles.

Again, there is an easy option. Take our Strike stat, add it to the 32 and call it a day. But even with one big set like this, there are other options. On your attack roll, your Primary Strike is a Minor Action. We could, if we wanted, stick it on the 18 and use our nice big 32 for something else.

If we have an Internal, External or Weapon technique that allows us to, we could make a Secondary Attack. Secondary Attacks are basically identical to Primary Attacks except they can only be made on a set (usually) and it'd let us go for a one two punch.

And then we get to the fun of Secret Arts and Elemental Attacks. Depending on your Archetype or Styles, you can curse, talk or fireball people into submission right alongside punching them. Elemental Attacks and Secret Arts often have lower attack bonuses than Strikes too, so attaching them to a nice big set can make them more effective.

But, even without any of those styles? You still have options.

Fighting a Secret Arts attacker, or someone relying heavily upon a particular skill? Throw a Disorient on them. Disorients are made by adding any skill to a set, and are always defended against by skills. If they hit, the opponent takes a -5 penalty to that skill. They can recover from it by beating the roll used to inflict it with a set on their init, but that's easier said than done.

There's also Disrupts, which acts like Disorients except they target stats, and reducing an enemies Strike or defensive stats is never a bad thing.

And then there's Knockback. Again, it's skill vs skill, but on a success you get to push the enemy into any Adjacent zone. Niche but useful.

One last thing- Defence.

Daaaamn that's a nice roll. Three 4's for 34, a solid 25 and even good singles at 19 and 17.

Anyway, Defence is probably the least interesting roll conceptually, given that it's reactive, but you can still be forced to make a lot of hard choices given the sets you roll. What to block entirely, what to mitigate, whether to let something through in order to deal with something else... There's a lot of fun stuff involved.

Reading through it like this, it might seem like a lot, but when you get a hang of your character sheet and know what you can do, you see your options and are able to pick out what you want to do decently quick, and these are by no means a limit to what you can do. These are just the basic options available to everyone and the most common tricks you'll get from your Internal and External Kung-fu styles. Plus, the GM is always encouraged to work with players to improvise interesting Waves and Marvels to do things not directly covered in the rules.

It's an in depth combat system, and it isn't for everybody, but damn I love it.

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I just realized you never see a lot of training montages with females in old Kung Fu movies, and even if they are there it's nothing like they do with guys.

Granted my favorite one is from Mad monkey kung fu RIP Lau Kar Leung

youtube.com/watch?v=1bipDTMwF-Y

This sounds amazing and extremely fun to run, but usual RPG combat consists of "let's everyone gang up on the bad guy" and this doesn't feel that heroic. The solution might be running 4 v 4(GM controlled) or 2 v 2(player controlled) duels, but the first sounds like a nightmare for GM and not everyone will be on board with second.

ISSTH is the absolute best.
Coiling drangon and stellar are very iconic but I felt they get real tedious eventually. Coiling at least ends before it gets tooooo awful but stellar just goes too fucking long. MGA is just junk from the start.
ISSTH I just can't get enough of, it never falls into all the other narrative traps of the genre and is fantastic.
Really enjoying a Thought through eternity right now too.

Hey, since I know you're in the thread, I've heard rumors that say the guy who wrote Tales of Demons and Gods is not very good at all and his works get rushed and SHIT very fast.
Is that true?
I did notice some kinda bullshit throughout TDG but nothing too horrendous when I spend a couple minutes reading it a few times a week.

Some guidelines for surviving a Xianxia world

>As soon as possible, climb into the mountains to cultivate chi: as an aside don't hide up there like a bitch 24/7 or someone who experienced struggle will show up and kick your ass
>If you're a girl, take caution: you'll most likely wind up as the cute socially awkward plot device girl member of the hero's growing harem if you isolate yourself on a mountain
>Have no relatives so they don't accidentally offend someone
>Like as a humble rice farmer
>Or rather don't, because odds are your sleepy farm just HAPPENS to sit atop a mysterious source of abundant chi
>Be a defenseless cowardly wimp, Xianxia villains hate fighting "weaklings"
>If you're going to enter a martial arts school, pick the one which used to be glorious but now is full of losers and in danger of being closed, guarantee you'll be the chosen one
>Try to find a weird rock, mysterious cave, wandering old man in a conical hat in the bamboo forest, or stand on an open plain during a dramatic lightning storm
>Don't take sides
>Don't leave your friends/family/masters out of anger
>Don't take any apprentice: instant death
>Figure out who the main character is: he's usually the "loser" who can somehow beat up guys a few levels higher than himself
>Become the main character's best friend, now you've got confucian loyalty on your side, expect to be saved and rewarded by the MC when you get attacked by his enemy
>Failing to become his bro, join his harem. Harem girls are perfectly safe. Particularly if you're his childhood friend, the mysterious plot device hermit girl, or the fiesty tigress rival who becomes a swooning maiden when he saves her
>Become a gentleman-scholar and become a news broker: learn who offended who so that you can escape when your family/friends/city/tribe/race/shoe-size have offended a possible Xianxia hero or villain
>Flatter everyone you meet

I might have to get back into ISSTH
Recently I started on Warlock of the Magus World it's ... interesting. The selling point of it for me is that the main character doesn't give any semblance of a shit about honor or face. The only thing that prevents him form taking out his enemies is the threat of retribution or exposure of his true abilities

TDG is like juuuuust at the edge of my drop list but I'm kinda enjoying it in like a very junk food kind of way. I can totally see the how it is rushed. I don't think its worse for getting rushed though, the whole is pretty awful so just skipping to the cool stuff isn't bad or the MC just randomly jumping power levels. I wouldn't ever recommend TDG but if you happen to already be reading it, I can't say it gets worse, it was just never that good.

I couldn't stomach that shit man that was just some bad writing.

I guess while I'm talking about this I might as well drop more unsolicited opinions

While ISSTH is amazing Xian ni by the same guy is pretty bad

My Disciple Died Yet Again is pretty great. Some arcs are kinda miss but the ones that hit really hit.

Lately I've been reading Cultivation Chat Group which looks like it has some potential. Hard to tell yet but its been pretty good so far.

Similar Genre, Long Live Summons! is surprisingly good, its very uh.. immature at times and it feels like a first draft sometimes but it has just enough fun for me to keep reading. I wish the author would meet a real girl at some point in his life. I actually feel that way about 99% of these novels. None of them know what a woman is.

I uh read a lot of garbage. I check Novel updates like three four times a day.

>EMIYA uses a fake sword, has a vault of powerful swords that he tries not to use
>Gilgamesh is obsessing over a specific sword and trying to show himself off to everyone, but is shit compared to most of the main characters
>Robin Hood is a former legit fighter, but decided to become a thief that targets villains instead because it's his true calling

Oh and Irisviel is a necromancer and Medea is a giant demon monster but those don't fit too well

I wouldn't worry about reading so much garbage it's what most novels are
Too many fall into the same trap of over reliance on genre tropes
>Secret Ancestry
>Strange Mutation/Birth Defect allows for easier/boosted Cultivation
>Stumbled onto Ancient Artifact/Cultivation Technique
>Found Super Badass Mentor to teach you shit no one at your level should know
>Reincarnated
Every other novel has at least one of those. Not that that's a bad thing but most of the time it's easy to see where the plot is going because you know all the beats it's trying to hit
For every amazing story there are five absolutely shit ones

Oh buddy, I'm not worried that I read a lot of garbage. Just stating that I do. I used to spend hours of each day reading web comics, then that turned into manga, and nowadays its a mix of manga, web comics, and now translated korean/japanese/chinese novels and one amateur fantasy english web novel written by a Croatian guy. Every now and then when I binge on like actual print comics and physical books. I've got enough daily updating shit to take up 2 hours a day easy. Eventually they'll be enough fiction that updates weekly that I will never have to stop reading.

I've often wondered if there's a way to do training montages in RPGs in a way that's interesting to play out and has consequences beyond simply improving a skill or not.

One example I quite liked (in an otherwise mediocre system) comes from Dogs in the Vineyard, in that system if a player's goal is some form of self-improvement for their character they can start a conflict which while fluff-wise is their character training is mechanically played out as a combat between their current self and them as they want to be. Whichever one wins the character gains a new trait as appropriate.

I did not expect this thread to stay up as long as it did, but I'm glad it's still here.

So anons. The Turtle or The Crane?

Always go Turtle

...

>not Tiger or Dragon
lmao fag

r00d

bet you can't even do the "monkey plucks the fruit" technique, keklord.

>not tiger crane

>It's an in depth combat system, and it isn't for everybody, but damn I love it.

You mean it's a needlessly overly complicated version of ORE

It is a bit tricky. Large scale fights of the PC's against an equal number of Xia can be awesome, but do take a lot of time.

I run and play most of my games online, so quite often I run the one on one duels in mini-sessions between main play sessions, using the time I have everyone together to set up the situation and allow for character interplay, then letting people beat the crap out of one another in their own time.

Although, as an aside? PvP duelling is one of the best ways to teach people LotW. PvP in RPG's is usually a shitshow, but it works great in LotW, and it keeps people involved and has them figuring out tactics together, it's a great way to start off. Plus, friends meeting and getting to know each other through beating the living crap out of them is very in genre.

>Although, as an aside? PvP duelling is one of the best ways to teach people LotW.

app.roll20.net/join/1709259/y86H8A

Consider me interested. If you have the time, of course.

...Except from what I understand the only real similarity is the dice system, and even that is actually used in extremely different ways?

Unfortunately I have an IRL game coming up soon, but I've linked the thread in the #lotw channel on the Sup/tg/ IRC. Feel free to drop by, you can generally find a few folks around who know about the game, even if it's often quiet.

How about Snake, centipede, Lizard, toad, and scorpian?

youtube.com/watch?v=aiJEdqxf7R4

>Xianxia
I have been looking for so long for a decent cultivation system to use in my group.
Are there any systems that give you that feel of cultivating your spirit force to get to new heights and then becoming more powerful? Like In Doulou Dalu or Tales of Demons and Gods

Pili has really come a long way with their puppetry and set designs.

LotW has Cultivation as a mechanic. but I'm not sure if it's in that sense.

>LotW has Cultivation as a mechanic. but I'm not sure if it's in that sense.
Hmm someone really should make a TDG and/or DD system

It's difficult to emulate in a game sense, especially with Xianxia.

Have you ever tried Wushu? It's a rules-lite kung fu game, definitely geared towards the upper end of the power scale. There was a storytime on Veeky Forums a long time ago that recounted a Wushu game set in a Fist of the North Star-esque shonen universe. It was fantastic.

should i feel like a scrub for liking the begger sect cause of their beating dog stick

nah, I immediately liked that bit of the fluff as well, just the idea of an immortal beggar with a magic staff called the Dog Beating Stick

awww yis a wuxia/xianxia thread

So guys and girls I need your help.
I GM a game of the usual "people are killed and then transferred into another world with their previous memories intact" bit and one of my players have shown some interest in some stone talisman from one light novel.
What I have heard is that it perfects martial arts, improves on cultivation techniques, boosts the effect of elixirs and such.

But how the heck am I supposed to do this?

We are playing a modified version of d20 (I know.. but the players insisted)

Goddammit.
It's Unlimited Blade Works. That's what this was. Shang Buhuan has Unlimited Blade Works, after a fashion.

Apparently I'm the only one in this thread who doesn't know, but what is this from?

my group has somewhat come up with a system to tackle the whole cultivation problem.
We are playing in a combat continent-inspired world and there we have cultivation rolls each day.
from rank 0-10, you need to roll collectively 10 points per rank.
So going from rank 1 -> 2 would require you to roll 10. So lets say that you rolled a.. 4. Then that would be your cultivation score. Then tomorrow you might roll a 3. Then your cultivation score would be 7 and so on and on.

Then the number required to cultivate rank 10-20 would be 100 points, 20-30 would require 1000 and so on and on.

I don't know if it is a good way to do it but it somewhat works in our group

Thunderbolt fantasy. A taiwanese puppet show by Urobutcher.

I've been working on a Xianxia setting that I was thinking about running on /qst/ for a while now. I'm currently still writing the cultivation levels and various martial skills to use, among other various fluff. I have a basis down, would any of you guys be interested in that.

ISSTH is GOAT and Stellar T. Dropped the ball at the Divine realm imo.

>cultivation levels
tell us or at least me

I only have a few now, I'm looking at chinese mythological and Daoist concepts for inspiration plus various Xianxia novels. I'm trying not to out right copy.

Mortal is the first level

Then you have to break through to Xiantian level by opening your lower Dantian which allows you to accept the power of the earth. There are 3 phases in it. Beginning, warrior and peak phase

Next is a Zie philosopher and you have to open your upper Dantian and accept the power of heavens into it. There's no phases in it but you only have 5 years to breakthrough because the power of the heavens is deadly.

Then is true warrior where you accept the power of heaven and earth into your fleshly body and can finally use the power. This sparks a tribulation.

That's all i got, i was thinking of merging the Dantians next

sounds good so far

So what will this cultivation form be able to do? TDG you bind a demon to your dantian, DD you improve your spirit essence, CLC improves the cultivators body by turning it into all muscles, HJC allows you to store skills and improve your physical abilities etc. etc.

And will there be cool artifacts?

KYS for running isekai trash

Xianxia is fascinating

When you first get into it it's the most awesome thing ever

Then it feels like cliched childish poorly writen bullshit

Then you love it again after accepting its flaws and praising it's good attributes

t. Chink

The best ones I've found so far are ISSTH, ATTE and Ze Tian Ji.

But flattering everyone can offend someone who don't like flattering and sycopaths.

Just cultivating to get stronger with a lot of Dao insights thrown in. There will be an abundance of manuals and artifacts and cool stuff. You can insight into any Dao or at least try to. The hard part is giving good encounters without railroading the campaign desu.

But what about the husbando/waifu harem?
Do you have a member of each of the cliches?