sengoku introduction

This page was originally designed as a resource for my Hero System based role playing game - Sengoku. It was mainly intended as a resource for players, but I thought it might be of interest to other gamers out there. Anyway, the original Sengoku game came to an end about halfway through the planned storyline when I moved from the US to Denmark. It has just started all over again, with a new cast of characters - maybe this time I'll get to finish it!

Sengoku is set in medieval japan - the game started in the winter of 1542. Although I have used a historical setting and a number of historical personalities have made cameo appearances, the game is actually a fantasy mixture derived mainly from three influences. The first and most obvious has been Japanese chambara movies such as "The Seven Samurai", "Sword of Doom" and so on, with their rapid-fire sword fights, honor-bound protagonists and swaggering samurai. Secondly, HK wuxia or "wire-fu" movies such as "Dragon Inn", "Chinese Ghost Story", "Wing Chun" or "Ashes of Time", with their wizards, evil cults, dashing martial artists and swordsmen leaping small (and not so small) buildings in a single bound. My third source has been all the secondary material derived from this mother lode - comics series such as Stan Sakai's excellent "Usagi Yojimbo" or Goseki Koijima and Kazuo Koike's "Lone Wolf and Cub", anime movies such as "The Legend of Jubei " (also called "Ninja Scroll") or "The Hakkenden" and books such as Jessica Amanda Salmonsen's "Tomoe Gozen" series.

If you are unfamiliar with this material, use these links to dash about and see what you've been missing.

So what's here? There's information in Hero gaming format on medieval Japan - characters, weapons, armour and so on. I have put up my house rules, including a section of new rules for martial arts which are particularly suited to building superheroic martial arts characters. There's a bunch of adventures, which string together to make an epic campaign ranging over Japan, Korea and China. This is still ongoing, so new adventures will be posted as they are completed. I've included some of the maps I've used for countries, as well as some for castles, temples, villages and houses. Perhaps most interestingly, there's a fairly substantial chunk of fiction written about the characters, which provides a view of the adventures from the player's point of view. This is also an ongoing procedure. I've matched this with a sort of "post-game history" of how the adventures unfolded, showing the same adventures from the GM's point of view, and filling in a few details to help make the fiction coherent. Finally, should anyone be tempted, there's a section on running these adventures from a GM's point of view.

This is getting to be quite a large site, and I'm always updating it, so I've added a list of what's new.

Feel free to browse - if you have any comments or ideas, you can email me.

And finally the legal stuff - the use of "Hero System", or "Hero games" is purely descriptive and in no way is intended to infringe on any copyrights pertaining to these items. Likewise "Sengoku: Chanbara Roleplaying in Feudal Japan" and the Sengoku kanji are trademarks of Gold Rush Games. The name Sengoku is simply derived from Japanese history and has no connection (except perhaps mutual admiration) with Gold Rush Games.

Copyright for most of the original material belongs to me (like it matters), while fairly substantial chunks of it were written by the individual players - especially the indefatigable David Kuijt.

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