Asian setting.

Hi guys. I've been playing a little Jade Empire and I'm interested in a bit of asian-styled fantasy.

Could anyone recommend me to anything in particular? D20 or otherwise? I'd really like a system that emulates different martial styles well.

You know.. My Storm Dragon will defeat your Rising Pheonix.

Anyone know anything?

You can always try Oriental Adventures. Its 3.0 but its had updates. Also the Book of Nine Swords: Tome of Battle is oriental-ish. There is Blood and Fists is from RPGObjects, but I have yet to read it and one of these days Dragonfist will be out.

Martial Arts Mayhem works for high level modern martial arts. As previously mentioned, it sounds like Dragonfist might be more what you want. If you want to go non-d20 Check out Feng Shui from Atlas Games.

If you want action along the lines of the old kung fu movies, definitely check out Feng Shui, The Hong Kong Action Movie RPG. There's also "Legend of the Five Rings" by AEG, which is a fun system. AEG's setting for L5R was also adapted to D20, in the form of "Oriental Adventures".

I can't recommend Steampunk Musha enough. It might be a little much with steampunk fantasy, but it's got a great oriental feel.

It runs on Iron Gauntlets, which I don't actually own, so I can't vouch for the system it relies on. I got it more for the fluff.

I think it would be easy to translate to both True20 or Savage Worlds if you're looking to lighten up rules a bit, although True20 isn't all THAT light.

More information can be found from Politially Incorrect Games links in my sig. (note that I am not affiliated with PIG)

I recommend Legends of Samurai by RPGobjects (d20), or Land of the Crane for True20. Note that I doubt that Dragonfist will ever be released.

Turanil said:

Note that I doubt that Dragonfist will ever be released.

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It is frustrating.

I am angry with myself for deleting the old Dragonfist files from my computer and I've been beating myself up ever since. Especially since I never thought WotC would have removed it from their servers as well. I brightened when I heard it was being updated and released, oh well.

Wooooooo! Jade Empire in the hizzzzzouse!

Until BioWare opts to make a p&p RPG from Jade , I'd suggest one of two or three solutions:

- Take a setting that works for you, be it Rokugan or Oriental Adventures or even a setting from a non-d20 source (GURPS has some great setting material) like, what, Legend of the Five Rings, maybe? I'm thinking less of playing these games than using these settings, although of course you might buy it for the setting and end up loving it and wanting to play it out of the box.
- Use some combination of Blood & Fists and Blood & Vigilance to approximate a good mix of "I'm a martial artist" martial artistry and "I'm a sorcerer-monk" martial artistry.
- Use Grim Tales with a high starting level for PCs, and also let people swap out feats for other abilities that improve their CR -- the ability to fly, for example, or fireball as a spell-like ability.
- Use Mutants & Masterminds 2.0 rules with some heavy flavor changes. If you were trying to fake Jade Empire, for example, Dire Flame style is just blast, Thousand Cuts is just Strike (possibly with the autofire extra), and Horse Demon Transformation is an alternate form-type power that combines growth with a linked fire blast extra'd to be an aura. (Or just Shapechange, which is pretty much exactly that, now that I think about it.)

The question of M&M versus Grim Tales versus Blood &... is simply a matter of what rules system is right for you -- which system your players know well already, so the learning curve is easy; which system gets you the level of magic and flashiness you want; and which system encourages your players to have the right level of swashbucklery for your campaign.

I think the best Martial Arts ever published for any d20 product are in Pan-Asian Collective for the SPYCRAFT Shadowforce Archer setting. I had no use for Shadowforce Archer, but this particular book had amazingly cinematic, easy to integrate well-developed martial arts feats and rules that were clearly well-researched from real world sources. I never bought any other books in Shadowforce Archer line, but this is a fairly unknown gem of a d20 rpg book.

You would need Spycraft to use the feats as written, but the unarmed combat rules in Spycraft are also of great use in creating truly useful and cinematic martial arts. Also, you could adapt the feats in Pan-Asian Collective to have different prerequisites too.

Feng Shui was mentioned below, and that is a great game, but for d20 specifically there was a cross-over d20/Feng Shui adventure, Burning Shaolin, that had great Wuxia d20 rules fixes in it.

If you just want something that will give you crazy kung-fu action of the "my kung-fu is superior" style with little or no work then Feng Shui is probably the way to go.
Legend of the Five Rings can also work out of the box. Their setting, Rokugan, is very interesting though a bit restrictive and inconsistent for my tastes (during one twenty year "in world" period they killed off half of the starting population in three distinct calamities and still have 90% of the starting population left).

If you want to stay with something d20 based then Mutants and Masterminds (2nd ed), Blood and Fist (d20 Modern), Blood and Vigilance (d20 Modern), or Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords (D&D) could all work. I've never looked at Martial Arts Mayhem but I've heard some good things.

I understand that Savage Worlds also has some solid rules for things like kung-fu showdowns. That would probably also work well.