Wu Jen? What is it?

[Henrix]

"medium person"

You are not talking about size here, right?

 

[Shin Okada]

You are not talking about size here, right?

Not the size. I meen spiritualistic medium, of course

 

[Gabriel Stryffe]

You have to consider also, Gary Gygax and a lot of the other "geniuses" (yeah right) responsible for D&D OA did not do as much -though they did do a considerable amount- research as they could/should have done before the book was released. And the book was targeted at gamers who wanted more Ninjas and Martial arts in their D&D Games. So the process of determining what to call the OA wizards went like this

GARY: "Ok, we've got Ninjas, we've got some martial arts, what else do we need to put into this book?"

Genius 1: "Whatever you say Gary."
Genius 2: "Looks good to us Gary."

Gary: "Well, yeah but maybe we should have a few more classes, like figther types, theives and Barbarians."

Genius 3: "That's a great Idea Gary!"
Genius 4: "You're a game designing god Gary!"

Gary: "Yeah, right ok, well then what are we gonna call these classes? 'Bushido' roughly translates into 'way of the warrior', so let's just call the fighters Do's."

Genius 1: "Sounds good to us Gary."
Genius 3: "We'll send it off to publishing right away!"

Gary: "No, wait. What the hell am I thinking? 'Do' means 'Way' or 'Way of', so we call the fighters Bushi, I guess we'll just call the Barbarians...um...Barbarians, gotta have Samurai of Course and then I guess we'll have the wizards called...uh...I dunno, how do you say Wizard or something like wizzard in Japanese or chinese?"

Genius 4: "Whatever you like Gary."
Genius 3: "You da'man Gary!"

Gary: "I think it's Wu-Jin."

Genius 1: "How do you spell that?"

Gary: "I don't care, I was up all night with my gaming group last night, just like every other night of My life since I finished reading Lord of The Rings."

Genius 1: "Don't worry Gary, We'll take care of it."
Genius 2: "Yeah you go get some sleep."
-Gary Leaves-
Genius 3: "So how do we spell it?"
Genius 4: "Here, W-U-Space-J-E-N...there send that off, and have them come up with a few new spells but incorporate most of the old spells from the players handbook."


I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went.

 

[lukelightning]

As other's have pointed out, it would be "wuren" in modern Mandarin. Of course, I've never heard them called "wuren" but only "wu" or "wushi" (what's "wu-shrr" not "wushee"). Or "wupo" which would be more like "witch."

The wu were spirit mediums; they would contact the world of the dead and channel ghosts and gods. They generally weren't thought of a having "active" magic (casting spells to affect things), just spirit communication.

Personally I see no reason why the wu ren class should be anything other than a wizard. There is no real justification for a separate spell list and spell mechanics other than to feed people's desire for "exotic orient" ideas. It would be much simpler to call all the wu ren spells wizard spells and say that these are the spells which are common in a fantasy China (there are already far too many categories of spells: bard spells, druid spells, cleric spells, wizard/sorc spells...ad naseum).

 

[Aaron L]

Snip large amount of drivel

Wow, could you get any more offensive if you tried? This is pretty disgusting.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Gary Gygax and a lot of the other "geniuses" (yeah right) responsible for D&D OA did not do as much -though they did do a considerable amount- research as they could/should have done before the book was released. And the book was targeted at gamers

So. . . kinda like 99% of RPG books, you mean?

[...] I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went.

Perhaps you should ask certain game designers who on occasion post here? One of them might even know. . .

 

[Gabriel Stryffe]

Wow, could you get any more offensive if you tried? This is pretty disgusting.

Only if you ask nicely

 

[wuyanei]

Wu shi (wu1 shi2, or 'wuu shee'): "Of those who can see (commune with) ghosts (spirits of the ancestors), the women are called wu and the men are called shi."

However, as you can see, the right part of the character for 'shi' looks a lot like the character for 'see', which is pronounced 'jien'.

According to usual chinese pronouncation rules, you often pronounce a word as the non-meaningful part of the character. In this case, left part denotes 'wu' -- the meaning of the character -- so a chinese person who does not actually recognize this (rather uncommon) word, if forced to guess its pronouncation, would likely pronounce it as 'jien'. This is similar to an native English-speaker miss-pronouncing the french name 'Lamer (La mer)' as 'lamer' -- you guessed wrong, because in this case the normal rules do not apply.

My guess is that the designers asked a chinese friend to pronounce the word for them. The friend made a guess according to the usual character pronouncation rules, but in this special case he or she guessed wrong.

I have sent you a private e-mail with a .jpg file of the characters wu and shi, since I do not know how to post images in the forum. If you could post the images here for everyone else -- or even better, teach me how to do so myself, I would be most grateful.

Hope that helps! Bye bye!

Edit: Of course! *Slaps forehead* I forgot that I could just add it as an attachment. File added.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

Nevermind.

 

[Henry]

...So the process of determining what to call the OA wizards went like this...[snip]

I could be wrong...

You are.