A Blade That Wanders.....

Chinese fantasy has enamored readers worldwide for centuries. Stories of martial artists, dragons, and the region's politics have been told and retold through stories like Journey to the West and Romance in the Three Kingdoms. However, Western exposure to Chinese media has always remained a niche. Asian cinema has slowly gained traction in the United States but remains a small part of the industry. That’s why a new game made by a former D&D designer is a unique tool for exposing Western players to a well-established genre.

Wandering Blades is a new game created by Daniel Kwan (best known for his work on Lost Omens Tian Xia, Avatar Legends, and Candlekeep Mysteries) and his team of creators. The game focuses on players acting as “highly skilled martial artists who roam the lands seeking to redress wrongs, help the downtrodden, and free the innocent from oppression.” The combat is built on a system inspired by OSR mechanics but draws heavily on a little-known genre of fiction known as wuxia.

The game began while Kwan worked on a setting inspired by Chinese history for his personal D&D game. Unfortunately, Wizards of the Coast’s update to the OGL arrived around that same time, a decision in 2023 that caused a lot of people to lose trust in the company and whether they wanted to leave their products susceptible to WOTC’s policy changes. That caused Kwan to pivot toward making his own system.

“Wuxia stories focus themselves around the concept of Chinese communities and the sorts of social sphere and drama surrounding martial artists,” Kwan told TTRPG Insider. “The stories are often anti-establishment and have elements of Robin Hood, but it is its own genre.” The heroes are rarely powerful individuals, but often lower-class heroes fighting for a code of honor and seeking to lift the oppressed. They come across as magical, but that’s all due to honoring their inner spiritual self.”

Supernatural elements are often missing from these stories, and anything that focuses on gods or dragons would be considered Xinxia, or their equivalent to high fantasy.

What makes Wuxia stand out in Asian media is the narrative. While the focus on action and blade mastery is similar to fiction like Demon Slayer, Kwan claims, what differentiates it from such stories is how central elements like chivalry, loyalty and the main character’s role as an underdog.

Kwan approached the game with an OSR-inspired “rules over rulings” thought about combat, not wanting to weigh gameplay down with an excess amount of rules, but rather to allow “cinematic” and “deadly” combat. He attempts to capture this through only having three classes: the “Youxia,” aka a Knight-Errant, the Scholar, and the Outlaw. Each class tries to capture a particular power fantasy in the setting, with players spending Qi to use special moves in a fight. The game draws heavily from D&D and d20 mechanics, making play easy for new parties, but it also allows for some combat flexibility, where players can choose where they are in initiative through “fast” and “slow” turns. But it also steals mechanics like the “countdown clock” of Blades in the Dark.

Capturing Chinese Fiction for Western GMs

One of the challenges associated with a game like Wandering Blades is ensuring that storytellers capture the flavor and fiction of a particular region without engaging in inaccurate tropes or inappropriate storytelling. (When talking to Kwan, I repeatedly compared the game to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Unfortunately, that is Japanese-inspired fiction, not Chinese.) Kwan and his team did their very best to help GMs with all levels of familiarity to understand the setting they can work with. “[Wandering Blades] is a complete experience for folks who have never watched or read a piece of wuxia fiction. It's also for folks who are like, die-hard fans,” Kwan emphasized.

Kwan also went out of his way to ask scholars and fans of wuxia to create essays that expand on the world of wuxia and help GMs set their games in it.

There’s also a desire to bring the game back to where its fantasy origins came from. Kwan mentioned that he hopes to see if anyone in China would be interested in their own version of Wandering Blades in the future by sending a translated localization of the game to friends he has there in hopes of seeing whether there’s a taste for the game. TTRPGs are popular in China, although Chinese players prefer games like Call of Cthulhu over mainstays like D&D.

As of the publication of this newsletter, Wandering Blades is fully funded and seeking to fulfill its stretch goals in the coming weeks. Kwan and his fellow designers are beyond excited to introduce people more to the game and have them explore its very “fast-paced back-and-forth combat,” which he describes as a “mechanically deep experience, but also one that enables player freedom” and that will help Western and Eastern audiences to explore this classic martial arts setting in all of its glory.

Thanks again to Daniel Kwan for talking to us! You can check out the campaign on Kickstarter.

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