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These tools are designed to augment the streetcrawling scenario structure used in Part 5B of the Remix. Most of them are procedural content generators that will help you fill in details of the city as the PCs crawl through it.

RANDOM BUSINESSES

The Random Businesses table is not designed to generate every single building in the city. Instead, roll on the table once per street and use the result to contextualize the street as the PCs move down it (e.g., “You turn right at the corner. On the next street you see the remains of a goldsmith’s shop on the right. A fire has gutted it.”). You might interpret the result as a single notable business, or as characterizing the type of business done on the street (e.g., a street with several blacksmiths).

Make sure to record the results on your map, in case the PCs double back.

The table found here is a fairly crude tool. It most notably excludes businesses likely to be found in specific areas of the city (like the Docks) that the PCs aren’t starting out in. (You won’t find chandlers or fishermen here.) You could also improve it by:

• Expanding the table to include more types of businesses.
• Customizing the results by neighborhood.
• Adjusting the results to more accurately model the likelihood of encountering different types of businesses.
• Perhaps biasing the results of your next roll by the previous roll. (So that, for example, the tanneries are less likely to be crowded in right next to the perfumers.)

I recommend checking out Midkemia Press’ Cities or Chaosium’s Thieves’ World as premiere resources if you want more sophisticated tables while having someone else do the work for you.

No Businesses: This usually means a purely residential street. It could also mean a green space of some kind.

Alternative: For a busier and more cosmopolitan feel, continue rolling on the table until you generate a “No Businesses” result.

BUILDING DAMAGE: Roll on the Building Damage table to determine the condition of a building. You can roll on a table whenever the PCs enter or inspect a particular building. You should also roll on the table when generating a street.

When generating a street, you can additionally roll a d6 to determine if the damage generated on the Building Damage table applies to the specific business you generated, a separate building on the street, or if the entire street has been effected. (If the original building generation roll resulted in a residential street with no businesses, then any result of 1-5 means that a specific residence has been damaged.)

Tip: I specifically designed these tables to use different types of dice. This makes it easy to generate an entire street in a single throw of the dice: Simply roll a d%, d8, and d6 simultaneously and then walk through the results using the appropriate die type for each table.

RANDOM FLOORPLANS

One of the challenges of running a streetcrawl is that the PCs may decide at any time to enter a random building. Here’s a quick method for generating simple floorplans on the fly.

ROLLING THE DICE: As with the street generator, this is a tablemat system. Take a handful of d4’s and roll them onto a sheet of paper. Most buildings are square, so you can just consider the edges of the paper to be the outer walls of the building.

The location where each die lands is a corner with a number of walls extending from that corner equal to the number rolled on the dice. The more dice you roll, the more complicated the interior of the building will be (and complexity generally equates to size). For simple cottages, a single d4 is often sufficient. Here’s an example using 3d4:

Tip: If a die rolls outside the “walls” of your building, you can ignore it, reroll it, or use it as an indicator of an irregularity in the otherwise square profile of your building. Whatever works.

After drawing your walls, you can remove the dice and add doors wherever it seems appropriate. For example:

I placed the doors here while imagining a residence (with a short entry hall leading from the front door and a master suite in the upper left corner; you can fill in the other rooms easily). But we could imagine randomly rolling a 77 on the Random Businesses table and then needing to generate the layout for a bowyer:

Here you can see how the same randomly generated walls can just as easily give us a shopfront with a door leading into a private residence at the back of the building. The master suite remains in the upper left, but here we find a bedroom with a large closet in the lower right. (Or maybe your imagination might make that a kitchen with attached larder.)

STAIR DICE: Roll a six-sided die as a d3 in addition to the intersection dice to determine the number of floors in the building. If there are multiple floors, where the die lands can be treated as the location of the staircase. If the raw number on the d6 is odd, then the building has a basement (included in the total number of floors). If it is even, then it does not.

You can increase the maximum number of floors, of course, by increasing the size of the die used and interpreting the results in the same way. (Rolling a d8 as a d4, a d10 as a d5, a d12 as a d6, and so forth.)

Rolling 2d3-1 produces a nice bell curve for the number of floors and a building with multiple stairs. (You can limit the number of buildings with multiple stairs by including multiple stairs only if the dice roll doubles, and otherwise placing the stairs at whichever die rolled higher.)

Rolling 2d3-2 (min. 1) produces the homes found in a mid-20^th century American suburb if you assume there’s always a basement.

RANDOM NPCs

If you need a random NPC:

1. Roll on the Random Businesses table to generate their profession.
2. If you get a result of “No Businesses,” roll on the Other Jobs table below.
3. Pull a name from the Elturian Names list.

Tip: This is, once again, a fairly crude tool. If you want the gold standard for this sort of thing, try to track down a copy of Central Casting: Heroes of Legend by Jennell Jaquays.

GENERATING A CRISIS: Roll on the NPC Crisis table below to see what type of crisis the NPC is facing (if any) due to Elturel’s fall into Hell. If the PCs run into an entire group of NPCs, you can probably just roll once to determine the entire group’s need.

No Current Need: The NPC probably isn’t happy, but they have a place of safety and they’re well-supplied.

Food & Water: Self-explanatory.

Injured: The NPC has been injured by collapsing structures, fires, looters, devils, or some other form of misadventure.

Trapped: Most likely due to a building collapsing on or around them.

Escort: The NPC needs to get some place (a place of sanctuary, to rejoin their family, etc.) and wants the PCs to escort them there safely. If in doubt, use one of the locations in Part 5C (the NPC effectively becomes a hook for that location).

Under Attack: The NPC is currently being attacked (or hunted) by criminals, devils, or something else.

Roll Again Twice: I’d recommend against stacking this result.

Tip: Structurally, these crises are a way of drawing the PCs deeper into the city. The more need they see, the more important what they’re doing becomes. The more people they help, the more emotionally invested they become. And the act of solving these problems will force them to explore the city and draw them towards the major locations.

FRACTAL STREET LAYOUT

An advanced technique while streetcrawling is to treat the system as having fractal complexity.

By default, you can just think of the system as generating and navigating specific streets. But you could also use it to generate the “major streets” of a larger neighborhood. (For example, this could be useful when the PCs are navigating towards a Distant Goal, as described in Part 5B.) Within each of these “major blocks” you can imagine myriad side streets, and, in fact, you can drill in and generate those side streets by treating each major block as the boundaries of a locality.

For example, you might start by generating a street map that looks like this:

You could then select one of those major blocks and generate the local side streets:

And you can take this even further, using the same system to generate footpaths, alleys, or even the outlines of specific buildings on an individual block. (The latter is a great way of getting non-standard building outlines that you can then use as a seed for random floor plans.) If you did that here, it might look like this:

When I demonstrate this system for new GMs, I’m sometimes told that this fractal approach isn’t realistic. “Cities don’t work like this,” one gentleman told me. If you’re feeling the same way reading this, then you might want to know that I pulled a fast one here. Although these are street layouts which could be trivially created using the street generator, in this case I didn’t actually use the generator: I just traced the streets for Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

And you can see, looking at that map, how the other individual blocks have similar levels of detail hidden away inside of them. (And that’s even before we crack open the satellite view and street views and really start looking at the details.) This is a good reminder that the real world is always an endless font of inspiration, even for our most audaciously fantastical creations.

Go to the Avernus Remix

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

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The Dungeon Masters Guild is a truly fantastic resource for 5th Edition games, and when it comes to supporting published campaigns utterly unique in the annals of the RPG industry. The ability to draw from and tap directly into Wizards of the Coast’s books is incredibly powerful, and it means that every time a new campaign comes out a whole flood of well-developed and professionally presented support material springs up.

While working on Descent Into Avernus, I made it a point to periodically survey the available material on the Guild and grab anything that looked interesting or potentially useful. (This was made possible by both my Patreon patrons and also those who click on the DriveThruRPG affiliate links here at the Alexandrian. I wouldn’t be able to justify this cash outlay without you, and as a result you’re supporting not only me, but also these other creators!)

Many of these books I have already recommended or referenced in the Remix itself. But I thought it might be useful to also offer up some capsule reviews of the various books and other products I looked at.

A few quick provisos before we begin:

• I’m generally aiming for a capsule review, which means just a very high overview of my thoughts/impressions of the book.
• Unless otherwise noted, none of these reviews represent actually playtesting the material.
• I was reading these books with a specific agenda: Can I use this in the Remix? I’ve not specifically reviewed or graded them with that in mind, but it’s probably worth your while to keep that bias in mind.

You may also want to review this Guide to Grades at the Alexandrian. The short version: My general philosophy is that 90% of everything is crap, and crap gets an F. I’m primarily interested in grading the 10% of the pile that’s potentially worth your time. Anything from A+ to C- is, honestly, worth checking out if the material sounds interesting to you. If I give something a D it’s pretty shaky. F, in my opinion, should be avoided entirely.

ELMINSTER’S CANDLEKEEP COMPANION: The Candlekeep Companion is great. Ed Greenwood himself does some writing on the book and served as a Creative Consultant, giving it a very impressive imprimatur. But where the Companion really excels is relentlessly keeping the focus on play-oriented material. In Part 4A: The Road to Candlekeep, I already described how the book’s delightful random tables can be used to instantly bring the PCs’ journey through the Castle of Tomes to life, and really the whole book is like that. It is constantly about what the PCs can do (or will want to do) in Candlekeep, what the DM needs to do to run those things at the table, and a nice set of tools to empower the DM while they’re doing it.

M.T. Black presents a “Director’s Cut” of the Candlekeep chapter from Descent Into Avernus that was actually what got me excited about buying the book, but I was ultimately underwhelmed by it. The scenario ends up just being a bunch of NPCs dragging the PCs around by the nose to little effect. There are a couple of ideas here (using the Prophecies of Alaundo to push the PCs towards Avernus and using the original gateway used for the Charge of the Hellriders to reach Avernus), but they both need a bit of TLC.

The book is rounded out with some PC character options that look very interesting to me (albeit with maybe a few too many dissociated divination mechanics for my taste) and a rich selection of original spells and magic items that just beg to be used ASAP.

Also of note is the absolutely gorgeous poster map of the castle by Marco Bernardini. The book is probably worth buying for this poster map all by itself, and I’ll almost certainly be hanging a copy of it on my wall when the PCs head to Candlekeep.

• Grade: B

SHIELD OF THE HIDDEN LORD: Written by M.T. Black, one of the co-authors of Descent Into Avernus, Shield of the Hidden Lord tweaks the continuity so that the Vanthampurs are still looking for the Shield. Following leads from Vanthampur Villa, the PCs can go racing to an abandoned temple beneath Hhune Villa and grab the shield first. I don’t really grok this hook: Since the PCs don’t find out about the Shield until the Villa, they won’t go looking for it until after the Villa… which mean the Vanthampurs have probably been eliminated and there’s no urgency in their search for the Shield. It would make a lot more sense, in my opinion, to seed the clues into the Dungeon of the Dead Three and then have the PCs race the Vanthampurs to get the Shield. (This would even allow you to add a Vanthampur delving team to the adventure.)

The design of the sealed temple is pretty good. The key is filled with a lot of evocative ideas. But it can be tricky to do a dungeon that’s been sealed up for a hundred years, and this unfortunately becomes clear as the adventure becomes overly dependent on creatures who have, totally coincidentally, all managed to accidentally stumble into the place within the last few weeks just before the PCs arrive.

I really don’t like the fact that the maps are only located as separate files (and not included in the PDF layout), but including versions both with and without numbers gets two huge thumbs up from me. (Hard to believe in an era of virtual tabletops people are still getting this wrong.)

Since the Remix gives the Shield of the Hidden Lord a different history, you’d obviously have some continuity issues here. With a little elbow grease (and some problem-solving) you could swap out the Shield in this adventure for the Tiamat relics.

• Grade: D

BALDUR’S GATE – THE FALL OF ELTUREL: The Fall of Elturel provides an alternative starting point for either Descent Into Avernus or Tyranny of Dragons. Conceptually it’s not bad: You start in Elturel, head out into the wilderness to deal with Tiamat cultists and Dead Three cultists, and go back to find Elturel a smoking crater in the ground. Along the way they stage several encounters with Elturgardians so that the PCs will have at least a light personal connection to the city’s inhabitants.

But there’s just nothing terribly exciting about the content, and the structure is problematic. The initial hook is weak and the adventure immediately saddles you with Reya Mantlemorn as a GMPC who constantly tells the PCs what they’re supposed to be doing at every single step (right down to prompting them for specific skill checks). If you’re going to use Reya later it makes sense to introduce her here, but doubling down on her as a railroading GMPC obviously doesn’t work.

It should also be noted that the adventure’s alternate hooks into Descent and Tyranny skip significant chunks of both campaigns. (The hook for Descent is only intended to skip a small chunk of material, but it missteps by immediately identifying Duke Vanthampur as being behind the Dead Three cultists, completely short-circuiting and/or deflating the whole first act.) These hooks are also completely incompatible with the Alexandrian Remix, so if you’re using the Remix I’d definitely skip this one.

• Grade: D

LULU’S GUIDE TO HOLLYPHANTS: Written by Kienna Shaw & Donathin Frye, I already recommended Lulu’s Guide to Hollyphants in the Remix because it includes a playable PC hollyphant race that will let one of your players take up the role of Lulu. The rest of the book is a little thin (although it does have a good selection of hollyphant NPC stats, including an evil variant, so you can easily add more of them to your campaign). The interpretation of hollyphants is quite twee and full of sparkles, which may limit the utility for you.

• Grade: D+

CHARACTER SHEET BY SHELBY ROSMYTH: Shelby Rosmyth designed a really nice Avernus-themed character sheet. I wouldn’t use it until the PCs actually head to Hell, but once there I think it will offer a really nice thematic feel at the table. The major drawback is the lack of equipment and spell list support, but the package does include a form-fillable PDF.

• Grade: B-

MARISA’S BLADES: Marisa’s Blades by Justin M. Cole came to my attention as being a tie-in for both Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus, potentially serving as a bridge between those two campaigns. This turns out to not actually be the case, so the adventure was somewhat wrong-footed for me from the start. Cole does a very interesting job of taking elements from a lot of other DM’s Guild supplements and mixing them together into an original adventure (an approach which, in my opinion, enhances the value of both Marisa’s Blades and the other material). Unfortunately, the actual adventure itself is somewhat incoherent: Marisa’s brother has made a deal with a devil, so she arranges for their whole gang to be arrested by the PCs to “solve” this problem… only it’s not at all clear how it would solve anything. The tone is set early with one of the hooks: “Laeral Silverhand walks up to the party on the street.” That doesn’t quite work does it? Multiple hooks, though! That’s smart! Cole has a lot of potential, but this is, unfortunately, unusable.

• Grade: F

ABYSSAL INCURSION: The basic concept of Abyssal Incursion is that Avernus is the front line of the Blood War; thus demonic armies should constantly be pressuring the defensive lines of the Styx and occasionally making deep raids onto the Avernian plains. Thus we have three such demonic incursions designed to be injected into an Avernus-based campaign. Where the supplement excels is Introcaso’s creativity: A gargantuan, demonic worm that serves as a living troop transport/tank. A war barge that carries maze-gates linked to the Abyss which can spit out demon strike forces onto the banks of the Styx.  These are fantastic concepts.

Where Abyssal Incursions comes up a bit short for me is its actual utility: Billed as a supplement for Descent Into Avernus (a campaign for 1^st to 13^th level characters), both Baphomet’s battle barge and Yeenoghu’s worm feature impossibly difficult demon armies. Despite this, they are both primarily (and almost exclusively) presented through the lens of combat. For example, the notes for roleplaying the CR 23 Baphomet (who is accompanied by a literal horde of demons and can summon even more three times per day) are: “Unless the characters find a way to gain the upper hand, the Horned King attacks them on sight.” and the story hooks include things like, “The characters want to kill … Baphomet.”

(And if the PCs do kill Baphomet, it causes the battle barge to immediately spit out three more demon hordes.)

This would be very useful for a higher level campaign in Avernus, however. (Or perhaps scenarios in which the PCs can gather a horde of their own to go demon hunting.) And, as of this writing, I’m planning to use the third incursion (a crashed elemental galleon from Eberron that’s crashed on the banks of the Styx) in my Avernian hexcrawl. So very much recommended.

• Grade: B-

More DMs Guild Capsule Reviews – Go to the Avernus Remix

Go to Table of Contents

We’re going to use a game structure called streetcrawling. You rarely want to track movement in an urban environment street by street (see The Art of Pacing), but there are occasions where the city is perilous, confusing, difficult, and/or treacherous enough that the PCs have to crawl through the streets (in much the same way that they might crawl through a dungeon or explore a hexcrawl). Lost in a post-apocalyptic city trapped in Hell definitely counts.

STEP 1 – SET GOAL: Establish the goal the PCs are trying to reach. This goal can be either specific (e.g., Helm’s Shieldhall) or generic (e.g., ‘someone who knows what’s going on’ or ‘a source of clean water’).

STEP 2 – GENERATE STREETS: Use the Street Generator (below) to determine the local street layout and the relationship between where the PCs are and where their goal is located.

STEP 3 – ORIENT: The PCs need to figure out how to go to where their goal is located. Options include:

• Their goal can be spotted from a distance. (For example, if they look around for a high tower to climb, they’ll probably be able to spot one.)
• They can ask the locals for directions.
• They can attempt an appropriate skill check to make an educated guess.
• They could use magic (like a locate object spell).
• They know the city (or have a map) and they know where their goal is.

If they can’t figure out how to go to their goal, then their first goal is actually going some place where they CAN figure that out. Or they’re randomly wandering (see below) and just hoping to stumble across something that will point them in the right direction.

STEP 4 – RANDOM ENCOUNTER: Check for a random encounter (see below).

STEP 5 – ARRIVAL: The PCs arrive at their goal.

If their goal was figuring out a way to get their bearings, then this will likely conclude the streetcrawling and transition to pointcrawling (see Part 5C: Pointcrawl in Elturel).

Design Note: What if the players don’t make orienting themselves a priority? What if they want to achieve some other goal? That’s fine. Use the streetcrawl structure to resolve whatever goal or goals they set for themselves.

In the process of pursuing other goals, they may unintentionally get their bearings. (For example, one of them might fly up into the air for some completely unrelated reason and see the city spread out below them.) That’s great. An equally likely outcome is that they’ll get frustrated trying to navigate the city when they really don’t know where they’re going and eventually figure out that they need to do something to get their bearings.

STREET GENERATOR

If you have a highly detailed map of your city, you can just grab a chunk of the streets depicted on the map and use those for your crawl. If you don’t have a map of the city or if that map is not particularly detailed, however, you can use this simple system to generate local street maps. (For a lengthier discussion of this, check out Random GM Tip: Visualizing City Block Maps.)

In the case of Elturel, the maps we have for the city arguably straddle the line between these two types of depiction. For example, look at this chunk of map:

You might look at that and clearly see streets, like this:

If you do, great. You can just sketch those local streets out on a sheet of paper and use that for your crawl.

For the sake of argument, however, I’m going to instead focus on the shape of the major streets which define the borders of this particular locality and sketch that onto a sheet of paper:

If you don’t have a city map at all to base these outlines on, you can either arbitrarily sketch the major streets bordering the area or just treat the edges of the current sheet of paper as the locality’s edge.

ROLLING THE DICE: This is a tablemat system, so you are now going to take a handful of street dice and location dice and roll them directly onto the sheet of paper. The locations where these dice land on the paper are as important (or more important) than the numbers they roll. If a die rolls off the paper, you can either re-roll it or ignore it.

Tip: You generally want to have the dice spread out across the available space, not clustered together.

STREET DICE: Take an arbitrary number of d4’s to be street dice. The larger the number of street dice, the larger the number of streets and the more convoluted the street plan you’ll generate. I’ve generally found that rolling 4d4 produces a good result.

The location where each die lands is an intersection and the number of streets attached to that intersection is equal to the number rolled on the dice.

LOCATION DICE: Location dice are d10’s. You roll a number of location dice equal to the number of locations where the PCs’ goal can be achieved in the current locality. If this is the beginning of the streetcrawl, add an additional location die (and the lowest die rolled will be the PCs’ starting location).

Tip: Streets can curve. Adding a curve when one is necessary for a street to intersect with a location die is a good prompt for adding a little variety to your street map.

For example, using the block outline from above to start our streetcrawl, we’re going to roll four street dice and two location dice (one for a goal location and one for the PCs’ starting location):

That’s not the only set of streets that could have been generated from that particular die roll. There is no “right answer.” The point is to be able to very quickly generate local street maps during the session by tossing some dice on the table and sketching out a few lines.

Here’s what the final locality map looks like with the dice swept aside (and surrounding streets added for context):

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

If you’re familiar with using random encounters in dungeons, you’ll want to make a mental adjustment for streetcrawls for several reasons:

• Cities are usually filled with a lot more activity and encounters should be more common.
• Navigational choices in the city are usually trivial or random, which makes them less inherently interesting.
• There are no rooms keyed with interesting content in a streetcrawl; the encounters need to carry more of the weight.

For example, in an old school dungeon a random encounter often happens 1 in 6 times per check. In a streetcrawl, you might want to have encounters 1 in 4, 1 in 2, or even 2 in 3 times.

Tip: For a short, simple streetcrawl like the one we’re most likely using for the PCs’ arrival in Elturel, I’d recommend just automatically slotting in an encounter. You might actually want to take the initial “woman running from devils” encounter (DEVILS!) and use it as the encounter for their initial streetcrawling move.

ELTUREL RANDOM ENCOUNTERS: I’m going to discuss the random encounters we’ll be using for Elturel in more detail in Part 5C.

DISTANT GOALS

If the goal the PCs are trying to reach is not local, then the immediate goal is actually ‘move one chunk of city closer to the goal.’ When generating streets, only roll one location die to determine the PCs’ starting location. Their immediate goal can obviously be achieved by reaching the appropriate edge of the current crawl map. (You’ll want to determine the number of chunks necessary to reach the locality of their goal.)

Note: When dealing with distant goals it will often be more appropriate to exit the streetcrawling structure while the PCs travel to the general vicinity of their goal and then resume crawling. (Imagine the PCs in a city they’re familiar with. If they’re in Oldtown and know that Old Tom is hiding somewhere down by the Docks, they don’t need to crawl their way across the whole city: They can just go to the Docks and then start crawling to find Old Tom.) In the case of Elturel, the point where this would become appropriate is likely also the point where we’ll be switching to a pointcrawl structure (see Part 5C). But it is possible for the PCs to strike out before getting their bearings (for example, they might head straight towards the High Hall after spotting it towering above the city).

CRAWLING WITHOUT A GOAL

If the PCs don’t have a goal:

STEP 1: Use the street generator to determine the local street layout, rolling a location die only to determine the PCs’ starting location.

STEP 2: The PCs choose a direction to walk. (Presumably at random.)

STEP 3: Check for a random encounter on each street they walk down.

If they reach the edge of the local map, use the street generator again to extend the map and continue crawling.

Generally speaking, this style of play should not persist for long. Context should prompt the PCs to begin setting goals. (Even if they’re just “wandering around looking for something to do,” the random encounters or street descriptions should eventually give them something to do or become interested in pursuing.)

RANDOM WANDERING

If the PCs are hoping to find something but have no idea where it might be or how they might get there, they are randomly wandering. Follow the same procedure as crawling without a goal, but roll location dice normally to determine the location(s) of what they’re looking for.

At any time, of course, they may be able to figure out how to orient themselves (running into an NPC they can ask for directions, etc.), at which point they’ll no longer be randomly wandering.

Note: Wandering randomly is generally a terrible way of finding a specific location. (Since you can easily go in completely the wrong direction and never find it.) It works better if they’re looking for a generic type of thing, since even if they miss one such thing they can stumble across another. (For example, there are any number of hardware stores you could hit up for supplies during a zombie apocalypse.)

WANDERING THE CITY: Some goals can be found almost anywhere you look in a city (e.g., someone to talk to). Other goals might be rare or found in only certain locations of the city. As the GM you can arbitrarily decide this based on your understanding and knowledge of the city (there’s one local alchemist nearby; the alchemists are over in the Dewberry neighborhood and they’ll have to crawl there; etc.). Alternatively, you can make a ruling for how likely they are to find the thing they’re looking for in a particular chunk of city and then roll to randomly determine if there’s one local to them. Examples include:

• 1 in 100 chance (for perhaps a specific location that they know is somewhere in the city, but have no idea where or if they’re even close to it).
• 1 in 6 chance (for something that is known to be “around here somewhere”; or that’s relatively rare in the city)
• 1 in 4 chance (for something that’s fairly common in the city, like a public fountain)
• 1d4-1 per locality (for something that can be found almost anywhere in the city, like bodegas in Manhattan)

And so forth.

CONCLUSION

I’ve dropped an entirely new scenario structure on you. That may be a lot to process, so let’s take a step back and do a quick recap on how this is likely to work out in play:

• The PCs show up in Elturel.
• They look around for a high place to get their bearings from.
• You generate a local street map.
• As they walk from their current location to the location of the tower they’ve spotted, you trigger the “woman running from devils” encounter (contextualizing the encounter based on the street map you’ve generated).
• After that (likely a fight) scene, they continue on their way, reach the tower, climb the tower, look around (WE ARE FLOATING IN THE GODDAMN AIR!), receive the poster map, and transition to pointcrawling (see Part 5C).

That’s it.

So what’s the deal with the whole streetcrawling structure? Isn’t it overkill? Couldn’t we just prep a locality street map of the area where the PCs appear with the location of the tower indicated? Possibly. But the reason we want the structure is because this might NOT be the way it goes in play: Players are fickle and unpredictable generators of random chaos. As we’ve already discussed, they might go in any number of unexpected directions.

This structure can easily generate the likely outcome described above, but it can just as easily handle anything that the players choose to throw your way.

Without this kind of structure (either formal or informal), your only option would be to have a GMPC tell the PCs what to do. (And then get frustrated when they don’t.)

Go to Addendum: Streetcrawling Tools – Part 5C-A: Pointcrawl in Elturel