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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 850982" data-attributes="member: 537">Wuxia, low magic? Har har. Did you not notice the people flying around, bouncing off lake tops, and walking on tree branches? These are powers that any high-level D&D character worth their salt will have. Also, check out _A Chinese Ghost Story_ some time. The swordsman guy in that literally uses a machine-gun magic missile spell to blast groups of undead to pieces. Or _Stormriders_ for some majorly flash-bang special effects, including what looks remarkably like an Otiluke's resilient sphere.Characters in D&D can easily be thought of as strong and fast, as a result of the trinkets they wield. Imbued magic provides a ready-made rationale for using D&D-style magic item mechanics in an ostensibly "low-magic" world. See the nemuranai chapter in Magic of Rokugan, the samurai's ancestral daisho in OA, and the levelled weapons article in Dragon 289 for details. And the fact remains that, however you slice 'n dice it, wuxia characters command a great array of powers that can only be described as magical: killing or paralyzing someone with one touch, flying through the air, throwing lightning bolts and fireballs, and healing incurable diseases with mystic herbs.D&D combat can be as cinematic as you want, or as dry and tactically oriented as you want. Where you set the "yoicks and away" slider is entirely up to you.Shamans and sorcerers who command arsenals of boom spells are staples of wuxia films. Not everything is as deliberately low-key as CTHD.Grim 'n gritty? Har har. Did you not notice the barroom brawl where Zhang Ziyi's character lays waste to a huge gang of thugs? Highly trained martial artists wading through hordes of mooks is a staple of wuxia. It's only when they meet someone whose kung fu (read: level) is equal to theirs, that they get into trouble. Which is basically just like what happens in D&D: if there's a large disparity in levels/HD between two sides, then the stronger side can be counted on to dispatch the weaker side with ease. It's when levels are nearly equal that things really get interesting.D&D at high levels _is_ wuxia, meaning fantasy that's highly fantastical, with characters who command a great array of supernatural powers. In fact, it's wuxia to such an extent that when you try to use it to emulate more low-key settings (eg most quasi-Western fantasy), that you run into problems.</blockquote>

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