Originally posted 22 February 2015
I've been working on a campaign off and on the last few months, as I've found time and energy. It's mostly just theory and "get ideas down" level at this point, but it is coming along.
I've wanted to do something set in a historical Asian period for a while now. Sometime in early 2013 I'd started on a setting based roughly on Three Kingdoms era China, wherein the players were provincial agents from a wide variety of backgrounds assembled by the new Magistrate for various special assignments. This was to take place in a kingdom that had participated in the Warring States period just prior to the campaign's start, but had collapsed due to internal troubles after truce brought that war to a close. Essentially inspired by the old Dune RTS campaign map, the players were supposed to perform various special assignments that would advance their kingdom's hold over the former territory of this "Middle Kingdom", at the cost of the remaining natives and eventually the other two factions who'd also moved in. None of the three states felt they could survive another protracted war - beggared and war weary as they were - but all wanted control over this bountiful "middle kingdom" so that they could have an economic advantage over the others. This sidesteps, well enough I feel, the problem with running RPG games set during open war - pitched battles don't RPG well.
The three factions were based on various Chinese philosophies. One was a hyper-religious Taoist faction that had learned to channel otherworldly powers to improve the capabilities of their armies, up to and including possession and wielding of the five Chinese elements. Another was a hyper-militant Legalist society that had the best war machine of the three. The players themselves were from a Confucian-esque society that represented the remnants of the old Dynasty. It was going to be a territory control / expansion / exploration style campaign, with an element of player classes, which is unusual for me because I was running it in GURPS.
An alternative to the "Middle Kingdom" was the players representing refugees from the old Dynasty fleeing to "Totally Not Taiwan", much the same way the Ming dynasty fled to Taiwan during the Manchu invasion in the 17th century.
Anyways, this ended up getting tabled. Some months back I started remembering it when I'd started thinking about doing a campaign set in Japan. I'd considered doing some kind of war-time game set during Sengoku Jidai, but remembered some of the elements I'd put down in my Three Kingdoms design notes. So, again sidestepping the issue of pitched battles, I started considering a game set during the late Sengoku Jidai era, right as the war was drawing to a close. Initially it was going to be based around Ronin trying to make a living in rough brigand country in the wake of their lord's suicide, but I remember wanting to play around with the idea of territory expansion and decided to make use of it here again.
I drafted the idea of a short, five or six game campaign with a clearly designated goal (unusual for me these last few years). The players would be a hodge-podge (or uniform, if they like) collection of various agents serving their Diamyo for a special assignment (sound familiar?)
Basically, their clan had been at the top of the world during the high water mark of their Sengoku period, but had a series of poor generals, rulers, and combat defeats that brought them to their knees. Instead of being erased completely, their Diamyo capitulated and the clan survived to through the remainder of the war as a client to the Shogunate. Now, it's been several hundred years into their version of "Pax Tokugawa", and society has remodeled itself much like the Tokugawa Shogunate's in our world. Samurai are bureaucrats, class structure is rigid (and legally enforced), and the country is (almost completely) at peace.
A few weeks prior to the campaigns opening, some peasant washes up on shore in their prefecture. Taken into custody, he reveals himself to be an outcast who had dwelt on an island off the coast of the clan's prefecture, along with several hundred others. Evidently, some banished (formerly) high class individual had recently come to the island and set himself up as a petty bandit lord. This wouldn't be terribly unusual, as it happens here and again, but it turns out this individual has uncovered some precious resource (probably gold, I haven't decided between that or some kind of mythic, magical substance). He intends to use this resource to essentially buy his way back into high society. This unfortunate individual tried to steal some of said resource and sneak back to the mainland, but got caught and very nearly killed on his way out. He managed to escape, but that doesn't change the fact that he's a criminal, so as soon as the clan's leadership were sure he'd told everything he knows they cut his head off.
The island in question is legally the possession of the clan the players serve, but is far enough away from the clan's mainland holdings that it hasn't really been exploited in several hundred years. It briefly served as a naval base of sorts in the early part of the Sengoku, but wasn't particularly strategically located and was abandoned. It has been a known outlaw holdout, but literally nobody has cared to enforce the clan's right to it. Naturally, now that this resource has been revealed, the Diamyo wants it so he can assert his clan's relative independence, maybe stake a new claim to the Shogunate...
The first step is to get an expedition over to the island to see what exactly is going on over there. Now the Shogunate has spies everywhere so the whole operation has to be quite clandestine. With strict controls on the number of soldiers, ships, and various other assets they can have (as a client state), the clan can't exactly mount a huge assault on the island. Further, if word gets out they suddenly have a source of this precious resource, the Shogunate would surely want it for itself, without having to deal with the clan as a broker.
The players are supposed to be various agents who are part of this expedition. Sent over on a small trade ship of sorts, there isn't room for a whole army, or even a small one. The members of this expeditionary force are selected largely due to political obligations within the clan, comprising representatives from the Zen temple, urban samurai-bureaucrats, low class laborers and ji-samurai, as well as miscellaneous ronin and even what are essentially proto-Yakuza (representing the interests of wealthy merchants). This opens up a wide variety of backgrounds for characters, which is good because I am taking the "enforced archetype" model.
By enforced archetype, I mean each player is basically selecting a class of sorts. All this does, though, is give you a basic template that dictates the bare minimum skills/traits you must have in some form, along side a list of other traits you are approved to select or forbidden to have. These archetypes range from several classes of samurai to peasant-warriors, ashigaru soldiers to warrior monks. Each boon of sorts comes with a bane to counter-balance it. For example, the wealthier samurai-bureaucrat archetype has a number of social advantages, free access to fine quality weapons and their skills, and gets heavy armor for free. However, the weapons are a little "too" fine - a bit stylish and fragile for combat use though quite sharp and deadly anyways, the armor is a bit overbuilt and frilly since it's mostly for show, even if it will turn all but the strongest blows, and their weapon skills are basically Bullshido at this point. More pragmatically trained fighters, like the peasant warrior Ikko-ikki or the Ashugaru, have their own problems, like low caps on skill levels or poor equipment quality.
This is all mostly to see if I can add some flavor to class-based character design. Naturally the players will, since this is GURPS, get plenty of customization opportunity. The mandatory stuff is mostly just a reflection of social rank / obligation, with the goal of giving everyone a larger "approved" list than a "denied" list. It doesn't have to be a combat heavy campaign, but if it is I'm challenging the players by not allowing them to be super-strong fighters, while compensating in some fashion.
The campaign itself I figure to be some kind of hex-crawl of sorts, as the players take five or six "expeditions" as they assess and attempt to assert the clan's authority over the island. I've not run a hex-crawl / exploration style game before, so this is an opportunity to give that campaign style a try.
It's hard for me to acquire regular players that game "serious" enough for my liking, and I'm not a particularly skilled GM, but if it gets a run I'll be glad for it. Since I'm giving the players reduced options, I suspect keeping it relatively short will be key, since I suspect I'll be stepping on my players toes more than they'd like. I'll try and work with them, though, to find a happy middle ground. My one regular player already has the idea of a fraud "Samurai", much like Toshiro Mifune's character in "Seven Samurai". Oddly, I didn't think of that, so I'll have to figure out how to work it. It's basically just one of the peasant archetypes with a stolen sword and a false set of identity papers. Not sure what I'd value his deception at, though, since it's highly unlikely anyone would work it out in the context of this campaign - he's a ronin-for-hire from some far off place (or so he claims), so his crude ways are probably fairly easily excused. The short timeline doesn't imply someone calling his bluff.
If I do more development work I might share it here. I do most of my work in Google Docs, but it may be a good idea I show it around to get more critique. And if it goes nowhere, at least I've padded this blog out a bit, eh?
I may also toss other setting sketches up here for similar reasons. Better people take it and run with it than my notes rotting away in Google Drive!
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