Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5199844" data-attributes="member: 42582">I ran a long campaign (11 years) from 1st to 27th level Rolemaster set in a fantasy East Asia. For setting elements I used a mixture of Kara-Tur, Bushido and my own knowledge of Asian history and Buddhist philosophy.Some of the issues that I wanted to come out in the game included (i) the relationship between mortals, spirits and gods, (ii) reality and illusion, (iii) the role of karma, and (iv) questions of freedom versus obligation more generally. These issues obviously interrelate in various ways.An East Asian setting isn't the only way to deal with this issues, but it has some obvious elements that help put the players in the right mood: lots of spirits and spirit courts; heavenly judges who oversee reincarnation; pacifist monks who are expert martial artists; family loyalties and politics; daimyo and samurai; etc.From fairly early on in the campaign, the PC party had solidified around: two samurai from a fallen family trying to reestablish their family and personal credibility; a former animal lord banished from heaven (fox shapechanger); the son of a merchant family sent to serve with the two samurai in order to raise his station, who was more interested in (i) mastering the arts of Taoist sword fighting and (ii) winning the love of a celestial dragon; and a pair of Buddhist monks, one Pure Land and the other more esoteric, trying to stop incursions of demons and similar "things that should not be" and also trying to transcend the dictates of karma, in the first case out of a desire to relieve others' suffering and in the second case out of a desire to achieve enlightenment.If you have PCs whose them and flavour is integrated with those elements of your world that are intended to deliver your desired feel, then I think you're well on the way to getting that feel. Conversely, I think it's hard to get the feel if it's not being expressed via the PCs - because the PCs are (at least in my experience) 90% or more of the screen time.</blockquote>

Verification