Enemies in Feng Shui — the action movie RPG of fast and furious combat inspired by the classic Hong Kong films of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Michelle Yeoh, and Jet Li — are split into four types: Mooks, Featured Foes, Bosses, and Uber-Bosses.

Mooks, in particular, are treated a little differently by the system. First, they’re significantly worse than any other foe in terms of statistics. And, second, they instantly get knocked out of the fight if they get hit. Don’t even bother rolling for damage.

(If you’re thinking, “Hey! That sounds like minions from D&D 4^th Edition!” you’re not wrong. They got the idea from Feng Shui.)

The goal is that you can — and should! — stuff your fight scenes full of disposable mooks to create frenetic action and allow the PCs to show off their badassitude. (Even in a baseline fight, you’ll have 3 mooks per PC, and the number only goes up from there. In fact, when you want to make an easier fight, you actually increase the number of mooks, albeit while decreasing the number of featured foes.)

Feng Shui also uses a 1d6 – 1d6 core mechanic, so for every check you’re rolling two d6’s. That means that the GM is going to be rolling a lot of dice to resolve all of their attacks. Despite all that dice rolling, though, it’s quite likely that literally none of those attacks will hit. (They are just mooks, after all.)

If you roll all of those attacks one at a time, this can be a huge drag on gameplay.

One option to avoid this is to roll fistfuls of dice! There’s an article here on the Alexandrian that dives in to a lot of different techniques you can use to make this work.

Another option is to use a mook sheet: A big sheet full of pre-rolled mook attack roles. They look like this:

The idea is that, rather than rolling dice, you can just use the values on the sheet, crossing them off for each mook attack.

Atlas Games actually provides an online tool that will let you generate new copies of these sheets.

A problem you can run into with either technique, though, is that — if the mooks all just make straight-up attacks — they can whiff a little too often. This is, of course, what lets you have so many of them in a scene, but if the players no longer feel as if the mooks are a relevant threat it can render the mooks moot.

Fortunately, the solution is a simple technique: combat boosts.

In Feng Shui, characters can perform a combat boost as a 3-shot action to help out another character. A boost can:

• Grant +1 to the recipient’s next attack.
• Grant +3 to the recipient’s Defense against the next attack (and all others in the same shot).

Instead of having the dozen mooks in your fight scene all flail ineffectually, what you should be doing is having each of them perform a combat boost.

You might have the mooks form up into small gangs: Five mooks working together can boost the attack value for one of their number to be roughly equal to a featured foe. A dozen can swarm over a hero, with eleven performing an attack boost and the twelfth packing a boss-size punch.

Alternatively, you can have the mooks group up with a featured foe or boss, either boosting their attacks to devastating levels and/or creating an almost impenetrable defense with their defensive boosts.

You’ll want to make sure to weave these boosts into your narration of the fight: Describe the mooks grabbing PCs by the arms and allowing their boss to land a crushing blow or throwing themselves in front of their boss to take a shot. You could even describe misses as the PCs being unable to get close to the big bad guy through the swirling swarm of mooks!

You want to make it clear to the players that the mooks are the problem, and that they’re going to continue to struggle against the featured foes until they clear out the riff-raff.

Fortunately, it’ll still be quite easy to do that.

They’re just mooks after all.

Feng Shui is the action movie RPG of fast and furious combat inspired by the classic Hong Kong films of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Michelle Yeoh, and Jet Li. It uses a really cool initiative system featuring a shot counter:

• Your initiative check determines your initial shot count in the sequence.
• Each action is rated by the number of “shots” it will take to resolve.
• This shot cost is subtracted from your initial shot count to determine the next shot count on which you’ll be able to act.
• When everyone’s shot count hits 0, the current sequence ends and a new sequence begins with fresh initiative checks.

I describe this mostly to provide context for the cool new toy we’re talking about today: mission critical objectives.

Most fight scenes end when everybody on the opposing team is incapacitated. You stand triumphant with bruised knuckles over their unconscious, dead, or groaning forms.

But sometimes, that’s not the point.

Sometimes you’re fighting the bad guys because they’re trying to launch their hijacked nuclear missile or open the gates to the Mongol invaders. And sometimes they’re trying to stop YOU from uploading the virus to their computer network or destroying the Crystal of All-Knowledge.

One way to stop an opposing force, of course, is the aforementioned carpet of corpses. But often these goals can be logically achieved in the middle of the fight (“Hold off those Nazis while I disable the V-2’s fuel line!”), and ideally we’d like to capture the frenetic thrill of the struggle, creating fight scenes that are more varied than just punching hit point pinatas.

The problem is that these scenarios often become anti-climactic when combined with the turn-based nature of most RPG combat systems: On the hacker’s turn they make a Computer Systems check and… that’s it. The virus is uploaded. It’s over. There are ways to work around this, but they can be extremely situational and difficult to pull off.

Fortunately, the Feng Shui initiative system makes it easy to implement a solution.

MISSION CRITICAL OBJECTIVES

Attempting mission critical objective requires a 5-shot action, often accompanied by a skill check (i.e., a Sabotage check to cut the fuel lines). If successful, then the character can achieve the mission critical objective on their next action.

While a character is attempting a mission critical objective, however, other combatants can attempt to interrupt them as a 3-shot action.

If a hero is attempting to stop a GMC from achieving a mission critical objective, they can attempt either an attack stunt or an appropriate skill check (with the foe’s skill AV as the difficult). If they succeed, the GMC fails to achieve the mission critical objective (although they can try again later). If they fail, the GMC achieves the mission critical objective.

If a GMC is attempting to top a hero from achieving a mission critical objective, the hero must make an appropriate skill check (with the foe’s skill AV or Speed as the difficulty). On a success, the hero achieves the mission critical objective. On a failure, they’ve failed (although they can try again later).

ADDITIONAL OPTIONS

Multi-Step Objectives: It can often be satisfying to have multiple mission critical objectives that have to be achieved. (For example, you might need to shut down all three etheric turbines to prevent the Martian death laser from firing.)

Tug-of-War: As a variant of a multi-step objective, each mission critical objective might exist as a kind of “toggle” that can be swapped back and forth. For example, you might need to cut the three pirate harpoon lines to free your ship and sail away. While you can attempt mission critical objectives to cut a lines, the pirates can attempt one to resecure a line you’ve cut.

Mission Critical Boost: Characters can spend 1 Fortune to grant a +3 bonus or +1d6 (their choice) to a character attempting a mission critical objective.

Non-Critical Mission Objectives: For objectives that are involved but not the ultimate goal of the confrontation, you might choose to attempt them as 3-shot actions (instead of 5-shot actions).

Just One Chance: For some mission critical objectives, you might only get one chance. If the mission critical objective is attempted and fails, it cannot be attempted again.

ENDING THE FIGHT

Achieving the mission critical objective means that victory has been attained… but there may still be a bunch of bad guys. So what happens next?

One option, of course, is to just finish the fight – i.e., keep fighting until everyone on one side has been KOed. But this can be rather unsatisfying: Victory (or defeat), after all, has already been achieved.

Mission done? Time to leave! Feng Shui conveniently includes rules for doing that! (See the Cheesing It mechanics on p. 111 of the rulebook.)

Probably the key thing to keep in mind here is the central lesson of the Art of Pacing: The question we used to frame the fight scene (“Can we achieve the mission critical objective / prevent the bad guys from achieving the mission critical objective?”) has been answered. The scene is, therefore, functionally done. And when a scene is done, it’s okay to just wrap it up, cut away, and start the next scene.

CODA: IN OTHER SYSTEMS

Although well-suited to Feng Shui, this same basic concept can be hacked into other roleplaying games. In D&D, for example, mission critical objectives can be actions that take 1 round to complete, finishing on the character’s next turn and allowing other combatants to potentially interrupt them.

Go to Part 1

FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY

Feng Shui is a game about pulse-pounding action and face-pounding fights. One of your key responsibilities as a player is to describe your character’s actions as if they were part of one of the greatest action movie fight sequences of all time. (You can do this because you have an unlimited budget and zero safety concerns.) Whether you’re performing a stunt or not, what your character does should sound awesome.

Some people can find this daunting. It can feel like a lot of pressure to have to always come up with something awesome. So here’s the first secret: If you can’t think of anything, it’s okay to go with something simple. It’s okay to just say, “Lao Zhi punches Ting-Ting in the face.”

A second (and related) secret is this: Not every single attack needs to carry the weight of the entire fight. Great action sequences are exactly that: Sequences of actions that build on each other. If you have an idea for an amazing, splashy centerpiece – great! But it’s also okay to just say something nifty and pass the baton to the next player.

Passing the baton quickly, clearly, and efficiently is almost as important as the action you actually take. If you keep the pace of the fight boiling along, you’ll often find the awesomeness of the fight seeming to grow as if of its own accord.

Respect the dice. Before the dice are rolled you don’t want to commit to a description that’s dependent on the outcome of the dice. For example, you don’t want to say, “I punch Ting-Ting so hard that one of her horns cracks in half, goes flying across the room, and gets stuck point-first in the wall.” (the attack check fails) “Okay, none of that actually happens.” There are generally two ways of respecting the dice, one basic and the other more advanced:

• Hold narration. The simpler option is to limit your action declaration to something very basic (“I try to punch Ting-Ting”), possibly no more than the mechanic or schtick you’re using (“I’m going to use Pincer and attack Ting-Ting”). Once the outcome of the action is known, you can narrate its full glory.
• Narrate to the point of success/failure. The more advanced technique is to fill both sides of the attack check with cool choreography. The trick here is to correctly identify the point at which success or failure is ultimately determined and only narrate up to that point. (“As the BMW speeds past, I leap in through the open window and try to punch Ting-Ting in the face.”) Once the action is mechanically resolved, you (or the GM) can pick up from that moment and complete the action appropriately. (“You punch Ting-Ting so hard that she flies out the far side of the car and goes rolling across the tarmac.” or “You leap through the window, but Ting-Ting raises one hand and grabs your fist in mid-air, stopping all your forward momentum. You’re now hanging halfway out of the car.”)

Extra Tip: Focus on one or two of these techniques at a time. When you get comfortable with a particular technique, add another one to your repertoire. Within just a few sessions you’ll have lots of options at your fingertips.

Add one cool detail. Start by adding just one cool detail your description. So if you’re thinking, “I want to punch Ting-Ting in the face,” you might add one detail and say, “I punch Ting-Ting in the face so hard that one of her teeth flies out.” Things to think about if you’re having trouble thinking of a cool detail include:

• Invoke your weapon (“I smash my fist into Ting-Ting’s face; as I pull my hand back we can see blood dripping from my brass knuckles”) or your schtick. If all else fails, you can just name your schtick (“I’m Strong as an Ox when I punch Ting-Ting in the face!”).
• Use the environment (“I leap up onto the railing and then even higher, pile-driving my fist into Ting-Ting’s face with all the force of gravity behind me”). This can include amazing lighting and sound design by master cinematographers and the best foley artists in the biz. (“My fist plows into Ting-Ting’s face and the boom of the impact echoes through the empty warehouse like a cannon shot.”)
• Describe hair or costuming. (“I punch Ting-Ting in the face, then step back and smooth the front of my bespoke suit from W.W. Chan and Sons.”) This can include the hair and costuming of your opponent. (“Ting-Ting’s head snaps back so quick her hair can’t keep up and her face disappears into a swirl of glistening black.”)
• Use quippy dialogue. (“Looks like you’ll have to move up that dentist’s appointment.”)
• Describe the camera move. Seemingly impossible camera moves are great because you don’t need to figure out how to actually film them. (“The camera whips around as we exchange blows, then zooms down my arm, following the arc of my fist as it plows into Ting-Ting’s face.”) Slow motion will almost always awesome something up, but is best used sparingly. X-ray shots (showing internal damage) are innately awesome, but need to be used even more sparingly.

Extra Tip: Looking at your character’s personality and schticks, you can actually prep some of these cool details before play begins. (For example, a Bodyguard has the Fast Draw schtick. You can brainstorm cool ways to describe how your character fast draws their weapon before ever sitting down at the table.) This can be particularly true for characters with Sorcery schticks, where this brainstorming also begins laying down the rules for how your particular brand of magic works.

Don’t let this become a trap, though: The best descriptions are still going to be those that arise organically and spontaneously out of the immediate circumstances. The best fight choreographers come prepared, but continue to collaborate and develop ideas.

Describe awesome misses. In The Matrix there’s a shot where Agent Smith throws a punch at Neo, misses, and his fist plows through a concrete column. Earlier a host of mook cops unleash a wall of machinegun fire at Neo and Trinity. Not a single bullet hits, but the barrage of gunfire completely annihilates the room — marble panels explode, rock goes flying through the air, Neo does a cartwheel through the rubble.

These are all examples of awesome misses: In an RPG we have a bias towards dismissing missed attacks because nothing changes mechanically, or we describe them as embarrassing failures for the attacker. But in action movies missed attacks are often just as impressive as the big blows (wreaking environmental damage), and near-misses are often highlights of the awesome martial arts ability of the person avoiding the blow.

Improvise props. As Robin D. Laws says, “If you want to hit somebody with a pair of skis, you say there’s a pair of skis there, and there is.” This is a central principle of the game: If there’s something that can make the fight a little more awesome, the camera can always pan over to reveal it. This extends to scenery, too. If you need to jump out of a third-story window, then of course there’s an awning down there to break your fall. If you need a trampoline to launch yourself up to the demon’s head and land a roundhouse kick, then of course there’s a gymnasium just on the other side of the wall.

Think about the environment where you’re fighting. What would be there? How could you use it to whup ass? If that particular object hasn’t been mentioned, you don’t need to ask the GM, “Are there any cars parked on the street?” You can just describe your character running over the top of them in order to jump up and reach the demon’s horns, yanking its head down and slamming it into the wall.

Reuse props. Once skis or a trampoline have been introduced to a fight scene (whether by you or by somebody else), look for ways to use that prop again. And again. And again. This works best if there’s a new twist to the action each time you reuse the prop.

Jackie Chan is a master of this, with many of his movies featuring a fight sequence in which a single everyday object (like a ladder or refrigerator) is constantly reinvented to attack, defend, or simply get in the way.

Tie actions together. Similarly, you can tie your current action to another action that just happened. The easiest example of this is ganging up on a single foe. (“Now that Ching has pulled the demon’s head down towards the ground, I deliver an incredible uppercut that sends it reeling backwards! It falls onto a Ferrari, crushing it flat!”) But more elaborate combos are possible, like scooping up the gun Bai Lin kicked out of the triad mook’s hands and firing it at the sorcerer Xiong Xuegang.

Off-turn collaborations. If someone is materially assisting you, that’s a Boost and needs to be mechanically accounted for. But the battlefield is a dynamic place and you shouldn’t picture the other characters all standing in freeze-frame while you’re resolving your action. You can describe yourself as switching weapons by sliding across the floor and scooping up a sword dropped by the recently deceased OR you can shout, “Bai Lai! Toss me that sword!” and then then let Bai Lai describe executing a perfect roundhouse kick that sends the sword swooping into the air so that you can snag it mid-flight. You can describe yourself running up a wall OR you can describe jumping off Bai Lai’s head to reach the balcony.

Extra Tip: Describing other characters (PCs and GMCs alike) battling in the background of your shot is another effective way of tying the action together. This background action isn’t mechanically resolved and will never inflict wounds (if it was significant it would be the focus of the shot, right?), but it once again emphasizes the fluid nature of the battlefield.

Flexible action descriptions. You have a great deal of leeway in how you choose to describe your attacks and schticks. This may be obvious with Martial Arts, but it’s equally true for Guns. Don’t forget the rules for Unconventional Attacks (Feng Shui 2, p. 110) which spell out that you can use your normal Attack Check to take advantage of the location to do straight-up damage with the same Smackdown as your default weapon. So, yes, you can shoot somebody. But you can just as easily shoot the chandelier and have it fall on them: The mechanics are identical; there’s no penalty for this.

Extra Tip: These are sometimes mistaken for stunts. Actions are only stunts if they do something more than damage the target: So slamming a chandelier into someone and causing them damage isn’t a stunt. Dropping a chandelier onto someone so that it pins them to the ground and they can’t move IS a stunt.

Elaborate your supernatural theme. This flexibility of action description extends to Sorcery and Creature Powers, too. What can be most effective for this is to develop a consistent mystical motif or set of arcane rules for your character. Maybe they inscribe spells onto slips of paper and then burn them for effect. Maybe they unlock sorcerous powers by pushing needles into specific acupuncture points on their body.

You shouldn’t feel tightly bound by these “rules.” Quite the opposite: Developing a supernatural “language” for your characters gives you a rich toolkit for improvising new material. For example, maybe you start by scribing spells on slips of paper and burning them. Then you slap one of these onto a hopping vampire to bind it in place. Then you place them around a building to ward it against evil. Then you paint the symbols directly over the acupuncture points of an ally in order to mystically aid them.

(This is in many ways like reusing props or tying actions together, just over the long term.)

If you ever need to do something completely new? Well, it’s a good thing you visited that secret Tibetan monastery in the Ancient Juncture between episodes. Or studied those ancient tomes you found in the ruins on Taiwan island. Or maybe it’s just something you learned from your master but haven’t mentioned before.

Extra Tip: Improvising awesome fight choreography is a skill. And, like any skill, it can be learned, practiced, and improved. Here’s an exercise you can use to practice away from the table: Take a really great fight film — any of the ones in the orientation list work, but also stuff like The Matrix, Rocky, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or John Wick – and narrate the action as it happens on screen, as if you were describing it to your gaming group. It may sound silly, but it will build your repertoire of action descriptions and push you to improve how you connect and transition between actions in a fight.

SPEAKING CINEMATIC LANGUAGE

In Feng Shui the characters don’t break the fourth wall. They don’t wink at the camera, get thrown into the stage lighting, read the subtitles, or anything like that. (This tends to degenerate the game into farce or parody, which isn’t what we’re aiming for.) As players, however, it is frequently effective to express things through a cinematic lens. The GM will introduce a scene by describing how the “camera” pans across it. As a player, you’ll talk about the extreme close-up on your magic cop’s Colt .45 as they jam it into the squealing face of a cyber-chimp.

When you first start doing this, it may feel like an awkward or artificial conceit. But it’s just a different way of communicating character, intention, and the narration of fictional reality. As you become more familiar with the technique, you’ll find that it naturally evokes the heightened reality and the particular types of story beats from the action mash-up genre we’re seeking to emulate.

In speaking cinematically, there are any number of techniques (close-ups, smash cuts, slow motion) that are common in films on both sides of the Pacific. Here are a few that are particular to the Hong Kong action genre that you might be less familiar with.

Inner Dialogue with Micro-Flashbacks. Instead of using voice-over or narration, Hong Kong films will often communicate the inner thoughts of their characters through a very quick sequence of flashbacks. These micro-flashbacks are usually only one or two seconds long, and often consist of footage or snippets of dialogue seen earlier in the film.

For example, if someone sees their friend get riddled with bullets, you might get four or five shots in rapid succession summarizing the entire course of their relationship. Or if someone is at their boyfriend’s bedside in the hospital, there might be a quick flash of the scene where they first met at the beginning of the film.

You can use this same technique to communicate your character’s inner thoughts to the table. Instead of saying, “Ying thinks that this is a terrible idea.” You might say, “We cut from Ying raising an eyebrow to a shot of Chunky falling down that pit in the Tomb of the Jade Emerald. And then a shot of Chunky tripping the infrared lasers at the Met. And then a shot of that time Maggie hit him in the face with a cream pie. Then Ying says, ‘Sure. Why not? What could go wrong?’”

Visual Emotions. Just as you create scenery in a fight scene to do cool kung-fu tricks, you can create scenery in interstitial scenes to express emotion — family photos, religious iconography, a flower vendor selling jasmine blossoms, the smell of a burning leaf.

As with micro-flashbacks, it’s usually best to keep these short and punchy. But if your character’s anger fills the whole scene, then it’s just fine if you keep coming back to the image of the flames in the hearth behind them roaring up and filling that end of the room in a reddish light.

Freeze Frame Emphasis. Freeze frames (usually close-ups of a character’s face or moments of group celebration) are used to emphasize emotional beats of particular importance. They are often used at the end of a film, and such scenario-enders are most likely to be invoked by the GM. But they can also be found elsewhere, usually at particularly important emotional turns or moments of transition, and you should feel empowered as a player to describe such cinematic freeze frames to highlight significant personal milestones to the rest of the table.

Ensemble pieces will sometimes feature a series of such freeze frames at the end of the film, emphasizing each character in turn. GMs may use a similar technique, framing up each freeze frame and prompting each player to fill it with their character’s current emotional state.

This technique was more popular in classic Hong Kong films and seems to have become less used in recent years, but that’s no reason not to include it in the Feng Shui mash-up.

Bullet Time. True bullet time (as opposed to just slow motion) is almost virtually exclusive to The Matrix. (Even the Matrix sequels didn’t actually use it.) But it nevertheless deserves a call out here.

Cue Music. Movies are not strictly a visual medium. The soundscape is also a vital part of the artform. You can invoke the audio of cinema at the game table just as you can camera angles and cuts. Describe the music playing in the scene to invoke your character’s emotional state, signal how important the current moment is to them, for humorous effect, or for any of the other myriad signals music can send.

(If you’re feeling ambitious and it’s appropriate for your table, you could actually select a hero track for your PC and then literally play it at key moments during the game. Over time you and the rest of the group could develop a rich variety of leitmotifs.)

A NOTE TO THE GM

If you’re planning to run Feng Shui for a new player, consider sending them the link to this essay to quickly orient them to the game. You may find a lot of the techniques described here are also useful tricks to add to your own toolkit.

The cheat sheet below is designed to be serve as a quick, at-the-table reminder of the techniques and expectations described here.

FENG SHUI – NEW PLAYER CHEAT SHEET

DEFAULT ACTIONS:

• Hit up a contact
• Attune to a feng shui site
• Pursue a melodramatic hook

CINEMATIC LANGUAGE:

• Inner dialogue with micro-flashbacks
• Visual emotions
• Freeze frame emphasis
• Bullet time
• Cue music

FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY:

Remember:

• Pass the baton
• Respect the dice

One Cool Detail:

• Invoke your weapon
• Name your schtick
• Use the environment + light/sound
• Describe hair or costuming
• Use quippy dialogue
• Describe the camera move
• Slow motion & X-ray shots

Advanced Techniques:

• Describe awesome misses
• Improvise props
• Reuse props
• Tie actions together
• Off-turn collaborations
• Flexible action descriptions
• Elaborate your supernatural theme

FURTHER READING – FENG SHUI
System Cheat Sheet: Feng Shui 2
Feng Shui: Filling the Shot
Feng Shui: Using the Shot Counter
Prep Notes: Hong Kong Task Force 88

So you want to play Feng Shui? The roleplaying game of Hong Kong action films? The game where you can:

• Get caught in the middle of a gun-fu shootout between corrupt cops and righteous Triad rascals.
• Lock eyes with the samurai who killed your sister, dew glistening on the edges of your blades.
• Travel through temporal portals to the 19^th century, fighting British oppressors seeking to corrupt Chinese civilization.
• Serve as court detectives to Empress Wu, rooting out the seditious conspirators who would destroy China’s only female regnant.
• Slide down the gleaming black side of a pyramidal arcology while locked in a furious melee with a dozen cyber-ape ninjas.

Then you’re in for a rollickin’ ride!

This article is not designed to teach you the game. Nor is it a rules reference or a setting guide (there’s a cheat sheet for that and the entire rulebook besides). We’re here to orient you into awesome. It’s kind of like a strategy guide, but only if you remember that this is a game where the only winning move is to make the game more memorable and fun for everyone at the table. It’s a little bit about what the game expects of you, and a lot about getting into the mindset of Hong Kong action flicks.

As such, it’ll be particularly useful for those who aren’t already familiar with these films. But even if you’re a long-time fan of the genre, you may still find some useful tips in here.

ORIENTATION: FILMOGRAPHY

The best way to get into the groove of Hong Kong action movies, of course, is to actually watch the films themselves (and the films they’ve inspired around the world). Feng Shui 2 includes an extensive filmography in which Robin D. Laws provides a fantastic overview of the entire medium/genre. It lets you to pick any of a dozen different sub-genres/actors/directors and dip your toes in, but it can still be easy to feel completely overwhelmed by the dozens and dozens and dozens of films it discusses.

So here’s my essential/idiosyncratic list of twelve films to watch if you want to grok the unique mash-up of genres and the language of action in Feng Shui:

• Hard Boiled (1992, John Woo)
• The Killer (1989, John Woo)
• Chinese Ghost Story (1987, Ching Siu-Tung)
• Mr. Vampire (1985, Ricky Lau)
• Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010, Tsui Hark)
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)
• Big Trouble in Little China (1986, John Carpenter)
• Kung Fu Hustle (2004, Stephen Chow)
• Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller)
• Once Upon a Time in China (1991, Tsui Hark)
• Armour of God II: Operation Condor (1991, Jackie Chan)
• Police Story 3: Supercop (1992, Stanley Tong)

If you want to narrow this list even further:

• Pick Hard Boiled OR The Killer
• Pick Chinese Ghost Story OR Mr. Vampire
• Pick Armour of God II OR Police Story 3
• Skip the Hollywood films (Mad Max: Fury Road and Big Trouble in Little China)

It’s likely you’re still looking at this list and thinking, “This is way more stuff than I want to do before my first session.” That’s no problem! That’s why we’re here, actually. But if you like the game and want to go deeper, you can start here. And if you find stuff you like, then you can use the filmography in the rulebook to continue exploring.

GETTING STARTED

Let’s start with the basics. You’ll need to have some basic understanding of the setting. This text is partially excerpted and adapted from “Getting Started with Feng Shui” on page 5 of the rulebook:

You play heroes of the Chi War, protecting humankind’s destiny in a titanic struggle across space and time. Victory depends on your gravity-defying kung fu powers, your ancient magics, your post-apocalyptic survival instincts, or your plain old-fashioned trigger finger.

Chi warriors grasp the fundamental truth of existence: the power of Earth. Certain sites that harness and intensify chi, the life force that animates man and nature, extend across the planet. Those controlling these sites benefit from the increased flow of chi, and gain great fortune in matters both mundane and mystical. Since ancient times, the Chinese have honed their knowledge of Earth magic — or geomancy — into the discipline known as feng shui.

History belongs to those who have attuned themselves to feng shui sites, forging a mystical bond harnessing their chi energy. When the Chi War ends, the victors will use their control of chi to rewrite history — past, future, and present. We will live the way the victors want us to, and we will have always done so.

Chi warriors have also learned how to access a mysterious realm known as the Netherworld. This Inner Kingdom lies between times, and by traveling through the Netherworld you can literally walk into other time periods: 690 AD (home to sinister magicians), 1850 AD (an era of imperialist oppressors), the present day (controlled by a secret conspiracy), and 2074 AD (ruled by cyborg rebels-turned-tyrants whose excesses collapsed the future). Some participants in the great struggle take their cue from this and refer to themselves as Innerwalkers.

Fortunately, the world of Feng Shui rewards heroism: You can dodge machine gun bullets, run sideways up a tree, bounce off a branch, and then clash swords with your opponent. In your best moments you might even run up the stream of oncoming machine gun bullets or cling to the bottom of a bad guy’s Maserati as it screams through the midnight streets of Hong Kong.

DEFAULT ACTIONS

If you’re playing Feng Shui and you aren’t sure what you should do next, what can you do? The default action of a game is something your character can do to trigger cool stuff when all else fails.

Hit up a contact. Possibly literally. Either approach one of your existing contacts or create a new one, as detailed in the rules tucked away on page 114 of the rulebook. This works whether you’ve gotten lost in the middle of a scenario (and just need a new lead or a little help to figure out how you can do the thing you want to do), but it’s also a great way of setting things up for your GM to hook you into new scenarios.

Attune to a feng shui site. This is the default goal of the game. If there’s nothing else that your character particularly wants to accomplish right now, you can always fall back on identifying a feng shui site and trying to attune with it. (If you don’t know where any appropriate feng shui sites might be, refer back to hitting up a contact to get a lead.)

Pursue a melodramatic hook. This is the default goal of your character (see page 22 of the rulebook). The GM will use your melodramatic hook to draw you into scenarios, but it will also often be something you can actively pursue when nothing else is currently on your plate.

Extra Tip: Look for ways to invoke your melodramatic hook in small ways throughout the game. For example, if your melodramatic hook is searching for your lost daughter then you might declare that a GMC looks just like them. Or in a quiet moment you might describe your character pulling their daughter’s photo out of their wallet. Going overboard with this will wear thin, but invoking your melodramatic hook thoughtfully will help unify the campaign into one cohesive heap of awesome.

Go to Part 2

From one point of view, the playing of a roleplaying game can be described as the organized exchange of information between players. Particularly numerical information.

GM: Give me an attack roll.
Player: 17.
GM: You hit.
Player: I do 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

The player generates a number (rolling their attack skill plus a d20 roll) and gives it to the GM. The GM performs a mathematical operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s armor class) and the result of that operation causes him to request an additional number from the player. The player generates that number (by rolling the damage for their weapon) and reports it to the GM, who once again does an operation on that number (comparing it to the orc’s remaining hit points) and determines an outcome (the orc dies).

This seems simple and intuitive. And, in this case, it largely is.

But it turns out that how we process and pass numerical information around the table can have a big impact on play. For example:

GM: The orc’s AC is 17. Give me an attack roll.
Player: I hit. 18 points of damage.
GM: The orc falls dead at your feet!

By passing a piece of information (and the associated mathematical operation) over to the player, this GM has significantly improved the efficiency of their communication. If the orc hadn’t died (or if there are other identical orcs), this efficiency compounds over time because the GM doesn’t have to keep passing that piece of information to the player.

Of course, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of a roleplaying game. There are any number of reasons why a GM might want to keep the orc’s armor class secret from the players (either as a general principle or due to specific circumstances). My point is not that these other considerations are somehow “wrong,” but rather simply that in choosing those other things the GM is sacrificing efficiency.

In many cases, however, the GM isn’t aware that this is a choice that they’re making. And often there are no reasons that might justify the inefficiency; the flow of information (and the impact it’s having on play) just isn’t something the GM is thinking about.

For a long time, this wasn’t something that I understood, either. I’d have discussions with people complaining that such-and-such a system was super complicated and a huge headache to play, and I would be confused because that didn’t match my experience with the game. It would have been easy to pat myself on the back and think, “Well, I guess I’m just smarter than they are,” but I would also have players say to me, “I’d played such-and-such a system before and I hated it, but you really made everything make sense. Can’t wait to play again.” And I’d scratch my head, because I really hadn’t done anything special in terms of teaching how the game worked.

The difference was in the flow of information. Not only can the flow of information around the gaming table be inefficient, it can also be confusing and burdensome.

ECLIPSE PHASE

We think of game mechanics primarily in terms of numerical values and how those values are created or manipulated. But in actual practice, many mechanical resolutions are performed by multiple people at the table. If you think of the resolution as a ball, it often has to be passed back and forth. Or you might think of it as a dance, and if we — as a table of players — don’t coordinate our actions in performing the resolution we’ll end up stepping on each other’s toes.

This efficient passing of information is an example of system mastery. Often, as a table gains experience with a particular RPG together, they’ll intuitively find the patterns of behavior that work. But this doesn’t always happen, and when it doesn’t we can benefit from consciously thinking about:

• What numbers we say
• Who is responsible for saying them
• How we say them

Let me give a simple example of this, using Eclipse Phase.

Eclipse Phase is a percentile system. You modify your skill rating by difficulty and then, if you roll under that number on percentile dice, you succeed. In addition, your margin of success is equal to the number you roll on the dice. If you roll 30+ (and succeed) you get an excellent success; if you roll 60+ you get an exceptional success.

Here’s how things often go when I’m introducing new players to Eclipse Phase (particularly those new to roll-under percentile systems entirely):

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got a 47.
GM: What’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Great. That’s a success. An excellent success, actually, because you rolled over 30. Here’s what happens…

The players don’t know what numbers to give me, and so I need to pull those numbers out of them in order to perform the necessary operation (determining if this is a success or failure and the degree of success.) As players start to master the system, this will morph into:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: Great. Here’s what happens…

They can do this because they’ve learned the mechanics and now know that their roll of 47 when they have a skill of 50 is an excellent success. (In this, the exchange mirrors that of a player attacking an orc in D&D when they know it has AC 17, right? They don’t need to pass me the information to perform the mechanical operation because they can do the operation themselves. In fact, many people like roll-under percentile systems like this specifically because they make this kind of efficiency intuitive and almost automatic.)

But there’s actually a problem with this because, if you recall, Eclipse Phase also features difficulties which modify the target number. This disrupts the simple efficiency and we would often end up with discussions like this:

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got an excellent success.
GM: There’s actually a difficulty here. What did you roll?
Player: 47.
GM: And what’s your skill?
Player: 50.
GM: Okay, so you actually failed. Here’s what happens…

This creates all kinds of friction at the table: It’s inefficient. It’s frequently confusing. And either the outcome doesn’t change at all (in which case we’ve deflated the drama of the resolution for no reason) or the player is frustrated that an outcome they thought was going one way is actually going the other.

The reason this is happening is because there is an operation that I, as the GM, need to perform (applying a hidden difficulty) but I’m not being given the number I need to perform that operation. The player has learned to throw the ball to a certain spot (“I got an excellent success”), but I’m frequently not standing at that spot and the ball painfully drops to the ground.

What I eventually figured out is that the information I need from the player is actually “XX out of YY” — where XX is the die roll and YY is their skill rating. I could catch that ball and easily carry it wherever it needed to go.

GM: Give me a Navigation check.
Player: I got 47 out of 55.
GM: An excellent success! Here’s what happens…

And I realized that I could literally just tell players that this is what they needed to say to me. I didn’t need to wait for them to figure it out. Even brand new players could almost instantly groove into the system.

ADVANCED D&D

As you spend more time with a system, you’ll frequently find odd corners which require a different flow of information. In some cases you may be able to tweak your table norms to account for the special cases, but usually it’ll be more about learning when and how to cue your players that you all need to handle this information differently (and the players gaining the mastery to be able to quickly grok the new, sometimes overlapping, circumstances).

Let’s go back to D&D, for example.

When I’m a DM and I’ve got a horde of orcs attacking a single PC, it’s not unusual for me to roll all of their attacks at once, roll all of the damage from the successful attacks, add all that damage up, and then report it as a single total to the player. It just makes sense to do a running total of the numbers in front of me as I generate them rather than saying a string of numbers to a player and asking them to process the verbal information while doing the running total themselves.

And, of course, it works just fine… right up until a PC gets damage reduction. Now it’s the player who needs to perform a mechanical operation (subtracting their damage reduction from each hit) and doesn’t have the information they need to do that.

Even PCs with multiple attacks usually resolve them one by one for various reasons, so the reverse (players lumping damage together when the GM needs to apply damage reduction) rarely happens. But two of the PCs in my 3^rd Edition campaign have weapons that deal bonus elemental damage, and they’ve learned that sometimes I need that damage specifically broken out because creatures are frequently resistant against or immune to fire or electricity damage.

When we first started running into this difficulty, the players defaulted to always giving me the elemental damage separately. But this was an unneeded inefficiency, and we quickly figured out that it was easier for me to simply tell them when they needed to give me the elemental damage separately.

These are simple examples, but they hopefully demonstrate that this sort of mastery is not an all-or-nothing affair. There’s almost always room to learn new tricks.

FENG SHUI

Let’s also take a look at one of these systems that’s fairly straightforward in its mechanical operations, but which can become devilishly difficult if you don’t pass information back and forth cleanly.

In Feng Shui 2, the dice mechanic produces a “swerve”: You subtract a negative d6 from a positive d6 in order to generate a bell curve result from -5 to +5. (Sixes actually explode and are rolled again, so the curve is smeared out at the ends, but that’s basically how it works.)

When you want to make an attack, you do two things. First, you check to see if you hit:

Roll Swerve + Attack Skill – Target’s Defense

If you hit, you then calculate damage:

Margin of Success + Weapon Damage – Target’s Toughness

Looking at those two equations on the page, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly exotic about them. In practice, though, I’ve seen players and entire groups get completely tangled up in them. There tend to be two major problems:

1. The attacker feels as if they should be able to complete one full step of this process and then report the result… except they can’t, because neither step can actually be completed without information that the defender posseses.
2. Upon completing the first step, players want to report a flat success/failure outcome (“I hit”), but if they don’t pass the margin of success to the damage equation they can’t actually calculate damage.

What frequently happens in the latter case is:

GM: The target’s Defense is 17.
Player: (does math) Okay, I hit!
GM: So your damage will be equal to the margin of success plus your weapon damage. What was your margin of success?
Player: Uh… crap. I forgot? Three? Maybe four? Hang on… (does the math again)

Another interesting thing that will happen in this kind of situation is that the players — who don’t like being confused or frustrated! — will try to find ad hoc ways of routing around the problem. In Feng Shui 2, for example, I’ll frequently see players basically say, “Well… I know what this guy’s Defense value is because I attacked him last round. So I’m just going to attack him again to keep it simple.”

The important thing to take away from this is that the players want to solve the problem just as much as you do. But often this kind of ad hoc pseudo-solution just shifts the frustration: They’ve figured out how to make the mechanical resolution flow more smoothly, but they feel trapped by the system into making choices that they don’t necessarily want to make. The insane, over-the-top Hong Kong action of Feng Shui 2, for example, has been compromised as they attack the same guy over and over again.

So let’s say that you find yourself in this situation. How can you fix it?

• Identify the sequence in which mechanical operations must be performed.
• Identify who has the necessary information for each operation.
• Figure out how to pass the information to the necessary person at each stage of the opration.

For example, in Feng Shui 2 who has each piece of information used when resolving an attack?

• Outcome of the swerve roll. (Attacker)
• Attack Skill (Attacker)
• Target’s Defense (Defender)
• Margin of Success (whoever calculated the outcome of the attack roll)
• Weapon Damage (Attacker)
• Target’s Toughness (Defender)
• Wound Points taken (Defender)

If you look back up at the mechanical equations, it should be fairly easy to identify the resolution sequence and the numbers that need to be said:

1. Attacker rolls swerve and adds their attack skill. (The game actually calls this the Action Result.) Attacker tells the Defender this number.
2. Defender subtracts their Defense from the Action Result. (This is the margin of success. The game calls this the Outcome.) Defender tells the Attacker the Outcome.
3. The Attacker adds the Outcome to the Weapon Damage. (The game calls this the Smackdown.) The Attacker tells the Defender the Smackdown.
4. The Defender subtracts their Toughness from the Smackdown. (This is the number of Wound Points they take.)

You can see that Robin D. Laws, being a clever chap, identified the significant chunks of information in the system and gave them specific labels (Action Result, Outcome, Smackdown). Other games won’t necessarily do that for you (and even the Feng Shui 2 rulebook, unfortunately, doesn’t specifically call out how the information should be passed back and forth), but you should be able to break down the mechanical processes in any system in a similar manner.

PIGGYBACKING IN GUMSHOE (AND BEYOND!)

Let me close by talking about a mechanical interaction that has multiple players participating simultaneously (which, of course, makes the “dance” of information more complicated to coordinate).

In the GUMSHOE System (used by games like Ashen Stars and Trail of Cthulhu), some group checks are resolved using a piggybacking mechanic:

• One character is designated the Lead.
• The difficulty of the test is equal to the base difficulty + 2 per additional character “piggybacking” on the Lead’s check.
• Those piggybacking can spend 1 skill point to negate the +2 difficulty they’re adding to the check.

The mechanic is very useful when, for example, you want Aragorn to lead the hobbits through the wilderness without being detected by Ringwraiths: The more unskilled hobbits there are, the more difficult it should be for Aragorn to do that, but you still want success to be governed by Aragorn’s skill at leading the group.

Many moons ago I adapted this piggybacking structure to D20 systems like this:

• One character takes the Lead.
• Other characters can “piggyback” on the Lead’s skill check by making their own skill check at a DC equal to half of the DC of the Lead’s check. (So if the Lead is making a DC 30 check, the piggybackers must make a DC 15 check.)
• The lead character can reduce the Piggyback DC by 1 for every -2 penalty they accept on their check.
• The decision to piggyback on the check must be made before the Lead’s check is made.

On paper, this system made sense. When I put it into practice at the table, however, it wasn’t working out. It seemed complicated, finicky, and the players weren’t enjoying using the mechanic.

I gave up on it for a couple of years, and then came back to it and realized that the problem was that I had been sequencing the mechanic incorrectly. One element of this was actually a slight error in mechanical design, but even this was ultimately about the resolution sequence.

The way the mechanic was being resolved originally was:

• The GM declares that, for example, a Stealth check needs to be made.
• The players decide whether they want to use the Piggyback mechanic for this.
• The GM approves it.
• The players choose a Lead.
• The other players decide whether they want to piggyback or not.
• The Lead chooses whether or not they want to lower the Piggybacking DC.
• The Lead would roll their check.
• If the Lead succeeded, the other players would roll their piggybacking checks. (The logic being that if the Lead failed, there was no need for the piggybacking checks. But, in practice, players would see the Lead’s result and then try to opt out of piggybacking if it was bad.)

Here’s what the actual resolution sequence needed to be:

• The GM declares that there is a piggyback check required.
• The players choose their Lead.
• The other players make their piggybacking checks. If any check fails, the largest margin of failure among all piggybacking characters increases the DC of the Lead’s check by +1 per two points of margin of failure.
• The Lead makes their check.

You can immediately see, just from the number of steps involved, how much more streamlined this resolution process is. The only actual mechanical adjustment, however, is to shift the adjustment of the piggybacking DC from a decision made before the piggybacking checks to an effect of those checks.

The take-away here is that while our passing of mechanical information at the table is often numerical, it can also include other elements (like who’s taking Lead in a piggybacking check) which can also be streamlined and formalized for efficiency.