Today was a good day. During my breaks between classes, I rewrote some sections of Chanbara, and I think really improved what I had.
I mentioned in the last post that I was cutting out theoretical blather (that can and should go here on the blog) and replacing it with more concrete tools that should make Chanbara easier to run.
I'm not always trying to reinvent the wheel here. If subsystems from Classic D&D work, I'll copy and slightly modify them for Chanbara. But one thing that is very different, and vital to get a distinctly Japanese (Confucian) feel to the game is the Allegiance system.
This replaces alignment, and gives your PC some ties to the game world. It also has an effect like sword & sorcery carousing rules. To get XP for gold, you need to turn it over to one of your lieges. I like it, because it dispenses with bean counting 'honor' systems like in the original OA but should serve the purpose of making behavior have consequences. My new work today gives some solid guidelines for that, I hope.
So I'm more confident now that Chanbara will be worth people's money. All the delays...and they have been numerous...have given me the time to get this right. Or at least pretty dang good, if not exactly right. So for those of you following the blog and my work on this, thank you for your patience. I hope to amply reward you with a kickass game.
Looking forward to it!
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteI know that you have been working on Chanbara for a bit, but I was wondering do you plan to ever make Flying Swordsmen 5E compatible? Or, perhaps a short conversion page to import just the Martial Art section in to 5E.
These rules would probably work best with the 5e basic rules since it only uses the 4 classic classes and make it human centric. The classes would not change it would be just porting the martial arts per level over.
My quick thoughts were to dump the Stunts and solely use the Martial Arts. The exception being each AC maneuvers would start at 12 OR your dex bonus whichever was higher and increase one point each time you advanced it to a maximum 20.
Good luck on Chanbara and I hope you return to Flying Swordsmen one day.