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Tips on Planning an asian themed/ Oriental Adventures campaign
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5166168" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I finished up a 10-year long Japanese/Chinese themed campaign in 2008.</p><p></p><p>The plot in that game was a bit convoluted, but ultimately revolved around the issue of karma vs freedom.</p><p></p><p>One of the PCs was the son of a middle-class merchant family who had been adopted into a samurai house that his family was financing. He also fell in love with a dragon in human form who was hiding on earth because she was disobeying her family's orders (I can't remember the details now, but it concerned a dispute between Sea Lord and Storm Lord family members. I also tied this into elements of TSR modules like OA3 and OA7, which involve various spirits and their machinations - I had all this connected to disputes between dragon dynasties). In the end he ended up trying to reach an agreement with her family (I think by blackmailing them) so she could be free from their control and the two could marry.</p><p></p><p>One of the PCs was a fox spirit, and part-way through the game the player decided (with my agreement as GM) that he was in fact an animal lord who'd been banished from heaven for some sort of impropriety. So parts of the game involved conflicts in the courts of the animal lords, and also the PCs protecting their fox companion against constables of hell who were trying to enforce the terms of the fox-spirit's banishment (which he was breaching by living as a human and gaining levels/doing non-foxish stuff). This was partly inspired by a bunch of 1990s Hong Kong films, including Green Snake.</p><p></p><p>One of the PCs was a yamabushi. He entered into a sort of communion with a "dead" warrior god who was trapped in the void (ie off the wheel of karma) endlessly fighting an elder evil that the gods had banished from the world at the beginning of time, in order to help maintain its banishment. The last couple of years of the campaign focused on the PCs finding a way to return this god back onto the wheel of karma while trying to ensure that the elder evil was not released. (I drew on ideas from the WoTC module Bastion of Broken Souls for some of this.)</p><p></p><p>One of the PCs was a weaponsmith and warrior. His plot was pretty lowkey for most of the game, but he ended up being the founder of a dynasty that played a crucial role in keeping the elder evil trapped even when the dead god was freed from his imprisonment.</p><p> </p><p>One of the PCs was a monk of an esoteric school. He was able to see the past, and travel into dreams. He helped the other PCs with knowledge of the spirit realms, the heavenly realms, etc. There were also tensions between his Buddhist ideals and the Cthulhuesque elder evils that played a prominent role in the game, because the idea that reality is an illusion comes very close to some of the ideas of the Cthulhuesque cultists, who also think that reality is an illusion (this was inspired in part by the Dr Druid limited series by Warren Ellis from the mid-90s, and also my own experience teaching philosophy of Buddhism). The PCs would discover texts written by the cultists in which they attacked the esoteric Buddhists as still enslaved by the world, and defended their own voidal entities as having achieved "super-enlightenment".</p><p></p><p>I also converted the original Freeport modules for use in the game (pirates become wako, priests of the god of knowledge become esoteric monks, etc). This worked OK, and gave the samurai PC a town that he was able to take over and turn into his own military base.</p><p></p><p>I also had ninjas who were spider cultists who turned out to be linked indirectly to the Cthulhuesque entities. This provided a bridge between the more worldly, samurai parts of the game and the more other-planar, mystical parts of the game. Another connection was when the samurai's daimyo had a monastic advisor who turned out to be a cultist.</p><p></p><p>Sorry that the above is a handful of rambling snippets from a long campaign. But that's some of the ideas I used, where I thought the distinctive cultural tropes of an Oriental Adventures game - family obligations, karmic obligations, relationships to the spirits and the gods, the relationship between illusion, reality and enlightenment - really helped bring out the thematic issues we ended up exploring in that game.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5166168, member: 42582"] I finished up a 10-year long Japanese/Chinese themed campaign in 2008. The plot in that game was a bit convoluted, but ultimately revolved around the issue of karma vs freedom. One of the PCs was the son of a middle-class merchant family who had been adopted into a samurai house that his family was financing. He also fell in love with a dragon in human form who was hiding on earth because she was disobeying her family's orders (I can't remember the details now, but it concerned a dispute between Sea Lord and Storm Lord family members. I also tied this into elements of TSR modules like OA3 and OA7, which involve various spirits and their machinations - I had all this connected to disputes between dragon dynasties). In the end he ended up trying to reach an agreement with her family (I think by blackmailing them) so she could be free from their control and the two could marry. One of the PCs was a fox spirit, and part-way through the game the player decided (with my agreement as GM) that he was in fact an animal lord who'd been banished from heaven for some sort of impropriety. So parts of the game involved conflicts in the courts of the animal lords, and also the PCs protecting their fox companion against constables of hell who were trying to enforce the terms of the fox-spirit's banishment (which he was breaching by living as a human and gaining levels/doing non-foxish stuff). This was partly inspired by a bunch of 1990s Hong Kong films, including Green Snake. One of the PCs was a yamabushi. He entered into a sort of communion with a "dead" warrior god who was trapped in the void (ie off the wheel of karma) endlessly fighting an elder evil that the gods had banished from the world at the beginning of time, in order to help maintain its banishment. The last couple of years of the campaign focused on the PCs finding a way to return this god back onto the wheel of karma while trying to ensure that the elder evil was not released. (I drew on ideas from the WoTC module Bastion of Broken Souls for some of this.) One of the PCs was a weaponsmith and warrior. His plot was pretty lowkey for most of the game, but he ended up being the founder of a dynasty that played a crucial role in keeping the elder evil trapped even when the dead god was freed from his imprisonment. One of the PCs was a monk of an esoteric school. He was able to see the past, and travel into dreams. He helped the other PCs with knowledge of the spirit realms, the heavenly realms, etc. There were also tensions between his Buddhist ideals and the Cthulhuesque elder evils that played a prominent role in the game, because the idea that reality is an illusion comes very close to some of the ideas of the Cthulhuesque cultists, who also think that reality is an illusion (this was inspired in part by the Dr Druid limited series by Warren Ellis from the mid-90s, and also my own experience teaching philosophy of Buddhism). The PCs would discover texts written by the cultists in which they attacked the esoteric Buddhists as still enslaved by the world, and defended their own voidal entities as having achieved "super-enlightenment". I also converted the original Freeport modules for use in the game (pirates become wako, priests of the god of knowledge become esoteric monks, etc). This worked OK, and gave the samurai PC a town that he was able to take over and turn into his own military base. I also had ninjas who were spider cultists who turned out to be linked indirectly to the Cthulhuesque entities. This provided a bridge between the more worldly, samurai parts of the game and the more other-planar, mystical parts of the game. Another connection was when the samurai's daimyo had a monastic advisor who turned out to be a cultist. Sorry that the above is a handful of rambling snippets from a long campaign. But that's some of the ideas I used, where I thought the distinctive cultural tropes of an Oriental Adventures game - family obligations, karmic obligations, relationships to the spirits and the gods, the relationship between illusion, reality and enlightenment - really helped bring out the thematic issues we ended up exploring in that game. [/QUOTE]
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