My Life As A Gamer: Yes, Your Martial Arts Game Works Better As A Braunstein

The Pundit talks about Righteous Blood Ruthless Blades: Wuxia Roleplaying RPG.

You can find it at Amazon in Kindle and Hardcover here, and in PDF at DriveThruRPG here.

If you need the backcover text:

Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades is a roleplaying game of dark adventure and heroic thrills inspired primarily by the wuxia stories of Gu Long. Players assume the roles of eccentric heroes who solve mysteries, avenge misdeeds, uphold justice, and demonstrate profound mastery of the martial arts. Character creation is designed to produce fleshed-out, potent individuals who can follow several paths, including those of the physician, beggar, assassin, thief, soldier, bandit, and more. These characters inhabit a unique martial world, or Jianghu, set in a romanticized ancient China. The towns, temples, and inns the characters can visit, and the sects and factions with whom they interact, will bring their own character to the game and provide a host of opportunities – and threats.

The game is based on a simple ten-sided dice pool mechanic, loosely modeled on the one found in Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate, and play is designed to be gritty, suspenseful, and fast, so the focus remains on solving mysteries and roleplaying your character. When combat does arise, it is consequential and swift, and often resolved in a single role of the dice. This rulebook includes a sample martial world and a starting adventure, as well as guidelines for games masters looking to run wuxia games and create their own unique Jianghu, rife with martial experts, sects, and mysterious locations.

I guarantee that you would greatly improve the quality of play if this was done as a Nested Braunstein.

The Big Scale would be the whole of the land. Patrons would be sovereigns, generals, cult or sect leaders, or other major figures in such tales that dominate domains and often command significant followings.

The presumed level of significance in the text for a player-character--enough to not be a nobody, but not yet enough to be Someone That Matters--are the parties that get caught up in the manueverings of the Patrons. Their interactions, often on a smaller scope and scale, are the second-order Braunsteins that nest themselves within the top-layer game.

While I doubt that the game's rules deal much in mass battles (or similar large-scale actions), martial heroes leading armies is hardly out of line for this form of fiction and thus for this game.

On a side note, know this: any such game is also a useful framework for making Fist of the North Star as a viable RPG.

Go ahead, check this game out. See what you make of it. Much thanks to the Pundit for getting the word out.