The Book Arrived

 Yesterday, I received my print copy of Joseph Bloch's Swords of Wuxia for his Adventures Dark & Deep retro-clone system. I've had the PDF since I ordered it, but I've only barely skimmed through it so far. Now that I've got the physical book in hand, I intend to dive into it in detail. I really prefer printed matter over screen reading. However, I don't have time to get into it today or even over the weekend. So a review of the content will have to wait. Oh, and if you didn't know, this is Joe's attempt to re-imagine what the old OA book would have looked like if it had take inspiration from Chinese myth and cinema instead of mostly Japanese inspirations.

I will say for now, that this book is well designed. It's got that orange spine that makes it look pretty good alongside the later printings of 1E books. It's a bit darker, but all of my older books are faded to differing degrees so it doesn't look out of place. The print size is a little different, though, with Swords of Wuxia being just a tad taller than the old TSR books. The cover is a nice painting of Sun Wu Kong (the Monkey King), looking like he's about to spring into action to beat down some demon or other. The back cover is text only, with a gradated turquoise (darker at the top, lighter at the bottom) background, similar to the trade dress of the old books. 

The interior is nice and cleanly laid out, with two column text and a sans serif font (Futura like the originals, I assume), and is easy to read. The book contains a lot of tables, and most alternate between three lines unshaded, three lines shaded. At least one table contains quite a bit of information in each cell, so alternate lines are shaded. The interior illustrations are all black and white, but look pretty good. There's a big list of artists, so there are quite a range of styles, some simple line art, some more detailed, a few just silhouettes. I don't find the mix of art styles jarring, but art is always subjective. Most of it looks good, in my opinion. 

The book contains races (two types of human, two demi-humans), three completely new classes plus extensive notes and conversions for all the other classes in Adventures Dark & Deep. There are rules for combat and martial arts, for creating families, Asian-style societies and organizations, and lists of spells and equipment, of course. There are campaign guidelines including wuxing (Taoist 5 elements) elemental planes. There are also lists of magic items and monsters. All this takes us up to page 128. Beyond that, there are some very extensive random encounter tables. Finally, there are some tables for weapons vs armor and the like if you use those rules in your AD&D games, and some inspirational sources. 

I'm happy to see that a lot of the inspirational sources are not only things I've read or viewed, but also listed in Flying Swordsmen. There are a few I'm unfamiliar with, which is always nice. New things to check out! 

So that's my initial impression (unboxing) review. After I've had some time to read through it, I'll of course provide more detailed thoughts, and how I think it compares to my own ideas in Flying Swordsmen and TS&R Jade (maybe Chanbara, too!).