Wiseman wrote:That said, there are several universe compendiums that describe the world in more detail and could be used as sources of ideas.
Sure. But it's not like in the era of Crunchyroll and Wikipedia that it's particularly hard to find lists of Yokai. Indeed, there are
so many Yokai available to choose from that you honestly are going to need to make some cuts or have the world of Yokai be a kitchen sink parade of Steves. So you'd kind of like to have Goblin villages, Tengu villages, Kappa villages, Nezumi villages, Mujina villages, Bakeneko villages, Tanuki villages, Hibagon villages, Jorogumo villages, Kodama villages, Yosei villages, Kitsune villages, Samebito villages, Naga villages, and Vanara villages. And that's
before we get in to the fact that we probably
want there to be Ogres that actually are a parade of Steves or delve very deeply into Chinese, Korean, or Southeast Asian literature. That's probably too many types of dudes for them to all get villages and spots on the map. So you're
already going to be announcing that Mujina, Bakeneko, Tanuki, and Kitsune are all collectively Obake. Kodama and Yosei are both stuff you meet in the same spirit forests. The Hibagon are just a flavor of Ogre. The Samebito can be just one creature of many in the Sea Dragon's forces. And so on.
Basically you have no problem at all filling up a monster manual, and your primary difficulty with the non-human peoples is getting their number down far enough that the players have the luxury to care what the differences between Tengu and Kappa are.
Count Arioch wrote:That image is hilarious
Yes, but it also derives logically from the constraints of the medium. If we want the
characters to care about the cultural trappings and honor and such, then we have to get the
players to care about it because in an RPG the players control all the protagonists. For the players to care about the cultural trappings, they have to be beneficial towards advancing character goals (note that this is emphatically
not the ridiculous PL claim that they all have to give combat bonuses, because not all challenges are combat challenges).
Now it is of course an open question of what it is that practicing calligraphy and embroidery and such actually does. I think most games that try to reward that kind of behavior give you XP or something equivalent for grinding away at craft skills, and I can't say that I like that solution very much. If grinding away at falconry or poetry is just a means towards generic character progression then it's just going to be better or worse than goblin stabbing and in either case it's the game explicitly wasting your time. To be satisfying, using your teamaking and songwriting has to not only contribute to your overall progression, it has to contribute directly to completing actual in-game and in-world challenges.
Now you could do it the completely ridiculous way where some characters just paint in the middle of combat and a certain number of enemy spider demons explode for "no reason." But that's extremely stupid, and in any case the desired outcome is for characters to actually be sword swinging samurai
who also have good taste in women, wine, and song. So the ability to support a party that has a swordsman, a wizard, and a flower arranger is not actually sufficient. Instead, the samurai has to be presented with genuine flower arranging challenges.
And further, since the characters are going to spend long periods (potentially entire campaigns) in barbarian lands, it is absolutely essential that there still be flower arrangment challenges while you are deep in Yomi. Which outside a video game means that there has to be
in character reasons why you'd want to compose poetry or make a rock garden while in a Goblin village in the middle of Yomi.
There are lots of ways you could possibly go about this, but the obvious solution to this problem is simply that the Goblins want to consume your culture because it is awesome. Nezumi, Tengu, Kappa, and even Oni want to wear imperial clothes, hang imperial paintings on their walls, and listen to imperial poetry after eating imperial food for dinner off of imperial porcelain. Your ability to be respectable makes nonhumans and even monsters respect you.
It's a totally different esthetic than the Conan-inspired one that murder hobos cultivate - where respectability and dressing nicely and eating non-expired food is merely a distraction from amassing essential tools of murder stabbing. This is a more imperialistic perspective in which being civilized is actually good and people want the trappings of your civilization and you can gain their trust and admiration by bringing it to them. But if you want to sell the players as being part of the empire, you should in fact do that. Otherwise everyone is just going to turn against the capitol and join the Mockingjay at the first opportunity.
And yes, this means that you need to have a robust tea party game, because it is entirely possible that you will use it frequently.
-Username17