I should state that Into the Badlands is a major influence in the game but not the only one. I'm also borrowing some inspiration from RIFTS, from periods in history (the Ming dynasty, Japan in the late Sengoku period), and from the Immortal General Yi Soon-Shin.
So far, the PCs are just low-ranking members of their clan, brought together on an imperial command mission to undertake expeditions into the "Land of Forests and Mountains" (mutant-riddled wilderness) to seek out technology of the ancients.
In the last adventure, they came to realize that while most of the Imperial bureaucracy wants these things just as trinkets and entertainments, there's one guy who wants them to try to get new technology: the empire is bordered on the north by very primitive barbarians, on the south by less-primitive barbarians, but across the eastern ocean there's a sea-faring people with much more advanced technology. These foreigners seem like friendly traders but their ships have an awful lot of guns for 'friendly traders', and while all the clans are fighting among each other, and the imperial house languishes in petty intrigue and decadence, only a tiny number of dedicated people are trying to restore the empire and save it from the foreign dangers.
Anyways, today they'll be heading up north. I don't know if I'll be doing regular updates of this game, but I thought you'd like this glimpse.
RPGPundit
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Call me intrigued. What ruleset are you using and how is it post-apocalyptic ?
ReplyDeleteI'm using a houseruled game. It's set hundreds or maybe thousands of years after an apocalypse, and though the culture looks 'asian', that's actually because the people who rebuilt civilization in this part of the world were originally kung-fu nerds. Thus, the culture that emerged is a weird mix of what a wuxia/samurai-movie fanatic imagined ancient 'asia' to be like plus a bunch of other stuff that evolved later on.
DeleteThere are pocket-remnants of high technology left lying around in hidden ruins, especially in the Land of Forests and Mountains, and terrible mutants that were undoubtedly the results of whatever the apocalypse was.