Masque of the Jade Dragon?

[Jonathan Winters]

Rucht Lilavivat Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 6:52 pm Post subject:

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Quote:
I, personally, believe that Jade Dragon was never defined. It was probably proposed out of desperation to create a new product for the Ravenloft line.


No, this is not the case.
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Can you elaborate on this?
I am very curious.

Thank you!

Patrick

[Rucht Lilavivat]

Masque of the Jade Dragon was intended to be a stand alone system that would have tangential ties to the Masque of the Red Death. It was intended to be a game that you could play on your own, or play as a supplement to MotRD.

The Jade Horror would have been a mysterious force similar to the Red Death, and we would have left questions to whether it was a separate entity from the Red Death entirely, or just another aspect of it.

Matt Barrett was coming up with the class system when the project was canned. I can tell you that the class system was wildly different from the MotRD system. The magic system would have been different as well.

I think that Jade Horror had potential. When I first heard about the idea, I thought it sounded off-base. Were Ravenloft fans lining up to get a setting set in Asia? But then I started looking at all of the great horror movies that come from the East. Ringu, The Eye, Jun-On... Not to mention great video games like the Fatal Frame series or even the Tenchu series.

That's where I saw some great potential. To make a really creeped-out setting where people aren't skeptical about the supernatural, they accept it as a possiblity, and play with conceits that weren't the same old stuff that we normally see.

Anyhow that's my take on it. I would have said more earlier, but I've been swamped with work.

Later all!

[Jonathan Winters]

Thank you Rucht!

(What I meant by the way, was that I was wondering if you could not talk about it because of a contract clause.)

I does sound very interesting.

Is there any chance you can recycle any of those ideas into what you are working on now? (I know I do it all the time!)

And when can you tell us what it is?

Thanks!

Patrick

[midnightcat]

that sounds great. I wished it had come out. it would aslos help create horror aspects for some of the Islands in Ravenloft that used Asian themes.

[HuManBing]

It is a pity that this never came out. I am trying to put together a late-Qing-dynasty style realm for Ravenloft, and it would have fit in even better if it were on Gothic Earth.

The premise is that a great empire lies in stasis, wracked with natural and manmade disasters while foreign occupiers make inroads from the ports.

The entire empire is ruled over by a dynasty that has begun to manifest dark traits and has begun feeding off its own people. At the same time, the foreign occupiers bring the promise of change - but at what cost, none can say.

Opium addiction is rampant and treachery is rife. Several classes of the Qing dynasty roughly correlate to the cleric, wizard, and paladin. As you might expect, the monk class makes a strong appearance in the TaiPing rebellion. However, all the "Chinese" style classes depend on an attribute, which I'll call "Yuan fen" - a term that roughly means "destiny" (and also has "karma" implications).

It used to be that the higher one's yuan fen, the higher one's station in life. The strict hierarchy of the social order, as espoused in public by Confucianism and enshrined in private by Daoism, preserved cohesion and made the society more fluent.

The arrival of the foreigners changed all that. With their strange religions, morals, and social norms, they lured away individuals who had peacefully abided as serfs and peasants, or even as lords and nobility. Now the social order is suffering a disruption that leads to unrest, uprisings, and other macrocosmic ills.

In such a setting, the PCs would live and work in a country that is struggling against a monolithic and uncaring Imperial order on one hand, and also struggling for survival against the cruel and avaricious foreigners who will stop at nothing to assert their colonial imprint on the land.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Matt Barrett was coming up with the class system when the project was canned. I can tell you that the class system was wildly different from the MotRD system. The magic system would have been different as well.

Argh! I've been unmasked!

I confess, I was working on MotJH, and I will also agree that the class and magic systems were very, very, very different from MotRD. I tried to pay attention to the feedback from fans, and I agreed with many of their criticisms of Red Death 3E. I tried very hard to avoid those problems and make Jade Horror a different setting all its own.

And then it was cancelled. So much for my debut into the world of gaming. Next time it will be different!

[DeepShadow of FoS]

that sounds great. I wished it had come out. it would aslos help create horror aspects for some of the Islands in Ravenloft that used Asian themes.

Yeah, I had great hopes for this myself. Perhaps someday, because you know Ravenloft is coming back again. The setting is gonna have more incarnations than Jason and Freddy combined!

[ScS of the Fraternity]

I confess, I was working on MotJH, and I will also agree that the class and magic systems were very, very, very different from MotRD. I tried to pay attention to the feedback from fans, and I agreed with many of their criticisms of Red Death 3E. I tried very hard to avoid those problems and make Jade Horror a different setting all its own.

Werry Interestink,

You wouldn't happen to have some of your old notes would you?
I'm sure that MotRD fans would love to see an alternate system - even if it is in an unoffical capacity.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

I do, but for the moment, most of them are not mine to present to fans, no matter how much I may want to. They are still bound by my contract with White Wolf, with the exception of bits that I cut from the submission before sending it in. Some of those bits I kept have been earmarked for upcoming publications I'm staking out.

But there's more where they came from, and they were far from finished anyway. I'm still very busy, but I still hope to get some submissions into QtR and the USS.

[Rucht Lilavivat]

It is a pity that this never came out. I am trying to put together a late-Qing-dynasty style realm for Ravenloft, and it would have fit in even better if it were on Gothic Earth.

The premise is that a great empire lies in stasis, wracked with natural and manmade disasters while foreign occupiers make inroads from the ports.

[snip]

In such a setting, the PCs would live and work in a country that is struggling against a monolithic and uncaring Imperial order on one hand, and also struggling for survival against the cruel and avaricious foreigners who will stop at nothing to assert their colonial imprint on the land.

What I tried to do in my part of Masque of the Jade Horror was really try to get across that Asia was a big place, with alot of different cultures. There are certain cultural elements that run through almost all of the Asian cultures, but each Asian nation is wildly different.

For example, the Japanese tend to be fairly reserved. Things are understated. This is not the case for the Cantonese, who are very loud, boisterous and somewhat obnoxious.

The Chinese tend to be pretty timely people and on time for most matters. This is not the case for, say, Thai people who sort of wander in around the appointed hour.

These are large generalizations, of course, but you get the idea.

If I were going to run such a campaign, HuManBing, I would try to really capture the specific national identity you were going for, so that the flavor and the culture really stands out. Otherwise, you'll end up with something a bit vague and nebulous.

[Dion of the Fraternity]

I agree with Rucht. As an Asian we here across the Pacific are diverse, even within a given cultural grouping.

Personally, Masque of the Jade Dragon would have been a most welcome addition to my Ravenloft collection. I have a question, though, Rucht: would this Masque campaign had been Earth-based or in another Oriental-like world?

[DeepShadow of FoS]

It was set on Gothic Earth, make no doubt about it. There was room to adapt, of course, but putting it on another world would have been a lot more than simple adaptation, especially when we were putting in specific Gothic Asia NPC's.

[HuManBing]

At the time frame I was looking at, the PCs would stay within China and with a bit of travel from one city to another, they'd get enough variety to show that it's a very large place.

At a time when warlords are rising and an empire is falling, there's also a wonderful capacity for finding ancient magical artifacts with subtle powers beyond a few pluses and minuses. Having travelled around China from Kunming to Harbin, I have a fair few ideas of my own for cultural and historical input.

Not so much on the other Asian states, though... I do agree there's an oversimplification of Asian cultures, and Oriental Adventures does nothing to counteract this.

[tec-goblin]

Aaaah, it's so a shame that WW doesn't let us see the results of this work. I guess we will see a WoD asian sourcebook soon

Anyway, just to add something to the d20 modern for MotRD argument, I urge you to check my stats (mine, not any strange super hero's ones, just that of an ordinary person) in http://recursive-cacophony.net/tec-gobl ... Stats.aspx

I urge you to do it with classic d20, particularly without using NPC classes .

[DeepShadow of FoS]

This has come up again on the Wizards boards, and for the sake of that discussion I'm bumping it to the top.