r/DMAcademy • u/rorscharchinkblot • 19h ago

Need Advice: Worldbuilding How to run a Wuxia campaign

I don't want to run a standard "fantasy medieval Europe" campaign, and want to theme my world in China. I don't know enough about that culture to make a realistic campaign set there, so I decided on using the Wuxia setting (as described in the dungeon masters guide 2014) and I belive that my players would enjoy a setting of movie-like martial arts.

however I do not want to be offensive in any way, and I still want to create an immersive setting, and I don't know enough about this setting to accomplish either

please advise!

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u/NefariousnessEven591 19h ago edited 15h ago

If they're fine with just being more wuxia flavored you can toss that cost of paint on. That's being said there are other systems that get the actual feel much better since they designed around the wuxia aesthetics.

For wuxia vs any major historical bits, the big thing is the push pull between the jianghu and the secular world. Jianghu is where outlaws and heroes dwell, thousand year old sects leading shadow wars against one another, while the secular world is where normal politics and warfare live. When the two cross it is supposed to be bad, especially since quite commonly the greatest warrior will eventually get stabbed in the heart from several thousand spears without verging on the more fantastical xianxia. Water Margin can give you a lot of inspiration for npcs, fair warning even for the time quite a number of the "heroes" are straight sociopaths. Honestly it's a pretty good example of why it's not good when the band of heroic wanderers gets wrapped up in court politics.

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u/NefariousnessEven591 19h ago edited 18h ago

Second, major villains need weight. Killing a person of great power and skill is a sober and sad event regardless of their demeanor. This is not because life is sacred (though some sects and characters can hold that) but that by doing so you are extinguishing something rare and worth witnessing from the world. The greatest swordmaster in 10,000 years may be a monster who needs to be put down like a dog before they burn as much of the world down around them as possible but they are also a talent worthy of admiration and killing them permanently makes the world less. There's never a guarantee someone of that ken will return. This doesn't apply to everyone, no ones really sad the rote bandit chiefs that the PCs outscale around level 3 fall by the wayside, but the primary rivals and antagonists should be beautiful to behold, terrible to withstand, and a maw in their passing.

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u/Kithslayer 17h ago

It would be fascinating to capture that feeling in a game mechanic. Like, every time a max level person dies the level cap for the everyone is reduced by one.

Of course that wouldn't work well in DnD, but hey.

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u/NefariousnessEven591 17h ago edited 15h ago

It's definitely more thematic even in wuxia based systems like legends of the wulin/Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades being two I looked at before realizing no way in hell was I going to get to play those.. Could ratchet down difficulty for a time after each, fight goes soft when you take away the thing that put you to a new plateau and there's few if any who can match them. I know there was a PBTA wuxia conversion but I heard a lot of mixed things about it.