Movie Review: The Great Wall

Last Monday I went and saw The Great Wall, but I've been busy so I'm only getting to blog about it now (Wednesday). I was looking forward to watching this film. I've enjoyed Zhang Yimou's work in the past, and this is "Ancient Chinese fantasy" which is pretty much what my little RPG is all about.

I was a bit hesitant, though, because here in S. Korea, they've oversaturated the market with ads for the film. I mean, try to watch anything on YouTube, and you have to sit through a 10-second ad for the film. I've got a bit of a contrarian streak from my dad. He hated Elvis and the Beatles back in the 60's when they were super popular (he prefers Elvis but doesn't mind the Beatles today). Because of the annoyance, I almost just waited to watch it on VOD later. But I thought, hey, I'm kinda the intended audience for this sort of film, so I'll go see it.

The basic story, if you haven't been over-inundated with ads, is that a pair of foreigners arrive at the Great Wall to "trade" just on the eve of a monster attack that happens for a week once every 60 years. And since the main character, William (that would be the Matt Damon character), is an excellent archer, he helps out. Oh, and it helps that he thinks Commander Lin (Tian Jing) is cute.

So yeah, it's not really wuxia, but it does play out a bit more similarly to how my Flying Swordsmen games have actually turned out in practice. Lots of combat, some cool stunts, monsters here and there, but not really a lot of interpersonal relationship development. In that department, it's more like a typical Hollywood film, although as far as the visuals go, it's very Zhang Yimou. This is a hybrid film, designed to try and appeal to both mainstream U.S. and mainstream Chinese audiences, after all.

And finally, my opinion of the film? I liked it well enough, but I can't say it was great. The beginning was pretty solid, but when the Nameless Order (the Chinese army defending the Wall) are first introduced, the very brightly colored armors looked like something out of a Koei strategy game. But again, it's Zhang Yimou. He loves to play around with colors in his films, and in this one the backgrounds were pretty stark, leaving only costuming as an area to use colors symbolically. The first attack of the creatures (tao tei) was fun to watch. Commander Lin's Crane Corps was very wuxia.

The second half of the film, though, was a predictable and not so exciting playing out of a typical Hollywood cliche. I don't want to spoil things, but we've seen this plot a hundred times, and they didn't really bring anything new to it. It's by the numbers.

I did appreciate that at the ending, they used a more traditional Chinese style ending than a traditional American style ending.

So, not the best film I've ever seen, but not too bad, either. A more creative plot would have really helped this film, along with a bit deeper character interaction (William and Lin spar about Western individualism and Eastern communalism, General Shao and Strategist Wang spar a little over how to deal with the tao tei, William, Tovar and Ballard disagree about how to get what they want and escape, but it's all fairly tangential to defeating the tao tei).

Poison in Chanbara

While in general I'm fine with "save or die" poison in RPGs both as a GM and as a player*, my recent foray into reading Mentzer Basic cover to cover (many monster venoms in Basic have a time delay before death, but potions/spells seem to be immediate), some reading up around the web about actual effects of poison (wracking pains, vomiting/diarrhea, muscle spasms, impaired cognition, nerve/tissue damage), and Alexis's musings on poison back in November got me to revise how I handle poisons in Chanbara.

I'm not 100% sure this is the best way ever to handle poisons in game, or anything like that. But it is a bit different, allows for a few different types of effects of different poisons, and tries to remain simple enough. It does require a bit of reference-checking for me still, but I think if I played with these poison rules long enough, I'd probably get them down in my head without needing to look them up.

I have divided poisons into four types (the names are not really relevant to their real world meanings, necessarily). Each does some damage over time, but also has another "side effect" such as sleep, paralysis, sensory deprivation, pain/vomiting/diarrhea/other hindrances, mental stupor, and yes, instant death. It may require a bit of extra book-keeping, but it also allows GMs to ignore any of the types they don't like. If you don't want Vizzini to just keel over a few seconds after drinking iocaine-laced wine, don't use the deadly poisons in your game.

No save-or-die poisons? Inconceivable!

In addition to having four broad types of poison, each one is listed with a strong/normal/weak dosage, which affects the duration. For most, a stronger dose has a longer duration, but for the deadly poison it's reversed (it kills you quicker). Characters take damage based on the strength of the dose over the duration of the effect. This is one area I like in concept, but I'm not sure if it works well in practice. The stronger doses of non-deadly poison deal more damage, but less frequently. Weak doses could be unbalanced as written due to the fact that the damage is concentrated into a short time, even though the dice being rolled for damage are smaller. Some people also may not like the fact that "sleep poison" doesn't only put the victim to sleep, it also deals damage to them. Well, nothing's perfect about this game, and Marilyn Monroe and plenty of other people have died from taking such poisons.

And to quit rambling on about it before anyone besides me really knows what I'm talking about, here are the snippets of rules from the draft. First are the players' side prices and types of poison commonly available (at least for criminals or Shinobi) from the equipment lists (mon is the standard silver coin of the realm, equal to a normal D&D gold piece).

The actual game effects are kept "behind the screen" so GMs can choose to add a bit of uncertainty with respect to duration/damage dealt when PCs use poison on monsters if they choose. Or, if they want they can reveal the mechanics behind the poison to the players. Those mechanics are (as they currently stand) found in the Combat Rules section of the text:

Finally, to help you gauge how useful or not it might be to rob a monster or NPC of their senses, paralyze them, etc. I present rules from the Combat Rules section that describe a variety of conditions or "status effects" to borrow the video game nomenclature.

A few notes: AC is of course armor class, TD is Tactical Defense - like AC, but for special maneuvers like disarm/trip/wrestle etc. (borrowed idea from Pathfinder). TN is target number.

*Save or die is simple. There's not really much you need to worry about remembering during an often messy, chaotic battle, or typical rambunctious RPG session. You get bitten by a giant spider and test your luck. Done.

The Ultimate OSR Franken-Setting?

One of my well-read posts from last September (currently over 1200 page views) but with no reaction (0 comments or plusses, other than the one I gave it for promoting it on G+) was a book review of Ernie Cline's second novel, Armada. In it, I (like most of the reviewers of the book I'd read before picking it up) invariably compared it to his debut novel, Ready Player One. RPO is the superior book, and since I'm on winter break and the dissertation is complete, a few weeks ago I re-read RPO. I likely could have gotten through it in a day if I didn't have family obligations. As it was, it took me two. It's a quick read the second time through.

If you're unfamiliar with it, the book takes place in the near dystopian future, where peak oil and global warming have pretty much ruined everything. But the world's first true persistent VR, the OASIS, has become for most people their means of escape from the hell Earth has become. It has its own economy, and game credits translate into real money. People work there, aside from just playing. Pretty much every internet service is delivered through it. And from the way it's described, it's amaze-balls awesome.

The original designer/coder was a geek roughly the same age as me (born in '72, I was born in '73) and loved to throw in all the stuff he could referencing pop culture from the late 70's to the early 2000's, but mostly from the 80's. Within the VR there are countless planets. Some allow high technology. Some allow magic. Some allow both. As with any MMO, there are PvP zones and safe zones.

There is a zone with planets based on Star Wars, another on Star Trek, one on Firefly, etc. Every D&D module has been coded in there as a 3D environment you can explore, most on the planet Gygax. There are giant Japanese robot worlds and cowboy worlds and Middle Earth, Zork, Hyrule, etc. Whatever cartoons you grew up watching in the 80's? There's probably a world in there for it.

Acererak challenges you to Joust (by J. Delgado)

Basically, it's the Mother of All Kitchen Sink Settings.

So I'm imagining (some day, when time is no hindrance, which will probably never come) setting a game there. Players would start with Classic D&D (or Labyrinth Lord or whatever) on a D&D style planet, but once they've got the funds or means to teleport or travel through space, other worlds open up, and each world has the potential to add new options for the players' character races, classes, equipment, spells, etc. based on other OSR rule sets.

So visit the world of Tombstone, and Go Fer Yer Gun or Boot Hill cowboy characters, sixguns, etc. become available. Visit Gamma Terra, and mutant characters and recovered high tech "artifacts" enter the game. After visiting planet LV-426 (if you survive the face huggers), colonial marines and pulse rifles enter the game. Visit Smurf Village and um...try to catch them and turn them into gold like Gargamel? Or something.

Basically, I'd just be giving myself cover to throw in any sort of interesting pop culture references I feel like. And I'd be forcing myself to actually read through and implement stuff from lots of these OSR games I've collected on my hard drive, but haven't bothered to look at other than a cursory glance or two. 

Cartography for Chanbara

I've got a hand-made map of the various provinces of my "Jade Islands" setting for Chanbara that I've been using in my play test games. I've been meaning to get it converted to a digital map for over a year now. Last night, I finally got that done.

If you've got Flying Swordsmen, the Jade Islands, or Yu Archipelago as the Zhongyang Dalu residents call it, is in the upper right hand corner. Here's the zoomed in version I finally completed last night. The coast lines, mountains and rivers are all hand drawn. Everything else I added to it using GIMP.

I've also been using this completely hand drawn map in my games. It's of Enzan Province in the middle of Tatsuo Island (18 on the map above). I'm including both maps in the game, with a brief overview of the nation as a whole, a few notes about the Spirit Realm, and extra details about Enzan, which has been fleshed out a bit from my two play test games.

It's not a very detailed rundown of the setting, but that's intentional. I think I've mentioned before that the bits of the "Known World" from Mentzer's Expert Set (Threshold and Karameikos) and X1 The Isle of Dread (a paragraph or two about each nation on the map) was enough to run years worth of games in that setting.