Best System for Japanese Setting

I'm DMing for a group that wants as little reading material as possible. What is the best and smallest system for a Japanese setting?

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I think any modern system would do nicely. It's just a different country.

Jokes aside, I think L5R is excellent for the medieval Japanese aesthetic.

I considered L5R, but it would require more reading from my players than they're willing to do. I need a system contained in 1 book.

If you want something simple and contained, maybe you could look into different varieties of games under the Powered By The Apocalypse umbrella.

Shadow of the Demon Lord's Mists of Akuma expansion is breddy good.

I also wanted to say this but other than that, we have a few translated Japanese systems now.
Namely, Tenra Bansho Zero and Ryuutama are pretty good for it.

Black Tokyo

I wrote a hack for Dogs in the Vineyard to get that samurai duel feel in. Japan is a cool setting, but there's more questions than setting you have to answer if you want to run a good game.

Burning wheel has a Japanese setting if you want to mechanically be all about bushido and shit.
>group that wants as little reading material as possible
nvm

What kind of tone do you want for the game?

High stakes action? Supernatural? Or low key, focused on politics and honor instead of swordplay?

Just reskin an OSR game like Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

I want a very dramatic game like the original Star Wars trilogy.

My Bushi.

Blossoms are Falling is great, easily my favourite of the BW expansions. The fact they went for the Heian era rather than yet another Sengoku Jidai romp was a nice touch, both for novelty and because it's actually really interesting as a period of history.

No chance OP's group would go for it though, if reading is hard then getting into the spirit of BW is a lost cause. That shit needs the players to be invested in the game.

I'd also recomend Mountain Witch as a self-contained and pretty simple RPG for a one-shot adventure, but has a very different tone than what OP is after.

Have you considered the 1PG system?

Daishò‚ - Samurai Adventure
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Daishò‚ - Adventure Pack 1
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Any system for medieval combat, which is like >50% of them?

Don't do L5R anyway, because it's got close to nothing to do with historical Japanese culture.

>all this shit about honour
Iconic Japanese warlords backstabbed the shit out of each other all the fucking time during the few eras of civil war they had. Most of the "samurai bushido" bullshit comes from a few armchair warrior philosophers who came up with their nonsense in eras of peace, and who were later glorified to hell and back during Japan's ultra-nationalistic pre-WW2 era when the samurai no longer even existed as a class.

Look, if you want a game about wearing kimonos and killing people with Katanas, you'd be better off with an Edo setting than Sengoku Jidai.

Just gonna point out that I'm not OP.

And knights didn't fight for the honor of damsels, cowboys weren't crackshot peace keepers of the new world and most dinosaurs were probably about as active and smart as any fat, giant lizard we have today. Let people have their Fantasy, dude.

It's impossible for people like him to just have fun without AKSHUALLY pointing out every flaw in a time period. Pay him no mind.

>implying dinosaurs weren't probably much smarter than modern lizards due to being much, much, much x[a lot of time] more closely related to the much more intelligent modern birds
Also, almost all of those periods make for much more fun settings and games when they aren't so childishly blue-eyed. And should you not think so, then that's fine, but then I'm still going to point out something more close to the reality of the situation to make sure that the people in question are in fact aware of the reality and choose not to emulate it, instead of simply being misinformed about the reality and not knowing any better.

And you on the other hand don't deserve any other answer than "fuck off."

Sengoku. The answer is Sengoku by Gold Rush Games.

Actually looks pretty fun. I'm not crazy about the Guts and Presence system though.

Savage Worlds

Two contradictory statements, user. The simplest (mechanically at least) game is probably Kagematsu and while it's bretty gud it's very peculiar. I mean, one could point out that a very nice modern Japan (hell, japanese) game is Golden Sky Stories, but it's not exactly what most groups would think of.

Also, "real" Japan or something inspired by?

This. It's pretty sad how little of Japan is there. Hell, how little Asia.

Has a problem with unnecessary use of Japanese terms where English would have worked better, but otherwise an excellent adaption of Wushu.

I think Pendragon might work if refluffed.

People will go on and on about how weeaboo fantasies about Japanese samurai are completely ahistorical and bullshit and samurais were actually huge dicks in real life. But what they fail to realize is that the exact same thing applies to medieval knights. When people play fantasy RPGs they are playing fantasy samurai and not historical samurai just as people play fantasy knights and not historical knights.

Yeah, but people usually don't think actual knights were like Malory's ones.

What instead usually stems from weebs is some bullshit about muh honor that is at best tangentially related to bushido.

Hell, you know what? Perhaps not even weebs. Odd as it sounds, weebs have glimpses about Japan (the bizzarre, the funny, the everyday) that are bad, but possibly less bad than that meme, in my experience.

Anyway Pendragon is beefy as fuck. Might as well use Tenra at this point - which is astoundingly buddhist and even deep as a game. Yes, even if it is a game about loli princesses in mechas and biomagical samurai their cosmo.

Precis Intermedia Games also has a diceless version of Sengoku that also works with their GenreDiversion system.

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>more reading from my players than they're willing to do. I need a system contained in 1 book.

Here u go senpai

This is absolutely disgusting, but I can't look away.

I like it!

Fukkin' saved.

...

Save this one while I commit sudoku instead, I missed a spot

Real Japan would be preferable since I plan on the game taking place in real Japan, but a system based around NOT-Japan would be close enough.
I've never used Dogs in the Vineyard before. How do you like it?
That's too simple senpai

Done and done. Make sure you use a bamboo knife to prove your contrition.

Dogs is very good. Have a copy.

I'm thinking Blood and Honor or World of Dew. Anyone here played either?

No, but I've tried Honor & Katanas a few times and I can tell you, it's solid.

:D

Mostly real Japan when?

Meiji