Seaward Play Update: Fun in Foreign Lands

 The players have grown aware that Baron Samedhi's plans are many and wide-spread, so they sent thier highest level characters in their spelljammer to Yashima (Japanland) where they docked at an island just for spelljammers and took a boat to Norunga, the Foreign Trade Port allowed by the Shogun of Yashima.

Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of Seaward, the other characters fought a week of bloody battles with the Bandit Lord they call Farquad eventually breaking the last remnant of Whitehill's army and last agents of Samedhi in the Bandit Realms. This opened overland trade between the Kingdom of Seaward and the High County of Banath for the first time ever. The players also found the Bandit's Brother, a powerful intelligent sword with a sage's knowledge of warfare. It had been the actual leader of the bandits!

  In Norunga the party established ties with local adventurers (read: their Oriental Adventures PCs met their Seaward are PCs), established trade between Yashima and Seaward (their cover), went on a very clandestine adventure for a local member of the Sea Folk nobility, and made initial contact with a 'good' clan of ninja. They learned that an admiral of Liung Diguo (Chinaland) was forming a great fleet ostensibly to conquer Goryeo (Korealand) but would actually attack Yashima and, with the help of armies of bandits led by Lady Snow, try to conquer the island and hand it to Samedhi.

  This session the party planned to negotiate with the Red Mountain ninjas to help provide them information about Lady Snow (half sister of Samedhi) and her bandit armies and perhaps interfere. The discussion was interrupted by an attack of other ninja. The two members of the party were a monk and a fighter that knows kung-fu (foreigners must be unarmed in the Foreign Quarter) so they triumphed quickly. They learned that the other ninja, the despicable Black Chrysanthemum Clan, were now backed by/led by someone calling herself 'Sister of the Oni King'. The PCs pieced together clues and realized that was Lady Snow. The Red Mountain ninja joined the alliance against Samedhi.

  Back at their rented house the party received a letter requesting a meeting. They agreed and soon a merchant from Qader (Arabialand) arrived with his retinue of bodyguards, servants, a seer, a sorceress, and a translator genie. After a meal (rought by the merchant, named Fazeel) Fazeel explained he was on a mission for his patron and lord, Prince Ali of Arrabess. There were three claimants to the empty throne of the Caliph - Ali, another prince named Bari, and a man who had quickly risen in prestige over the last decade, not of noble birth but with many willing to declare him Caliph, a man who called himself al-Samadi. There was only one was to be certain you became Caliph - present the Granite Blade, an enchanted scimitar of great power that was the ancient symbol of the Caliph. But it had been missing for centuries. Prince Ali had asked Fazeel to find it.

  Fazeel soon realized that for some reason magic could not find it so he had hired the cleverest sorceress in Qader and she had tracked down a powerful Seer and the two women had asked different questions, resulting in two visions.

  The first was to come to Norunga on this day of this year and speak to whomsoever was in the only red house.

  The second was to ask them "Where is Rupert?".

As a DM watching the players' reaction to this question [groans of horror and inevitability, mainly, with many a head slumped with a hand over the eyes] was epic.

   The party conferred among themselves and realized Samedhi was trying to seize the Caliphate at the same time he was angling to take over Yashima. Speaking with Fazeel they surmised he was also working on Rushk (Russialand). Concerned about these possibilities they told Fazeel that Skull Mountain cannot be scried into and that Rupert is a being of incredible power that "guards" parts of the mountain. According to the legends inside the mountain Rupert wields a weapon called the Granite Sword.

  ...and then the monk in the party realized what was bugging him. The Sorceress was using magic to 'broadcast' the meeting somewhere! He warned the others the sorceress was a spy.

  Cue the ninjas. It was a full-on brawl between the party (aided by Fazeel) against the sorceress, the seer, and a pack of ninja. Hans and Franz, the twin barbarian henchmen, were on a tear and the monk (Akira, Nick's character) was in fine form so the fight didn't last long. And they were glad they had poison antidote magic!

  After it was over Jennifer's character, Fiona, reluctantly used the Hoary Head of Hogarth to interrogate the dead sorceress. She had indeed been working for Samedhi and Samedhi himself had been listening in, so he now knows where to find the sword. 

  The party struck up a deal with Fazeel that the party will try to get the sword. In return Fazeel will slowly  and carefully inform others in Qader about the true nature of al-Samadi. Fazeel left until the morning and the PCs/Players started talking.

  They wondered why Samedhi was making so many plays for power all at once in so many areas. The logistics of organizing and controlling them all must be staggering. And why some nations and not others? Sure, Yashima was vast and wealthy, as was the Caliphate, but tiny, backwater Seaward? 

  About then Nick cracked a joke about 'while we're here we should look for a Skull Mountain substation'. There were a few chuckles that faded to a contemplative silence. Then Jack said,

  "The Wizard of the Tower uses his control of local substations to boost his magic."

  Jennifer,

  "What if... what if there are bigger stations, or even just substations, farther away? What could you do if you controlled 10 of them?"

  So the party asked local natives if they had ever heard tales of a room made of silver metal with flashing lights and that you needed a small back card to enter?

"Of course! The Black Metal Mirror is part of the Imperial Regalia of the Emperor. All of the other regalia is in the Room of Flashing Jewels. It is sister to the one in Liung Diguo, the Yellow Throne of the Dragon Emperor lies over the silver room in that nation."

  They confirmed from Fazeel in the morning that part of being Caliph was access to the Room of Silver Walls under the palace of the Caliph. Then the party realized - in Seaward there is the Royal Island, a heavily fortified island where on the royal family and their personal guard may ever go....

  Another sage pointed out that according to legend, legends that can only be told out of earshot of the Shogun's spies, that many years before the first Shogun had snuck into the Room of Flashing Jewels and used it to ask the Lord of aAll Evil to use something called 'Skull Mountain' to destroy the skyship ferrying the Crown Prince, allowing the first Shogun to sieze power!

  Sam,

"Samedhi is trying to control these 'national' stations. Now we know that if you know what to do you can use them to communicate. And the Wizard in the Tower proves you can use them to boost magic. Maybe the only way to get to the Contraption is to control enough national stations?"

Nick,

"What if you control enough of them you don't need access in person? Maybe 6 or 7 of them IS remote access to the Contraption!"

Jack,

"If he controls enough of them, maybe he can just make himself a demon prince, Or worse."

  The PCs resolved to thwart Samedhi everywhere they could

  The next morning Fazeel used his genie-powered galley to take the party to their spelljammer (Clarence, Sam's character, stayed behind for a series of solo adventures in Yashima).

--------

One Hell of a day at the table!

DM Notes: Seaward, the Celestial Bureaucracy, Genies, and Cambions

  As I have written about extensively, clerics, religious brothers, and all 'good guy human/semi-human/demi-human/etc.' NPCs/PCs in the Seward area are essentially Medieval Catholics. I vaguely mention that druids, Oriental Adventures PCs/NPCs, my guys from Arabialand, cultists, and humanoids aren't.
  But what are they?

DM Report - Oriental Adventures and the Trip to the Perfume Islands

I have been doing a little bit of OA as part of the Seaward campaign. Initially based in Yashima (Japanland) the party consists of:
Jen: a Sohei
Jack: a Wu-jen
Alex: A Yakuza/Ninja
Sam: A Bushi
Nick: A Kensai (bamboo spirit folk)

After a series of adventures where they foiled the humiliation of daimyo, stopped the theft of a lightning fan, toppled a group of yakuza who were not protecting the peasants, prevented a ninja clan from assassinating an imperial functionary, and more they were up in level a bit and had earned a reputation as being trustworthy.

Jeffro Reacts to Oriental Adventures and I React to Jeffro. Welcome to the Internet.

 Jeffro, he of the Hugo Nominations, has been looking at the old Oriental Adventures book for 1e and has written a second blog entry about it. I am going to talk about me and then about Jeffro's article.

  As some of you may know, my oldest 4 sons (ages 13 to 19) and my wife are my primary group. About 6 months ago, just before Christmas, #4 pulled down my original copy, first printing, very worn Oriental Adventures so he could memorize that, too. Next day he was sharing the book with his brothers and they were all admiring how fun, weird, and compelling it is.
  Christmas is a busy time for us, so we were doing a ton of other things until the end of the Christmas season in February. Second weekend in February? They all made characters for OA, and the wife did, too:

Wife- Shukenja
#1- Wu-jen
#2- Yakuza
#3- Bushi
#4- Kensai (as a spirit folk of bamboo the only non-human)

  I spent a few sessions doing a Seven Samurai - they protected a remote village from bandits in return for food and shelter and ended up leveling (as designed) and getting used to the new rules. They then moved to the town of the local daimyo looking for better positions, learned of a plot by a ninja clan to trigger a war between the local daimyo and his closest neighbor. Using a variety of stratagems they got received minor positions at the local castle or got 'close enough', eliminated the low-level ninja, and stopped a surprise assault on the outer gate, giving defenders times to react and proving the real threat was a third party. The players had to use guile, contacts, and deceit as much as spells or combat to succeed.
  They loved the non-standard monsters (I created 4 more from Japanese mythology), the different yet same cultural cues, and the unusual class abilities. I explicitly had everything set in my Seaward campaign (I have been using OA in my 1e campaign since the book came out) so they hope to have future crossovers.

  #1 in particular liked the wu-jen, although he found the differences in how they use their "chance to know" very different than standard AD&D spell acquisition for mages. He also liked the 'six hours to learn all spells, regardless of level or number' fun and different - he roleplayed out his character meditating, chanting, burning incense, and bargaining with unseen spirits to get back spells. His 'spellbook' was just the required chants to ask the right spirits for the correct spells.

  #2 loved teh mix of sneak, fight, and know people of the Yakuza and his ability to use contacts to answer questions was a key element of the main adventure.
  #3 played his bushi with gusto, emphasizing his lower-class origins and his outlook on his profession as a way to get paid while drinking, fighting, and impressing farm girls.
  #4was a little down at first; all through the village saving he rolled lousy and rarely hit anything. but at the key fights in the castle he was  Can't Miss Man, cutting down tough foes by himself more than once

  A key figure, though, was my wife. While she is Irish/Polish by ancestry one of her dual majors was Japanese and she went on to study Chinese and Chinese Literature. Since we were in my Japanland, she was in her element. She enjoyed the book and the 'Asian, yet generic' information in the main rules. She most appreciated giving the entire 'inscrutable Oriental' stereotype a total miss.

So, now that our very recent trip to Asialand is covered, let me address a few points that Jeffro brings up in his second post, linked above.
  Jeffro asks,

  "...shouldn’t oriental style magic be a bit more exotic?"

  More exotic than spending hours studying abstract symbols so that you have 5 dimensional constructs stored in your mind, eager to be released, such that when you do release them you summon or create energies from beyond the walls of reality?More exotic than that?
  More importantly, while I understand he is vexed by the fact that the description of how much time it takes a wu-jen to relearn spells is a touch ambiguous he seems to miss a simple fact - either reading is radically different from standard memorization procedures. OA states specifically that spells come from spirits, rather than from mentors or libraries. Sure, if you encounter a scroll you can learn from it, but the implication is these scrolls come from spirits, first- or second-hand. And with the rigid times, rather than the fluid level-based times of the DMG, it smacks of exactly how my son played it - you don't memorize spells, they are slapped into your mind by spirits as part of a ritual where your 'scrolls' are a lot more like a sutra to be chanted, like this;

  So you meditate for a few hours, then burn incense and perform small rituals to summon the spirits, then appease them with offerings (and by confirming that you have, indeed, obeyed all the odd taboos that wu-jen must follow!), then then you fisnish with 2 hours of chanting the sutras from your "spellbook" and at the end, breathe deeply of the smoke from the last of the incense. If you obeyed your taboos and performed your chanting properly you also inhale your spells.

  Rather different than reading a book for 15 minutes per level of the spell for each spell, right?
  As a matter of fact, this would make the reading 'six hours per spell' pretty hardcore. You have to summon and appease a different spirit for each spell! Every spell in your memory is much more precious because of the time needed to recover it....

  "Wait a minute," you say, "I didn't read any of that in the OA!"
  Sure you did. I mean, it wasn't forbidden, was it? And even if it was....
  The classes and mechanics of classes in OA are pretty different and the spells, elemental bonuses, ki powers, taboos, and how spells are memorized by wu-jen are pretty different than standard!

 The Jeffro writes,

  "The bottom line here is that to get a game off the ground, I either have to do the design work involved in creating these sorts of tables myself. OR I have to use the tables from the Dungeon Masters Guide and then manually retheme the results to something feels a little more “eastern”... … the former is simply not going to happen. (With the number of functional, completed game designs on the market, why would I ever do that?! Bah!)..."

Which functional, completed game designs? It was 1985. It was this, Bushido (Which I played a lot and enjoyed, but made AD&D look like a stripped-down version of S&W) or Land of the Rising Sun which was based on Chivalry & Sorcery but much more complex and difficult to play and one reviewer stated 'just play Bushido, it is easier to learn'.
  So....
  And as for 'making all sorts of tables myself'.... Yeah. It was '85. That's what you did.
  Look, when the MMII came out with its lists of monsters by occurance my friend Sean uttered a prayer in French because he usually did that by hand so he could make custom encounter lists. My Seaward stuff includes a set of manila folders which hold my custom encounter tables for each region of the campaign area. Almost everyone I knew did that.

  That is just for the Lower Briars and calls a bunch of sub-tables, too. The first draft for this thing is on the basement closet, longhan, in fading Bic ballpoint from lunchtime in 5th grade.

  Of, since Jeffro is really looking at OA for the first time now, almost 1/3rd of a century later, when there are tons of pre-made things all over the place, sure! Get it from somewhere else! But then?

  And this leads me to the end of his post. He writes,

  "Y’all got handed a half baked book that looked good on the shelf and that’s it. It was not in the interests of the company that sold it to you to ACTUALLY SOLVE THE GAME DESIGN PROBLEMS THEY WERE PUSHING ONTO YOUR DUNGEON MASTER. That poor sod either had to be so good that he didn’t need the supplement in the first place or else he had to shell out cash for modules that would only complete the design process on an adventure-by-adventure basis."

  Sorry, Jeffro. I like you, and I like your writing, but this is simply wrong.
  "Not having pre-made encounter charts" is not a 'game design problem'. More importantly, you, yourself, name this book for what it is -a supplement. In 1985 you might have to go to a university library to get access to things like 'monsters of Japanese folklore' or 'legends of China'. Having a list of monsters and classes was a huge help to guys that didn't have access to that sort of resource. A bunch of new, unusual classes, rules for making custom martial arts, tons of new spells - that was all pure gold.

  One of the most interesting things Jeffro wrote is this,
  "[the DM] either had to be so good that he didn’t need the supplement in the first place..."
  One of the things I noticed in the first minute of picking up the D&D 3e PHB was a change in assumption about the players and DM, and I miss it. The biggest, most profound, change was the loss of the presumptions of competence, creativity, and confidence.
  Gygax and crew didn't make modules at first because they assumed that anyone running the game was not just capable of creating their own adventures, but that they would far prefer their own stuff. The same folks hesitated to publish settings because they assumed anyone who wanted to build a campaign world could and if they did so it would not just be good enough, they would prefer it.
 
  I bought OA when it came out. I never saw a module in anyone's hands. Heck, I didn't remember there had been modules until a few weeks ago. And the only time I saw Kara-Tur was on the shelf of a buddy who is a completist. By the Fall of '85 when I was at DLI I know of at least 3 OA games there: one set in Japan, one in Korea (with all new monsters and a mix of OA and PHB classes), and the third in a fun Thai/Philippines/China setting, also full of unique creatures, spells, and a class or two.
  I also really enjoyed meeting a magic-user in 1986 that was PHB with martial arts as his only weapon. He was from Lyonesse, but was orphaned and raised in a monastery for a decade until an uncle retrieved him and taught him magic. Tons of fun.

  Here's the bottom line. Jeffro has every right to be upset about anything he wants to be upset about. And it can be really hard to 'get' that OA was not meant to replace anything ever, just be stuff to add to your game and, with effort, make a more Asian Asialand. But I had never encountered the same pains Jeffro did with this book.

  Thanks for the original work, Jeffro!