Monday, April 8, 2019

Flying Swordsmen Revisited?

There's been some talk of Flying Swordsmen over on The Piazza forums. I've read some threads there before, but never signed up to post there until just recently.

On the Oriental Adventures boards, there's sporadic discussion of Dragon Fist, and as would be expected, someone usually mentions Flying Swordsmen since the original Dragon Fist files are getting harder and harder to find these days.*

Someone else was mentioning that there should be a discussion of my campaign world of Zhongyang Dalu. There's not much there, mostly hints and suggestions. I've got a lot more information I created for the setting (which, in its first incarnation, predated Flying Swordsmen and was originally intended for a 3E OA campaign that never got off the ground). What I included in FS was intended to be like the fragments of inspiration about the Known World (Mystara) setting in X1 Isle of Dread.

I didn't include any setting information in Chanbara, but when I run it, the games take place in the Zhongyang Dalu setting (the Jade Islands, northeast corner of the map).

I'd been planning to put out a Chanbara campaign gazetteer using the setting info I came up with for that. Maybe I should do for both.

Of course, the problem is that FS is 100% fantasy China inspiration, while Chanbara is 100% fantasy Japan inspired. My original Zhongyang Dalu setting was much more of a melting pot/grab bag type setting, trying to do what standard D&D/Tolkienish settings do to Europe for OA settings.

Maybe I should dust THAT off? In my mind, a group of fantastic/fictional cultures and nations with decidedly East Asian FEEL makes for better grounds for a fantasy campaign than barely disguised analogs for the actual historical region, just with its mythology/legendary mixed in.




*I should find a good way to promote Chanbara over there, in a way that doesn't seem like the shameless money grab it is. Then again, by the looks of it, there are only a handful of regular posters on the OA section, and some of them may have already bought it!

2 comments:

  1. Cool map- could you give us a rough distance between two known points so I can eyeball a scale?

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  2. New post addressing your question.

    https://lordgwydion.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-big-is-zhongyang-dalu.html

    ReplyDelete