"I am excited to see Tetsubō finally come to life in 2023. And equally excited that it is for Heroes & Hardships, which I have dedicated years to develop. My long term goal was to always support Heroes & Hardships with various settings, and Tetsubō is a perfect first major release for our system. I am eager for the challenge of making Tetsubō an authentic Sengoku Jidai setting with inspirations from Japanese mythology that will set it apart from any similar roleplaying game on the market today. For those interested in the core rulebook, please check out our Kickstarter page."

I began by asking Paul about kusa, a group of medieval Japanese saboteurs-cum-mischief-makers that I read about in a martial arts magazine. The kusa were a sort of precursor to ninja, but I also wanted Tetsubo to dispense with the notion of ninja as feudal-era special ops that was popularized after World War 2. And the best way to go back to the roots of the profession (if indeed it has any that we can isolate from all the modern myths) would be to ditch the name “ninja” in favour of something more historically accurate.

Paul responded: Wikipedia has kusa as another term for ninja, but unfortunately no context behind it, whether it's period-based or regional. My source for terms was the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum. It lists shinobi, ukami, kanja/rappa, onmitsu and ninja as the terms used by period (the last is listed for Taisho: ie the 20th century). Regional terms include some of those period based terms as well as suppa, ukami, dakko, kikimonoyaku, and kurohabaki. Interesting that it includes none of the Wiki ones apart from rappa and shinobi.

So in Tetsubo, kusa became the apprentice level of the kanja (not ninja) profession. I then asked Paul about how to represent defilement.

Paul: The term you need is kegare (穢). It would translate as impurity or uncleanness. When you go to a shrine and wash your hands at the little shack for that purpose, it's a ritual washing to rid you of kegare. This obsession with cleanliness (see also Japanese bath houses, and taking off your shoes when you enter a house) is somewhat relevant in the present pandemic. I've even heard it given as a reason why the Japanese never had an industrial revolution -- better hygiene meant longer lifespan than Brits meant there were not enough surplus agricultural workers, a necessity for industry.

Dave: Funnily enough, I’d previously thought of using kegare for bad joss [a rules concept in Outlaws] and immediately rejected it for the fairly daft reason that Tetsubo already has defilement defined as occurring in specific circumstances (proximity to a dead body, fluffing etiquette when addressing a kami, etc).

Paul: That's exactly what bad joss is supposed to deal with!

Dave: The mental process here is interesting because it illustrates why it’s taking me longer to edit Tetsubo now than it probably took to write it in the first place. I’ll think of a way to implement something (kuji-no-in, say) using Outlaws rules. But then I see there are a couple of other ways to do it, and whichever I choose has knock-on effects, so I enter a mental holding pattern where no decision is taken as I move on to another part of the rules. All of which is pretty stupid given that the people who want Tetsubo will mostly be Warhammer players and the people who want Outlaws really want Outlaws, not Tetsubo – so I’m agonizing over choices that might only matter to the handful of people who buy the book and play it as written.

Paul: I can't help thinking that trying to imagine the kind of people who want to play the game is a bad move. Surely you can only say to yourself: what is this game to me? And design it accordingly. In the case of Tetsubo, the answer is clearly: "not Kwaidan". So just go ahead and do interesting things that wouldn't work in Kwaidan.

If you haven't followed the Tetsubo saga, it starts here and until recently ended here. The tishatsu version: Jamie and I wrote a Japanese-flavoured supplement for the Warhammer. That's way back in the early '90s. It was never used, the rights reverted to us, and parts of it appeared in Robert Rees's fanzine Carnel.

The rest is told in the links to those two earlier posts, and during lockdown I made a start on adapting it to fit with Paul Mason's Outlaws RPG. If not for the Vulcanverse books it would be finished and on sale by now. Oh, and Jewelspider. And some bits of paid work too. Stuff got in the way, in short, but I'm hoping to get it done sometime in 2023. So, only about thirty years late.

A couple more links. This week I'm interviewed on the Awesome Lies blog about Tetsubo's past and future. My thanks to Gideon of Awesome Lies for the opportunity, and if there are any questions he missed -- well, you know where the comments are. I also enjoyed this article on putting Warhammery concepts of Chaos into a Japanese setting (despite the author's conclusion that "Tetsubo shows that slavishly copying Japanese culture and folklore into Warhammer doesn't really make for a satisfying result") though if and when Tetsubo does get an official release it won't any longer be trying to fit into the Warhammer universe.

Back in the 20th century, the grimdark fantasy tradition had its beginnings in Michael Moorcock's Von Bek novels (The Warhound and the World's Pain, etc) which surely inspired Games Workshop's Warhammer RPG. In the early '90s, Jamie and I signed with GW to write a pseudo-Japanese supplement for Warhammer, which made sense given that the Sengoku period makes the Thirty Years' War look like a tussle between two drunks outside a kebab shop. But enough of me and Jamie...

Tetsubo had been commissioned by Paul Cockburn. Unfortunately he left GW the same week we delivered the manuscript. The new people in charge of roleplaying games there didn't have much enthusiasm for an Oriental take on the game -- and possibly not for roleplaying in general, as soon after that I think GW passed the Warhammer licence on elsewhere.

So that left Tetsubo in limbo -- or rather in Yomi -- until 2018, when Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios asked to adapt it as a supplement to his Warhammer heartbreaker, Zweihänder. The good news was the renewed spark of interest drove me to dig out the Tetsubo manuscript and scan it all, most of the book never having even been saved to disk and only existing in a faded dot-matrix-printed box of papers. The bad news: after a burst of activity it sank back into the land of mists, and after a year the contract lapsed.


Daniel Fox got back in touch last month to talk about renewing the contract, but his thinking had moved on. He wanted to bring in elements of 1960s chambara movies. That wasn't in itself a problem. Jamie and I are Kurosawa fans, even though we harbour no illusions about his movies being in any way authentically Japanese. But Daniel wanted to square the circle by meshing that with a real Sengoku vibe, and he had the problem that the book as written was more of a fit with the Bakumatsu -- because, of course, GW had wanted players to be able to bring their Old World characters in.

And then there was the question of who would tackle the redesign and conversion to the new system. Daniel proposed hiring Graeme Davis, who would have been ideal, but he was too busy to take it on. Now, at this point I should probably address the notion of "cultural appropriation", whose proponents (I think; I don't actually know any) might say the game could only be done properly if it had a Japanese designer. But would "a Japanese designer" have to mean somebody born and raised in Japan? Or could it be a Japanese citizen (wherever he or she was born) with a deep knowledge of medieval Japanese culture? Or simply somebody who happens to be ethnically Japanese -- Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, who went to school down the road from me in Surrey? You might have guessed by now that I don't subscribe to the woke obsession with ethnicity, an obsession which is supposedly progressive but in fact quite the opposite; we are all human, nobody owns culture or history, and there's no reason why the world's leading authority on, say, Classical Greece shouldn't be Maori.

But those are all just distractions. The bottom line is, a year on, Jamie and I could see that Tetsubo just wasn't going to happen. At least, it will only happen if we do it ourselves.

Currently we're mulling over whether this is worth doing as a Kickstarter. We'd need to rebuild it around a different game system, of course, and our first thought was Powered By The Apocalypse, which we enjoyed for its simplicity when we played our Sagas of the Icelanders campaign, but the appeal of Tetsubo will surely be to traditional roleplayers whereas PbtA would take it in a whole other narrativist direction. So not that.

One option is to use a variant of my Tirikelu RPG, but I'm not sure that would make best use of the skills and career paths in the Tetsubo book. I intend using Tirikelu for my Abraxas RPG (a good fit, hopefully, being science fantasy) and also Tirikelu isn't GURPS; we can't just tack it onto everything. Jamie suggested using a variant of my currently-in-development Jewelspider rules, on the principle that OSR players and Warhammer fans might have at least a nodding acquaintance with Dragon Warriors.

But then we had a brainwave. Paul Mason is an Anglo-Japanese academic who has lived in Japan for over twenty-five years. He's not only an authority on Japanese culture and history, he's also an editor, author and RPG designer with his own (as yet unpublished) game Outlaws, based on the stories of Liang Shan Po. What if we used the Outlaws system for Tetsubo? Not only would the gaming world get a taste of a brilliant and authentic Eastern-influenced RPG, but we'd get an extremely erudite Japanese scholar on board to consult on the final manuscript.

We asked Paul, he said yes, and that's the plan right now -- unless somebody throws an even better suggestion into the comments below.

Paul Mason is famous in roleplaying circles as one of the uber-fans involved with Dragonlords and as the editor of the superb if infrequent imazine, in which he treated us to a stellar series of articles and reviews in his inimitably trenchant and thought-provoking style. He was also for many years one of my Tekumel players and has written Outlaws, a great but so far unpublished RPG of the heroes of Liangshan Po, which I used as the basis of my (also unpublished) Heian Japan roleplaying game, Kwaidan.

These days Paul is too busy with his academic career in Japan to do much roleplaying, but the last time he was over in Britain I asked if he wouldn’t mind me running some of his articles as guest posts, and he gave a kind of oblique permission. That is, he looked at me with an expression that was more 'are you serious?' than 'don’t you dare'.

This piece might strike you as very basic stuff if you’re a roleplayer – but hey, I’ve been roleplaying since the mid-70s and I found it useful. Remember that once you reach 10th Dan you go back to wearing a white belt. Nobody should ever think they’re anything but a novice. Take it away, Paul...


In a role-playing game the rules are details: they are the trees from which part of the wood is composed. So let’s consider a different approach to writing rules for role-playing games. Let’s try to look at the wood.

goal
The purpose of this game is to take part in a story. The story isn’t told by anyone, but is built up from the improvised contributions of all the participants. See the sample for an idea of how this works.

how to play
The game creates a story. Participants in the game all play a part in creating the story, by making contributions. The goal of the game is to make it as easy as possible for participants to act or describe their improvised contributions to the game without spoiling the sense of immersion.

participants
There are two basic types of participants in the game. Players are a little like actors. They will usually act the life of a single person: their character. The referee is more like a director. The referee describes sensory information in the story, and may occasionally act other characters in the story, as needed.

action
A participant who contributes to the game by acting does so by saying what their character is trying to do. So in the sample, Fred says: ‘I climb up the gantry to the deck above.’ If you like, when this action is speech, the participant can act the speech by actually speaking as the character. So later in the sample, when Fred says ‘Set it to stun!’ he’s actually saying what his character is saying. In some cases you might need to check which it is, but usually it will be obvious. Two or more participants can thus act the roles of their characters, conducting a conversation which forms part of the story.

Anything which is acted by a participant takes place as described, unless it is challenged by another participant (usually this is the job of the referee, but other players may also challenge if they like). A participant whose action has been challenged must prove that the character could succeed. To do this, they need to use an agreed game mechanic (such as Outlaws Light, presented in imazine #33). An example of a game mechanic is that you must roll 9 or less on two dice to hit with your phaser. Really skilled characters like Worf need an 11 or less. Other Klingons need 7 or less.

Some complex interactions, such as fights, often involve continual implied challenges, and therefore may require a lot of use of mechanics. Other actions, if they seem reasonable given the character and the story, can pass unchallenged.

description
A participant who contributes to the game by describing does so by talking about something accessible to the senses of characters in the game. This is usually the job of the referee, but players may also occasionally describe things connected with their characters. So in the sample, Sam describes what the players can see once they have climbed the gantry, and what they can feel.

Descriptions, like actions, can be challenged. They shouldn’t be contradicted outright, but senses can be mistaken! A player who describes a scene is speaking only for their character, and other players, or the referee, may perceive things differently. Note that the referee is privileged in description: because they speak for ‘everybody’ a player who challenges a referee’s description is simply describing what their own character perceives, and not what anyone else does.

Obviously, not everything needs to be described, and referees should beware of trying to act events in the story in the guise of description! For example, if Sam in the sample goes on to say ‘When you walk on to the transporter pad, there is an explosion’ this is wrong, because the players haven’t yet said that they are acting by walking on to the transporter pad. Remember, you’re not telling a story by crafting it authorially, you’re creating one by inhabiting it.

contributing
There are no fixed rules governing how and when you can contribute to a story, but there are some obvious guidelines that should be followed. The most important is: take your cues from the story. If you act something your character is doing tomorrow, then everyone else’s actions today will have to be done in flashbacks. This will be difficult, and may even cause a contradiction with what you acted about tomorrow. Challenging other player characters, or getting into conflicts with them, is fine, but blocking the story itself is generally bad form.

A typical sequence of contributions will be:

• Referee describes the situation facing the player characters, and/or uses a character to act a stimulus.
• Players respond by acting their character’s reaction. There’s no fixed order to this, but if a player feels that their character should be able to act first, they always have recourse to a challenge.
• Participants respond to the actions. This may lead to further description—the referee, or a player, may describe the result of actions.
• Out of all these contributions, a sequence of events will soon be evident. This is the story.

Even in your own mind, separate Action from Description. At first it’s tempting to think that your character could do absolutely anything, but soon you find that the limitations are what create drama. Maybe you can’t leap that chasm, maybe you’re not fast enough to outrun the fireball. Maybe the Ferengi saw you pick his pocket. Sometimes you should challenge yourself, not wait for other players to do it.

timing
Time for the characters in the story does not pass at the same rate as it does for the players. At times, it will pass very slowly, if you’re working out something that doesn’t take long, but needs to be explained in detail. At other times, it will pass very quickly, as with a long journey in which nothing much happens. As with most things in the game, time can be skipped over, subject to challenge by any of the other participants.

winning
There are no rules to cover winning. Players can decide on their own ideas of what constitutes winning. However, they may find that other players don’t agree with them. So how do you win? Well, how does a character win in a story?

ending
The game takes place in game sessions. A game session is when the participants get together to play the game. It can end at any time that is convenient for the participants. The end of a game session doesn’t mean the end of a story. The story can continue in the next session. A story only ends when everyone agrees that it’s finished, and you start a new one, or when you stop playing the game entirely!

postscript
Thanks to Dave Morris for providing comments and useful examples based on Star Trek. In writing this, I’ve been particularly inspired by all those games which have started with some vague waffle about how role-playing is like improvisational radio theatre, have followed it with a sample dialogue, without any explanation as to how and why people said what they did, and then plunged straight into tables of character generation. I’m also indebted to my own players, half of whom were complete beginners.

Who do you think these two are? I don't speak Japanese, but given that these are the covers of Blood Sword books 3 and 4, I'm going to take a guess that it might be Psyche and her brother Icon. That's Saiki and Aiken to their friends -- or indeed to their dearest enemies.

"Role Playing Game"? That wasn't me. I didn't even know the publishers had sold the rights in Japan till I received these copies.

And while we're chatting about Blood Sword (subtle segue, huh?) have you seen the Kickstarter for book 5: The Walls of Spyte? (In English, that is.) And there's an interview I did with The Story Fix giving some background to that Kickstarter; you can read that here.

We've signed the contract. After thirty years, it's finally going to happen. It --

I should really start at the beginning, shouldn't I?

Tetsubo is a Japanese role-playing game that Jamie and I wrote back in the '80s to supplement Games Workshop's Warhammer RPG.

We had a blast researching it. We've always been big fans of directors like Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, so we got to rewatch a bunch of classic movies. And we loved steeping ourselves in the folklore of medieval Japan, with whopping great books like Henri L Joly's Legend in Japanese Art.

One of the things we wanted to capture in Tetsubo is the rural folk tradition in Japanese myth. Monsters are fabulous and strange, like something out of a dream, out of the Land of Roots. For the medieval Japanese the invisible world was never far away and it was the subject of fascination as well as dread. Tetsubo tries to capture that sense of energy and danger and weirdness. It's very far from being D&D with Oriental names.


But the project was not to be. The very week we were going to send Tetsubo over to Games Workshop, our contact there, Paul Cockburn, quit the company. Nobody else was particularly keen to pursue the idea of a Japanese WFRP book, so eventually we returned the advance (that was three pints of beer apiece we had to pay for ourselves, then) and recovered our manuscript. I think I had some vague plan of converting it to Dragon Warriors. But other projects got in the way, Tetsubo went back in the attic, and there it stayed until a few months ago when we got a message from Daniel Fox, founder of Grim & Perilous Studios.

Daniel is the designer and publisher of Zweihänder, a gritty roleplaying game for settings like the Witcher, Game of Thrones, Solomon Kane, and the Black Company. In short, the entire genre of fantasy spawned by Michael Moorcock's Von Bek stories.

Daniel sent us a copy of the Zweihänder rulebook, a truly mighty tome that fully justifies the name. He'd seen the Tetsubo PDF that we used to offer for free -- not the full work, that, just the pages we had in digital form. (Well, it was the 1980s. A lot of it was written on typewriters or stored on floppy disks.)

Would we, Daniel asked, be willing to consider...?

There was no need to say more. A second lease of life for our labour of love? And as a companion book to a great modern RPG like Zweihänder? It was worth the thirty-year war -- er, I mean the thirty-year wait -- to get here. Watch for more info over the next few months, and take a look too at the official announcement on the Grim & Perilous site. There's also an interview here with Daniel Fox that answers some of the questions I hope you're eager to put to us. Obviously there's some work to be done. I've dug out the complete manuscript and have been scanning the chapters that we hadn't stored digitally. And the entire book needs to be edited and converted to the Zweihänder rules system. But within a year we hope to get this thing out into the world. All it took was a little patience.

Last time I was over at Leo Hartas's he recommended some movies I needed to catch up on. One of them was Kubo and the Two Strings and - wow. Just wow. I don't want to say anything spoilery (even the trailer gives away a little surprise that's waiting in the end credits) so I'll just urge you in the strongest possible terms to watch this asap. It packs in ten times the wit, charm, imagination and originality of the typical blockbuster SF/fantasy movie. Oh, and Blood Sword fans will realize by the end why I especially cherish the story. A real delight.

Land of Ninja? What Avalon Hill meant by that was Japan, for this was one of the then-controversial "RuneQuest Earth" historical sourcepacks of the mid-1980s that did away with the talking ducks and intelligent vegetable elves of Glorantha in an attempt to get gamers to see RQ as a - what could we call it? I know: as a generic universal roleplaying system.

Surprisingly, sourcebooks for 1930s America (Land of the Bowery Boys), 1970s England (Land of Morris Dancers) and the 19th century Raj (Land of the Thuggees) did not follow. But ninja were like hot cakes to the mid-eighties roleplaying market. Ironically, you saw them everywhere.

In the scramble to create the modern mythology of medieval Japan, game publishers weren't too bothered about the details. They just wanted to print the legend. When Jamie and I submitted Tetsubo to a roleplaying company (who shall remain nameless) we were told, "We don't want a simulation of medieval Japan right down to [sic] the level of the Japanese people themselves." In short, can we have Caucasian samurai, midriff-baring geisha, and clans of professional assassins? This thing has to sell to 15-year-old kids in Peoria, you know.

My litmus test was how a game referred to seppuku, a self-sacrificial act carried out to expunge shame or to admonish a lord. As it's not a crime, you do not "commit" seppuku, you "perform" it. A lazy designer, not taking the trouble to think their way inside the culture, invariably used the former. Will the court please refer to Exhibit B, the back cover of the Land of Sushi sourcebook, below? And I rest my case.

Now the confession: this post isn't really because I have any interest in old RQ sourcebooks. I just noticed Land of Ninja in a box in my wife's study last night (she's selling it on eBay) and it reminded me of a big announcement that's coming up on the Fabled Lands blog tomorrow. Nothing to do with Japan, RuneQuest or seppuku, but everything to do with the sneaky fellows in split-toed sandals. Easy, tiger.

The floating head goblin encountered throughout South-east Asia occurs in a much more Shinto-friendly sanitized form in Japanese folklore. No pus-dripping entrails here, no blood and childbirth, just an eerie flying head as described by Lafcadio Hearn in Kwaidan:

Gently unbarring the door, Kwairyo made his way to the garden, and proceeded with all possible caution to the grove beyond it. He heard voices talking in the grove; and he went in the direction of the voices, stealing from shadow to shadow, until he reached a good hiding-place. Then, from behind a trunk, he caught sight of the heads—all five of them—flitting about, and chatting as they flitted. They were eating worms and insects which they found on the ground or among the trees. 

Presently the head of the chieftain stopped eating and said, "Ah, that travelling priest who came tonight—how fat all his body is! When we shall have eaten him, our bellies will be well filled. I was foolish to talk to him as I did; it only set him to reciting the sutras on behalf of my soul. To go near him while he is reciting would be difficult, and we cannot touch him so long as he is praying. But as it is now nearly morning, perhaps he has gone to sleep. One of you go to the house and see what the fellow is doing."

Another head—the head of a young woman—immediately rose up and flitted to the house, lightly as a bat. After a few minutes it came back, and cried out huskily, in a tone of great alarm, "That travelling priest is not in the house. He is gone! But that is not the worst of the matter. He has taken the body of our chieftain; and I do not know where he has put it." 

At this announcement the head of the chieftain—distinctly visible in the moonlight—assumed a frightful aspect: its eyes opened monstrously; its hair stood up bristling; and its teeth gnashed. Then a cry burst from its lips; and, weeping tears of rage, it exclaimed, "Since my body has been moved, to rejoin it is not possible. Then I must die! And all through the work of that priest. Before I die I will get at that priest! I will tear him! I will devour him! And there he is behind that tree!—hiding behind that tree! See him—the fat coward!"

In the same moment the head of the chieftain, followed by the other four heads, sprang at Kwairyo. But the strong priest had already armed himself by plucking up a branch, and with that branch he struck the heads as they came, knocking them from him with tremendous blows. Four of them fled away. But the head of the chieftain, though battered again and again, desperately continued to bound at the priest, and at last caught him by the left sleeve of his robe. Kwairyo, however, as quickly gripped the head by its topknot, and repeatedly struck it. It did not release its hold; but it uttered a long moan, and thereafter ceased to struggle. It was dead. But its teeth still held the sleeve; and, for all his great strength, Kwairyo could not force open the jaws.

With the head still hanging to his sleeve he went back to the house, and there caught sight of the other four Rokuro-Kubi squatting together, with their bruised and bleeding heads reunited to their bodies. But when they perceived him at the back door all screamed, "The priest! the priest!" and fled through the other doorway out into the woods.


Notice that Hearn calls it a rokuro-kubi, rokuro being the Japanese word for a potter's wheel and kubi meaning neck. Technically (if folktales can ever be subject to technical analysis) the word rokuro-kubi ought to describe another Japanese goblin that sends out its head by night on the end of a long stretching neck, like Mister Fantastic, and the proper term for one of these things with a fully detachable head is nuke-kubi. I'm not sure that a Japanese storyteller would bother with the distinction, though. Hearn certainly didn't.

Less viscerally terrifying than the penanggalan this may certainly be, but I prefer it. Like a lot of Japanese folklore it's more dreamlike, less shlock-horrific and so far creepier. Hence it was the nuke-kubi that I used in Lords of the Rising Sun - as brilliantly illustrated here by Russ.

Want to pick up a big, sumptuous full-colour map of Akatsurai to go with the newly reissued FL Book 6: Lords of the Rising Sun? Thought so. Well, hit the link and it's yours. Mythic cartography courtesy of Russ Nicholson as usual.

While you're at it, and if that low, low price of free appeals, why not grab a copy of Tetsubo, the Oriental-themed RPG that Jamie and I wrote originally as a Warhammer supplement. We delivered our first draft the day the commissioning editor left Games Workshop, so it ended up cast into the oblivion of a Nottingham filing cabinet. (Or so I like to think. More likely it just lay on the floor under a desk for a year.) It's only a work-in-progress, and it's full of all that Dungeons and Dragons stuff like alignment, ho hum, but there's enough there to get an Akatsurai role-playing campaign going if you're so inclined.

The Oriental RPG I'm really waiting for is Paul Mason's Outlaws, based on the exploits of the Water Margin heroes. I ran my own Kwaidan variant of Outlaws at just about the time I was writing Lords of the Rising Sun, so (as usual) a lot of the ideas for the gamebook came from our role-playing sessions.

The new edition of Fabled Lands Book 6 goes on sale today. As you can see from Kevin Jenkins's cover, the action takes place in the Oriental land of Akatsurai, which has a strong flavour of Heian and Kamakura Japan with a little bit of Thai, Burmese and Chinese folklore thrown in for good measure - although, to avoid the usual archly indulgent exoticism of a Western writer looking East, I mostly avoided Japanese terms. So no ninja, samurai are "knights", and the Emperor is referred to as the Sovereign, a better translation of the role in the period I was drawing on for inspiration. (Sixteenth century explorer Will Adams thought the Japanese Emperor was more like a Pope.) I would have used the term Lord Protector instead of Shogun, too, except that might have caused confusion with the title of General Marlock in Book 1.

The blurb is a bit small to read on the image here, so to save you eye-strain:

More news about the Orb role-playing game that's in production at Megara Entertainment. Check out Megara's website, where you can pre-order the rulebook (including a limited run of signed copies) and buy maps, T-shirts, Way of the Tiger necklaces, and other Orbalicious goodies. (No, I don't get a commission.)

And if this distinctly Oriental palace (by Megara artist Lise) from the opening adventure gets your heart pumping, you're going to like the news we've got coming up in a few days.

No prizes for spotting where the image above comes from. Unfortunately, as the new paperback editions of the Fabled Lands books don't have the large format and fold-out cover flaps of the original books, this beautiful big mother got the chop. Unlike the notorious Lorna the Leprechaun, however, I cut her with a heavy heart.

I wouldn't even try to pick a favourite Russ Nicholson picture. He is so versatile that there are a least a dozen "best" images executed in completely different styles. That's one of the reasons he is the definitive Fabled Lands artist as far as Jamie and I are concerned - not only for the fresh inventiveness of his ideas and the humanity and humour in his character studies, but because he chose a different style to reflect the flavour of each region of the world of Harkuna. Man, that's an artist.

As a body of work, Russ's illustrations for Lords of the Rising Sun comprise the high point in the FL series for me, in large part because of the bold brush-stroke inking that reminds me of the work of Chic Stone. My favourite of all of the Book 6 pictures is this one showing four floors of a palace (or is it?) that has been invaded by a dragon (or is it?). You'll have to play the adventure to find out:

‘The dragon has entered the palace!’ screams a footman. The courtiers fly to and fro in panic while you marshal the best of the paladins and lead them down the long staircase. The dragon squats in the vast hall below chewing the palace’s valiant defenders in its maws. Its head alone is longer than your ship! You give the order to attack, leading the paladins down the staircase in a reckless charge. The dragon bares its fangs and spits venom. Make COMBAT and CHARISMA rolls, both at a Difficulty of 15...

A mock-up cover image just to show that this one is coming along too. At current estimates, I'd reckon on early September for The Court of Hidden Faces and sometime in October (maybe November) for Lords of the Rising Sun.

While editing the book I came across a passage that seems best to invoke Kevin Jenkins's atmospheric cover - a scene inspired, as cineastes and wuxia enthusiasts will not need to be told, by King Hu's classic A Touch of Zen:

"You are standing in the weed-choked courtyard. Pampas grass stands all around to the level of your shoulders, dampening your clothes with dew as you press forward. Clouds of midges rise like smoke into the air to swirl about in the low sunlight..."

All next week we'll be running a scenario from way back in the days of White Dwarf. I mean the days when it used to feature material for D&D, RuneQuest, Traveler and other systems - in this case Bushido, a medieval Japanese RPG that had a burst of cult popularity in the early 1980s.

My own preference is for Heian Japan, a good five or six hundred years earlier than games like Bushido are set. No samurai to speak of then. No seppuku or dai-sho. And certainly no sneaky fellers in black pyjamas spending their days practicing on tiptoe over squeaky floors. I ran a campaign set around the events of The Tales of the Heike using Paul Mason's Water Margin rules, but when it came to Bushido we probably played one or two sessions at most.

"Kwaidan" got written because Oliver Johnson and I were asked to come up with a scenario to help sell Bushido, copies of which must have been lying too long in the Games Workshop window, curling and sun bleached. We had recently seen the movie of the same name at the National Film Theatre and Oliver had bought me Royall Tyler's excellent book of Japanese folktales, so we settled down at our two typewriters with a supply of green tea on hand and bashed out the scenario in an afternoon. Essentially it's an exercise in how to cram as many classic Japanese horror-fantasy elements as possible into one adventure. Not likely to make it into "The Best of Morris & Johnson" then, and most definitely not the kind of roleplaying we were doing in those days or now, but of interest to collectors, perhaps.

I'm going to leave the Bushido stats in. I can't remember now what all those MNAs ("maximum number of actions"?) and BAPs (a type of bread roll?) were all about, but it should be pretty easy to convert to your system of choice. Or you could use Tetsubo - rather apt, that, since it too was written primarily to help sell GW/Citadel products.

Now a footnote. I queued this series of posts up a month ago, but in light of the recent appalling events in Japan I can't let the coincidence of timing pass unnoticed. So I'm going to ask everyone who plans on using the Bushido scenario, or indeed who regularly drops in and enjoys this blog, to please pay for that enjoyment. Normally we believe in giving stuff away for free. But have you played the Heart of Ice gamebook? Or read Jamie's Fabled Lands comic book? Or downloaded Tetsubo? Then I'm asking you now to reach into your pocket on behalf of the people in Japan who need our help. Here's where: the Japanese Red Cross c/o Google Crisis Response. Doing it that way gets aid directly to where it is needed. And please contribute something now, this minute, before you do anything else today.

Any excuse for a picture by Russ, you know that. This is the ghost of Akugenda from FL6: Lords of the Rising Sun:

It is a long steep climb. The sun is sinking towards the horizon as you emerge from the trees and look along the clifftop. The late afternoon light is the colour of blood.

Lord Kiyomori and his guards stand in a circle around a man who is kneeling with his hands tied behind him. The breeze whips his long loose hair around his face as he looks up at them with a scowl of almost demonic ferocity.

‘So, Akugenda,’ says Kiyomori, ‘you are unrepentant even now.’

The man called Akugenda spits on the ground. ‘Repentance, you pious hypocrite? I call upon the Thunder Spirit to hear this vow: I’ll be revenged on the pack of you!’

Kiyomori looks away in distaste. ‘Enough of this. Jiro, kill him.’

Akugenda gives a defiant shout as Jiro lifts the two-handed sword and swings it towards his neck. Slish, the blade cleaves through; thunk, the head drops to the ground. Jiro lowers his blade and reaches for a pitcher of water to clean it.

Kiyomori and his retainers turn to depart, but then a sound makes itself heard. It begins as a low groan, building rapidly to a drawn-out scream of hatred that suddenly becomes an ugly laugh. The hairs on your neck stand on end.

All eyes turn to the body. Coalescing in the air above it is a shadowy image, tinged with the dark red of clotted blood, eyes burning like the heart of a storm. Akugenda’s ghost.

The ghost leaps high into the air with a boom like lightning rebounding off a tree. Jiro steps forward to interpose himself in front of the Lord Chancellor, but the ghost dispatches him with a hellfire bolt.

You watch in horror as the smoking carcass falls to the ground at Kiyomori’s feet.

‘Time to die, chancellor,’ cackles Akugenda’s voice.

Kiyomori stares at the ghost. ‘Do your worst.’

What will you do? Run for it? Leap in front of Kiyomori? Or drive the ghost off with prayer?

This is in preparation for a special series of posts for next week, starting with an important and very serious message tomorrow. See you then.