Brian's WotG Campaign
Contents |
Story Pages
Player Characters
NPCs, Places, and Items
Other Things
House Rules
- The following change is made with respect to how weapon stats are handled: Your "Speed" rating applies to both initiative and defense, while your "Strike" applies only to your attack roll, and not defense. The purpose of this is to make the strike stat less "uber" and to make a greater variety of weapon choices mechanically feasible. This change applies to both regular weapons and God Weapons. It does not, however, apply to kung-fu styles: if a kung-fu technique adds to "strike" it adds to both attack and defense; while if a kung-fu technique adds to "speed" it adds only to initiative.
- The "obtain" cost for God Weapons may not be paid at character creation. The reason for this rule is balance, and that God Weapons should have an interesting story behind their acquisition and use, and should not be seen as merely "starting equipment".
- The "obtain" cost for rank 1 God Weapons may never be paid. The reason for this is that I believe giving players extended access to weapons like "Heaven's crystal" and "Tiger Soul" is unbalancing in a way that is detrimental to the story.
New/Trial House Rules (9/30/08):
- Any character may pay 5 any chi to negate the effects of an entangle or stun critical effect.
Reason: A lucky stun can be an anti-climactic and abrupt battle-ending effect, and is boring for the stunned player. Paying 5 chi is in line with other bad conditions, and is still a sufficiently harsh penalty as to make stunning worth it.
- Kung-fu creation: You only get the benefit from the highest point flaw included on each kung-fu technique. In order to avoid nerfing kung-fu that players already have, this will not be retroactive to any Kung-Fu you had during our last (9/23/08) session.
Reason: To be brief, I wanted to maintain at least rough parity between the core book and created kung-fu so that players would not be overly penalized for using one or the other and rough party balance would be maintained. After examining both and giving it a lot of thought, I believe that the default creation rules often result in techniques more than 50% more powerful than those in the book, especially at higher levels. The biggest contributor to this is the flaw system which allows you to double the power of a technique by piling on flaws and restrictions. Most book techniques don't have a flaw or have at most 1, while the creation system invites you to pile them on for maximum benefit. On top of this, many of the flaws are not that meaningful. In order to maintain at least rough parity I have come up with this solution.
Resources
Rules Explanations, Examples, and Tips
- Bartkusa's Wiki - Deeds, Kung Fu Marvels, and Secret Arts explanations
- Great Game 101 - Example and accompanying explanation of a Great Game session
- Combat Tips - A forum topic giving some basic combat tips. Some tips regarding the primacy of Strike may not be true with our house rules.
- Great Game Cheat Sheet (pdf) - A cheat sheet by Zack for actions in the Great Game.
Additional Material
- Revised Kung Fu PDF (Official) - Uncommon and Rare Core styles updated to compliance with the Companion system by Eos
- MRB Common Styles Revisited (Fan) - Common Core styles updated to compliance with the Companion system by fans
The updates to martial arts above generally improve them, at least at the low levels. They are not errata so adoption of these revisions is optional.
- Downloads - There's a link for downloading the character sheets here.
Names
- Random Name Table - A 1d100 table for Chinese names with their meanings.
- NameDB - Name and meaning database for many cultures.
- Rachel's Mandarin Chinese Names - Names, meanings, and characters. Also includes information for pronunciation and naming ships.
- Chinese Restaurant Generator Generates random names for a Chinese Restaurant, but it can probably be used for naming towns and gangs and such.
- Chinese-English Dictionary -Decent dictionary for translation, with characters and pronunciation.
Pictures
Kongming.net hosts a number of picture galleries of characters from Koei's games centered around the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese History that can provide good images for characters or NPCs.
Some of the best galleries to mine are:
The Dynasty Warriors 3 and Tactics galleries are also of a reasonable quality, as are the Sanguo Qunying 3 and Kessen 1 and 2 galleries. The Kessen galleries contain more women than Dynasty Warrios and tend to use more fantastical outfits and weapons.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms galleries, unlike the others above, are only face portraits rather than full body pictures. Some faces are armored but many are not, which makes those galleries great for non-combat characters and even normal villagers. The best galleries are 8, 9, 10, and 11.
There are pictures of items at:
