(click for PDF)

When Robin D. Laws first designed Feng Shui, Jackie Chan, John Woo, and The Matrix had not yet brought the pulse-pounding action of Hong Kong cult cinema into the Hollywood mainstream.

I discovered the game way back in the summer of 1997: I had taken a hiatus from RPGs, but had maintained my subscription to Dragon magazine. That summer, I realized I hadn’t received an issue of Dragon for several months, and I went online — revisiting my old Usenet and FidoNet haunts — to figure out why. I quickly had my answer: TSR had gone bankrupt. But in the process, I was drawn back into discussions of RPGs. Two of them were burning up the discussion groups at the time: Heavy Gear and Feng Shui.

At the time, I was living with my dad in Mankato, MN. I biked from our apartment building down to a hobby store in “downtown” Mankato. The hobby store had exactly one magazine rack of RPG titles, but by some miracle it was well-stocked: I grabbed copies of both Heavy Gear and Feng Shui. This was a seminal moment in my life, as Heavy Gear would ultimately prove to be my doorway into the RPG industry. (A tale I’ve told elsewhere.) Feng Shui didn’t feature as prominently in my work, but it played a really important part in reigniting my passion for RPGs. It’s a truly great honor that I’m now it’s caretaker.

Back in 1997, however, Feng Shui also kindled my love for Hong Kong cinema. Using the bibliography Robin D. Laws had placed in the back of the book as a map, I spent the rest of my summer biking to Suncoast Video and picking up VHS copies of whatever films I could get my hands on. As such, Feng Shui 2, by necessity, can’t recapture the wonder of the original game for me: The original Feng Shui wasn’t just a really cool game; it was the gateway to an entire medium of film I had never seen before.

But Feng Shui 2 is still frickin’ awesome: The rip-roaring, time-leaping magic of the Chi War is just such an innately awesome premise for a game that just flipping through the book is enough to get me amped about playing.

Which, of course, brings me to a cheat sheet for the system.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

As I’ve described in the past, I keep a copy of the system cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. Of course, I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, too. But my goal with the cheat sheets is to consolidate information and eliminate book look-ups: Finding something in a half dozen or so pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive. The actual sequencing of pages is mostly arbitrary.

Page 1 – Basic Mechanics: This includes the core dice mechanic, plus the difficulty table, an Action Value reference for when your need to improvise GMCs, and the mechanics for Fortune, Impairment, and Boosts.

Page 2 – Skills & Other Checks: These rules round out the basic mechanics.

Page 3-7 – Combat: The core combat experience is contained on a single page, with additional options and guidelines laid out over the subsequent pages.

Page 8 – Vehicles: Primarily the rules for chases.

Page 9 – Chi War: Rules for sorcery, supernatural creatures, transformed animals, mutants, and feng shui sites.

Page 10 – Enemies: A one-page quick reference for GMs looking to build fights and create stat blocks on-the-fly.

OTHER THINGS TO PRINT OUT

You might also want to print out copies of:

• GMC names (Feng Shui 2, p. 220-221)
• Vehicle Table (Feng Shui 2, p. 156)

And you don’t need to print it out, but before playing you might want to take a guided tour through the Select Filmography, updated with all the awesome flicks of the last 20+ years and still found tucked away tidily at the back of the book.

BLUE MOON RULES

One unusual piece of slang you’ll find here is “blue moon.” This is taken from the chapter “Blue Moon Rules” in Feng Shui 2, of which Laws writes:

This chapter gives you the rules for situation that come up only once in a blue moon. These edge cases and special situations may arise in your game once or twice.

I found this distinction remarkably valuable, and in preparing these cheat sheets I have greatly expanded the scope of the rules covered by the “blue moon” designation. Essentially, if you look at a section of the cheat sheet I have:

(a) Specified the core mechanics of a given topic; and

(b) Designated everything else as “blue moon.”

For example, there is a page titled “Combat.” In my opinion, everything you need to run combat encounters in Feng Shui 2 is located on that page. Then there’s another page labeled “Blue Moon: Combat.” That page contains a lot extra rules that you’ll use only to respond to very specific situations in combat. A third page is labeled “Blue Moon: Weapons,” and contains a bunch of weapons-specific rules that you can use to spice things up.

You can see a similar distinction on the page of the cheat sheet dealing with vehicle chases: The “Vehicles” section contains the core gameplay loop for chases; the “Blue Moon: Vehicles” section of the page contains a bunch of additional rules that can be injected into that core gameplay.

I actually find this distinction so conceptually useful in organizing and focusing the cheat sheet that I think you’ll likely see me using it again in the future with any number of other games.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

As with my other cheat sheets, the Prince Valiant sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. This is the screen arrangement I’m currently experimenting with:

• Panel 1: Basic Mechanics (with Skills & Hazards behind it).
• Panel 2: Combat (with Blue Moon: Combat & Blue Moon: Weapons behind it).
• Panel 3: Vehicles (with Keeling Over & Vehicle Table behind it).
• Panel 4: Enemies (with Chi War & Hong Kong GMC Names behind it).

FURTHER READING
So You Want to Be a Feng Shui Player?
Feng Shui: Filling the Shot
Feng Shui: Using the Shot Counter
Prep Notes: Hong Kong Task Force 88

SANSERIF SNARK

When Sanserif was a little girl, her mother Waitin told her that if she kept rolling her eyes like that it would make her head fall off. If she ever sees her mother again, Sanserif would like to tell her that it’s definitely not rolling your eyes that makes your head fall off. Or your whole body fall through a giant hole in the floor for that matter. Whatever. Look, the point is that Sanserif spent her entire childhood dreaming that she would grow up to be part of Fairytale Gloom and this is NOT. WHAT. SHE. WAS. PROMISED.

ARIAL SNARK

Arial was a no-nonsense girl who grew up wanting three things: First, a sword. Second, a second sword. Third, to stab people with her swords. In any rational world, therefore, Arial would be super happy with her life, but somehow it hasn’t turned out like that. She misses her dad. She misses Syriously Forreal (no relation), who taught her the Art of the Pincushion. She even misses her dumb sister, Sanserif. Fear cuts deeper than a sword, but a sword will do in a pinch.

JOSH FROST

Josh’s father was [SPOILER] and his mother was [SPOILER], which makes him [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER] and he also [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. He got very cold, but he got better. He died, but he got better. He’s probably going to get married, but he’ll get better.

HEAD SNARK

Head Snark, Lord of Winterstumble, Lord Mount-a-Pair, Warden of the North, Foot of the Ruler to King Bobby Bratsforëöns, and Kind of Slow to Notice Things. He and Bobby were both fostered to Johnny Errant, who taught Snark everything he knew and taught Bobby how to drink, hunt boar, and woo women. (Johnny wasn’t actually good at any of those things, which explains a lot about Bobby.) Snark is survived by his wife Waitlin and his loving children Rockwell, Sanserif, and Arial.

GLUTEN SNARK

Gluten was introduced to the wonders of absinthe by Typsion Bannister. When he goes on a bender with the Green Fairy, he often suffers from what he refers to as his “greensight” and has some difficulty distinguishing delusion from reality. That’s probably how he ended up falling out of that window, honestly.

On Kickstarter Now! – Next: The Bannisters

Go to Part 1

REFERENCE – TWIN CITIES 1925

NOTABLE NEWSPAPERS:

• Minneapolis Tribune (since 1867)
• Minneapolis Daily Star (since 1920)
• Minnesota Pioneer (since 1849, first daily newspaper in Minnesota, morning paper)
• Saint Paul Dispatch (since 1868, evening paper)

TRANSPORTATION: Twin Cities Rapid Transit operates 524 miles of electric trolley lines, laced between Minneapolis, St. Paul, and into the suburbs as far as Anoka and Lake Minnetonka. (Map above.)

UNIONS: Minneapolis’ reactionary, anti-labor employers organized into the Citizen’s Alliance. They blacklisted labor organizers, hired spies to keep tabs on “radicals”, crushed strikes, maintained scab registries, etc.

The Minneapolis CLA (Communist League of America) is led by Carl Skoglund, a Swedish socialist who immigrated to America in 1911, and Vincent Ray Dunne. These Trotskyists undermined the business-friendly leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). The first strikes would not actually happen until 1934, but the union-business espionage ran rampant through the ‘20s.

Source: Red Teamsters

FARMER-LABOR PARTY: Founded in 1918, by 1925 the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party – operating on a platform of farmer and labor union protection – was beginning to dominate statewide elections.

• J.E. Meyers is the mayor of Minneapolis. He ran as a member of the Loyalty Party, focusing on a patriotic platform of supporting America’s World War I veterans.
• Laurence C. Hodgson, a former newspaper reporter and poet, is the mayor of St. Paul.

GENERAL RESEARCH – HAMSA

Occult 1 / Library Use: The Hamsa symbol, also referred to as the Hand of Fatima and the Hand of Miriam, is a protective sigil or charm taking the figure of a hand with an eye in the center of its palm. It is supposed to guard against the “evil eye” and is widely recognized throughout the Middle East and North Africa, with some scholars believing it to have originated in Carthage.

GENERAL RESEARCH – TANIT PARASITES

Lab Analysis (Chemistry/Medicine): The purplish color in the whiskey / denatured ethanol is due to a contaminant. This appears to be bacteriological in nature.

• If analyzing raw ethanol, this will be remarkable because alcohol is generally antibacterial – it destroys cell membranes, penetrates the bacteria’s cytoplasm, denatures its proteins, coagulates the enzymes, binds water (dehydrating the cell), and dissolves fats, leading to massive cell dysfunction and death.
• Closer inspection of the bacteria reveals it to be disturbingly unusual: The cell envelope is shaped like a symmetric hexagon. Its internal structures are simplistic, similar to those of a prokaryote (the first form of life on Earth) and lacking anything suggestive of an internal nucleus. It’s possible that this is some atavistic remnant of an alternative evolutionary path.
• Chemistry 1 / Medicine 1: The hexagonal cells interact strongly with each other, forming honeycomb-like lattices and, due to their symmetrical nature, capable of forming tightly-packed, perfectly tiled structures similar to hexagonal crystals. Within these larger hexagonal bio-crystals, the individual cells appear to take on specialized functions – although its impossible to determine exactly what those functions are, it would seem they serve a function similar to organelles. Thus, in relation to the prokaryote-like individual cells, the bio-crystals are analog to more complex eukaryotic cells – although organized in a way seemingly completely alien to terrestial biology.
• Chemistry 2 / Medicine 2: The interactions between the cells within each bio-crystal seem to possess a neuronal character – perhaps synapse-like micro-structures could explain the coordination between the various “organelle cells” of the crystal, in a fashion similar to a nervous system or brain tissue.
• GM Note: If investigated in a later time period, researchers might detect electrical signals “disturbingly reminiscent of human brain activity”, but neither the equipment nor knowledge of the human mind necessary for this conjecture exists in the 1920’s.
• Organic Tissue: If exposed to organic tissue (whether human or not), the tanit parasites will swarm – forming a kind of purple halo around the tissue. (Investigation of this specific phenomenon with Chemistry or Medicine would suggest that this is stimulating biocrystal growth, as described above – and functionally reducing those point spends by 1 point each.)

Tophet Serum: If dosed with tophet serum, a character must make a 2 point Stability test each day. If they succeed on three tests in a row, the effects dissipate and no further tests are required. (During this time, they will begin to manifest hallucinations, motor apraxia, and alien hand syndrome.)

• If the character is Shaken by tophet serum, they begin to manifest symptoms of dissociate personality. (The bicameral division of their mind is breaking down, their perception of self is evaporating, and the Tanit consciouness is striving to take sole control of their body). This takes the form of a Driver that can impel actions (i.e., Tanit’s consciousness is taking control). As with any other Driver, obeying the driver restores Stability per the normal rules, but also prompts a 7 point Stability test (due to Possession).
• If the character is Blasted by tophet serum, in addition to permanent mental illness they also develop an Eye of Tanit on their left hand.
• A character who is rendered Incurably Insane by tophet serum has become a fully-realized host of Tanit.
• Non-Human Hosts: Unknown effects.
• GM Note: Those who observe the progression of tophet serum may realize that virtually everyone who drinks it will, in fact, be lost to the Tanit consciousness. Realizing that hundreds of serum-tainted whiskey bottles have been sold (and presumably drunk), they may make the intuitive leap that Barca has successfully created hundreds of fully-realized Tanit hosts. (Cthulhu Mythos could also provide a similar revelation.) Where are they? Some might be lost to insane asylums, but most are just quietly continuing the façade of their mortal lives – an invisible army of sleeper agents who will continue to pursue the eventual re-awakening of Tanit throughout the 20^th century.

Go to Part 3: Arrival at Hill House

Justin Alexander is… the Voice of Gloom.

If you’ve ever wondered what my voice sounds like in real life… this is not it. Generally speaking, any way. If I’m specifically doing these character voices, then, yes, this is what I sound like.

You know what I mean.

Any way, you should check out this trailer: Nicolas Gluesenkamp has done some marvelous work animating Brian Patterson’s beautiful and hilarious art.

A GAME OF TRANSPARENT PARODY AND MISERABLE MONARCHS

From the frozen lands of the Snark to the torrid intrigues of the Bannisters, there is one truth that echoes through the Umpteen Kingdoms: Gloom is coming…

Epic Fantasy is Ghastly

Prophecies of doom. Protagonists slopping through the wilderness. Battles of blood and mud. At least in Gloom of Thrones you know the story will get an ending.

Tell the Tale of Your Noble Family

Plague them with mishaps like Seduced by a Sibling or Tumbled from a Tower while heaping happy events like w̶e̶d̶d̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ and family reunions onto your opponents to raise their Self-Worth score.

Award-winning Gameplay with Clear Cards

Unique transparent cards let you play multiple cards on the same character, determining their ultimate fate while still allowing you to see straight through their machinations!

JOIN US ON KICKSTARTER!

I’ll be serializing this scenario for Trail of Cthulhu, set in the Twin Cities (Minnesota, USA) in the 1925 over the next few weeks. Originally run in an abridged format at Gen Con 2017, it will be presented here in its entirety for the first time. If you’re a member of my local gaming groups, you may want to steer clear of this one, even if you’ve played this scenario before: The background elements (discussed in depth in this first post) aren’t fully revealed in this scenario and may feature in future scenarios I design.

STARTING DATE
Friday, November 13^th, 1925

DAWN OF MAN

Tanit and Ra are both incomprehensible alien intellects which came to Earth (or perhaps arose on Earth) in a prehistoric era. Some legends speak of them as brother and sister, suggesting the possibility that they are both exemplars of a single species (or perhaps a single entity turned against itself). But it’s more likely that they are utterly unlike in nature except for their shared point of commonality in humanity.

Before the origin of the conscious mind, humans were simply very smart apes. In anatomically modern humans, tool use and even agriculture were more advanced than among other animals, but they did not possess true intellect.

THE HERDS: This made them ideal hosts for Tanit and Ra, both of whom infested the minds of man like viruses and turned them into extrusions of their will. The resulting herds created the first civilizations, although they still did not exist as individuals – they were merely tools wielded by Tanit or Ra; a physical host for a vast hive consciousness.

THE FIRST HUMANS: The First Humans came to exist when Tanit attempted to infect the herd of Ra (and vice versa). Human consciousness was born from the friction between them. The bicameral mind is, in fact, a manifestation of this conflict between Tanit and Ra – and in its asymmetry, human consciousness is given form in the discontinuity between the mind’s two halves.

THE REBELLION: The First Humans rebelled against the herds. In Egypt, there is some evidence that the ensuing rebellion may have even fractured the Ra consciousness (into Amun-Ra and Aten-Ra). Tanit endured in her last refuge of Carthage until the Punic Wars razed the city.

FUNDAMENTAL METAPHYSIC: To be clear, it is not the case that there is a human identity which is plagued by Tanit and Ra. Rather, all human identity is nothing more than a byproduct of the conflict between vast alien intelligences. The lateralization of brain function in each individual is merely the wavering frontlines of an ancient war. Your entire sense of self and all of your conscious thought is nothing more than a metaphysical fever boiling out of the trench warfare being fought in the sulcus of the cerebral cortex.

Note: Ra is primarily active in the left hemisphere of the brain. Tanit in the right.

TANIT

In a fully realized host (i.e., one in which the taint of Ra is not present), the parasite which is Tanit manifests as an eye in the palm of the left hand.

THE FASCICULUS: Tanit forms a cluster of nerve tissue within the hand, suborning the Ulnar nerve and altering the structure of Guyon’s canal. This cluster is the actual seat of the Tanit consciousness, with this “mind” or “eye” of Tanit remotely controlling the primary brain of the host. It is capable of operating the hand as an independent entity in the case of death (a “hand of Tanit”); and in some cases may even lend a semblance of motion to an otherwise brain dead host (as long as the brain stem is intact), creating a shambling, zombie-like thing.

INFECTION: Tanit is a parasite — microscopic and slightly purplish in color. When a host is infected by Tanit, the parasites cluster in the left hand, where they join together (in accordance to a biology utterly foreign to terrestial life) to form more complex structures.

Child Sacrifice: Tanit uses rituals of child sacrifice to create tophet serums of viral payload capable of overriding (or destroying) Ra’s presence in the host. This effectively kills the human “personality”, and creates a fully realized Tanit host.

FACE OF BAAL: Tanit is also referred to as the Face of Baal (a word meaning “Lord” or “master” in primal Semitic tongues). This suggests that perhaps the Tanit hive consciousness is nothing more than a representative or tool of some greater and even more inexplicable entity.

RA

Ra transmits itself to new hosts as a primarily memetic virus — it is written that Ra created man by “speaking their secret names” (proper verbal coding can actually alter the Broca area of the brain, effectively infecting the host; fortunately, the memetic payload must be customized to each victim). Direct transmission via liquid, however, is also possible — in another Egyptian tale, Ra weeps and from his tears man is given birth. In the Book of the Dead, Ra cuts himself and his blood transforms into the personifications of Hu and Sia.

HU/SIA: When fully realized, Ra’s hosts manifest in two forms — the Hu (authority) become central coordinators while the bulk of the host is made up of Sia (mind). (Hu is the deification of the first word, the word of creation, and was “companion to the pharaohs”.)

Hu-manifestations are at least somewhat resistant to the Tanit parasite. Those with a Hu-strain of Ra may experience this as an enlightened/mystical state. But the more a Hu-infected host opens itself to Ra, the more its own personality is destroyed.

Note: There could be fourteen different manifestations of Ra (in the “train of Ra”). In some translations of the Book of the Dead, Chapter XVII begins: “I am Tem in rising. I am the only One. I came into being in Nu. I am Ra who rose in the beginning… The pillars of Shu were not as yet created. It is Ra, the creator of the names of his limbs, which came into being in the form of the gods, who are in the train of Ra” (i.e., the gods who personify his phases) “– fourteen Spirits, seven dark and seven light…”

APEP SERPENTS: Hu-infected hosts can be particularly long-lived, with their bodies undergoing severe transformation which eventually leaves them in a form similar to a huge, misshapen, white wyrm.

Apeptosis: Apep serpents can sometimes undergo a bizarre fission, rapidly undergoing a clonal fragmentation in which their mass collapses in a multitude of small serpents — almost maggot-like in character, but incredibly fast. These small serpents can enter potential hosts through eyes, ears, or other orifices and rapidly infect them with Ra.

Replication Errors: Apeps are dangerous to Ra, however, because they can diverge from the parent-state and become independent entities. In a fully-realized Ra society, therefore, Apeps are often killed before this happens. In the modern world, Apeps are particularly dangerous because there is no guarantee that their apeptotic fission will maintain a state of equilibrium with Tanit (which could result in anyone being infected by them having their humanity destroyed).

EYE OF RA: Eyes of Ra were extensions of Ra’s will. They included Hathor, Sekhmet, Bast, Wadjet, and Mut.

SISTERHOOD OF FATIMA

A coven of witches who have passed the secrets of Tanit and Ra down through the ages. They are particularly focused on preventing outbreaks of the Tanit parasite.

The Virgin Mary, Miriam (sister to Moses), and Fatima (daughter of Muhammad) were all members.

The inner mystery of the Sisters of Fatima is that they are all Hu-manifestations of Ra. Their mystic rites are the result of opening themselves to Ra, and their interest in crushing Tanit is not entirely wholesome for mankind.

THE HANDS

HAMSA: Also referred to as the Hand of Fatima and the Hand of Miriam, the Hamsa is a protective sigil or charm taking the figure of a hand with an eye in the center of its palm. It is supposed to guard against the “evil eye” and is widely recognized throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

In mundane scholarship it is theorized to have originated in Carthage and to spring from Tanit worship. The reality is the inverse: True Hamsas are created by the Sisterhood of Fatima to both “warn and ward” against Tanit and her cultists.

MANO PANTEA: Also known as the Hand-of-the-All-Goddess. Known to Egyptians as the Two Fingers, with the fingers representing Isis and Osiris; the thumb, their child Horus. Used to invoke a protective spirit of parents over their child, it was later adopted (through Byzantine) by Catholicism as a sign of benediction, derived from a Roman symbol meaning “to speak” and eventually gaining a retconned meaning of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Mano Pantea was used by Tanit cultists to identify themselves to each other. The meaning inverted when agents of Ra began using the symbol to expose Tanit worshipers (by initiating false calls and returns; you give the sign and if the other person responds you know you’ve found a Tanit cultist), eventually eking into common Egyptian culture as a general ward against children Tanit infections.

Tanit cultists still use it as a ritualized greeting for each other. (The fact that a number of organized religions adopted it suggests Tanit cultists infiltrated them at very high levels.)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1: Revelation List
Part 2: Background & General Research
Part 3: Arrival at Hill House
Part 4: The Hill House Investigation

Node 1: The Black Cats
Node 2: Minnesota 13
Node 3: Alicia Corey’s Boarding House
Node 4: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans
Node 5: Fatima’s Shrine
Node 6: Davis Farm
Node 7: Harris Chemical Plant
Node 8: Minneapolis Federal Reserve
Proactive Nodes

Pregenerated Characters

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