Alright Veeky Forums what is the best system to run a Science Fiction Kung-Fu/Wuxia game
I'm looking for the right mix of cool combat and character customization in order to create cybered out martial artists
Also general sci-fi and martial arts discussion thread I guess
Legend of the Wulin, but that requires
1) Rewriting all the lore sheets to fit the setting and refluffing everything you didn't rewrite
2) Learning LotW in the first place and convincing your players to do the same.
#1 is tedious, #2 is madness.
Would Legends of the Wulin be able to handle the combination of technological integration and superhuman ability inherent in Post Human Martial Arts
What I know of the game is gathered from what little I have heard here on Veeky Forums
LotW would likely require abstracting it and making it mostly fluff, using loresheets and similar- Packages of fluff and mechanics that can be purchased alongside more conventional things like Kung fu techniques- to represent them.
Also, put it in short but to be explicit-
LotW is a hard game to learn. It makes a lot of strange assumptions about how things work, counterintuitive to a lot of what you'd expect from a RPG (A simple example is that in LotW you roll first, declare actions second, the inverse of almost every RPG I'm aware of).
This is made even more of a barrier to entry by the frankly appalling editing and layout of the core book. If you can actually get the damn thing running, it's a magnificent system that I've personally used for sci-fi action stuff before now, but actually getting to that point is a lot of effort.
A man after my own heart. Non-human/robot kung-fu has been something that has kept me entranced for years.
Ok so one thing you'll have to realize is that if you take a typical wuxia game and replace all instances of ki/qi/whatever and like taoist magic with technobabble you'll get what you want pretty trivially.
Unless you're trying to actually ground this in some semi-realistic science. You gotta understand this shit is all nonsense so don't try that and have fun with it.
On that note I'd just suggest anything that runs wuxia fine and that's it. Keep in mind Wuxia games themselves granularity in their power. Just like how you have high fantasy and low fantasy there is Wuxia where you play normal dudes with kung fu. Kung fu dudes with powers. Straight up mythic shit. Finally, there is also a sub genre about batshit crazy immortal garbage.
Personal suggestion is Wandering heroes of Ogre gate.
It isn't technically free but its pay what you want and you can pay 0$ with a dummy account that doesn't need any real verification or email attached to it so its about as close to free as you can get without being free.
Thought about M&M as I am familiar with it and have used it as something of a general system before but I was kind of looking for alternatives
If all else fails it is probably the system I'll end up falling back on
>if you take a typical wuxia game and replace all instances of ki/qi/whatever and like taoist magic with technobabble you'll get what you want pretty trivially.
True
> You gotta understand this shit is all nonsense so don't try that and have fun with it.
Also true
I guess the easiest thong to do would be to take a wuxia system or a sufficiently general system and just fluff or refluff things to work the way I want
>Non-human/robot kung-fu has been something that has kept me entranced for years.
Same, I love martial arts media and the idea of the things you can do once you surpass the limitations of the human form and its limitations is fascinating. Like what kind of martial arts would you get if you replaced your arms with arms made of Synthetic Nano Fibers that turns your arm into pure synthetic muscle, with an arm that works like a normal arm and a tentacle depending on your will what sort of techniques could be developed
Or what about integrated weaponry what happens when you fight a guy who has turned his arm into a miniature Gauss Rifle, or cybernetically altered perception so you are fighting in Bullet Time
The possibilities are endless
If anyone wanted to know the basic premise I have worked out so far is that at some point in the not too distant future, 50-100 years I haven't decided yet, cybernetics have advanced pretty far and people are able to undergo Full Body Replacement surgery if they have the money and the balls to go through with it. For the most part this means the rich and famous have perfect lifelike cyborg bodies and the lower classes are stuck with basic human flesh and blood. War and political unrest plague the world and the U.S. and China are in a Cold War that is seconds away from turning hot, the wealth gap has widened and corporate entities have in some cases become states unto themselves the largest being headquartered on floating man made islands.
All these factors and more have led to a class of semi-underground mercenaries made up of the desperate and crazy that perform all manner of illicit activity, they have upgraded themselves with the latest military and experimental hardware some, those who seek power above all else, have even given up their human forms in order to achieve even greater heights of power
One of the main factors in the game would be what exactly defines humanity as in order to become more powerful you need more modifications and the more mods you have the less human you look, the more cyberware you shove into your brain to out think your enemies and keep up with being able to casually break the sound barrier the less human you think. Neither of those things are necessarily bad but the stigma attached to them would be a complication for the players that choose to embrace post humanism
Basically I want to include an underlying them of Self Determination, Transhumanism and Directed Evolution as they relate to the Individual and the Collective group when filtered through the mindset of Xia
bump before bed
Here's hoping the thread is up when I wake up
Use standard xianxia setting.
Chi and magic are discovered through scientific research.
Make the world magitech/chi-tech.
Write the setting from there onwards.
>Gunnm
>Boichi
Bless this thread
To expand on this a little, I should go over the various elements which make up a LotW character.
Your Kung fu is defined by your External and Internal Kung fu styles, where there's a good few to choose from in the core book and more over on the Wulin Legends wiki, and they're pretty easy to homebrew.
Your External represents your physical fighting style, the weapons you use and your general approach to combat, defining your base combat stats and giving you access to a number of passive techniques that change the way you interact with a fight.
Internal Styles, meanwhile, represent more actively used special abilities. They consume the systems primary in combat resource, Chi, to produce powerful stat boosts or other effects like elemental attacks.
These two will likely be the best way to mechanically represent the basics of cyborg martial artists augmentations, whether passive and always on or requiring active use.
Beyond that, you also get character options from Archetypes/Secret Arts, Loresheets and Transcendent Techniques/Legendary Weapons.
LotW has five Archetypes- Warriors, Doctors, Courtiers, Priests and Scholars. Warriors are the most straight forward and direct archetype, but every Archetype is very powerful in combat, they just interact with it in slightly different ways.
For a sci-fi game, it's quite easy to refluff Priests from supernatural bullshit to hacking and indirect interaction with technology, while you can also fold engineering into Doctors Arts or use one of several optional Engineer archetypes that have been homebrewed up.
Loresheets are a mixed bag of whatever you want them to be. You could write up a basic 'Cyborg Kung fu' loresheet and give it to every player as a basic thing, or you could create multiple variants of it and let them choose one, or whatever. It's kinda cheating, but sometimes in a new setting instead of writing up loresheets I just come up with a few titles and fill out the material later.
Legendary Weapons and Transcendent Techniques are the last piece of the puzzle. They're weird, very awesome and generally not appropriate for starting characters.
LW/TT's are very expensive to buy into and initially provide no benefit- Paying for it just gives you access to it, but it takes more than just access to get full use out of it. Every LW/TT has an agenda, some clause or goal it possesses. Whenever the character achieves things in line with that goal, they gain points with the LW/TT, slowly gaining access to magnificently powerful abilities. However, you lose points for going against it, so it's sometimes tricky to balance a commitment to your chosen LW/TT against what you personally want.
Panzerkunst is something I would probably represent as a Transcendent Technique, rather than a normal Internal or External style.
Run a mecha campaign and then focus the fighting in magical martial arts.
You get the fun of giving bizarre antagonists and NPCs for the player while making things still stay focus on human interactions and relationships.
While it sounds very interesting it also sounds like a complicated mess that would take a lot of time to wade through to properly learn and process
From what I can gather it sounds like for my purposes
External would be your basic martial arts
Internal would be your basic cybernetic loadout
Loresheets from what I can tell from the wiki would work something like a more crunchy version of the Aspect system from FATE? representing your ties to the setting and things about your character
Legendary Weapons and Transcendent Techniques would be custom experimental technology or incredibly powerful and advanced Cyborg Martial Arts
Is that about right
Pretty much, yes.
It's also simpler than it sounds, although the core book does a very bad job of actually explaining that.
Basic character generation is picking an Archetype, Internal and External style, assigning a few points of Skills and spending some extra Destiny (XP) on buying techniques. The other stuff is all room for expansion in play.
Could you explain/give an example as to how a turn progresses in LotW?
I actually have an example written up for this, give me a moment.
LotW uses d10 dicepools where you read sets. Dicepools generally have a set value, 7 dice for starting characters, which increases as you gain Rank, a general measure of power, and can also be influenced by spending in game resources or using certain powerful techniques.
When you roll your pool of seven dice you look for sets- That is, multiple dice showing the same number. A set has a value of ten for each die in the set, plus the number on the dice. So two sevens has a value of 27, four sixes has a value of 46. Single dice also have values, ten plus the number they show, but you're more restricted in the actions you can take on a single dice.
This creates one of the most interesting core mechanical properties of LotW- The ability to make multiple actions on a single roll. As long as you have enough sets, you can make any number of actions, giving you a lot of depth of options, especially in combat.
The other key concept of the system is Chi Conditions. Chi Conditions are very simple, being a narrative clause tied to a mechanical bonus or penalty. Beneficial Chi Conditions grant you their bonus as long as you obey the narrative clause, while harmful ones inflict the penalty unless you obey them.
Injuries are a common example of harmful Chi Condition. When you suffer an Injury, it creates a choice- Either limit your actions and descriptions in the way defined by the narrative clause, or suffer a penalty.
I'll explain the flow of combat along with it to give context.
I'll use these two styles for the example, I'm familiar with both since I use them for a current PC of mine-
External Styles define your basic combat stats. They're generally passive and offer broad, general benefits.
wulinlegends.pbworks.com
Internal Styles are more active, each technique requiring Chi to be expended to use it and can provide a variety of effects, from stat boosts to various strange kinds of utility.
wulinlegends.pbworks.com
In terms of character building you purchase techniques from within your Internal and External separately, but I'll just point out the ones I'm using for the purpose of the example.
Combat starts with the Initiative Roll. This is something of a misnomer, as while defining your Initiative score is the key action, you can do a lot of other things.
Ah, I should explain Major and Minor actions- Major Actions are necessary actions for a roll. You have to make them, and they can be declared on a single die. Minor Actions are everything else, but can usually only be made on a set.
So, getting an example roll from my dicebot... Say I'm sitting at the following- 29, 23, 10, 12, 14.
The simplest thing to do would be to take the highest set- 29- and add my Speed score of +5 for a total Initiative of 34. However, I have two sets and, as I said above, there are some actions you can only take on sets, while your Initiative can come from a single dice.
Instead, I might take the 14 for my Initiative, a total of 19, and make use of the sets for different reasons. Focus on Breath is an action you can take with a skill depending on your archetype to regenerate extra Chi at the end of the round, so I could toss the 24+10 for 34 Focus on Breath to regenerate extra combat resources, since I'm planning to use some this round.
Those 9's could also be used for quite a few things. Moving between Zones is an action declared with a set on the Initiative Roll, as is assessing an opponents External style, learning its strengths and weaknesses for you to exploit. However, here I think we'll put the dice in the River.
The River is an area you can store dice. It starts at 2 slots for a starting rank character, increasing as you go. Dice stored in the River can be returned to the pool later, giving you an extra set or letting you expand a set to get a nice big number.
With a low Initiative like 19, we'd likely get attacked first, but I'll do my attack roll first to show how it works.
So we declare the target of our attack and roll our dice, getting- 24, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19,
Not as good as initiative, but look! A tasty tasty nine. We can flow the 9's out of our river to make a whopping great set of 39, a very effective option.
Again, the simple choice would be to just add our Strike value of +10 to our highest set, 39, and call it quits. A Strike at 49 is pretty good, but we can do better.
Icy Void Hand, from Ghosts and Shadows, lets you make a Freeze attack at a +15 bonus. Elemental Attacks are a special kind of secondary attack, using their own modifiers instead of your External styles Strike and Damage bonuses. They ignore Toughness and Armour and inflict significantly nastier conditions than normal. So, we can take that beastly 39 set and add 15 for a Freeze at 54.
But we still have lots of dice left. While we could go for an attack on the single dice and do something else with a set, low attacks are often not worth it, so let's use that 24. Our base External Strike bonus is +10, so that'd give us 34, but our Internal style also has a Technique which gives +10 Strike, boosting it up to 44.
So we declare our actions from our roll- A Freeze attack at 54 and a Primary Strike at 44.
And now, because it seems weird but it works for the example, we'll defend against our own attacks
So we roll our dice for defence and get- 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 19,
Which sucks, although not as bad as it might. While Initiative and Attack rolls only have one Major action, on the Defence roll every defence is considered a Major Action, so even if we don't have any sets we can still defend ourselves. Still, without good numbers on our side this is probably going to suck.
Two stats in LotW are used for defence- Block and Footwork. Most styles focus on one, although some go for a balanced defence since some attacks penalise one defence over the other.
For now, with our Footwork of +10 our base values are 27 and 29. Not enough to stop either, but hopefully we can blunt their impact. We can also use another Internal Technique for +5 dodge. However, we have to choose which set to apply it to, as each Internal technique can only be used once per round.
We have another option however. The rank 5 technique of Ghosts and Shadows is, amidst its other effects, a +10 Round Long bonus to Footwork. Round Long means that, as you might expect, its bonus applies to all uses of that skill for the entire round. We'll ignore its other effects for now, focusing on the primary math of the combat rather than the extra utility and depth that can be added by various techniques.
In this case, we use it to boost our defences up to 37 and 39. Now we compare our defence values with the attacks made against us.
44 against 37 has a difference of 7 points. The difference between attack and defence is meaningful in Legends of the Wulin. In this case, a difference of 0-9 mean all we suffer is a Ripple.
Ripples are an abstract measure of the cost of combat, doing nothing on their own but gradually accumulating over the course of the fight, creating more and more danger if you're hit by a particularly successful attack.
Speaking of particularly successful attacks, we're still facing down that nasty Freeze. 54 vs 39 is a difference of 15. It's greater than 10, so in addition to taking a second Ripple we also suffer a Rippling Roll.
A Rippling Roll is, as you might expect, a roll with the total number of Ripples you've suffered in the fight up until that point. Normally a Rippling Roll would make use of your Damage bonus, but as this is a Freeze attack it instead uses the bonus listed in the Technique- In this case +5.
So we roll two dice for our Rippling Roll and, lucky/unlucky us, we get a pair- two sixes for 26. That makes the total value of our Freeze 31.
We oppose this with Chi Aura. Usually, Armour and Toughness would help here, but the mystic ice ignores those defences, leaving us relying on raw dice. Each dice of Chi Aura costs 1 Chi, but we'll spend both points here, hoping to avoid a nasty early fight Chi Condition.
We roll and... 11 and 15. That aint good. We reduce the 31 by 15, leaving a remainder of 16.
From here, we compare it to our Chi Threshold. Chi Threshold is defined by your total amount of Chi. For starting characters, it's generally 12, but Armour increases it by 5. If this was an ordinary attack, the damage value of 16 would be less than our Threshold, so the condition would only be Trivial- Present, but not yet having any mechanical impact.
However, we aren't that lucky. Denied our Armour bonus, we suffer a Minor condition. Freeze penalties always apply to Breath, reducing the amount of Chi we regain each round by one. As an extra fuck you, Freeze conditions also freeze one of your River slots, denying you the option of storing dice in it.
And then we hit the end of the round. This round we've spent our full 12 Chi- 3 for the Freeze, 2 for the +10 Strike, 5 for the Footwork boost and 2 for Chi Aura.
The base Chi regeneration is 2 for starting rank characters. We regain an additional 1 from Focus on Breath, but are denied 1 by the Minor Freeze condition, so we only regain 2 Chi.
Generally, this would be really bad. Running low on Chi massively limits your options and makes you super vulnerable to attacks as you might not be able to buy Chi Aura, so alpha strikes like this are extremely risky. However, in this case it was for the purpose of example.
That's an overview of a single potential combat round in LotW, but there's a lot I didn't get into. Marvels which let you penalise enemy stats or skills, Secondary and Area attacks, the whole mess of Secret Arts... I can get into some of it if you like, but hopefully this'll serve as a decent example of how the numbers actually work in play.
It's also worth noting that at any stage in the turn I could have chosen to do something different. Made use of the numbers presented to me and my resources in different ways. That's the thing I really enjoy about LotW- Almost every time you roll the dice, you look at them and have to consider your options, how to best make use of what you've been presented with to stay in the fight and push towards victory.
That Freeze effect sounds pretty nasty
In fact all the elemental effects sound like they could be pretty nasty
Elemental Attacks in general are very nasty, although they have some downsides.
Internal Styles can grant one of the four forms of Energy Attack (Freeze, Burn, Shock, Poison) with their Internal Techniques, costing Chi to use. This gets you an extra attack, which is good, and the injury conditions they inflict ignore your normal defences and inflict greater penalties, which is awesome. The downside?
Energy Attacks are generally very inaccurate. They gain no benefit from your External or Weapon stats, instead being made only with the value of the technique itself. This means that generally an opponent will have a very good chance of defending themselves, since they have their full defensive bonus available which will usually be higher.
Energy Attacks are generally best used alongside other attacks, marvels and so on, forcing the opponent to divide their dice and defensive techniques, overwhelming them with things they need to defend themselves against in hope of landing the crippling penalties.
Thanks for the explanation, it seems quite interesting. I suppose it becomes easier to chew with practice. How are things on the GM's end? Is enemy building roughly the same as PCs? Does it tend to better handle adversaries of equal power, big brutes, or lots of small enemies?
There are three kinds of enemy you have access to as a GM- Xia tier enemies built in the same way as PCs, alongside Minions and Lesser Legends.
Minions are simplified opponents representing mobs of lesser enemies. They always go last, have a limited array of combat stats and very few options. On their own, a minion mob is more of a speedbump than a threat, throwing out attacks every round that might inconvenience PCs but aren't particularly dangerous. However, if a Xia or a Lesser Legend is leading a minion mob, they gain a bonus from their leaders skills, making them significantly more dangerous.
Lesser Legends are a middle ground between Xia and Minions. They don't have Chi or Internal styles, but can have External styles and Secret Arts. They always go last but have access to all the combat options PCs do. Lesser Legends aren't a match for a Xia one on one, but they can still pose a threat.
In my experience, LotW works at its absolute best for one on one duels between opponents of roughly equal power. However, it also works well for all vs one fights, with the PC's facing off against one very powerful enemy with minion or Lesser Legend support.
Running a full group of Xia on the same tier as the PCs against them can work, but it's a bit of a struggle to remember all the various techniques they have and run all of the full characters properly, and it does slow down a lot.
You can play with the formula, though. I'm running a fight later today consisting of a Rank 3 Xia (one rank higher than the PCs), a Rank 4, a LL and a Minion mob.
Another thing I noticed is that the wiki is chock full of fan styles, with only a few 'canon' styles. Are these fully homebrewed, or is there an "ability buy" section in the proper book that you add fluff to like these?
The canon style pages are mostly there for discussing and fixing flaws that exist amongst the various styles in the core book. The Half Burnt Manual errata book (also available on the wiki) compiles those fixes, and while I don't agree with all of them it's a very useful resource for the system.
For actually building styles, the core book gives guidelines but a lot of it is a matter of guesswork and testing. A lot of the fan styles are over or underpowered and might take some fiddling to get working right, but they're a useful resource for drawing on and seeing what can be done in the system. One of the most prolific homebrewers on the site, Zechstyr, has a really good handle on LotW and basically all the content with his name next to it is really good.
Oh, one thing about LotW-
Don't buy the book. You're not supporting the creators, you're creating Chinese thieves. No, seriously, the company imploded after the Chinese half of the business ran off with the Kickstarter funding meant for Jenna Moran's latest project, and a lot of the developers and artists who worked on LotW were never fully paid. Pirating it is more ethical than giving those fucks money.
Interesting. Thanks for the tips, user.
OP here
Thanks for the info on Legends of the Wulin I'll definitely check it out, I think I'll fiddle with my backup system M&M in the meantime just in case but LotW looks like it could be exactly what I'm looking for
Anyway I guess the thread is open to general discussion of Sci-Fi, Martial Arts, and Sci-Fi Martial Arts
For a general starting topic what are some of your ideas for Post Human Martial Arts
I realize this is a very niche genre
Of course, there's gotta be martial >gun arts
Which includes using it in melee; a rifle like a quarterstaff or spear, handgun like a club/tonfa
Something with magnets to overcome metal armor; accelerating a striking object towards its target and demagnetizing right before contact, slamming into it
Rockets on the limbs is a classic
Non-human body shape in aliens using styles that function quite differently, putting both sides against unfamiliar form
I would imagine that their would be those that incorporate weapons directly into their body and those that prefer to rely solely on futuristic firearms
I ran a sci-fi martial arts game about humanity fighting off huge, impossibly powerful alien monsters that rose up from every world in the solar system, driving humans back to Earth.
Modern weapons were useless against them, the monsters being an incredibly powerful and alien form of Chi. The only way to fight them was to train people in the old ways of martial arts and the cultivation of Chi, and equip them with mecha which were less weapons in themselves and more Chi-amplifiers, letting their Chi rival that of the alien monsters.
Of course, it was also the case that some rare and legendary masters of Kung fu were fully capable of fighting the monsters on foot, such was the density and power of their Chi.
Well that sounds fucking great
It was pretty fun times. Sadly the game died before it could ever reach a real ending, but we had some awesome fights and some fun times.
Pic related is art of one of the mechs that one of the players drew. They used a slow and heavy style, taking hits to create openings to strike back even harder, as well as protecting their allies with their heavy armour and resilience.
Character idea for an NPC for my hypothetical campaign
Ageing boxer who can no longer compete on the pro circuit undergoes radical cyberization in order to compete in a new League that allows mods. Disillusioned with the his treatment in the new league and facing ever mounting debt from his surgeries he agrees to become the hitman for an Organized Crime Family, his weapon of choice his own hands his arms having been modified to act as those of a human sized Mantis Shrimp
Final Bump