Day Two: Feng Shui

 Every day I pick a random RPG off my list. Today it's Feng Shui!

Feng Shui is a martial-arts RPG based on Hong Kong action movies. It's also based a collectible card game called Shadowfist, with which I'm not familiar. Sites of feng shui allow travel between different time periods through the Netherworld. If you control enough of these, you can use the feng shui to rewrite reality. Various nefarious factions fight a secret war to control Hong Kong, which has the most feng shui portals. There was a good guy faction fighting to stop them, but they got almost wiped out just before the PCs joined up, so now it's up to them... 

I'm not much for combat-focussed games, but Feng Shui is so unapologetic about being an action game that I sort of like it! It really wants you to lean into clichés and have fun with them. Players get to describe elements of the world so they can use them in fight scenes, and you get penalties if you just 'attack' rather than doing something cool. To perform any action, you take the appropriate statistic, add one d6, and subtract another d6. I like this for creating a bell curve where characters are usually pretty competent. In combat, you have shots which determine how long something takes, so you can conceivably chain together multiple actions in a single round. Feng Shui also has the rule that nameless enemies in fights are automatically defeated if you achieve an appropriate success level. Without playing, it sounds like you'd get some pretty cinematic fight scenes. 

Character Creation

I really enjoyed this one! There are twenty character templates, with genre-appropriate options like the maverick cops or old martial arts masters, and some stranger ones from some of the portals and other time periods. All characters have a strong cliché hook for why they're fighting bad guys. Once you've picked your template, you allocate points to your statistics and skills, and choose Shticks (cool powers that you can use) and then you're done! It was all very easy.

I randomly rolled and got a Martial Artist. I decided that my character would be Thomas Quan, whose parents own a laundromat, so he has to do lots of odd jobs to make money to be able to afford martial arts training. When one of the jobs involved the secret war, people came looking for Thomas, and his school was destroyed. Now he blames himself and seeks revenge! He's a bit rough around the edges, and has some unusual skills he's picked up along the way. 

And check out Thomas' amazing Martial Arts skill! Pretty cool that a starting character gets to be that awesome!

Final Thoughts

Feng Shui seems pretty cool, and I'd happily play a game of it. I like how dedicated it is to its genre. I liked choosing from all the nifty kung fu powers, and I liked picking a strong motivation for my character.