Druken PREview Feng Shui 2nd Edition.
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momothefiddler
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Josh_Kablack
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As you may have noticed, quality control, clarity and addressing rules ambiguities are not well handled. So what's going to happen when your MC correctly points out that the mutant recharge engine is too powerful and not what the designers likely intended are tries to nerf it with the interpretation you point out is that you are gong to equally correctly counterargue that their stats are crap and without a crazy go nuts loop like that you could just play a martial artist or sorcerer and have better stats while you abuse similarly problematic Fu schticks like Stave off Monkey or Magic Schticks like Mind Control and then you are going to reach some compromise which will either involve dropping grenades at your own feet for damage to be healed or building your engine with the less crazy Psychic Vampire plus Recuperation.
And if having to hash out such arguments before you know how your character actually works rubs you the wrong way in a system you paid actual dollars to own, welcome to the club.
And if having to hash out such arguments before you know how your character actually works rubs you the wrong way in a system you paid actual dollars to own, welcome to the club.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Tue Jun 09, 2015 5:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Josh_Kablack
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Chapter 12: Cyborgish Bits
Best Hits: The Scroungetech Schticks are thematically less offensive to campaigns not using the default Chi War backstory than the old Arcanowave Schticks were.
Worst Flops: Deciding that Cyborgs were the class that used their wound points as a resource, then dialing that up to 11.
In the previous edition, 3 of the 20 archetypes in the core book had access to the Arcanowave material. In this edition, only 1 of the 36 corebook archetypes has access to Arcanowave's obvious successor: Scroungetech. Thus the Scroungetech chapter is almost entirely schticks for Cyborgs. Once again, the advancement list and editing combine to form failtron and many of these schticks cannot be taken by anyone according to the rules strictly as written.
As good an insight into cybernetics as the rules in this chapter
At least this time out there is only one schtick in the advancement list which is undefined in the chapter - as "Force Distributor" was probably named "Kinetic Distributor" after key parts of layout were done.
Unlike Sorcerers, Supernatural Creatures, Tranimals and Mutants, Scroungetech Schtick don't get a Juncture Mod / Juncture Penalty / Reversion / Freakout type hosey subsystem, which is probably a good thing. Like Gene Freaks there is exactly one archetype who can take these schticks, so there is heavy role protection of speshul snowflakieness at the cost of added page count and steeper learning curves. This is a bad thing.
Speaking of Bad Things, the Cyborg Archetype take as -2 Penalty to Up Checks and Death Checks. Otherwise it has a statline very similar to the Gene Freak, AV 13, Defense 13, Speed 6. The notable differences are first the Cyborg swaps the other two stats around for 9 Toughness and 6 Fortune, second that the Cyborg get a Guns backup attack (at the same value 13 value as the Primary Scroungetech AV
) and finally that the Cyborg comes with Fix It and Sabotage skills. So Cyborgs are slow, relatively easy targets with the minimum heroic luck, but high durability. That's not terribly exciting to a powergamer, but it is evocative of the source material. The part where they are less likely to pull through grievous bodily harm is however contrary to the source material.
But let me back up a bit and discuss the source material in a bit more depth. First, consider some cyborgs from action movies
click for a bunch of pics
If you want to split hairs, this is an android not a cyborg. See below.
Obligatory early 90s HK action movie. Also porn.
Movie slated for 2020 release
Scarlett Johansen tenentively slated to star in live action movie
James Cameron has the rights, but has backburnered it in favor of making Giant Smurfs II: So Blue, We Rake in the Green
No movie in the works yet, give it a decade
Okay, what all of those have in common is that they have been *rebuilt*. Even if I were being pedantic and calling the T-800, Alita and Kresnov androids rather than cyborgs, ( which is a distinction finer than even this classploded version Feng Shui makes ) the concept of having been rebuilt is still fundamental to those characters. All of these undergo notable rebuilding and recovery scenes as part of their melodramatic hooks. This rebuilding is used to explore questions of identity (am I still human?), capability (what can I do now) and loyalty (what do I owe those who rebuilt me? what do I owe those who were close to me before I was rebuilt?) within the narratives. And someone as gameclever and genresavvy as Robin D. Laws surely saw that those are the bones of all the juiciest melodramatic hooks for players who want to play cyborgs?
Surprisingly not.
I'm unsurprised that the rules here give short shrift to such consideration, we've reached the point where added snowflake subsystems were being phoned in and the designers forgot to even hose them with Arcanowave Mutation. What truly surprises me is that Laws also totally misses this in Blowing up the Movies. His review of a pair of Kamen Rider film therein, focuses instead on refluffing existing FS2 archetypes instead of what makes "cyborg" a useful idiom within the action movie concept. Which is to say that nobody involved in writing this game really had an understanding of what "cyborg stories" even are. There's a passing mention of being rebuilt in the cyborg archetype's flavor text - but even that is just parody of the Six Million Dollar Man intro meant to cause chuckles.
Instead of pinning the game's vision of cybernetics on an understanding of the how the trope commonly ties into melodrama, the game does itself a grave disservice by linking cyborgs to its particular post-Chi-pocolyptic uplifted monkies future wasteland. There's not even any allowance for modern day supersoldiers or even past-juncture Frankensteins.
Are you distracted by the Cyborg Monkey? The authors really hope you are.
So instead of working on a foundation that supports common action stories about Cyborg characters, what the Scroungetech Schticks actually offer are some kinds of okay utility abilities and damage schticks and a heaping helping of ways to play a suicide bomber.
The utility schticks are kind of cool - you get can Spider Tracers, WiFi anywhen, X-Ray Specs of narrative exposition, and a burrito storage rack. Those all reinforce my opinion that Cyborgs should just attack with Guns and Martial Arts and have their tech dedicated to nifty tricks rather than yet another mess untested schticks. But this isn't a game about noncombat utility, and you don't have anything else going for you so as a Cyborg, you are going to take the combat schticks and you are going to be a suicide bomber.
Did I say suicide bomber yet?
Here's a summary of the first four schticks in the chapter
Honest Flavor Text for the Cyborg Archetype
That's not merely damaging to character continuity, but goes all the way to outright insulting to players who wanted their games to be more than one shots. Hope you didn't have a campaign in mind.
Even worse, a number of the other Scroungetech schticks do things like deflect incoming attacks to other PCs or steal another PC's successful roll for the your Cyborg to use on their next attack. Those sorts of schticks are going to make the cyborg player unpopular with their teammates in groups of casual players. The cyborg's inevitably hastened demise will likely be celebrated around the game table.
Which is in itself encouragement to play a cyberdized version of various real world politicians.
You may also note that a lot of those schticks aren't really worth taking damage or impairment for. You have a Guns AV, you can just pick up a shotgun or assault rifle and shoot fools for 13+ damage instead of having to burn yourself for 3 wound points to use your onboard flamethrower to shoot them for 14. Who in the history of history has ever said "it would be cool if my character could take damage to aid another faster?" And causing everyone to take damage on missed attacks is only worthwhile in cases where the PCs are outnumbered by named foes or in have some sort of "run the gauntlet" combat objective that does not involve shooting back - which will not happen meaningfully in any map-agnositc system, and will superextradoublezowie not happen with this edition's Opportunistic Fire rules.
But you might also notice that if you accept that your character is already dead, you can martyr yourself spectacularly, and if you are going to play a cyborg you are going to ignore the common Cyborg themes I discusses above and instead you are have a Samurai's melodramatic hook: "I am already dead. And I have already returned, for it was not a good death."
probably not what you wanted to play a high-tech revenant for
Once you accept that your character Cyborg is already dead, the maximization simplifies to "how many enemies can I take with me?" And the answer is unsurprisingly: "all of them, they didn't actually playtest these schticks". My best first pass optimization build is to take the speed booster schtick, the schtick that lets you ignore failed Up checks and you open the fight to gain an arbitrarily large number of wound points to gain an arbitrarily large initiative - let's go with 450 wound points for +90 to initiative. That's still just one packet of wounds, so it's just one Up Check, but you do not care if you fail, you're up for this fight. Your first action is on shot 100 or so, and you have the "go faster while Impaired" schtick so you get to make literally dozens of attacks before anyone without an initiative copy or swap schtcik gets their first action. Your usual priority is to just flail wildly at -2 Impairment until you hit with the schtick that lets you swap wound point totals with a victim. But that's just your safe warm up, the real martyr card is to first you activate your damage over time schtick on your ludicrously high first shot. That one ticks per shot, requires no attack roll and you can spend fortune to exclude your allies. Since it ticks per shot, it means that Bosses and Uberbosses who have taken enough damage will have to make their 50/50 not-actually Up Check rolls each shot. That's like an autokill on everybody, but you can make it an Overkill by using Blow up Real Good every other shot. So yeah, they are autodead and also took a couple dozen damage 20 attacks before anyone got to act in the first sequence, and you have triple digit wounds and like 200 Marks of Death to resolve at the end of the fight, making your character also superextradead,....but that is just doing what the authors wanted Cyborgs to do in this edition albeit a bit more quickly and efficiently than the default build. Time to bring in the identical twin....
Best Hits: The Scroungetech Schticks are thematically less offensive to campaigns not using the default Chi War backstory than the old Arcanowave Schticks were.
Worst Flops: Deciding that Cyborgs were the class that used their wound points as a resource, then dialing that up to 11.
In the previous edition, 3 of the 20 archetypes in the core book had access to the Arcanowave material. In this edition, only 1 of the 36 corebook archetypes has access to Arcanowave's obvious successor: Scroungetech. Thus the Scroungetech chapter is almost entirely schticks for Cyborgs. Once again, the advancement list and editing combine to form failtron and many of these schticks cannot be taken by anyone according to the rules strictly as written.
As good an insight into cybernetics as the rules in this chapter
At least this time out there is only one schtick in the advancement list which is undefined in the chapter - as "Force Distributor" was probably named "Kinetic Distributor" after key parts of layout were done.
Unlike Sorcerers, Supernatural Creatures, Tranimals and Mutants, Scroungetech Schtick don't get a Juncture Mod / Juncture Penalty / Reversion / Freakout type hosey subsystem, which is probably a good thing. Like Gene Freaks there is exactly one archetype who can take these schticks, so there is heavy role protection of speshul snowflakieness at the cost of added page count and steeper learning curves. This is a bad thing.
Speaking of Bad Things, the Cyborg Archetype take as -2 Penalty to Up Checks and Death Checks. Otherwise it has a statline very similar to the Gene Freak, AV 13, Defense 13, Speed 6. The notable differences are first the Cyborg swaps the other two stats around for 9 Toughness and 6 Fortune, second that the Cyborg get a Guns backup attack (at the same value 13 value as the Primary Scroungetech AV
) and finally that the Cyborg comes with Fix It and Sabotage skills. So Cyborgs are slow, relatively easy targets with the minimum heroic luck, but high durability. That's not terribly exciting to a powergamer, but it is evocative of the source material. The part where they are less likely to pull through grievous bodily harm is however contrary to the source material. But let me back up a bit and discuss the source material in a bit more depth. First, consider some cyborgs from action movies
click for a bunch of pics
If you want to split hairs, this is an android not a cyborg. See below.
Obligatory early 90s HK action movie. Also porn.
Movie slated for 2020 release
Scarlett Johansen tenentively slated to star in live action movie
James Cameron has the rights, but has backburnered it in favor of making Giant Smurfs II: So Blue, We Rake in the Green
No movie in the works yet, give it a decade
Surprisingly not.
I'm unsurprised that the rules here give short shrift to such consideration, we've reached the point where added snowflake subsystems were being phoned in and the designers forgot to even hose them with Arcanowave Mutation. What truly surprises me is that Laws also totally misses this in Blowing up the Movies. His review of a pair of Kamen Rider film therein, focuses instead on refluffing existing FS2 archetypes instead of what makes "cyborg" a useful idiom within the action movie concept. Which is to say that nobody involved in writing this game really had an understanding of what "cyborg stories" even are. There's a passing mention of being rebuilt in the cyborg archetype's flavor text - but even that is just parody of the Six Million Dollar Man intro meant to cause chuckles.
Instead of pinning the game's vision of cybernetics on an understanding of the how the trope commonly ties into melodrama, the game does itself a grave disservice by linking cyborgs to its particular post-Chi-pocolyptic uplifted monkies future wasteland. There's not even any allowance for modern day supersoldiers or even past-juncture Frankensteins.
Are you distracted by the Cyborg Monkey? The authors really hope you are.
So instead of working on a foundation that supports common action stories about Cyborg characters, what the Scroungetech Schticks actually offer are some kinds of okay utility abilities and damage schticks and a heaping helping of ways to play a suicide bomber.
The utility schticks are kind of cool - you get can Spider Tracers, WiFi anywhen, X-Ray Specs of narrative exposition, and a burrito storage rack. Those all reinforce my opinion that Cyborgs should just attack with Guns and Martial Arts and have their tech dedicated to nifty tricks rather than yet another mess untested schticks. But this isn't a game about noncombat utility, and you don't have anything else going for you so as a Cyborg, you are going to take the combat schticks and you are going to be a suicide bomber.
Did I say suicide bomber yet?
Here's a summary of the first four schticks in the chapter
- When you are impaired, make attacks quicker
- Deal a point of damage over time each shot to everyone, you cannot exclude yourself
- Gain Multiple Marks of Death to make a Damage 20 attack against multiple opponents without the usual multiple targets penalty and an added bonus (whose wording doesn't quite make sense)
- 50/50 chance to Deal more damage on a melee attack or to take damage yourself.
- if you are impaired, get to make counterattacks as an interrupt
- all named characters (including you) take damage when they miss
- attack mooks at a bonus, take wounds if successful
- take wounds to give an ally a boost as an interrupt
- ignore failed Up Checks until end of fight, have an extra Mark of Death for doing so
- have a damage 14 Flamethrower that you take Wound points each time you use
- Add X to your Speed. Take 5x wound points.
- gain a bonus to Smackdown when Impaired
- take 4X Wound Points, X Allies heal 10 Wound Points each.
- the shot cost of attacks against you goes up when you are impaired.
Honest Flavor Text for the Cyborg Archetype
That's not merely damaging to character continuity, but goes all the way to outright insulting to players who wanted their games to be more than one shots. Hope you didn't have a campaign in mind.
Even worse, a number of the other Scroungetech schticks do things like deflect incoming attacks to other PCs or steal another PC's successful roll for the your Cyborg to use on their next attack. Those sorts of schticks are going to make the cyborg player unpopular with their teammates in groups of casual players. The cyborg's inevitably hastened demise will likely be celebrated around the game table.
Which is in itself encouragement to play a cyberdized version of various real world politicians.
You may also note that a lot of those schticks aren't really worth taking damage or impairment for. You have a Guns AV, you can just pick up a shotgun or assault rifle and shoot fools for 13+ damage instead of having to burn yourself for 3 wound points to use your onboard flamethrower to shoot them for 14. Who in the history of history has ever said "it would be cool if my character could take damage to aid another faster?" And causing everyone to take damage on missed attacks is only worthwhile in cases where the PCs are outnumbered by named foes or in have some sort of "run the gauntlet" combat objective that does not involve shooting back - which will not happen meaningfully in any map-agnositc system, and will superextradoublezowie not happen with this edition's Opportunistic Fire rules.
But you might also notice that if you accept that your character is already dead, you can martyr yourself spectacularly, and if you are going to play a cyborg you are going to ignore the common Cyborg themes I discusses above and instead you are have a Samurai's melodramatic hook: "I am already dead. And I have already returned, for it was not a good death."
probably not what you wanted to play a high-tech revenant for
Once you accept that your character Cyborg is already dead, the maximization simplifies to "how many enemies can I take with me?" And the answer is unsurprisingly: "all of them, they didn't actually playtest these schticks". My best first pass optimization build is to take the speed booster schtick, the schtick that lets you ignore failed Up checks and you open the fight to gain an arbitrarily large number of wound points to gain an arbitrarily large initiative - let's go with 450 wound points for +90 to initiative. That's still just one packet of wounds, so it's just one Up Check, but you do not care if you fail, you're up for this fight. Your first action is on shot 100 or so, and you have the "go faster while Impaired" schtick so you get to make literally dozens of attacks before anyone without an initiative copy or swap schtcik gets their first action. Your usual priority is to just flail wildly at -2 Impairment until you hit with the schtick that lets you swap wound point totals with a victim. But that's just your safe warm up, the real martyr card is to first you activate your damage over time schtick on your ludicrously high first shot. That one ticks per shot, requires no attack roll and you can spend fortune to exclude your allies. Since it ticks per shot, it means that Bosses and Uberbosses who have taken enough damage will have to make their 50/50 not-actually Up Check rolls each shot. That's like an autokill on everybody, but you can make it an Overkill by using Blow up Real Good every other shot. So yeah, they are autodead and also took a couple dozen damage 20 attacks before anyone got to act in the first sequence, and you have triple digit wounds and like 200 Marks of Death to resolve at the end of the fight, making your character also superextradead,....but that is just doing what the authors wanted Cyborgs to do in this edition albeit a bit more quickly and efficiently than the default build. Time to bring in the identical twin....
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Tue Jun 09, 2015 5:35 am, edited 2 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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OgreBattle
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Username17
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Well... no. The point is that whenever you pay something to get an effect, you need to have a limit on how much you can pay it. So "paying hit points" is acceptable, but "paying adding to an uncapped damage counter" is not.OgreBattle wrote:That sounds like a good mechanic for playing an eversor assassin that explodes at the end of the mission
Like many things in this book, the Cyborg simply fails basic checks of "did you pass your Craft: Game Design?" The Cyborg is a poor fit for source material, doesn't survive campaigns, has a crap tonne of infinity loops, and is basically worthless if he doesn't bring the cheese. It's a perfect storm of bad design.
The Cyborg is based on the Shadowfist card the Ten Thousand Dollar Man. He had the tagline "We don't have the technology, but what the heck let's rebuild him anyway." and he was big and had toughness but couldn't turn to heal. So unless you had doctors or chi healing or something on your side, he was was a character that was impressive for one fight and then was permanently crippled or dead. Which did a decent enough job of being the cinematic cyborg/robot thug, who staggers around being crippled after you hit them with a car or something. But he was never even intended to be a named character Cyborg. For that we have folks like Titanium Johnson.
He not only can heal up between battles, but he actually gets harder to kill later in the game.
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Josh_Kablack
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As I have now covered all the chargen material and am bogging down in my own verbosity on enemy assymetry. This time out I take a different approach, more of a summary of progress so far and the sort of capsule thing you can share elsewhere on the interwebs when someone wants a review of FS2 that doesn't take them hours to page through
Okay, so the biggest problem with Feng Shui 2 chargen is probably that the lengthy list of archetypes takes too long for new players to page through and decide which class archetype to play. To help remedy that, I hereby present a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style set of listed menus to speed up chargen. Enjoy:
1. Do you want to be able to customize you schticks before the game starts?
"Yes, I enjoy chargen." go to 11
"No, I dislike having choice." go to 2
2. What are you feelings about your character dying?
"It's cool, so long as I can take all the enemies with me!" Go To X1
"Actually, what I really want is to make a single roll at the end of each session to see if my character buys it." Go to 12
"I'd like to try and avoid it", go to 3
3. Do you want to use a special snowflake rules set that hardly any other archetype uses?
"Hell yes, that's where the worst playtesting and best cheese is!" Go to 13
"Ah, I don't mind using Guns and/or Kung Fu" Go to 4
4. Do you sometimes use Guns or do you only fight in close?
"Guns" go to 5
"Only In Close"go to 14
"I want another option" go to X2
5. Are you Fast, Tough or a bit of Both?
"Fast" go to 20
"Tough" go to X17
"Both" go to 6
6. Want to play a cop?
"Sure!" go to 21
"No, thank you officer!" go to 7
7. Does your character keep an arsenal of specialized gear?
"Yes, tools of the trade are essential" Go to 22
"Well, no more so than the typical character in a chop-socky shoot-em-up" Go to 8
8. Ninjas or Pirates?
"Ninjas!" Go to X20
"Pirates - unless we're talking baseball!" Go to X21
"Uh, what are my other choices?: Go to 9
9. What sort of day job do you have?
"I sell my talents at violent adventure to the highest bidder, caring only about my own code." go to 23
"I work on the wrong side of the law" go to X29
"My clients pay me to work within the law. Right up to the edges, but still within" Go to 24
"What's a day job?" go to 10
"Blue Collar through and through!" go to X22
10. Wanna play Mad Max?
"Two Archetypes Enter, One Archetype Leaves!!" Go to X27
"Uh, naw" Go to X28
11: Well, only 3 of the 36 archetypes in the book allow schtick swapping by the rules as written! So let's see which one of those you are: Kung Fu or Sorcery?
"Kung Fu" Go to 17
"Sorcery" Go to X8
12. Congrats, you are a Transformed animal. Once you fail three reversion rolls, your character dies! Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to reversion! Now Let's see which one:
What's more important to you?
"Bare Knuckle Brawling" Go to X13
"Justified Arrogance" Go to X14
"Knowledge of Hidden Rules" Go to X37
13: Special Snowflake Schticks only? Or some other schtick type to fall back on?
"I trust in my snowflakiness?" (Go to 18)
"Ah, it never hurts to have a backup plan?" (Go to 19)
14: "Would you like to be immune to enemy attacks?"
"Ayup. Sounds pretty good" Go to X3
"Uh, that's probably a trick question no thanks" go to 15
15: Wheels?
"Hell Yes! from the glory days of American Muscle Cars!" Go to X4
"Yup, whatever car I can get my grubby mitts on." Go to X5
"Ah, mastery of war is more important to me than mastery of wagons."Go to 16
16: Mastery of the blade or mastery of the body?
"The Blade" Go to X6
"The Body" Go to X7
17: Are you willing to risk running a fragile character in order to strain the game's random number generator function?
"Heckz yeah, I understand probability!" Go to X9
"Um, maybe not, my GM likes to hit us with explosions." Go to X10
18: Would you like to waste the first three shots of every fight?:
"Uh, no, that sounds stupid" Go to X11
"This must be another trick, I bet it's a speed for power trade" Go to X12
19 Would you prefer to start with a Schtick that isn't explained at all in this edition or a schtick that doesn't do anything as explained in this edition?
"Unexplained is better than useless" Go to X15
"Sounds like another trick question I'll take the useless schtick in hopes that something makes up for it" Go to X16
20 Want a better attack or a better Defense ?
"Strength lies not in defense, but attack!" go to X23
"Offense wins games, defense wins championships"X24
21 In combat, would you rather focus on a wound point management minigame or on coming up with pithy quips?
"I like eurogames and don't mind a side of paindeck in my TTRPGS" Go to X25
"My quips will take the pith out of anybody" Go to X26
22: How do you feel about masks?
"They are terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.” Go to X18
"I'd rather people saw my full face, that way they better understand the depths of my obsession" Go to X19
23 Want a schtick that is has two different descriptions, a schtick that ruins Robin Laws's ideas for streamlining the game or merely a solid skill list?
"I like contradictions" Go to X34
"This far into the book, I feel that it's time for turnabout, so now I want to make Mr Laws cry" Go to X35
"Save your snark, simple and Solid is the way to go." Go to X36
24: Would you rather protect people; hunt fugitives, seek down priceless treasures, or do some of each?
"I protect people" Go to X30
"I hunt people" Go to X31
"I hunt treasures" Go to X33
"Whatever pays the bills" Go to X32
X1.
X2
X3.
X4:
X5:
X6
X7
X8
X9.
X10:
X11:
X12:
X13:
X14:
X15:
X16
X17
X18
X19
X20.
X21.
X22.
X23.
X24.
X25.
X26.
X27:
X28:
X29:
X30;
X31:
X32:
X33:
X34.
X35.
X36:
X37:
Okay, so the biggest problem with Feng Shui 2 chargen is probably that the lengthy list of archetypes takes too long for new players to page through and decide which class archetype to play. To help remedy that, I hereby present a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style set of listed menus to speed up chargen. Enjoy:
1. Do you want to be able to customize you schticks before the game starts?
"Yes, I enjoy chargen." go to 11
"No, I dislike having choice." go to 2
2. What are you feelings about your character dying?
"It's cool, so long as I can take all the enemies with me!" Go To X1
"Actually, what I really want is to make a single roll at the end of each session to see if my character buys it." Go to 12
"I'd like to try and avoid it", go to 3
3. Do you want to use a special snowflake rules set that hardly any other archetype uses?
"Hell yes, that's where the worst playtesting and best cheese is!" Go to 13
"Ah, I don't mind using Guns and/or Kung Fu" Go to 4
4. Do you sometimes use Guns or do you only fight in close?
"Guns" go to 5
"Only In Close"go to 14
"I want another option" go to X2
5. Are you Fast, Tough or a bit of Both?
"Fast" go to 20
"Tough" go to X17
"Both" go to 6
6. Want to play a cop?
"Sure!" go to 21
"No, thank you officer!" go to 7
7. Does your character keep an arsenal of specialized gear?
"Yes, tools of the trade are essential" Go to 22
"Well, no more so than the typical character in a chop-socky shoot-em-up" Go to 8
8. Ninjas or Pirates?
"Ninjas!" Go to X20
"Pirates - unless we're talking baseball!" Go to X21
"Uh, what are my other choices?: Go to 9
9. What sort of day job do you have?
"I sell my talents at violent adventure to the highest bidder, caring only about my own code." go to 23
"I work on the wrong side of the law" go to X29
"My clients pay me to work within the law. Right up to the edges, but still within" Go to 24
"What's a day job?" go to 10
"Blue Collar through and through!" go to X22
10. Wanna play Mad Max?
"Two Archetypes Enter, One Archetype Leaves!!" Go to X27
"Uh, naw" Go to X28
11: Well, only 3 of the 36 archetypes in the book allow schtick swapping by the rules as written! So let's see which one of those you are: Kung Fu or Sorcery?
"Kung Fu" Go to 17
"Sorcery" Go to X8
12. Congrats, you are a Transformed animal. Once you fail three reversion rolls, your character dies! Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to reversion! Now Let's see which one:
What's more important to you?
"Bare Knuckle Brawling" Go to X13
"Justified Arrogance" Go to X14
"Knowledge of Hidden Rules" Go to X37
13: Special Snowflake Schticks only? Or some other schtick type to fall back on?
"I trust in my snowflakiness?" (Go to 18)
"Ah, it never hurts to have a backup plan?" (Go to 19)
14: "Would you like to be immune to enemy attacks?"
"Ayup. Sounds pretty good" Go to X3
"Uh, that's probably a trick question no thanks" go to 15
15: Wheels?
"Hell Yes! from the glory days of American Muscle Cars!" Go to X4
"Yup, whatever car I can get my grubby mitts on." Go to X5
"Ah, mastery of war is more important to me than mastery of wagons."Go to 16
16: Mastery of the blade or mastery of the body?
"The Blade" Go to X6
"The Body" Go to X7
17: Are you willing to risk running a fragile character in order to strain the game's random number generator function?
"Heckz yeah, I understand probability!" Go to X9
"Um, maybe not, my GM likes to hit us with explosions." Go to X10
18: Would you like to waste the first three shots of every fight?:
"Uh, no, that sounds stupid" Go to X11
"This must be another trick, I bet it's a speed for power trade" Go to X12
19 Would you prefer to start with a Schtick that isn't explained at all in this edition or a schtick that doesn't do anything as explained in this edition?
"Unexplained is better than useless" Go to X15
"Sounds like another trick question I'll take the useless schtick in hopes that something makes up for it" Go to X16
20 Want a better attack or a better Defense ?
"Strength lies not in defense, but attack!" go to X23
"Offense wins games, defense wins championships"X24
21 In combat, would you rather focus on a wound point management minigame or on coming up with pithy quips?
"I like eurogames and don't mind a side of paindeck in my TTRPGS" Go to X25
"My quips will take the pith out of anybody" Go to X26
22: How do you feel about masks?
"They are terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.” Go to X18
"I'd rather people saw my full face, that way they better understand the depths of my obsession" Go to X19
23 Want a schtick that is has two different descriptions, a schtick that ruins Robin Laws's ideas for streamlining the game or merely a solid skill list?
"I like contradictions" Go to X34
"This far into the book, I feel that it's time for turnabout, so now I want to make Mr Laws cry" Go to X35
"Save your snark, simple and Solid is the way to go." Go to X36
24: Would you rather protect people; hunt fugitives, seek down priceless treasures, or do some of each?
"I protect people" Go to X30
"I hunt people" Go to X31
"I hunt treasures" Go to X33
"Whatever pays the bills" Go to X32
X1.
Congrats, you are a Cyborg, have fun Suicide Bombing the enemy. Agony Grenade, Lumbar Scorpian, Neural and Stimulator are you first three schtick picks. Plasma Tubles and Blow Up Real Good help, but are not strictly necessary.
Congrats. You are an Archer. You use Guns to use a weapon that is not a gun since you don't use guns. You also get a Guns schtick as a Core Schtick.
Congrats. You are an Exorcist Monk. You are going to spam Stave off Monkey whenever you are attacked.
Congrats You are a Driver. You are essential to using the Chase rules in game. So was playtesting, but that didn't actually happen fro those rules. So you will get to enjoy things like using your kid brother's Hot Wheels to model two cars literally touching bumpers while one of them is Near the enemies but the other is Far from the enemies, tracking Chase Points, Condition Points, Gaps and whether any of those Condition Points were caused by specific events from a three lists on three different pages or not. But it doesn't matter, because all you will be doing is making a Driving roll every 3 shots in chase scenes and getting cursed at by the other players if you ever have to make an Up Check while driving, because success on such is just as bad in a chase as failure is. Have fun.
Congrats You are a Scrappy Kid. You don't actually break the game, but you have maximum speed, maximum fortune, one point from maximum defense, deal only one point less damage than the biggest weapon in the party and you get 3 useful noncombat skills.
Congrats. You are a Swordmaster. Be sure to pick up Lethal Strike with an advancement and an ally who can heal you.
Condolences, you are a Sifu, it actually kind of sucks to be you. Remember that you can only heal once between fights, can't dodge while healing in combat and the only way you will ever use Flow Restoration is if an enemy mind controls you into hitting one of your allies with Point Blockage.
SUPER JACKPOT. You are a Sorcerer in yet another a casters > you system. not only can you customize without having to con your GM, but that customization lets you reflect the majority of enemy attacks, infinitely charge your Fortune Substat, deal theoretically unbounded damage while having schticks with greater noncombat utility than anyone else. Your schtick picks are MIND CONTROL!, Lucky 8 Blast, Far Lift and Illusions and you actually get to start with those by the rules as written. Heck you can even take another one, so long as you remember that Bend Fate is worse than the using default dodge and boost rules.
Congrats, you are an Old Master. You will be Dodging every attack with an added Fortune Die in order to trigger Aerial Pushaway. When you are not Dodging, you will be spamming Flying Windmill Kicks. Or you can swap those around to do the sorts of thing I recommend with the Martial Artist (X10)
Congrats, you are a Martial Artist. Since you can customize you are going to ditch those worthless Nunchuk schticks. First you are going to spend 3 of those to get the Drunken Fist / Mesmerizing Dart combo, which lets you use the rules for attacking multiple opponents to stunlock an arbitrarily large number of foes for 1 Chi per Sequence. Then you face the tough choice of whether to spend your other two schticks to get Aerial Pushaway to recharge that Chi thereby extending those stunlocks or to get Stave off Monkey to be immune to any attack ever.
Congrats you are a Mutant Gene Freak. Sadly not half as effective as even the also rans in the X-Men comics if you play it with the default picks, and sadly you have like the worst mismatch between schticks named in your Awesoming Up section and Schticks actually printed in the book. But if you can use this sort of sloppiness to convince your GM to let you customize you are going to have a two-schtick infinite mana infinite heal deathproof engine and then you are going to spend the rest of your schticks on being a solid damage dealer or on making sure your allies never take non-attack damage, never miss and any enemies who hit have to reroll their swerve.
Condolences, you are a Supernatural Creature. You're ugly. You have no skills. You only have Speed 6, you have to spend the first 3 shots of any fight transforming into creature form and many of your potential schticks reduce in effectiveness each sequence. You have an Intimidation value, but neither the numbers nor the Schtick name in the archetype match those listed in the Creature Powers chapter. With a few schtick swaps (not allowed by rules as written) or advancements you can make the entire PC party nigh-immune to Death Checks. Have fun arguing how Regeneration heals you outside of combat time.
Meh, You're a Transformed Crab. Nuthin to get excited about here and not a whole lot to mock. Aren't you glad you can die to reversion rolls?
Congrats you are a Transformed Dragon. If you can live without reverting long enough to get 5 to 10 advancements you will be doing things like autosucceedeing at all noncombat skills, having an effective Speed of 15 or trading the actions you already used to negate attacks with Stave off Monkey for twice as many of your enemies' unused actions. But that is a pretty big gamble.
Congrats, you're a Ghost. Hide your 1st Edtion Feng Shui book from your GM to make Damage Immunity: Bullets work against Arrows and Grenades. As if you flying, passing through walls and being immune to bullets wasn't already enough to wreck any heist-type adventure, your Advancement options also include access to two of the three real ultimate power schticks in Sorcery.
Condolences, you're a Magic Cop and Ghost Sense might not be completely useless, but it is at least self-contradictory It says outright that ghosts cannot communicate with you, but they can provide clues - apparently that's not communication. The only compensation is that you do get Sorcery, which is Real Ultimate Power again in Feng Shui 2, but you can't get the actually game breaking schticks with the listed advancement options. Go back and try again.
Condolences, you're a Big Bruiser. You have the lowest primary attack value, the lowest defense value and the lowest speed of any archetype. You're not even like tied for lowest on any of those, you're all by yourself at the bottom. Somehow that's supposed to be balanced by you getting 5 more toughness and 15 more HP than the typical PC does, and by being able to do as much damage with a sword as other characters do with a shotgun. The bizarre part is that you start with two different schticks that boost your AV under different conditions instead of the simpler expedient of starting with a higher AV. Also, your extra toughness doesn't help you with Up Checks nor Death Checks, because letting you use the stat you gave up everything else for would somehow be too good.
Congrats, you are a Masked Avenger. You're pretty good at dropping mooks. Sadly, your advancement options do not include Carnival of Carnage, so you'll only ever be pretty good at it.
Condolences, you are a Full Metal Nutball. While this was an enjoyable role for Johnny Knoxville, it won't be for you. You are going to spend your first advancement on Signature Weapon Shotgun and thereafter ignore the two schticks the designers wasted on Bag Full of Guns.
Congrats you are a Ninja. You're good at being sneaky and dispatching guards.
Congrats you are a Redeemed Pirate. You get a bonus to swashbuckling, although you will have to argue precisely what counts for that with your GM.
Congrats, you are an Everyday Hero. You have solid Defense, good attack with improvised weapons and you'll be adding Fortune Dice to damn near everything, making you not truely cheesey, but just accidentally awesome.
Congrats, you are a Killer. you have the highest non-cheesed Speed and are tied for 2nd highest Attack value in the game. With Carnival of Carnage 3 you kill multiple mooks every 2 shots or you can go both guns blazing with your starting Submachine Guns Autofiring to lay the hurt on named foes.
Congrats, you are a Thief. You have the highest non-cheesed Speed and the highest Defense value in the game. You also have a 15 Intrusion value, letting you sneak in to just about anywhere.
Congrats, you are a Karate Cop. You get a bonus after taking damage and you take damage from missing with attacks, but then you heal that damage when you hit with a subsequent attack. So half the time, you'll be attacking like an Old Master and while you will be spending your Wound Points as a resource, you will also be healing like half of them back, which is strangely favorable as it counts as healing for purposes of removing Death Checks. You also have a great Police skill value for noncombat investigations and Notice Checks.
Congrats you are a Maverick Cop. With aforementioned Pithy Quips and a buddy who is an Archer, Scrappy Kid, or a Sorcerer with Flesh Melter you get to enjoy a 22 Damage revolver. You also have good Police and Driving skill values for noncombat investigations and chase scenes.
Congrats, you are a Highway Ronin, that's a straight Mad Max rip, aside from the predictable editorial mixup between a Smith and Wesson Model 19 and a Smith and Wesson Model 29. You also get to force Bosses to reroll Up Checks, which bosses technically never actually make.
Congrats, you are a Drifter. You'll want to strike off on your own in game, and go on the beer run when combat starts. That way you get the bonuses that make you worthwhile later in the fight.
Ho-hum, you're a Bandit. You're thoroughly mediocre and surprisingly you get to neither rob stagecoaches with six-guns nor drive a modified Trans Am.
Congrats you are a Bodyguard. You are mediocre by yourself, and while your "keep an ally alive no matter what" trick has some synergy with Cyborgs and advanced Swordmasters, it's just not up to snuff with the better ways to do that in this book.
Congrats you are a Bounty Hunter. You start off with Sig Weapon Shotgun, for a very solid 16 damage. You also gain and can share attack bonuses against a single named foe each fight, making you very helpful, if not truly cheesy against bosses.
Meh. you are a Private Investigator. You get a schtick to force the GM to weigh in on your planning and speculation, but otherwise you'd rather be playing a good class.
Congrats, you are a Two-Fisted Archeologist. This is a straight Indiana Jones Rip, which you can't even customize for Lara Croft. Hope you like the fedora.
Congrats you are Ex-Special Forces. The Guns Schtick For the Squad as listed on your character sheet is meaningfully different than the Guns Schtick For the Squad in the Guns Schtick Chapter. If your GM doesn't let you have the recharge version on the Archetype sheet, you probably want to play something else.
Congrats you are a Gambler. This is a must play at any convention game run by employees of atlas games for one simple reason; Your Stack the Odds schtick means that the GM cannot use the mook attack generator tool and must instead preserve both dice that went into generating a Swerve. Aside from being that sort of a justified jerk to people who took your money (and six figures worth of other people's money) for a book they didn't even bother to proofread, there's not much else to do with this class.
Congrats you are a Spy. You have decent combat stats and like half the noncombat skills in the game. Sadly, you lose the highly flavorful "Before I Kill You" schtick from first edition.
Congrats, you found the secret archetypes not in the archetype section!! You are an unlisted Transformed Animal. See page 178 for details. Supposedly these aren't in the Archetypes chapter because they weren't playtested. Funny how that didn't stop so many other problematic combos and mismatched schtick labels from seeing print. Also funny how the non-playtested archetpes actually get the type of schtick customization that 33 of the 36 playtested archetypes do not get by the rules as written.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Nov 11, 2015 11:42 pm, edited 9 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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OgreBattle
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How does Kurt Russel's character work in Feng Shui? Throughout the film he was overshadowed by his friends who were actual kungfu gunmen as he has rocks fall on him for comedic relief, but shines in the final boss encounter with the one special move he can do.
mechanically he just survives mook encounters in a comedic manner then has a super 'the boss underestimated me' move to use on the boss
mechanically he just survives mook encounters in a comedic manner then has a super 'the boss underestimated me' move to use on the boss
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RelentlessImp
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Josh_Kablack
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Kurt Russel's Jack Burton is half of the inspiration for Feng Shui's "Everyday Hero" class. The other half is probably Jackie Chan's Jackie from the Police Story series of movies. Mechanically, Jackie Chan brings the "Improvised Weapon Mastery" and Kurt Russel brings the "Accidental Awesome" schtick to that archetype. Due to the dual inspirations, that's not a perfect match for the knife catch and reflect, but Accidental Awesome is a meaningful bonus on an attack immediately following a failed attack - which is pretty close to what happens at the movie's climax.
In Blowing up the Movies, Laws discusses how Russel's performance comically undercuts the then-standard iconography of the masculine action hero and makes the audience both want to root for him and laugh at his truly American overconfidence. While Laws doesn't make the connection, what Russel did in his performance as Burton would later be distilled into Homer Simpson's USA chant - where the character's semicompetence and unironic invocation of American Exceptionalism is meant to both be viewed ironically and at the same time evoke sympathy for the character.
Laws further discusses how a lot of Burton's slapstick results are just players flavoring in game failures for comic effect: Rather than dodging with a slow mo bullet cam showing impossible contortions out of the bullets' paths, Burton dodges by shooting the ceiling so rocks fall on his head, leaving him out of the line of fire for the sequence.. And then he gives some advice on how and when you can and when you really shouldn't try such flavoring in your own games.
In Blowing up the Movies, Laws discusses how Russel's performance comically undercuts the then-standard iconography of the masculine action hero and makes the audience both want to root for him and laugh at his truly American overconfidence. While Laws doesn't make the connection, what Russel did in his performance as Burton would later be distilled into Homer Simpson's USA chant - where the character's semicompetence and unironic invocation of American Exceptionalism is meant to both be viewed ironically and at the same time evoke sympathy for the character.
Laws further discusses how a lot of Burton's slapstick results are just players flavoring in game failures for comic effect: Rather than dodging with a slow mo bullet cam showing impossible contortions out of the bullets' paths, Burton dodges by shooting the ceiling so rocks fall on his head, leaving him out of the line of fire for the sequence.. And then he gives some advice on how and when you can and when you really shouldn't try such flavoring in your own games.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Thu Jun 11, 2015 5:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Josh_Kablack
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Chapter 13: Enemies
Best Hits Taking Mook standardization further; Trying to minimize MC bookkeeping.
Worst FlopsNumber of named enemies in typical fights; the hash made of Foe Schticks.
We start out with some Lawsian admonitions which say that the goal of the MC is to make fights fun, memorable and distinctive. That's three goals the way I count, but they are all worthwhile.
Then we get a short paragraph about how what players really remember is not stats nor type of attacks but rather visual details, character moments, and action descriptions. That is at best wishful thinking, and more realistically outright crazy talk. Action Movies are a visual medium where visual details make or break the work in the eye of a passive observer. Tabletop RPGs are a small group interactive oral medium. In TTRPGs, visual details are necessarily low production value; character moments fail if they lack buy in from the multiple authors in the group; and the longer your action description is the less time everyone else gets to take their turns.
Up next is a short section titled "Away from the numbers" which gives advice I would consider taking if the last two chapters hadn't had the sorts of numbers that let characters get infinite Fortune / healing and autokill everyone, but as things stand make me think the author wants away from the numbers because he is ashamed of failing math class. Maybe a real "rollplayer" needs to beat the fact that the largest determinants of memorable fight details in a TTRPG are actually probabilities and players awareness of such into the author.
Funny on the internet, not so funny in a ruleset that costs real money
I'm sorry but when some characters can take a whole sequence worth of actions before other characters even get to act, and when some characters get to be outright immune to attack while others don't - no amount of clever flavoring or neat set dressing is going to save this fight. What you actually need is to GO BACK CLOSER TO THE NUMBERS,
not suggestions for how to polish up Expendables fanfic.
Now Feng Shui First edition was possibly the first game to draw an explicit distinction between named and unnamed opponents, which worked wonders to simulate the feel of action movies, and also had the benefits of allowing PCs to feel badass and simplifying the MCs' bookkeeping.
Once you remind the audience that he has a name, even the dog can leap safely away from the CGI fireball
So Feng Shui 2 tries to simplify foes further and extend this segregation of enemies. There's a "what Enemies lack" section which explains that mooks do not make reload rolls, and named enemies do not have Fortune (nor Subtypes of Fortune) to simplify things. This section also includes the default Will resistance for enemies my category, but tellingly not default resistance values for Constitution, Strength, Melodrama, Fortune nor Notice - so I'm left wondering why that part of the simplification wasn't extended to PCs. Then it's explained that the while Mooks are even more standardized than the prior edition, and that named opponents are divided into Featured Foes and Bosses, and Bosses are further divided into Bosses and Uber-Bosses. This is a nice try, but like so much in this edition, it is not handled well.
Mooks go down from any successful attack. There are an number of meaningful differences between featured foes and Bosses. Featured Foes take Impairment at 25 and 30 wound points just like PCs, but auto-drop at 35 wound points, bypassing the whole UP check mechanics. Bosses effectively have 15 extra hit points, taking Impairment at 40 and 45 Wound Points and any attack taking them to 50 or more wound points triggers a flat even/odd roll to see if they stay up or drop. Uber Bosses are not meaningfully different from bosses, they just have higher defense and AV numbers. None of this is problematic in and of itself. It's when we get in to the actual math and shot cost accounting that things start to fray.
Since all Mooks are Attack 8, Defense 13, Speed 5 Will 5, and the only differences are in flavor, loyalties, juncture and weapons, it's pure bloat that causes the 18 Different types of mooks listed to take up 3 columnated pages. To illustrate just how bloated this is, I will now design and write up my own set of 18 different mooks:
There, even with format that adds line breaks and two pieces of flavor text each, that's still only half a page upon columnation. But having wasted space and too much fluff is not a problem compared to what comes later in the chapter.
Moving on to Featured Foes, the book gives suggested ranges of Attack 12-14, Defense 12-13, Toughness 5-6 and Speed 6-8 for a Featured Foe, and then lists 20 (21) subtypes that have only three or four( exceptions from those ranges. The "Security Honcho", has a Def of 14, and the "Key Jiangshi" and "Hitman" have attacks of 15 while the Nice Guy Bad Ass MC Penis Insertion Character statline is designed to be flat-out better than you at 16/17/5/9. Featured foes might also have a "Foe Schtick" or two (although if they have 2, at least one will be a Driving Schtick for chase scenes).
But let me take a minute to compare those stat ranges to the PC starting stat ranges:
Big Bruiser Attack 12
Old Master Attack 16, Martial Artist, Killer: Attack 15
Everyone Else Attack 13-14
Big Bruiser Defense 12
Thief Defense 16
Everyone Else Defense 13-15
Scrappy Kid, Toughness 4 Old Master Toughness 5
Big Bruiser Toughness 12, Cyborg Toughness 9
Everyone Else Toughness: 6-8
Big Bruiser Speed 5
Scrappy Kid, Swordmaster, Killer, Thief 9
Everyone Else Speed 6-8
So ignoring the outliers, PCs are generally going to have a defense that is one higher than a Featured Foe's primary attack, PCs are going to have an attack that is one higher than a Featured Foe's Defense, PCs and Featured Foes are going to move at the same speed and PC's are going to have a a point more Toughness than featured foes.
Now the default fight is an equal number of featured foes to PCs, plus three mooks per PC. So on the "in favor of PCs" side of a typical fight, add "can spend fortune", "Each PC has a handful of Schticks" and "PC can make Up checks". On the "in favor of enemies side add " of a typical fight Have mook support", "Never run out of ammo" and "generally do not need to survive multiple fights".
That's not terribly bad numbers for a game. Things are close enough to feel exciting, but overall tilted toward the PCs winning and players have more resources to expend to tilt things further in their favor. Sure repeated iterations mean that PCs will die, but Robin clearly wanted that to happen when he was writing things like Reversion checks.
However, those *are* terribly bad numbers for a movie, and pretty ugly numbers to keep track of on this game's shot counter.
While the PC party is probably Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy, R2 and Threepio, the enemies are pretty much Darth Vader and a bunch of stromtroopers. Over three full moves Greedo, Grand Moff Tarkin, Boba Fett, Jabba, The Rancor and The Emporer also show up. That's still only roughly one named opponent per named PC over an entire trilogy.
While Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus are all PCs, the only named opponent in the first movie is Agent Smith.
James Bond plus Bond Girl of the Movie plus maybe a support agent or spy from another agency generally just take on the talky boss and the fighty boss, with maybe one of the named characters playing both sides and switching halfway through.
In just about no action movie ever, do a group of three heroes proceed to fight three named opponents in act one, three new named opponents in act two, and then a boss plus two named opponents in act three.
This is because the audience has limited memory and reserves of emotional investment to bestow upon characters. Action movies almost never have more than 8 named characters total, because it takes time and effort to establish characters and get the audience to invest in them.
Even worse, with a party of X PCs, and having all mooks act on the same shot, that's 2X+1 Initiatives to roll each sequence and track on the shot counter. And with a variety of shot costs for actions and so many schticks that cost both users and targets extra shots, you really can't ignore it.
Love or hate, the game wants you to care about each of these people. it also wants you to track initiative for each of them.
Also, there is up to one keyframe effect per named character ongoing and those durations have to be tracked. So despite the attempt to minimize MC accounting for enemy resource management, there's going to be a lot of bookkeeping involving the action economy and things are likely to either bog down or get missed when X gets bigger than about 3. (7 initiatives to track, up to 6 Keyframe effects at once). When you start getting into Expendables II territory where you have like 8 PCs in one big climactic fight, that's up to 33 pins to move on your shot tracker and you are thoroughly fucked by the lack of simplicity here.
Now obviously the right answer to remove Keyframe effects from the game and never speak of them again, just as obviously the right answer for initiative systems in games of more than 5 players will always be "seating order, go around the table"; but those are decisions that Feng Shui 2 made the wrong choices on those 95 pages back. And rather than mitigating the problems with those wrong choices, the rules for featured foes and default fight populations double down on them with nary a sidebar about limiting the PC group to a manageable size nor keeping fights even with fewer but tougher opponents in sight.
All of that is to say this would be a more playable game that also more faithfully emulated the source material if the default fight was against only one or two named foes who were individually slightly tougher than any individual PC and backed up number of mooks that would scale with the PC party size..
Admittedly, there is tension between keeping fights to a manageable number of combatants and allowing PCs to feel suitably awesome. But having mooks to chew through helps with that. So giving PCs more tactical options through their greater number of schticks and ability to expend Fortune keep them relevant against foes who have numbers a point or two higher.
Speaking of Higher Numbers, that brings me to Bosses. A Boss character is just a Featured Foes type that adds +3 attack, +2 Defense +1 Speed +15 Hit Points and the following schticks
Getting to make attacks at a lower shot cost helps to keep bosses relevant in the action economy when they are outnumbered by PCs, and it does it in a way that doesn't result in the boss being so far ahead in imitative that the PCs don't get to counterattack. However using a trigger where you have to remember prior attacks and having per sequence duration is asstastic. This should just work when the boss is outnumbered by named characters and/or the last enemy left standing and it should apply for the rest of the fight. As it stands, the rule encourages the PCs to wait until the bottom of the sequence to dogpile on any boss.
And the arbitrarily large damage value is just fucking insulting. This is a game system with rules for how much damage various weapons do, and to have an enemy type ignore those rules is in all ways stupider than just giving that enemy a bigger weapon or using one of the existing damage boosting schticks. I can deal with a boss having a Sig Weapon: Shotgun or doing extra melee damage due to being Very Strong or having Chi Flow Perception. I could even deal with a system that gave the occasional boss better-than-PC damage values due to assymetrical schticks and explanations like Sig Weapon: Gattling Laser Cannon or Super-Duper-Extra-Strong. What is insulting and immersion breaking is to have the boss's Luger deal more damage than a PCs signature Shotgun for the purely metagame concern that the designers thought that balanced the game. Oh, it also doesn't balance the game, since it means that a PC who takes a schtick like Signature weapon which boosts their own common damage is now facing enemies who deal more damage while a PC who spends that schtick on something like going faster with Fast Draw or being dodgier with The Fox's Retreat is facing enemies whose abilities in those categories have not increased.
So to fight bosses, you should actually take a very small gun and a combo of schticks that let you pull a surprise nova, and don't have more than one PC target them until the last shot of the sequence.
Uber-Bosses are just like Bosses, but with another +2 Attack, +2 Defense. Which means that an Uber-Boss by themselves is probably a decent to difficult challenge for a relatively buff party of 4 starting PCs., and if the Uber-Boss has named allies or mook support, then the PCs will get curbstomped without real cheese.
I'm going to mention here, but otherwise ignore the part about advancing foe statistics and move into Foe Schticks.
Foe Schticks are the sorts of assymetrical powers that team evil
gets to use. They are supposed to be simple to run and help keep the resource management the MC is doing to a minimum, they come in basic and driving-based flavors and some have tips about what types of foe they are suitable for. In general foes do not get more than two of them.
Predictably, this goes off the rails and runs in all sorts of different crazy directions.
And to round out the chapter, we get two pages of advice on "Running Foes", which has the problems with the default numbers of enemies to use in fights I already griped about and then a bunch of generally decent advice mixed with only a few details that rub me the wrong way. Basically you are encouraged to: keep the players active and have them doing any die rolling; don't have bad guys roll skills; give PCs foes that suit them; use an online auto-roller to speed up mook attacks; have a few setting-specific action descriptions jotted down ahead of time; focus on a single highlighted featured foe to taunts or insult the PCs in any given fight; remember that the rules for Bosses work differently; let the PCs actually down bosses they down; but if a feature foe escapes a fight have them show back up later as a boss. So not perfect, but nothing there worth delaying my trip out to buy a new case of beer over.
Priorities
Best Hits Taking Mook standardization further; Trying to minimize MC bookkeeping.
Worst FlopsNumber of named enemies in typical fights; the hash made of Foe Schticks.
We start out with some Lawsian admonitions which say that the goal of the MC is to make fights fun, memorable and distinctive. That's three goals the way I count, but they are all worthwhile.
Then we get a short paragraph about how what players really remember is not stats nor type of attacks but rather visual details, character moments, and action descriptions. That is at best wishful thinking, and more realistically outright crazy talk. Action Movies are a visual medium where visual details make or break the work in the eye of a passive observer. Tabletop RPGs are a small group interactive oral medium. In TTRPGs, visual details are necessarily low production value; character moments fail if they lack buy in from the multiple authors in the group; and the longer your action description is the less time everyone else gets to take their turns.
Up next is a short section titled "Away from the numbers" which gives advice I would consider taking if the last two chapters hadn't had the sorts of numbers that let characters get infinite Fortune / healing and autokill everyone, but as things stand make me think the author wants away from the numbers because he is ashamed of failing math class. Maybe a real "rollplayer" needs to beat the fact that the largest determinants of memorable fight details in a TTRPG are actually probabilities and players awareness of such into the author.
Funny on the internet, not so funny in a ruleset that costs real money
I'm sorry but when some characters can take a whole sequence worth of actions before other characters even get to act, and when some characters get to be outright immune to attack while others don't - no amount of clever flavoring or neat set dressing is going to save this fight. What you actually need is to GO BACK CLOSER TO THE NUMBERS,
not suggestions for how to polish up Expendables fanfic.Now Feng Shui First edition was possibly the first game to draw an explicit distinction between named and unnamed opponents, which worked wonders to simulate the feel of action movies, and also had the benefits of allowing PCs to feel badass and simplifying the MCs' bookkeeping.
Once you remind the audience that he has a name, even the dog can leap safely away from the CGI fireball
So Feng Shui 2 tries to simplify foes further and extend this segregation of enemies. There's a "what Enemies lack" section which explains that mooks do not make reload rolls, and named enemies do not have Fortune (nor Subtypes of Fortune) to simplify things. This section also includes the default Will resistance for enemies my category, but tellingly not default resistance values for Constitution, Strength, Melodrama, Fortune nor Notice - so I'm left wondering why that part of the simplification wasn't extended to PCs. Then it's explained that the while Mooks are even more standardized than the prior edition, and that named opponents are divided into Featured Foes and Bosses, and Bosses are further divided into Bosses and Uber-Bosses. This is a nice try, but like so much in this edition, it is not handled well.
Mooks go down from any successful attack. There are an number of meaningful differences between featured foes and Bosses. Featured Foes take Impairment at 25 and 30 wound points just like PCs, but auto-drop at 35 wound points, bypassing the whole UP check mechanics. Bosses effectively have 15 extra hit points, taking Impairment at 40 and 45 Wound Points and any attack taking them to 50 or more wound points triggers a flat even/odd roll to see if they stay up or drop. Uber Bosses are not meaningfully different from bosses, they just have higher defense and AV numbers. None of this is problematic in and of itself. It's when we get in to the actual math and shot cost accounting that things start to fray.
Since all Mooks are Attack 8, Defense 13, Speed 5 Will 5, and the only differences are in flavor, loyalties, juncture and weapons, it's pure bloat that causes the 18 Different types of mooks listed to take up 3 columnated pages. To illustrate just how bloated this is, I will now design and write up my own set of 18 different mooks:
- Imperial Stormtrooper (Long Long Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away)
"None are so accurate" Blaster 9, Punch 7 - Nazis (1930s)
"Papers Please!" Luger 10 Knife 8 - Wastleland Mutants (The Blasted Future)
"Your skin sure is smoooth" Claws 9 - Super Porp Production Facility Guards (The Land of Ooo)
"That poorly disguised intruder is covered in Porp syrup" Wrestle 7 - Hostile Injuns (The Old West)
White man speak with forked tongue. Me Stereotype. Scalp Em! Bow and Arrow 7 Tomahawk 9 - Uruk-Hai (Middle Earth)
"Ash nazg bargle nawdle zouss " Crossbow 9 Scimitar 11 - Frenzied Beatles Fans (1960s)
Aiiiiiiii!!! We Love You Banner 8 - Typical Denizens (Online)
"Go Suck a Barrel of Cocks" Math Blast 10, Rage 7 - Military Police (Contemporary)
"You're either with us or you are with the terrorists" 9mm Pistol 10 Tactical Knife 8 - Redshirts (The Outer Space Future)
"I'm not even supposed to be here " Grazer Beam 9, Two-Handed Punch 8 - Ninjas (Ubiquitous in Shadow)
"Move along citizen, I am a bush" Shuriken 5 Crushing Ninja Kick 8 - Xerxes' Immortals (The Age of Sword and Sandals)
"Our Arrows Will Blot Out the Sun" Bow and Arrow 7 Short Spear 9 - Frontline Infantry (Contemporary)
"DOO YOOUU SPEEEAK ENGLISH?!" M4 Carbine 13, Tactical Knife 8 - Rednecks (The Summer of Hate)
"Squeal like a pig, city boy" Shotgun 13 Hunting Knife 8 - Spess Mahreen (The Grimdarkness)
"Death to Traitor Mutant Commie Scum!" Pulse Rifle 13, Vibro Sword 11 - Victorian Street Urchins (Gone to Dickens, Every One)
"Good even' Governer. Lose yer way?" Shiv 8 - Luchadores (Mythic Mexico)
"Madre de Dios!" Practiced Chokeslam 10 - Killer Robots (Yet Another Blasted Future)
"Destroy All Humans" Gattling Gun 11 Hydraulic Slam 10
Moving on to Featured Foes, the book gives suggested ranges of Attack 12-14, Defense 12-13, Toughness 5-6 and Speed 6-8 for a Featured Foe, and then lists 20 (21) subtypes that have only three or four( exceptions from those ranges. The "Security Honcho", has a Def of 14, and the "Key Jiangshi" and "Hitman" have attacks of 15 while the Nice Guy Bad Ass MC Penis Insertion Character statline is designed to be flat-out better than you at 16/17/5/9. Featured foes might also have a "Foe Schtick" or two (although if they have 2, at least one will be a Driving Schtick for chase scenes).
But let me take a minute to compare those stat ranges to the PC starting stat ranges:
Big Bruiser Attack 12
Old Master Attack 16, Martial Artist, Killer: Attack 15
Everyone Else Attack 13-14
Big Bruiser Defense 12
Thief Defense 16
Everyone Else Defense 13-15
Scrappy Kid, Toughness 4 Old Master Toughness 5
Big Bruiser Toughness 12, Cyborg Toughness 9
Everyone Else Toughness: 6-8
Big Bruiser Speed 5
Scrappy Kid, Swordmaster, Killer, Thief 9
Everyone Else Speed 6-8
So ignoring the outliers, PCs are generally going to have a defense that is one higher than a Featured Foe's primary attack, PCs are going to have an attack that is one higher than a Featured Foe's Defense, PCs and Featured Foes are going to move at the same speed and PC's are going to have a a point more Toughness than featured foes.
Now the default fight is an equal number of featured foes to PCs, plus three mooks per PC. So on the "in favor of PCs" side of a typical fight, add "can spend fortune", "Each PC has a handful of Schticks" and "PC can make Up checks". On the "in favor of enemies side add " of a typical fight Have mook support", "Never run out of ammo" and "generally do not need to survive multiple fights".
That's not terribly bad numbers for a game. Things are close enough to feel exciting, but overall tilted toward the PCs winning and players have more resources to expend to tilt things further in their favor. Sure repeated iterations mean that PCs will die, but Robin clearly wanted that to happen when he was writing things like Reversion checks.
However, those *are* terribly bad numbers for a movie, and pretty ugly numbers to keep track of on this game's shot counter.
While the PC party is probably Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy, R2 and Threepio, the enemies are pretty much Darth Vader and a bunch of stromtroopers. Over three full moves Greedo, Grand Moff Tarkin, Boba Fett, Jabba, The Rancor and The Emporer also show up. That's still only roughly one named opponent per named PC over an entire trilogy.
While Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus are all PCs, the only named opponent in the first movie is Agent Smith.
James Bond plus Bond Girl of the Movie plus maybe a support agent or spy from another agency generally just take on the talky boss and the fighty boss, with maybe one of the named characters playing both sides and switching halfway through.
In just about no action movie ever, do a group of three heroes proceed to fight three named opponents in act one, three new named opponents in act two, and then a boss plus two named opponents in act three.
This is because the audience has limited memory and reserves of emotional investment to bestow upon characters. Action movies almost never have more than 8 named characters total, because it takes time and effort to establish characters and get the audience to invest in them.
Even worse, with a party of X PCs, and having all mooks act on the same shot, that's 2X+1 Initiatives to roll each sequence and track on the shot counter. And with a variety of shot costs for actions and so many schticks that cost both users and targets extra shots, you really can't ignore it.
Love or hate, the game wants you to care about each of these people. it also wants you to track initiative for each of them.
Also, there is up to one keyframe effect per named character ongoing and those durations have to be tracked. So despite the attempt to minimize MC accounting for enemy resource management, there's going to be a lot of bookkeeping involving the action economy and things are likely to either bog down or get missed when X gets bigger than about 3. (7 initiatives to track, up to 6 Keyframe effects at once). When you start getting into Expendables II territory where you have like 8 PCs in one big climactic fight, that's up to 33 pins to move on your shot tracker and you are thoroughly fucked by the lack of simplicity here.
Now obviously the right answer to remove Keyframe effects from the game and never speak of them again, just as obviously the right answer for initiative systems in games of more than 5 players will always be "seating order, go around the table"; but those are decisions that Feng Shui 2 made the wrong choices on those 95 pages back. And rather than mitigating the problems with those wrong choices, the rules for featured foes and default fight populations double down on them with nary a sidebar about limiting the PC group to a manageable size nor keeping fights even with fewer but tougher opponents in sight.
All of that is to say this would be a more playable game that also more faithfully emulated the source material if the default fight was against only one or two named foes who were individually slightly tougher than any individual PC and backed up number of mooks that would scale with the PC party size..
Admittedly, there is tension between keeping fights to a manageable number of combatants and allowing PCs to feel suitably awesome. But having mooks to chew through helps with that. So giving PCs more tactical options through their greater number of schticks and ability to expend Fortune keep them relevant against foes who have numbers a point or two higher.
Speaking of Higher Numbers, that brings me to Bosses. A Boss character is just a Featured Foes type that adds +3 attack, +2 Defense +1 Speed +15 Hit Points and the following schticks
- If disarmed, can replace or swap any weapons for zero shot cost
- When attacked by more than one character in a sequence, the shot cost of a boss's standard attack drops from 3 to 2 until end of sequence
- Bosses arbitrarily get a damage value one better than the highest damage value of any PC's "usual attack"
Getting to make attacks at a lower shot cost helps to keep bosses relevant in the action economy when they are outnumbered by PCs, and it does it in a way that doesn't result in the boss being so far ahead in imitative that the PCs don't get to counterattack. However using a trigger where you have to remember prior attacks and having per sequence duration is asstastic. This should just work when the boss is outnumbered by named characters and/or the last enemy left standing and it should apply for the rest of the fight. As it stands, the rule encourages the PCs to wait until the bottom of the sequence to dogpile on any boss.
And the arbitrarily large damage value is just fucking insulting. This is a game system with rules for how much damage various weapons do, and to have an enemy type ignore those rules is in all ways stupider than just giving that enemy a bigger weapon or using one of the existing damage boosting schticks. I can deal with a boss having a Sig Weapon: Shotgun or doing extra melee damage due to being Very Strong or having Chi Flow Perception. I could even deal with a system that gave the occasional boss better-than-PC damage values due to assymetrical schticks and explanations like Sig Weapon: Gattling Laser Cannon or Super-Duper-Extra-Strong. What is insulting and immersion breaking is to have the boss's Luger deal more damage than a PCs signature Shotgun for the purely metagame concern that the designers thought that balanced the game. Oh, it also doesn't balance the game, since it means that a PC who takes a schtick like Signature weapon which boosts their own common damage is now facing enemies who deal more damage while a PC who spends that schtick on something like going faster with Fast Draw or being dodgier with The Fox's Retreat is facing enemies whose abilities in those categories have not increased.
So to fight bosses, you should actually take a very small gun and a combo of schticks that let you pull a surprise nova, and don't have more than one PC target them until the last shot of the sequence.
Uber-Bosses are just like Bosses, but with another +2 Attack, +2 Defense. Which means that an Uber-Boss by themselves is probably a decent to difficult challenge for a relatively buff party of 4 starting PCs., and if the Uber-Boss has named allies or mook support, then the PCs will get curbstomped without real cheese.
I'm going to mention here, but otherwise ignore the part about advancing foe statistics and move into Foe Schticks.
Foe Schticks are the sorts of assymetrical powers that team evil
gets to use. They are supposed to be simple to run and help keep the resource management the MC is doing to a minimum, they come in basic and driving-based flavors and some have tips about what types of foe they are suitable for. In general foes do not get more than two of them.
Predictably, this goes off the rails and runs in all sorts of different crazy directions.
- You get fiddly little bonus schticks (+1 Defense only against Guns, Mutant and Scroungetech attacks),
- Brokenly strong schticks (Dominate, which forces PCs to roll a number of successive +3 swerves or get stunlocked)
- Schticks that do almost exactly the same thing, but with teensy differences in flavor and mechanics (Reinforced Skeleton vs Rock Hard, both of which are damage shield effects, but one of which triggers on any martial arts miss while the other triggers only on unarmed attack hits. One does fixed damage, the other does variable damage.
- Schticks that turn the type hosing up to 11 (Reversion Curse can add +5 reversion points up to once per sequence. So on an enemy sorcerer who shows up in 2 fights within a session and who stays up for 2 full sequences in both of them, that's a 22 difficulty reversion check right there.)
- Schticks which remove players' tactical options for no reason (Clear Aim, accidentally makes a PC using Dodge a flat out waste of a shot)
- Schticks that reference rules which do not actually exist (Flying Guillotine references "Stunt Attack or fanfare stunt".
- But the seriously
schticks are the ones meant to pull PC aggro by triggering noncombat consequences if the PCs can't punch out the bad guy with such a schtick inside a keyframe. Enemies can have powers to ruin your character's finances, love life or organizational loyalties this way. They can also resurrect your former arch-nemesis with one of these schticks. I get that these sorts of thing are supposed to both enhance melodrama and change player tactics...but dammit, these sorts of plot-device stakes are not powers possessed by individuals, they should be set up as part of the stakes of a given adventure.
And to round out the chapter, we get two pages of advice on "Running Foes", which has the problems with the default numbers of enemies to use in fights I already griped about and then a bunch of generally decent advice mixed with only a few details that rub me the wrong way. Basically you are encouraged to: keep the players active and have them doing any die rolling; don't have bad guys roll skills; give PCs foes that suit them; use an online auto-roller to speed up mook attacks; have a few setting-specific action descriptions jotted down ahead of time; focus on a single highlighted featured foe to taunts or insult the PCs in any given fight; remember that the rules for Bosses work differently; let the PCs actually down bosses they down; but if a feature foe escapes a fight have them show back up later as a boss. So not perfect, but nothing there worth delaying my trip out to buy a new case of beer over.
Priorities
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Nov 11, 2015 8:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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The Foe floobiness seems pretty clearly to have been a step in the wrong direction. Yes, it's Feng Shui where the points are made up and the score doesn't matter, but actually turning the enemies into moving targets gives the game away. If you're going to spend a couple hundred pages nailing down the powers and numbers of the player characters, the enemies have to have solid numbers as well or it's a totally empty exercise. This is a bridge too far for lazy GMing.
The bad guys needed to have numbers and weapons and shticks off the PC list. This needed to happen, and the fact that it didn't is not acceptable.
Basically, there are definitely some interesting ideas in Feng Shui 2, but this is a train wreck and isn't really playable at all. You'd think that this would be Feng Shui with an extra two decades of polish, but instead it's just Feng Shui with an extra two decades of sclerosis and alzheimer's.
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The bad guys needed to have numbers and weapons and shticks off the PC list. This needed to happen, and the fact that it didn't is not acceptable.
Basically, there are definitely some interesting ideas in Feng Shui 2, but this is a train wreck and isn't really playable at all. You'd think that this would be Feng Shui with an extra two decades of polish, but instead it's just Feng Shui with an extra two decades of sclerosis and alzheimer's.
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Josh_Kablack
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Chapter 14: Running the game.
Best Hits:Robin's amusing snark.
Worst Misses: In the past almost 20 years, it's become apparent that this game is centered too heavily on Hong Kong action cinema.
There's a palpable sigh of relief here, as the book is now basically done with crunch and into pure Robin Laws insights and rants about appropriate tones and genre conventions and different romanization and whatnotisits. So there's a lot more to enjoy and a lot less to be angry about from here on in. Sure there's still the occasional piece of bullshit or potentially disruptive gaming advice, but it's frighteningly apparent that most RPG authors would rather be writing anything but RPG game rules. And Robin D Laws is still one of the better RPG authors out there, so he really shines when he gets to do what he wants.
This chapter starts out halfassedly claiming that [bullshit] new game design speeds up chargen,[/bullshit], but then has a reasoned discussion of how most groups will probably discuss chargen via email and social media
What's good is the short blurb about "using Buy-in judiciously" that makes it explicit that character motivations to engaging with the premise and interacting with the other PCs are the player's responsibility, but the MC has a responsibility to respect player's established characterizations when using Buy-in. Honestly, I would not be upset if this whole chapter droned on about that sort of co-operative and respectful shared authorship.
Sorta like the Fantastic Four
After a brief stub about inspirational material (which you probably do not need if you bought this book knowing what the game is) There's an overly long but decently done set of examples of working with players to generate melodramatic hooks that are descriptive, emotional and suggest specific types of actions. These examples are then used as the basis for designing an adventure. The advice on adventure design here is an update of the 3 act fight Structure that Laws described over a decade ago in Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering. To keep it in genre, I guess I should call this a "rail shooter" structure. Basically, there are three unavoidable fights (Opener, Bridge and Climax). which all happen at cool but distinct set pieces. These fights all connect together, but the connections are flavored differently depending on if you win or lose. If you win the fight, then the grateful villagers / hostages / shopkeeper / etc. thank you profusely and gives you the clue to find the next fight. If you lose the fight you get captured the villains gloat their plans to you and you and have to escape the baddies' dungeon / holding cells / deathtrap to get to the next fight.
There's a lot of discussion of how to work the "connective tissue" between fights and to flavor it so that wins and losses still feel meaningful and to base the possible connections on character abilities. I like this advice, but since the game went with like 200 pages of crunch, I have to wonder if this could have been an actual crunchy-bits
hard coded clue-gathering minigame that connected fights. Instead it's a fuzzy list where the MC just has notes that say things like "Deceit, Intrusion and Sabotage might help the escape".
On the rails, but full of fun ups and downs
Despite the on-the-rails nature of such an adventure structure, this chapter has a lot of advice about weaving PC hooks into the adventure fabric, so that things feel less forced. There's also a fair bit of advice about allowing players to choose which hooks they are pursuing, but the idea there boils down to the PCs choosing which set of rails to ride this week, and ideally the system is rules-lite enough that the MC should be able to quickly improvise an additional fight or to even wing a whole-nother-adventure shoehorned into Robin's 3-fight structure if the players do decide to exercise free will or something.
My biggest overall objection to this part is that the sample adventure is about the Lotus orchestrating militants in contemporary Afghanistan on the border with Pakistan. Coming from an author who feels that having Nazis be villains in games cheapens the reality of the Holocaust, this is seriously fucking offensive. Any actual real life Nazis are 80 or older, as is anybody who fought them in real life. This is not a demographic you are likely to see at your game table, and fiction about Nazi villainy really is only marginally more likely to ruin friendships than fiction based on the horrors of Spanish Inquisition, the War of Three Kingdoms, the American Civil War or the Mongol Conquests. By contrast, a significant percentage of gamers are current or recently discharged military, and a significant percentage of those actually fought in Afghanistan. Suggesting, even in genre fiction, that their efforts there were opposed by eunuch sorcerers from the past is far more likely to offend actual players of this game than anything about WWII.
Figure 14-3 Actual WWII veteran
Following the how-to-design an adventure sample, this chapter continues on with a mishmash of blather, some useful, some cringeworthy, but the vast majority totally irrelevant padding in the age of wikipedia.
Useful
Cringeworthy
Padding
Best Hits:Robin's amusing snark.
Worst Misses: In the past almost 20 years, it's become apparent that this game is centered too heavily on Hong Kong action cinema.
There's a palpable sigh of relief here, as the book is now basically done with crunch and into pure Robin Laws insights and rants about appropriate tones and genre conventions and different romanization and whatnotisits. So there's a lot more to enjoy and a lot less to be angry about from here on in. Sure there's still the occasional piece of bullshit or potentially disruptive gaming advice, but it's frighteningly apparent that most RPG authors would rather be writing anything but RPG game rules. And Robin D Laws is still one of the better RPG authors out there, so he really shines when he gets to do what he wants.
This chapter starts out halfassedly claiming that [bullshit] new game design speeds up chargen,[/bullshit], but then has a reasoned discussion of how most groups will probably discuss chargen via email and social media
with some calling of dibs on various archetypes and back and forth a few days before the first game session. Following is some lackluster discussion of centering your game around a team working for one of the factions in the Chi war. Meh.page 209 wrote:or however you kids today hatch your cockamamie
schemes.
What's good is the short blurb about "using Buy-in judiciously" that makes it explicit that character motivations to engaging with the premise and interacting with the other PCs are the player's responsibility, but the MC has a responsibility to respect player's established characterizations when using Buy-in. Honestly, I would not be upset if this whole chapter droned on about that sort of co-operative and respectful shared authorship.
Sorta like the Fantastic Four
After a brief stub about inspirational material (which you probably do not need if you bought this book knowing what the game is) There's an overly long but decently done set of examples of working with players to generate melodramatic hooks that are descriptive, emotional and suggest specific types of actions. These examples are then used as the basis for designing an adventure. The advice on adventure design here is an update of the 3 act fight Structure that Laws described over a decade ago in Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering. To keep it in genre, I guess I should call this a "rail shooter" structure. Basically, there are three unavoidable fights (Opener, Bridge and Climax). which all happen at cool but distinct set pieces. These fights all connect together, but the connections are flavored differently depending on if you win or lose. If you win the fight, then the grateful villagers / hostages / shopkeeper / etc. thank you profusely and gives you the clue to find the next fight. If you lose the fight you get captured the villains gloat their plans to you and you and have to escape the baddies' dungeon / holding cells / deathtrap to get to the next fight.
There's a lot of discussion of how to work the "connective tissue" between fights and to flavor it so that wins and losses still feel meaningful and to base the possible connections on character abilities. I like this advice, but since the game went with like 200 pages of crunch, I have to wonder if this could have been an actual crunchy-bits
hard coded clue-gathering minigame that connected fights. Instead it's a fuzzy list where the MC just has notes that say things like "Deceit, Intrusion and Sabotage might help the escape".
On the rails, but full of fun ups and downs
Despite the on-the-rails nature of such an adventure structure, this chapter has a lot of advice about weaving PC hooks into the adventure fabric, so that things feel less forced. There's also a fair bit of advice about allowing players to choose which hooks they are pursuing, but the idea there boils down to the PCs choosing which set of rails to ride this week, and ideally the system is rules-lite enough that the MC should be able to quickly improvise an additional fight or to even wing a whole-nother-adventure shoehorned into Robin's 3-fight structure if the players do decide to exercise free will or something.
My biggest overall objection to this part is that the sample adventure is about the Lotus orchestrating militants in contemporary Afghanistan on the border with Pakistan. Coming from an author who feels that having Nazis be villains in games cheapens the reality of the Holocaust, this is seriously fucking offensive. Any actual real life Nazis are 80 or older, as is anybody who fought them in real life. This is not a demographic you are likely to see at your game table, and fiction about Nazi villainy really is only marginally more likely to ruin friendships than fiction based on the horrors of Spanish Inquisition, the War of Three Kingdoms, the American Civil War or the Mongol Conquests. By contrast, a significant percentage of gamers are current or recently discharged military, and a significant percentage of those actually fought in Afghanistan. Suggesting, even in genre fiction, that their efforts there were opposed by eunuch sorcerers from the past is far more likely to offend actual players of this game than anything about WWII.
Figure 14-3 Actual WWII veteran
Following the how-to-design an adventure sample, this chapter continues on with a mishmash of blather, some useful, some cringeworthy, but the vast majority totally irrelevant padding in the age of wikipedia.
Useful
- The advice on establishing bit players, such as non-combatant informants quickly as distinct NPCs.
- The bit about letting players know Defenses to speed things up and using description to clue them in that they might want to dodge again high-roll attacks. This all needs to be more explicit and use fucking numbers, but the idea is in the right place.
Cringeworthy
- The advice on how to track shot costs and handle initiative using cardboard, paper, pushpins, a laptop, a tablet, your phone, a calculator a sheet of pregenerated mook attacks, a Bunsen burner, an autistic savant and an alembic. Fucking hell guys, the need to prep all this stuff should really have prompted you to reconsider your initiative system to run smoother. Seriously the "Fight Quick Reference" on page 224 has 7 steps, and the first FOUR of those steps need to occur before the first character gets to act in a sequence. Steps 2,3 and 4 need to recur each sequence. Remember than non-cheesed PCs are getting an average of roughly 4 actions per sequence, so something like 20% of the players' actual time at the table is spent figuring out turn order.
- Despite the fundamental problem with the math that the author admits to being bad at (Page 225, Speeding the Math heading), this section includes admonitions that "When run speedily, the shot cost system evokes a filmed fight sequence." and "Learning to do this takes a bit of extra effort, compared to the more measured pace of the fixed initiative system you may be used to from other roleplaying games. The effort pays off if you master it." Yeah, well if I'm putting in extra effort to master overly complicated math, Hedge Fund Management pays off a whole lot better.
- This chapter is also where we find "The Map is Not Your Friend " section, which lays out the design philosophy behind have this be an acartographic system. The design philosophy is understandable - not great, not horrible. But at this point into the book we've already had rules for movement speeds and using toys to track positions in chase scenes, so trying to defend a design goal that the book failed to implement in the actual rules is both stupid and insulting. If you wanted to make a map-agnostic system, then you should have used something along the lines of Big Fat Squares where characters are in one of a small number of zones and can either move between them or stunt to add/remove zones from the fight terrain. If you wanted to make an anti-map system then you should have left movement vague and given players explicit narrative ability to add scenery to a fight when they act and characters incentives to use previously described scenery.
Padding
- The three full pages on mainland Chinese and Hong Kong naming conventions and juncture differences for them. This whole thing could have been a link to wikipedia, and a mention that half of Jackie Chan's characters are named "Jackie" in the english language credits.
- The bit about differentiating Hong Kong action style from Hollywood action style isn't bad, but it feels forced and restrictive. Since the first edition of Feng Shu we have had action movies with iconic scenes come out of not merely Hollywood, Bollywood and Hong Kong, but also Japan, South Korea (Old Boy), Indonesia (The Raid), and even Sweden (Kung Fury). Harping specifically about the Hong Kong versions narrows the focus of this game unnecessarily, and makes me said when Robin Laws discusses several of the films from elsewhere and adapting them to Feng Shui in Blowing up the Movies, so it's not like he is unaware or thinks that they are incompatible with this game.
- The "Temporal Confusion" section overlaps with the "Skills and Juncture" section back in chapter 4 in a way that doesn't seem to be 100% compatible. One of these should have been cut from the book as redundant and a source of potential confusion.
- The sections on pacing, dithering, digressions and maintaining forward momentum all say pretty much the same thing and could easily be compressed into a single paragraph.
- The bits about "using the Chi War" isn't bad, but I have issues with the chosen faction setup, so it comes off as useless to me.
- The bits about customizing your game to not use the chi war and setting up different series types also come off as maybe-helpful-to-brand-new-MCs, but likely patronizing to anyone reading my ranting here on the Den. Seriously. I'll just end this with a direct quote to highlight the uselessness:
page 232, section on running a Wuixa game wrote: "Modify gear and flavor as needed.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Username17
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Also Australia.Josh wrote:The bit about differentiating Hong Kong action style from Hollywood action style isn't bad, but it feels forced and restrictive. Since the first edition of Feng Shui we have had action movies with iconic scenes come out of not merely Hollywood, Bollywood and Hong Kong, but also Japan, South Korea (Old Boy), Indonesia (The Raid), and even Sweden (Kung Fury).
That's not an American or Chinese franchise, but it does have an archetype in the book.
I'd also mention that the Mexican entries like El Mariachi aren't exactly Hollywood, and neither are the German films like Run Lola Run or the French films like District B13. And Ong-Bak is from Thailand.
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Josh_Kablack
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Chapter 15: Feng Shui Sites
Best Hits: "Don't let the PCs spend their time turtling"
Worst Flops: "Don't let the PCs have nice things, that way they don't need to turtle to protect them." Also, failures of consistency.
Well I've been slacking off a little. Had my annual Independence day cookout to plan and prep and shop for. But now that is over an I have sooo much leftover beer and wine that drunken reviewing should pick back up. I'm working through the rest of the case of MacKenzie's Black Cherry Hard Cider as I write this..and unfortunately I find it frighteningly easy to keep on going with these.
Okay, so the eponymous conceit of Feng Shui is that Chinese Geomancy is for reals the way to powah. Certain places have strong positive chi, and the people who claim those places reap intangible benefits. This gives the game several things. Firstly, an excuse for fights to have cool backdrops. Secondly a psuedo-mystic Chinese/Hong Kong veneer. Thirdly an excuse to have various conspiracies which fight over pieces of real estate without needing to match the resources of said conspiracies and ferocity of the fighting to the scale of the real estate. This chapter sadly dwells almost entirely on the psuedo-mystic veneer and aside from a few pieces of arbitrary-PC hosing, it doesn't really discuss Sites in any sort of game-saavy way nor does it provide much in the way of cool example sites to stage fights.
So gogo psuedo-mysticism. Blahblahblah. Geomancy is about shapes and angles and mirrors and metaphorically making stuff look like animals, and you can move mirrors and angles to improve or destroy the flow of Chi at a site. But it's not long before it becomes apparent that the text itself is confused as to whether it counts as "magic" or not.
"Chinese geomancers see themselves more as wise men or scientific practitioners than as magicians." page 233
"You’ll note from this story that feng shui depends a great deal on sympathetic magic." page 234.
And while that sort of hedged bet not actual magic but maybe something to it attitude is a valid position to have for a semiskeptic want-to-beleiver in the real world (See Tarot Readings, Lillydale Assembly, I Ching Readings, Transubstantiation of the Host, Thetans et al), it's crap in a game where the schticks which interact with geomancy are filed under the same Sorcery heading that lets people fly and shoot blasts of acid from their fingertips.
There's also an apparent contradiction about whether Chi flow works like drinking booze or like having a bank account:
"overabundant chi flow damages you just as surely as the lack of it." page 234 So it's like drinking booze: a little warms you nicely, but a lot makes you stupid and gross and a whole lot threatens your life.
"Although all sites have feng shui of some sort, there is little point in attuning to a site with mediocre chi flow. Most buildings, villages, and natural formations have only average feng shui. Only a small minority give off strong enough chi to become tactical goals in the Chi War." page 235.
"Certain sites resonate huge quantities of chi, making them crucial stakes in the Chi War. " page 238
So it's like a bank account, where more money is always better and people fight over the best investments.
Figure 15-3 Feng Shui 2 Geomantic Metaphysics Explained
So after reading the explanations behind things I know less than I did before I started this chapter. But let me move on to the nitty gritty. PCs attune to a site by being a member of the group that controls the site, occupying the site for 24 hours and all performing a ill-defined meditative ritual together. Once your PC has done that, they are now eligible for advancement. (as explained way back in chapter 2). NPCs do not get mechanical benefits, but their sites are assumed to be the background for their power and if you blow up an important one, the text suggests that you give enemies connected to it a small arbitrary penalty the next time they show up. But it's only a suggestion and not even firm about which form such a penalty might take.
Enemies can capture sites from PCs or sabotage them through geomantic rearrangement. Generally PCs do not take a direct penalty from losing a site, they just have lower odds on their next advancement roll for being attuned to fewer sites. There is however a mention in the chapter of PCs who are attuned to sites with bad Chi becoming unable to use Fortune Dice until they've beat up the obstacle behind it. That's horribly PC hosey for no reason and futhermore punishes players who chose archetypes or advancements favoring Fortune instead of anything else. The text says this shouldn't come up often, but it really shouldn't have been written in the first place.
However you may have noticed a problem with this set up. PCs gain real advancment options by taking and holding sites. This means that optimizing players will be concerrned with both capturing new sites and defending their current sites. The author noticed this and put a bunch of admonitions in for the MC to keep things moving and discourage turtling and remind everyone about the action movie logic this game works under. Unfortunately, these admonitions also work out to "don't let the PCs have good sites, because the big factions not making all out assaults on good sites strains the credulity of the existence of the Chi War" This is probably the last place I ever would have expected to see a "don't let the PCs have nice things, they might use them to change the game world" screed
PCs can also get a one-time +1 to this session's advancement roll (okay actually a -1 bonus because THAC0) after any session in which they burned a site. That part is good, but it would do more to discourage turtling, encourage a more proactive world and allow niftier sacrfices if burning a site was worth a bigger one-time bonus than holding it for this session was.
To end out the chapter, we get three sample sites, which are rather uninspired. The baseball stadium requires you to win a baseball game against the current owners' team to attune, and the office building has some vague hints at an Office-Space style undercover comedy session, while the Forest Temple might as well have been lifted from a D&D game.
Best Hits: "Don't let the PCs spend their time turtling"
Worst Flops: "Don't let the PCs have nice things, that way they don't need to turtle to protect them." Also, failures of consistency.
Well I've been slacking off a little. Had my annual Independence day cookout to plan and prep and shop for. But now that is over an I have sooo much leftover beer and wine that drunken reviewing should pick back up. I'm working through the rest of the case of MacKenzie's Black Cherry Hard Cider as I write this..and unfortunately I find it frighteningly easy to keep on going with these.
Okay, so the eponymous conceit of Feng Shui is that Chinese Geomancy is for reals the way to powah. Certain places have strong positive chi, and the people who claim those places reap intangible benefits. This gives the game several things. Firstly, an excuse for fights to have cool backdrops. Secondly a psuedo-mystic Chinese/Hong Kong veneer. Thirdly an excuse to have various conspiracies which fight over pieces of real estate without needing to match the resources of said conspiracies and ferocity of the fighting to the scale of the real estate. This chapter sadly dwells almost entirely on the psuedo-mystic veneer and aside from a few pieces of arbitrary-PC hosing, it doesn't really discuss Sites in any sort of game-saavy way nor does it provide much in the way of cool example sites to stage fights.
So gogo psuedo-mysticism. Blahblahblah. Geomancy is about shapes and angles and mirrors and metaphorically making stuff look like animals, and you can move mirrors and angles to improve or destroy the flow of Chi at a site. But it's not long before it becomes apparent that the text itself is confused as to whether it counts as "magic" or not.
"Chinese geomancers see themselves more as wise men or scientific practitioners than as magicians." page 233
"You’ll note from this story that feng shui depends a great deal on sympathetic magic." page 234.
And while that sort of hedged bet not actual magic but maybe something to it attitude is a valid position to have for a semiskeptic want-to-beleiver in the real world (See Tarot Readings, Lillydale Assembly, I Ching Readings, Transubstantiation of the Host, Thetans et al), it's crap in a game where the schticks which interact with geomancy are filed under the same Sorcery heading that lets people fly and shoot blasts of acid from their fingertips.
There's also an apparent contradiction about whether Chi flow works like drinking booze or like having a bank account:
"overabundant chi flow damages you just as surely as the lack of it." page 234 So it's like drinking booze: a little warms you nicely, but a lot makes you stupid and gross and a whole lot threatens your life.
"Although all sites have feng shui of some sort, there is little point in attuning to a site with mediocre chi flow. Most buildings, villages, and natural formations have only average feng shui. Only a small minority give off strong enough chi to become tactical goals in the Chi War." page 235.
"Certain sites resonate huge quantities of chi, making them crucial stakes in the Chi War. " page 238
So it's like a bank account, where more money is always better and people fight over the best investments.
Figure 15-3 Feng Shui 2 Geomantic Metaphysics Explained
So after reading the explanations behind things I know less than I did before I started this chapter. But let me move on to the nitty gritty. PCs attune to a site by being a member of the group that controls the site, occupying the site for 24 hours and all performing a ill-defined meditative ritual together. Once your PC has done that, they are now eligible for advancement. (as explained way back in chapter 2). NPCs do not get mechanical benefits, but their sites are assumed to be the background for their power and if you blow up an important one, the text suggests that you give enemies connected to it a small arbitrary penalty the next time they show up. But it's only a suggestion and not even firm about which form such a penalty might take.
Enemies can capture sites from PCs or sabotage them through geomantic rearrangement. Generally PCs do not take a direct penalty from losing a site, they just have lower odds on their next advancement roll for being attuned to fewer sites. There is however a mention in the chapter of PCs who are attuned to sites with bad Chi becoming unable to use Fortune Dice until they've beat up the obstacle behind it. That's horribly PC hosey for no reason and futhermore punishes players who chose archetypes or advancements favoring Fortune instead of anything else. The text says this shouldn't come up often, but it really shouldn't have been written in the first place.
However you may have noticed a problem with this set up. PCs gain real advancment options by taking and holding sites. This means that optimizing players will be concerrned with both capturing new sites and defending their current sites. The author noticed this and put a bunch of admonitions in for the MC to keep things moving and discourage turtling and remind everyone about the action movie logic this game works under. Unfortunately, these admonitions also work out to "don't let the PCs have good sites, because the big factions not making all out assaults on good sites strains the credulity of the existence of the Chi War" This is probably the last place I ever would have expected to see a "don't let the PCs have nice things, they might use them to change the game world" screed
PCs can also get a one-time +1 to this session's advancement roll (okay actually a -1 bonus because THAC0) after any session in which they burned a site. That part is good, but it would do more to discourage turtling, encourage a more proactive world and allow niftier sacrfices if burning a site was worth a bigger one-time bonus than holding it for this session was.
To end out the chapter, we get three sample sites, which are rather uninspired. The baseball stadium requires you to win a baseball game against the current owners' team to attune, and the office building has some vague hints at an Office-Space style undercover comedy session, while the Forest Temple might as well have been lifted from a D&D game.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Sun Jul 05, 2015 10:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Username17
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That's odd, because of course Feng Shui is based on a card game, that already has a big list of iconic feng shui sites in it.
The game has things like the Escher Hotel, the Puzzle Garden, and the Temple of Angry Spirits. The Netherworld sites go straight crazy with shit like the Whirlpool of Blood and the Field of Tentacles.
There's no reason for the sample list of feng shui sites to be short or boring.
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The game has things like the Escher Hotel, the Puzzle Garden, and the Temple of Angry Spirits. The Netherworld sites go straight crazy with shit like the Whirlpool of Blood and the Field of Tentacles.
There's no reason for the sample list of feng shui sites to be short or boring.
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Josh_Kablack
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Yeah, I am downright baffled how this chapter didn't have at least a pair of example sites from each juncture. And I am further baffled how a generic office tower gets a writeup. Given about half an hour more than I have, I could give you decent writeups for any of the several local skyscrapers:
The Steel Building was built to harden with rust and has water filled support columns as a form of fire prevention, but was captured by UPMC in 2008when they put their sign atop it. The Gulf building has lighting at the top that is actually a color coded weather forecast. The. Grant building flashes coordinates in morse code since the days of early aviation.
But heck, I've got time now so lemme edit in a writeup for One PPG Place:
One PPG Place: The largest of the 6 buildings that comprise PPG Place, One PPG is a 40 story tall blend of modern class A office space and fairy tale wonderment. It has been known as the "crystal palace", for its castle-like spikes and entirely mirrored exterior. The look is so distinctive that it has been used as a supervillain headquarters in at least one big budget Hollywood movie, so it could very well serve as such in your game. The office building itself sits between an open-air plaza and a large enclosed atrium / greenhouse known as the Wintergarden.
The plaza between One PPG and Six PPG features a 44 foot tall pink granite obelisk humorously nicknamed "The Tomb of the Unknown Bowler" due to the decorative element of four large black balls linking the corners of the pedestal to the corners of the obelisk proper. In the summer months, this obelisk is surrounded by a fountain and outdoor tables for people to sit at or eat food from the food court in two PPG across 4th avenue. In the winter the fountain is transformed into a small and mildly overpriced ice skating rink. But One PPG's most interesting feature is the on the other side of the building from the Plaze: The Wintergarden. This is an indoor atrium / urban greenhouse space as big as the plaza and with 50' ceilings. It's usually open to the public from morning to afternoon, but it hosts several events throughout the year: It's indoor space during the annual rain-soaked Arts Festival, and hosts part of the Vintage Car Show that your Driver will want to check out, even though it happens inside a huge greenhouse during the hottest part of the sweltering summer. During the Christmas Season it hosts a gingerbread house competition and train display - and really how cool would it be to stage a running gunfight where characters stalk each other through Hansel and Gretel sized gingerbread houses and divert model trains to cause distractions? It's also frequently rented for private events such as the sorts of fancy weddings you might have to crash to raise your objection, award dinners you might have to attend to meet your contact and even in one case a massive Yoga Class which would make a cool background for a kung-fu-fight.
While the Wintergarden and Plaza are accessible to the public aside from events, the elevator banks on the first floor of the office tower are closely guarded. One PPG Place has up to a dozen blue-blazer wearing security guards manning the main desk, walking the public areas and watching the elevators. Nobody gets upstairs without a security card or a day-pass sticker. People that work in the building are issued security cards, and messengers and deliveries have to check in at the main desk to get a sticker - and the desk calls up to see if messages or deliveries are expected, so many a pizza has gotten cold waiting for the lawyer upstairs to call down and give security the okay to let the delivery boy up. Even with a sticker to get on the elevators, most of the elevator lobbies on the upper floor are enclosed by locked doors, so you again need a swipe card or someone to open the door for you.
Shooting your way in is an option, as the guards are there for the image of professionalism, not militant force, and as such, they are armed only with radios and nightsticks. Furthermore, the doors locking off the elevators on the upper floors are plate glass, so you can smash or shoot your way through easily, if nosily. The violent approach will trigger alarms, remember that the building is a glass building surrounded by six other glass buildings in an urban core. Even if you can quickly and quietly neutralize all the guards in One PPG, the guards from the buildings Two through Six are going to figure out that something is wrong inside a couple of minutes, and the actual city police are likely to have an initial response time of less than one minute. You might have up to half and hour before SWAT gets called in.
The building is owned by a nebulous property management company, but it is named for PPG industries, and the mirrored exterior was meant to increase their branding give them the benefit of most of the site's Chi. But they are only the largest tenant in the building. Other tenants who benefit from smoke and mirrors effects such as law firms, accountants and tech start ups are also attuned to and benefiting from the building's unique Chi flow. Your PCs may very well have to recover evidence or experimental technology from such an office.
The Steel Building was built to harden with rust and has water filled support columns as a form of fire prevention, but was captured by UPMC in 2008when they put their sign atop it. The Gulf building has lighting at the top that is actually a color coded weather forecast. The. Grant building flashes coordinates in morse code since the days of early aviation.
But heck, I've got time now so lemme edit in a writeup for One PPG Place:
One PPG Place: The largest of the 6 buildings that comprise PPG Place, One PPG is a 40 story tall blend of modern class A office space and fairy tale wonderment. It has been known as the "crystal palace", for its castle-like spikes and entirely mirrored exterior. The look is so distinctive that it has been used as a supervillain headquarters in at least one big budget Hollywood movie, so it could very well serve as such in your game. The office building itself sits between an open-air plaza and a large enclosed atrium / greenhouse known as the Wintergarden.
The plaza between One PPG and Six PPG features a 44 foot tall pink granite obelisk humorously nicknamed "The Tomb of the Unknown Bowler" due to the decorative element of four large black balls linking the corners of the pedestal to the corners of the obelisk proper. In the summer months, this obelisk is surrounded by a fountain and outdoor tables for people to sit at or eat food from the food court in two PPG across 4th avenue. In the winter the fountain is transformed into a small and mildly overpriced ice skating rink. But One PPG's most interesting feature is the on the other side of the building from the Plaze: The Wintergarden. This is an indoor atrium / urban greenhouse space as big as the plaza and with 50' ceilings. It's usually open to the public from morning to afternoon, but it hosts several events throughout the year: It's indoor space during the annual rain-soaked Arts Festival, and hosts part of the Vintage Car Show that your Driver will want to check out, even though it happens inside a huge greenhouse during the hottest part of the sweltering summer. During the Christmas Season it hosts a gingerbread house competition and train display - and really how cool would it be to stage a running gunfight where characters stalk each other through Hansel and Gretel sized gingerbread houses and divert model trains to cause distractions? It's also frequently rented for private events such as the sorts of fancy weddings you might have to crash to raise your objection, award dinners you might have to attend to meet your contact and even in one case a massive Yoga Class which would make a cool background for a kung-fu-fight.
While the Wintergarden and Plaza are accessible to the public aside from events, the elevator banks on the first floor of the office tower are closely guarded. One PPG Place has up to a dozen blue-blazer wearing security guards manning the main desk, walking the public areas and watching the elevators. Nobody gets upstairs without a security card or a day-pass sticker. People that work in the building are issued security cards, and messengers and deliveries have to check in at the main desk to get a sticker - and the desk calls up to see if messages or deliveries are expected, so many a pizza has gotten cold waiting for the lawyer upstairs to call down and give security the okay to let the delivery boy up. Even with a sticker to get on the elevators, most of the elevator lobbies on the upper floor are enclosed by locked doors, so you again need a swipe card or someone to open the door for you.
Shooting your way in is an option, as the guards are there for the image of professionalism, not militant force, and as such, they are armed only with radios and nightsticks. Furthermore, the doors locking off the elevators on the upper floors are plate glass, so you can smash or shoot your way through easily, if nosily. The violent approach will trigger alarms, remember that the building is a glass building surrounded by six other glass buildings in an urban core. Even if you can quickly and quietly neutralize all the guards in One PPG, the guards from the buildings Two through Six are going to figure out that something is wrong inside a couple of minutes, and the actual city police are likely to have an initial response time of less than one minute. You might have up to half and hour before SWAT gets called in.
The building is owned by a nebulous property management company, but it is named for PPG industries, and the mirrored exterior was meant to increase their branding give them the benefit of most of the site's Chi. But they are only the largest tenant in the building. Other tenants who benefit from smoke and mirrors effects such as law firms, accountants and tech start ups are also attuned to and benefiting from the building's unique Chi flow. Your PCs may very well have to recover evidence or experimental technology from such an office.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Sun Aug 14, 2016 2:02 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Josh_Kablack
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It's vanity art piece commissioned by the author of a book in the sort of contemporary psuedo-pulp genre that I spend most of my leisure reading on. Here's the Amazon Link to the novel the illustrated scene is from. The series has some neat fauxlosophy and fauxlitical backdrops for the superhuman action scenes and cyborg / android angst, but even as a huge fan of the genre I personally used libraries and loaned-from-friends copies rather than paying for the books.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Mon Jul 06, 2015 6:48 pm, edited 4 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Josh_Kablack wrote:It's vanity art piece commissioned by the author of a book in the sort of contemporary psuedo-pulp genre that I spend most of my leisure reading on. Here's the Amazon Link to the novel the illustrated scene is from. The series has some neat fauxlosophy and fauxlitical backdrops for the superhuman action scenes and cyborg / android angst, but even as a huge fan of the genre I personally used libraries and loaned-from-friends copies rather than paying for the books.
Thanks!
Ferret needs to unfuck their tags.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Josh_Kablack
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Chapter 16: Factions
Best Hits: The overview chart on page 244 that gives a two-word summary of each faction's leader.
Worst Flops: Since the bestiality is only implied, the racism is the worst part of the factions.
This chapter presents the factions in some depth and in alphabetical order.
Amber Lager, Brown Ale, Hard Cider, Dunkelweizen in front of my 1e book, with the Tuxedo Mask figure so you know I took this photo myself.
As I have mentioned previously my overarching issue with the factions in Feng Shui is that there is one faction that is supposed to appeal to the PCs, and the others are merely presented as different hats for the enemy of the week to wear. Except it's even worse than that, because the faction that is supposed to appeal to the PCs is left so bland and vague that it probable won't. and instead of hats, the bad guy factions tend to be based on races. And while that's sort of forgivable when the races in question are things like "Transformed Crab" and "Cyber Monkey" it gets into problematic territory when it is instead "Chinese Traditionalists" Sure it's somewhat mitigated by the addendum of "Opposed to the British Occupation", and the legitimacy of their grievances -- but still when you can identify which bad guy faction within the juncture a character belongs to by the slant of their eyes -
Since this is in alphabetical order, we start with Straub Amber and the Ascended. These guys have a rather problematic backstory: In the old days, wise animals used magic to assume human form, and interbred with humans, founding lineages of Tranimals which continue to this day. So not only are Tranimals granted their powers by feudal lineage and their powers are inexplicably based on Fu not Magic and indeed they suffer reversion if exposed to the power source that created them. It's just a logical as Superman and Kryptonite, but with side endorsements of both bestiality and the divine right of kings.
The backstory aside, they do serve a couple of decent world-building goals. These guys are the evil Templars / 11t9th degree Masons / Scientologist conspiracy who are really behind the conspirators behind the conspirators behind your friendly local order of the Water Buffalo Lodge
As you can see this faction takes wearing different hats very literally
And their overarching goal is suppressing magic in the world to protect themselves. So you have a layered conspiracy for PCs to investigate X-Files style and you have a setting reason for Sorcery to be rare in the contemporary and Past Junctures. Those are laudable, and I want to applaud the whole Reversion thing is probably just a nod to Reptoids, but Icke's synthesis of that particular conspiracy theory wasn't published until 1999, meaning that the timing of the 1st Edition and Shadowfist release mean it cannot be an intentional reference.
Anyways, the 3 pages we get on the ascended include some fictional history for the group, their general modus operandi and a 4-level Org Chart with a bunch of Capitalized Words forming levels of the conspiracy.
Up next, the chapter gives us just one page on the Dragons, and while I could focus on just how patronizing it is to assume that all games will use one of the presented Dragons setups, I am instead going to focus on the most offensive aside in the entire 350 page book:
And heck, that beer endorsement is there as a handwaving off of player-logic for locating a named NPC who should be around again in the 1850 juncture now that it got reset to 1850. Which as both Frank and I have previously stated, was an oddball choice to make and not worthy of rationalizations.
The Eaters of the Lotus
Sadly not either of these
get a page and a half, and while their suggested plotline of fractures between the Eunuchs from the old Ancient Juncture and new Ancient Juncture and attempts to transport Gao Zheng through 6 centuries of time and/or reanimate his remains as a Lich are neat, there's just not the same degree of interaction between factions as there was in the prior setup where the Architects kept spooknapping and :borg:ifying the monsters the Lotus used for their supernatural extortion rackets.
Here's where we get the best part of the entire chapter, a half-page infographic on page 244 that summarizes the leader of each group in merely two words. Now it would be better if it summarized the group itself in that compact a format, but this is an action movie, where you have to be able to punch problems in the face. So the focus on individuals is acceptable. After all, Captain America couldn't very well punch National Democratic Socialism.
Next there's 2 and a half pages on the Four Monarchs. Blahblah King Lear. Blahblah in-setting warning of how Critical Shifts work. Blahblah, most of these can serve as unreliable patrons to lend aid to PCs when another of them or a rival faction is on the verge of getting to 10 Victory Points, but each will stab you in the back when they do not need wood for their own sheep. Blahblahblah. At least the chapter gives us have enough description of resources and combat magics that I could easily stat any of these up as uberbosses for a big fight scene. But the text itself doesn't take that step, which would involve math and numbers. So Meh. Next
The chapter has 4 pages on the Guiding Hand, but spends a half page on an illo and another half page on a sidebar for why 1850 is still 1850 when the contemporary and future junctures jumped forward almost 20 years and how to deal with it, and a really convoluted calendar adjustment formula that claims 1847+19 = 1865 among other things. The Hand are still Sinocentric Confucionists, and despite the sympathy a modern reader might have for their struggle against British colonialism, they are made somewhat less sympathetic than they were in the prior edition by highlighting their strict disciplinary measures and ludicrously authoritarian structure. This is a poor choice, as "natives seeking empowerment to resist the exploitations of 19th Century European colonialism" is a political point of view that's gonna have a lot of fans among the late 20th and early 21st century English-speaking demographic most likely to play this game. So the faction really should be made into a plausible faction for PCs to come from and not a source of slightly-less-offensive, but you're still racist if you use them as presented villains.
Which reminds me, it's time for a beer of a different color
The chapter gives us a page and half on The Jammers, who used to be cool anarchists with the recruiting slogan and grandstrategy of "Blow Things Up, Blow Things Up, Blow Things Up". This made them absolutely great allies of convenience for last session's raid, but who have to fight against this session as you were defending a site. That sort of useful straightforward simplicity is gone and now we get Battlechimp Potempkin's melodramatic hook about hitting bottom with a .45 in his mouth and vowing to undo the gigideath he wrought with the C-Bomb via any means necessary, even though the he is aware that the ( admittedly shaky) metaphysics of the game say critical shifts cannot bring anyone back to life. So while the text tries to present him as a tragic figure worthy of some sympathy, it also says outright that he weighs any other lives against the (however slim) chance to save billions. Meaning that he is not sympathetic, he's a megalomaniac with a martyr complex who does not care what obstacles anyone puts in his way.
Even if he prefers blondes, he's no gentleman. And this time, he won't be stopped by biplanes.
Then to round things out, we get just over two pages on the New Simian Army. This is where all the named pun apes are, and it's a strict militaristic theological hierarchy led by cyber ape evangelists. Its focus is on cosolidation of resources and power in the scorched Future juncture and the hope to acquire the technology to make new cyber-apes from the Contemporary juncture.
Guess they never checked Amazon dot com
That's not bad for a minor villain group, but they really could stand to interact with a few more of the other factions than they do. It would be a better setup if Furious George's quest to find sources of new cyber-apes intersected with the Eaters of the Lotus's quest to revive Ghao Zen as a Lich or something.
And that's the chapter.
Best Hits: The overview chart on page 244 that gives a two-word summary of each faction's leader.
Worst Flops: Since the bestiality is only implied, the racism is the worst part of the factions.
This chapter presents the factions in some depth and in alphabetical order.
Amber Lager, Brown Ale, Hard Cider, Dunkelweizen in front of my 1e book, with the Tuxedo Mask figure so you know I took this photo myself.
As I have mentioned previously my overarching issue with the factions in Feng Shui is that there is one faction that is supposed to appeal to the PCs, and the others are merely presented as different hats for the enemy of the week to wear. Except it's even worse than that, because the faction that is supposed to appeal to the PCs is left so bland and vague that it probable won't. and instead of hats, the bad guy factions tend to be based on races. And while that's sort of forgivable when the races in question are things like "Transformed Crab" and "Cyber Monkey" it gets into problematic territory when it is instead "Chinese Traditionalists" Sure it's somewhat mitigated by the addendum of "Opposed to the British Occupation", and the legitimacy of their grievances -- but still when you can identify which bad guy faction within the juncture a character belongs to by the slant of their eyes -
Since this is in alphabetical order, we start with Straub Amber and the Ascended. These guys have a rather problematic backstory: In the old days, wise animals used magic to assume human form, and interbred with humans, founding lineages of Tranimals which continue to this day. So not only are Tranimals granted their powers by feudal lineage and their powers are inexplicably based on Fu not Magic and indeed they suffer reversion if exposed to the power source that created them. It's just a logical as Superman and Kryptonite, but with side endorsements of both bestiality and the divine right of kings.
The backstory aside, they do serve a couple of decent world-building goals. These guys are the evil Templars / 11t9th degree Masons / Scientologist conspiracy who are really behind the conspirators behind the conspirators behind your friendly local order of the Water Buffalo Lodge
As you can see this faction takes wearing different hats very literally
And their overarching goal is suppressing magic in the world to protect themselves. So you have a layered conspiracy for PCs to investigate X-Files style and you have a setting reason for Sorcery to be rare in the contemporary and Past Junctures. Those are laudable, and I want to applaud the whole Reversion thing is probably just a nod to Reptoids, but Icke's synthesis of that particular conspiracy theory wasn't published until 1999, meaning that the timing of the 1st Edition and Shadowfist release mean it cannot be an intentional reference.
Anyways, the 3 pages we get on the ascended include some fictional history for the group, their general modus operandi and a 4-level Org Chart with a bunch of Capitalized Words forming levels of the conspiracy.
Up next, the chapter gives us just one page on the Dragons, and while I could focus on just how patronizing it is to assume that all games will use one of the presented Dragons setups, I am instead going to focus on the most offensive aside in the entire 350 page book:
In rebuttal, here's John Oliver. Offensive marketing and beer taste aside Bud Light is a tool of the Ascended. At least the first edition went with Guiness for its mass market beer-shilling, but honestly, you're not reading an RPG for beer endorsements. At least not when you have internet reviews for that sort of things, so moving on:page 242-243 wrote: , because...look, it’s complicated, all right? Have some more french fries and maybe a Bud Light.
And heck, that beer endorsement is there as a handwaving off of player-logic for locating a named NPC who should be around again in the 1850 juncture now that it got reset to 1850. Which as both Frank and I have previously stated, was an oddball choice to make and not worthy of rationalizations.
The Eaters of the Lotus
Sadly not either of these
get a page and a half, and while their suggested plotline of fractures between the Eunuchs from the old Ancient Juncture and new Ancient Juncture and attempts to transport Gao Zheng through 6 centuries of time and/or reanimate his remains as a Lich are neat, there's just not the same degree of interaction between factions as there was in the prior setup where the Architects kept spooknapping and :borg:ifying the monsters the Lotus used for their supernatural extortion rackets.
Here's where we get the best part of the entire chapter, a half-page infographic on page 244 that summarizes the leader of each group in merely two words. Now it would be better if it summarized the group itself in that compact a format, but this is an action movie, where you have to be able to punch problems in the face. So the focus on individuals is acceptable. After all, Captain America couldn't very well punch National Democratic Socialism.
Next there's 2 and a half pages on the Four Monarchs. Blahblah King Lear. Blahblah in-setting warning of how Critical Shifts work. Blahblah, most of these can serve as unreliable patrons to lend aid to PCs when another of them or a rival faction is on the verge of getting to 10 Victory Points, but each will stab you in the back when they do not need wood for their own sheep. Blahblahblah. At least the chapter gives us have enough description of resources and combat magics that I could easily stat any of these up as uberbosses for a big fight scene. But the text itself doesn't take that step, which would involve math and numbers. So Meh. Next
The chapter has 4 pages on the Guiding Hand, but spends a half page on an illo and another half page on a sidebar for why 1850 is still 1850 when the contemporary and future junctures jumped forward almost 20 years and how to deal with it, and a really convoluted calendar adjustment formula that claims 1847+19 = 1865 among other things. The Hand are still Sinocentric Confucionists, and despite the sympathy a modern reader might have for their struggle against British colonialism, they are made somewhat less sympathetic than they were in the prior edition by highlighting their strict disciplinary measures and ludicrously authoritarian structure. This is a poor choice, as "natives seeking empowerment to resist the exploitations of 19th Century European colonialism" is a political point of view that's gonna have a lot of fans among the late 20th and early 21st century English-speaking demographic most likely to play this game. So the faction really should be made into a plausible faction for PCs to come from and not a source of slightly-less-offensive, but you're still racist if you use them as presented villains.
Which reminds me, it's time for a beer of a different color
The chapter gives us a page and half on The Jammers, who used to be cool anarchists with the recruiting slogan and grandstrategy of "Blow Things Up, Blow Things Up, Blow Things Up". This made them absolutely great allies of convenience for last session's raid, but who have to fight against this session as you were defending a site. That sort of useful straightforward simplicity is gone and now we get Battlechimp Potempkin's melodramatic hook about hitting bottom with a .45 in his mouth and vowing to undo the gigideath he wrought with the C-Bomb via any means necessary, even though the he is aware that the ( admittedly shaky) metaphysics of the game say critical shifts cannot bring anyone back to life. So while the text tries to present him as a tragic figure worthy of some sympathy, it also says outright that he weighs any other lives against the (however slim) chance to save billions. Meaning that he is not sympathetic, he's a megalomaniac with a martyr complex who does not care what obstacles anyone puts in his way.
Even if he prefers blondes, he's no gentleman. And this time, he won't be stopped by biplanes.
Then to round things out, we get just over two pages on the New Simian Army. This is where all the named pun apes are, and it's a strict militaristic theological hierarchy led by cyber ape evangelists. Its focus is on cosolidation of resources and power in the scorched Future juncture and the hope to acquire the technology to make new cyber-apes from the Contemporary juncture.
Guess they never checked Amazon dot com
That's not bad for a minor villain group, but they really could stand to interact with a few more of the other factions than they do. It would be a better setup if Furious George's quest to find sources of new cyber-apes intersected with the Eaters of the Lotus's quest to revive Ghao Zen as a Lich or something.
And that's the chapter.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Aug 05, 2015 6:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Reading this review and leafing through the pdf, I can hear the 90s calling to me in an old granny voice. I mean, Ive heard only good things about Feng Shui 1 and how great it at its time, but this edition makes me think its greatness must have been so some 30 years ago where games were those piles of clunky, incoherent and messy rules. Nowadays, after D&D 3e and 4e happened, after narrative games happened, and "new school" games happening now.. whats the catch ?
Why would someone pick this game over, say, the last version of D&D or Fate or Savage Worlds or Wushu or Cortex+ or some *World game ?
Why would someone pick this game over, say, the last version of D&D or Fate or Savage Worlds or Wushu or Cortex+ or some *World game ?
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
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Chapter 17: Chi War
Best Hits: Pop Up Junctures
Worst Flops: Anytime an actual rule is referenced
This chapter starts off with a great little synopsis that gives the most crucial parts of the setup in just three bullet points and then explains that all the time-travel metaphysics are just a way to justify mixing and matching archetypes from different types of movies. It's completely open that the whole setup is an excuse to have swordmaster samurai fighting alongside maverick cops and cyborgs from the future against robot monkeys and demon sorcerers, and that works so well that I have to wonder if the most of the rest of this chapter could have been cut. If you are familiar with how things worked in the last edition the only changes are: the shift of the Future from dystopia to wasteland ; the shift in the Ancient enemies from evil puppeteers behind the throne to scheming conspirators trying to retake the throne; and the addition of pop-up junctures. I'm lagging in inspiration currently, so I'm just gonna slog through each heading and subheading in order here.
Junctures
This section explains that Feng Shui treats time just like places. There are four of them you can go to (at least in the default setup) and time passes linearly within each of them. Sometimes portals to a specific one close and/or portals to a new specific one open up.
Changing History
The way things work in the game's metaphysics is that if you do manage to kill Hitler, then Julius Schwab grows a little mustache, becomes the Fuhrer, leads the Nazis in their fascist control of Germany, oversees the holocaust and World War II happens just the same from 1939 to 1945. You've only really changed the nametag on the uniform.
However if you instead go back and firebomb Neuschwanstein a decade early and prevent the Nazi Regime from controling the Brandenburg Gate, Frauenkirche and similar German nationalist Feng Shui sites, then you diminish the historical influence of the Nazi party and reduce what success they had in the war, ending up with a world where the Battle of Britain never happened and Stalin's forces conquered all of Berlin, leading to an early Cold War that turned into the first atomic war when president Nixon bungled the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc etc, leading to very different contemporary and future junctures from those presented in the book. And those new junctures are the way most of the world remembers history, even though they are not the way things were at the start of a given campaign. Such Critical Shifts give PCs a chance to roleplay culture present shock while reinforcing that the stakes in the Chi War are control of reality itself.
The part that makes PCs and their opponents speshul here, is that only those who have passed through the Netherworld, who are known as Innerwalkers even notice such changes in history. So the game has metaphysics that allow for characters to start out in our normal world fighting foes from our normal world and then awaken to the real stakes of the secret magical cyberape war for all of history as they uncover layers of the conspiracy. That's actually decent set dressing for a world-outside-your-window fantasy. Although as a Denizen, I have to wonder why all the factions play by the Masquerade and nobody at all tries to gain leverage by leading a large population through a netherworld portal and back to awaken them to what's really going on.
Lateral Reincarnation
If you manage to kill your own grandfather, then you still exist pretty much the same, but now you have a different family tree that still adds up to you having exactly the same life. The game needlessly calls this "lateral reincarnation" as you are reincarnated into a having slightly different family name. If and if you go back and acquire Feng Shui sites for your grandfather, then you come from a more illustrious family line and more prosperous upbringing. Again, changing control of sites in past junctures can result in present shock for PCs and other Innerwalkers.
Reincarnation and New Characters
Wait, that's an actual subheading? Not just a workaround for the crappy lethality of the ruleset and still inadequate experience system? I thought I was being snarky.
Oh wait. I wasn't being snarky enough, this section just says that you can use reincarnation as flavor text and by the way the author forgot the rules again:
So yeah, this piece of "you can use this part of game metaphysics for flavortext" references the old rules, presumably contradicts the current rules and points out a gaping hole in the current rules, while missing the actual issue my prior snark was mocking.
Figure 17-1: An attempt to increase my snark closer to the required amount[/align]
Then to round out this subheading Robin channels JJ Abrams:
Yeah, this section says what the chapter has already covered, just a bit more explicitly and with the fall of the Four Monarchs as an example. Then there is a note that some Innerwalkers become "Exiles" (people who never existed in the new version of a junture) a section called "Handling Critical Shifts" which is mostly a list of where the various factions want to set the magic level in junctures they control instead of anything new or interesting and then we get a "Juncture Shift Example" where the New Simian Army founds the Monkey King Society in the Past Juncture and wins the Opium Wars. This example starts out neat, but ends with a pretty boring setup where the Simians control the Past, Conterporary and Future junctures while all the other players line up to stop them from getting to 10 VP first. Instead of something interesting where they just take one jucture and thereby shift the factions active in subsequent junctures.
Erasing the Backstory
This subheading says that you cannot use the time-travel nature of the setting to undo events that happened onscreen in your game. The example of how a PC getting ambushed yesterday and then going back to 1850 and arranging a letter to be sent to arrive the day before yesterday warning him of the ambush fails has only one of the listed dates updated for the new edition, because again editing can't.
But then we get to the Stretch Goal kewlness that is: Pop Up Junctures, each of which is a roughly 2-page summary of an alternate adventure setting for Feng Shui2.
After Robin's already discussed sidebar disclaimer that doing a Nazi juncture cheapens the reality of Nazism, each listing offers:
The stick figure is Robin D. Laws, little tophat is any sort of rules detail
Shanghai 1937 - Like the intro fight in Temple of Doom, but more Chinese because Hong Kong.
Barbarian Borderlands (China 986) - Dynastic infighting with invaders massing at the gates.
Gee I wonder why that sort of thing would be popular now?
oh wait, this is Feng Shui, it needs to be gratuitously Chinese
There, that's more like it.
Samurai Dawn (Japan 1600) - This one I know enough actual history to have some problems with. There are reasons that Seven Samurai is set in 1586 and that Ikusa (The Game Formerly Known as Shogun / Samurai Swords) is set just pre-1600. Having Oni on the battlefield is fine -- explaining that they are guarding the gates to the afterlife is so not fine when this game already has an elaborate set of portal network metaphysics that do not include any sort of afterlife.
Feng Musketeers (semi-fictionalized France 1620) Personally, I am irrationally attached to this pop-up juncture and would totally use it if I ever actually run a Feng Shui game again. But there is a detail here, so of course Robin trips over it:
Figure 17-3, this pop-up juncture's rules modification to help preserve the setting
Red Red Mars A mashup of the Auhnold Total Recall and Barsoom, where earth colonists fleeing the killer robots back on earth fight inscrutable but perhaps sympathetic aliens for Martian Turf.
Kaiju Patrol A Feng Shui riff on the cheesiest of 70s Toho Kaiju flicks, complete with aliens who wear gold lamé and use their saucers' hypno-rays on the giant monsters. I want to point out the issues this might cause when introduced as a pop-up into a long running game, but my inner five year old is too busy jumping around and singing the theme song to the Godzilla Power Hour
Best Hits: Pop Up Junctures
Worst Flops: Anytime an actual rule is referenced
This chapter starts off with a great little synopsis that gives the most crucial parts of the setup in just three bullet points and then explains that all the time-travel metaphysics are just a way to justify mixing and matching archetypes from different types of movies. It's completely open that the whole setup is an excuse to have swordmaster samurai fighting alongside maverick cops and cyborgs from the future against robot monkeys and demon sorcerers, and that works so well that I have to wonder if the most of the rest of this chapter could have been cut. If you are familiar with how things worked in the last edition the only changes are: the shift of the Future from dystopia to wasteland ; the shift in the Ancient enemies from evil puppeteers behind the throne to scheming conspirators trying to retake the throne; and the addition of pop-up junctures. I'm lagging in inspiration currently, so I'm just gonna slog through each heading and subheading in order here.
Junctures
This section explains that Feng Shui treats time just like places. There are four of them you can go to (at least in the default setup) and time passes linearly within each of them. Sometimes portals to a specific one close and/or portals to a new specific one open up.
Changing History
The way things work in the game's metaphysics is that if you do manage to kill Hitler, then Julius Schwab grows a little mustache, becomes the Fuhrer, leads the Nazis in their fascist control of Germany, oversees the holocaust and World War II happens just the same from 1939 to 1945. You've only really changed the nametag on the uniform.
However if you instead go back and firebomb Neuschwanstein a decade early and prevent the Nazi Regime from controling the Brandenburg Gate, Frauenkirche and similar German nationalist Feng Shui sites, then you diminish the historical influence of the Nazi party and reduce what success they had in the war, ending up with a world where the Battle of Britain never happened and Stalin's forces conquered all of Berlin, leading to an early Cold War that turned into the first atomic war when president Nixon bungled the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc etc, leading to very different contemporary and future junctures from those presented in the book. And those new junctures are the way most of the world remembers history, even though they are not the way things were at the start of a given campaign. Such Critical Shifts give PCs a chance to roleplay culture present shock while reinforcing that the stakes in the Chi War are control of reality itself.
The part that makes PCs and their opponents speshul here, is that only those who have passed through the Netherworld, who are known as Innerwalkers even notice such changes in history. So the game has metaphysics that allow for characters to start out in our normal world fighting foes from our normal world and then awaken to the real stakes of the secret magical cyberape war for all of history as they uncover layers of the conspiracy. That's actually decent set dressing for a world-outside-your-window fantasy. Although as a Denizen, I have to wonder why all the factions play by the Masquerade and nobody at all tries to gain leverage by leading a large population through a netherworld portal and back to awaken them to what's really going on.
Lateral Reincarnation
If you manage to kill your own grandfather, then you still exist pretty much the same, but now you have a different family tree that still adds up to you having exactly the same life. The game needlessly calls this "lateral reincarnation" as you are reincarnated into a having slightly different family name. If and if you go back and acquire Feng Shui sites for your grandfather, then you come from a more illustrious family line and more prosperous upbringing. Again, changing control of sites in past junctures can result in present shock for PCs and other Innerwalkers.
Reincarnation and New Characters
Wait, that's an actual subheading? Not just a workaround for the crappy lethality of the ruleset and still inadequate experience system? I thought I was being snarky.
Oh wait. I wasn't being snarky enough, this section just says that you can use reincarnation as flavor text and by the way the author forgot the rules again:
I should remind you that 2e no longer uses experience points and the use of "find all" within a PDF reveals such in just a few seconds? Oh and since the FS2 advancements system specifies that players who miss sessions with advancements receive retroactive advancements to keep all PCs on the same number of advancements, presumably new characters who join an existing campaign also get the retroactive advancements, as that's the only way to keep them even. Curiously the 350 page text does not actually say explicitly how to handle new players / new characters joining an already ongoing series - which really seems an oversight given the amount of bloat and Laws general savvyness for what actually happens at game tables.page 259 wrote: a player may choose to make the new character a reincarnation of the old one. This brings no game benefits; the new character does not share the memories of the old one, is not entitled to use his equipment or other property, and does not carry over any accumulated experience points to the new character creation process.
So yeah, this piece of "you can use this part of game metaphysics for flavortext" references the old rules, presumably contradicts the current rules and points out a gaping hole in the current rules, while missing the actual issue my prior snark was mocking.
Then to round out this subheading Robin channels JJ Abrams:
Critical and Superficial Shiftscondensed paraphrasing wrote: Also, souls
Yeah, this section says what the chapter has already covered, just a bit more explicitly and with the fall of the Four Monarchs as an example. Then there is a note that some Innerwalkers become "Exiles" (people who never existed in the new version of a junture) a section called "Handling Critical Shifts" which is mostly a list of where the various factions want to set the magic level in junctures they control instead of anything new or interesting and then we get a "Juncture Shift Example" where the New Simian Army founds the Monkey King Society in the Past Juncture and wins the Opium Wars. This example starts out neat, but ends with a pretty boring setup where the Simians control the Past, Conterporary and Future junctures while all the other players line up to stop them from getting to 10 VP first. Instead of something interesting where they just take one jucture and thereby shift the factions active in subsequent junctures.
Erasing the Backstory
This subheading says that you cannot use the time-travel nature of the setting to undo events that happened onscreen in your game. The example of how a PC getting ambushed yesterday and then going back to 1850 and arranging a letter to be sent to arrive the day before yesterday warning him of the ambush fails has only one of the listed dates updated for the new edition, because again editing can't.
But then we get to the Stretch Goal kewlness that is: Pop Up Junctures, each of which is a roughly 2-page summary of an alternate adventure setting for Feng Shui2.
After Robin's already discussed sidebar disclaimer that doing a Nazi juncture cheapens the reality of Nazism, each listing offers:
- Title and then two subheadings each offering a few paragraphs of flavor text establishing history and politics and such
- A "Why you go there" subheading. With a list of potential motivations in bullet points.
- A "Who you fight" subheading. With a list of opponents in bullet points
- A "Where you fight" subheading. With a list of ideas for fight scene locations in bullet points
- A "Distractions" subheading. With a list of other locations, history or possible subplots in bullet points.
- A "Film Library" subheading with a handful of movies that are recommended viewing. (or which can't be directly named for fear of litigation)
The stick figure is Robin D. Laws, little tophat is any sort of rules detail
Shanghai 1937 - Like the intro fight in Temple of Doom, but more Chinese because Hong Kong.
Barbarian Borderlands (China 986) - Dynastic infighting with invaders massing at the gates.
Gee I wonder why that sort of thing would be popular now?
oh wait, this is Feng Shui, it needs to be gratuitously Chinese
There, that's more like it.
Samurai Dawn (Japan 1600) - This one I know enough actual history to have some problems with. There are reasons that Seven Samurai is set in 1586 and that Ikusa (The Game Formerly Known as Shogun / Samurai Swords) is set just pre-1600. Having Oni on the battlefield is fine -- explaining that they are guarding the gates to the afterlife is so not fine when this game already has an elaborate set of portal network metaphysics that do not include any sort of afterlife.
Feng Musketeers (semi-fictionalized France 1620) Personally, I am irrationally attached to this pop-up juncture and would totally use it if I ever actually run a Feng Shui game again. But there is a detail here, so of course Robin trips over it:
Okay, the idea being that PCs in a Musketeers setting should behave like Dumas' musketeers did. Firstly, that sort of trading in character idioms for setting idioms is a really bad fit for a game whose whole Chi war dealio was to have expys of Dirty Harry, Mad Max, Robocop and Nick from Push / Matt from Chronicle team up to fight cyber-ape zealouts from the future and prevent Ancient Chinese eunuch sorcerers from reviving their dead leader. But more importantly, in this game the weapon granularity is limited for simplicity such that all Swords already have the same damage value anywayspage 273 wrote: "Before or after the fight, turn in your machetes and other crude blades for rapiers. In this popup juncture the slimmest sword does as much damage as any great honking hog-slasher."
chart back on page 108 wrote: Spear, sword, absurdly large improvised weapon† 10
Figure 17-3, this pop-up juncture's rules modification to help preserve the setting
Red Red Mars A mashup of the Auhnold Total Recall and Barsoom, where earth colonists fleeing the killer robots back on earth fight inscrutable but perhaps sympathetic aliens for Martian Turf.
Kaiju Patrol A Feng Shui riff on the cheesiest of 70s Toho Kaiju flicks, complete with aliens who wear gold lamé and use their saucers' hypno-rays on the giant monsters. I want to point out the issues this might cause when introduced as a pop-up into a long running game, but my inner five year old is too busy jumping around and singing the theme song to the Godzilla Power Hour
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Thu Jul 30, 2015 3:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Time travel is always a good way for a setting to shoot itself in the foot. It seems that the game takes the rather ballsy view that if one of the factions goes back and takes some Feng Shui sites the present is just changed and you get to deal with it?
I mean, I get that Feng Shui goes for the action movie vibe and any changes are probably going to be temporary until the PC's go back and kick whoever is screwing up the timeline off the sites in question, but it still seems like there is the potential for rewriting the campaign if a scenario goes south.
I mean, I get that Feng Shui goes for the action movie vibe and any changes are probably going to be temporary until the PC's go back and kick whoever is screwing up the timeline off the sites in question, but it still seems like there is the potential for rewriting the campaign if a scenario goes south.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire