Still Alive!

Art of Wuxia is still alive. My progress on the game slowed significantly this past year for several professional and personal reasons but things are going well and I wanted to post an update on where things are. I’ve gotten to participate in an ongoing Art of Wuxia game as a player and the insights have been invaluable. Below are listed some of the significant hurdles of the past year of game development and what direction I’ve taken on them.

NPC Opponents: “tough” NPCs have been completely revamped. They are no longer built as player characters. Instead, a range of simplified stats and numbers of spells and kung fu techniques has been defined to greatly speed up creation of just what the GM needs to play these NPCs. In addition, that extra timesavings allows the GM to create memorable personalities and presentation of their NPCs.

The world map: there were significant problems with some map symbols that weren’t working out well. I think I’ve found some new symbols that should make the map even better. I should be able to finish it soon.

GM Guidance: Some of the book is being reorganized into a GM guidance chapter. The wuxia genre is close enough to standard fantasy that many GMs will be able to run successful campaigns right away. There are some differences though and I’m providing all the hard-learned lessons and tools I can provide to help GMs make their games really fun and feel like good wuxia material.

Adventure Scenarios: I’ve got six scenarios that I’ve been running at gaming conventions. They are all quite fun and showcase different styles of wuxia stories. I have outlines for another six. I thought long and hard about how I run published adventures in all my years of gaming and have determined that the best way I can present these adventures to other gaming groups is to write them up as one-shots. This will give GMs something they can grab, run as is or easily slot into their own game. I can’t write

adventures that capture all of the nuanced player character interactions with each other and the shared world that the players and GM create together, but I can provide some action packed plots that allow gaming groups to play them the way they want. With minimal art and layout needs, I should be able to provide several of these to help jumpstart campaigns close to publication of the game.

Finishing the Game: talk of DWD Studios doing a second edition of their BareBones Fantasy game really threw design decisions of my own game for a loop. Here we were, almost ready for large-scale public playtest and the game it was based on was about to be changed. The bottom line is, I let this interfere with progress on Art of Wuxia. A positive outcome of this is that it made me go back over every assumption of the game to-date. And you know what? This game is fun as is. We are moving forward as is. If great things come out of a second edition of the d00Lite game system, I’ll consider them for Art of Wuxia but until then our game kung fu must continue.

Gaming Conventions in 2019: not going to happen. I need the time to finish up the game and get it ready for large scale playtest. I’m sorry about that. I love running games at cons but I need to apply all my focus to finishing the game.