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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Epametheus" data-source="post: 1501158" data-attributes="member: 719">Nice work, Psi.  Sadly, d20 combat ends far too swiftly to emulate the prolonged duels in R3K.Xiahou Dun definately needs a really high Con and the Die Hard feat; 'tis not a normal man, who can take an arrow to the eye and keep on going..I'd give the really superior weapons, like Green Dragon and the Swords of Heaven and Light, some sort of nonmagical enhancement bonus just to reflect how much better they were from the regular weapons.Also, a little clarification on The Twelve Kingdoms -- the 12 Kingdoms (there're are really 13, but the 13th is a neutral ground that belongs to God) are in some sort of pocket dimension located between China and Japan; Japanese people that are washed away in great storms sometimes wake up on the eastern shore of the 12; I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese are sometimes washed away to the western shore, but we never see much of the western kingdoms; the show is almost entirely set in the eastern kingdoms of En, Kei, and Kou.  Regardless, it's a land where the people know that God is real, and that the Emperors rule with His mandate.  An Emperor that fails the divine mandate dies with his kirin, while those that maintain the mandate are immortal (though at the time that the show starts, only two of the emperors are older than 400 years old; most are under a century).  The kirin, Chinese unicorns that can assume human form and bind demons to their will, are an interesting lot -- only 12 live at any time, and are compassion incarnate.  This is partly due to them just being inherently nice (they're definitely Lawful Good), and partly due to enforced pacifism -- coming across a place where blood was shed a week ago makes a kirin slightly nauseous; actually getting splattered with blood (including the kirin's!) will normally put a kirin out of comission for hours.  However, the kirin are almost blindly obediant to the emperor that each one serves, and will carry out orders that they find repugnant (such as executions and assassinations) if the emperor commands.  Kirin attached to such emperors are often struck down by a wasting illness, and an emperor has only a year to live at most if his kirin dies.  A kirin afflicted with the disease can only survive if the emperor renounces his or her throne and dies in the kirin's place.The reign of many emperors ends in disaster, leaving one to wonder just what the heck is up with the divine selection process.  A kingdom that is missing emperor, kirin, or both suffers from famine, plague, and an incredibly high spawn rate of youkai; the monster population in a kingdom outright explodes during the periods of turmoil; it might be around as much as 1 monster for every 10 humans or so.  The first task of a newly appointed Emperor is often to settle the monster attacks and reduce their population to a managable level.And I've rambled long enough <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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