Thursday, April 12, 2012

Fighting with Style!

One thing I really like about Wuxia and the World of Martial Arts concepts is the fact that most martial artists have a "Style" or nom-de-guerre.  Outlaws of the Marsh is full of them, for example:

The Timely Rain
Sagacious Lu, the Tattooed Monk
Nine Dragons Shi Jin
Li Kui, the Black Whirlwind

There was even that fight scene in the inn in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where they sorta made fun of the concept.

So I slapped together a little random generator to come up with them quickly.  Unfortunately, I can foresee people seeing the title and thinking it's for martial arts styles, like "Drunken Crane Taekwondo" or the like.  Well, it's not for that, and if some people don't like it oh well.

This is more or less an "all the dice" generator.  If you pick up a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20 and roll them all at once, you can get a result.  Only if the d6 comes up a "4" will you need to roll a second d10 and d20.  I haven't calculated all the possible permutations only using the words on the list, but considering that one could easily substitute a synonym or similar category word for any result (and the "Titles" section is deliberately open-ended), and the same result could be connected in different ways, you can get a gob of names for your martial artist. 

Some results, of course, may not work so well.  If you don't want your PC to be called "Duke Invulnerable Meat" and can't come up with a good modification of that ("Invulnerable Lord of Bacon"?) you can always roll again or just look through the lists and use them for inspiration to come up with something on your own!

Download it here!

3 comments:

  1. Excellent. Many years ago I did a much simpler version of that table to generate names for my 1/1200th junks that I use in Age of Sail games.

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  2. One of my favorite marital art film scenes of all times! Good choice.

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  3. I really need to come up with list of maneuvers for swashbucklers - I think that's going to be my M entry for the A to Z thing going on right now.

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