I stole the setting for my BESM campaign (a year old this month) from the comic book The Path (written by Ron Marz, penciled by Bart Sears) published by defunct CrossGen Comics. The comic takes place in the world of Han-Jinn in the feudal Japanese-esque island nation of Nayado. The comic revolves around a monk named Obo-san and his companions a female samurai named Aiko, and Wulf a foreign sailor (basically a Viking) swept onto Nayado’s shores by a storm. Obo-san has a lot on his plate: his Emperor starts the comic insane and quickly becomes a demon animated corpse, his country keeps getting invaded by Shinacea (think ancient China), his brother was killed by the gods, both his Emperor and the Emperor of Shinacea want the “weapon of heaven” left behind by the god that killed his brother, and Obo-san has come to the conclusion that the only way to save Nayado is to overthrow its Emperor. If you can find the two trade paperbacks containing this story I highly recommend picking them up.I made a number of changes to the setting. I didn’t much care for the name Todosi (Obo-san’s dead brother) so I renamed him Todosai (much better sounding IMHO). I also didn’t really care for Shinacea, so I renamed that country Li Lung. Not wanting to have to come up with a detailed account of what happened after last events depicted in the comic (Obo-san using the weapon of heaven to defeat Shinacea’s second invasion of Nayado, and then deciding to overthrow his Emperor) I decided to set my campaign about 120 years after the events of the comic. The gist of the post-comic events were Obo-san succeeds at overthrowing the Emperor, which results in further civil war as the various clans try to become the next Emperor. Obo-san decides to end the civil war by placing the late Emperor’s only surviving son on the thrown (I’m pretty sure there is a passing reference in the comics indicating the Emperor has no heirs, but it isn’t like I hadn’t already changed some details). He succeeds at doing this, but the political power of the restored Emperor is sharply curtailed, with the real power resting in the hands of Obo-san as Nayado’s first Shogun. To deal with the weapon of heaven, Obo-san breaks it up into pieces and hides them throughout Nayado. Next I married off all the main characters and chronicled 120 years worth of descendants to give me an idea of the current political climate in Nayado. Finally I decided to turn Obo-san into a Buddha like figure. I did end up downplaying and nearly completely eliminating Obo-san’s quest to show that the gods of Nayado were fakes.
With all this decided I created a time line detailing the major events of Nayado stretching from the founding of the first imperial dynasty, through the events of the comic, and beyond until the start of the campaign. I also started thinking about how to filter this setting to make it an anime style campaign, and not a fantasy campaign using an oriental setting. The fact I was planning on using BESM for my game system meant a lot of this work was already done for me. But in order to get my players in the right frame-of-mind I started thinking about what anime had inspired me to want to run this campaign, and what type of characters were found in them. InuYasha and Fushigi Yūgi proved to be the two main influences so I informed my players that demons, half-demons, and dimension traveling high school children were all viable character types. My players didn’t disappoint. Paul decided to go with a wolf hengeyōkai who was attached to one of the major samurai families (actually the family descended from Wulf). Matt chose to go with the dimension traveling student route, and I decided to make him a descendant of Obo-san. Dan (who joined the campaign a bit latter on) opted to play a samurai from one of the clans that Paul’s and Matt’s characters had recently helped (given his character’s skills with stealth it would seem he’s got a bit of ninja in him as well). Rounding out the party are two NPCs. One is a
cursed exorcist named Daigyo who pretty much owes his existence to the character of Miroku from InuYasha. The other NPC is a kitsune named Tomomeko who is pretty much a copy of a NPC kitsune in a BESM campaign Matt and I played in run by our friend Tim (who was last mentioned in this blog for all the anime he showed me).At its heart this campaign is about the characters traveling around Nayado reassembling the weapon of heaven, but a fair number of side quests have popped up. Originally this campaign should have lasted seven sessions: five sessions to get each of the five pieces of the weapon of heaven, one send-the-party-back-to-the-real-world session to break up the collecting the pieces sessions, and a final confrontation with the villain session. When Dan joined the campaign the party had already obtained 3 pieces of the weapon of heaven, and had the back-in-the-real-world session. Because I didn’t want him to go through the trouble of making a new character for just three sessions, and because I was having way more fun running the campaign then I’d had GMing in awhile, I slowed down the pace and started introducing the side quests.
A few other updates. . .
You may be wondering just what is up with all these updates? It’s actually due to a unique situation at work. I’ve been working evening shifts since Monday, and since Monday we’ve been having a hardware problem, that while it doesn’t really impact our customers, it does leave me with long periods of time during my shift were I really cannot do anything other then watch the operators work. So I’ve been filling that time with writing posts for this blog. They are getting the hardware issues sorted out, so expect this blog to return to its regular irregular status soon (if not tomorrow then Friday).
I’ve watched another five episodes of Hunter × Hunter. That just means another 52 to go plus three OVA series with another 30 episodes between them. I'm just saying it may be awhile before I have too much to say about this one yet. I’ve been introduced to the four main protagonists Gon, Leorio, Kurapika, and Killua. I’ve also been introduced to a rather interesting character named Hisoka who seems like he’ll be a recurring antagonist.
Finally I leave you with this random picture that just amuses me to no end. . .
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