So what is Weapons, Armor & Castles of the Orient? Would you believe it’s what the title implies, a compendium of material originating or best known from the Orient?
I first bought this book for $5.95 back in 1984 with a much different cover but with almost exactly the same layout with the exact same information. It starts off with a code key that explains what the tables accompanying each section detail. This includes the Name, Type, Length, Mass, Dex. Parry, Attack Types, Sym. And Damage. The name is the name of the weapon, the Type is the group the weapon belongs to. For example, M is Miscellaneous, Sp is Spears. Dex is how fast the weapon is with low ratings being better than high ones. Parry is similar to dex, but opposite in terms of rating. Attack types are broke up into cut, chop, thrust and impact. Symmetry or Sym., is how effective is the weapon at being thrown. Damage is how much damage the weapon would inflict to an average target. I guess that means that a 2 would be a 1d4 to roll for damage.
The book then starts right into the weapons of the orient with clear illustrations that are spaced out enough to provide excellent attention to detail with variants drawn to showcase the differences in weapon styles. For Jittes for example, a Japanese parrying weapon that looks similar to a sai, there are three main versions with two variants. To show the edged side of a weapon, dash lines are used. The book has almost every weapon you can imagine from most old Kung Fu movies including Naginatas, Parangs, and even War Fans.
For Armor, the armor is drawn cleanly with labels so that you can see what a Kote is, what a Sune-Ate is, and what a Kabuto is. Armor has ratings based on cut RF, chop RF, Thrust RF, and Impact RF, which provides a number, the higher the better, that shows the resistance factor
For Castles, there’s a brief section that introduces Japanese Castles and then provides the maps. The maps generally have no grids so scale is provided in distance. No information accompanies the maps outside of indications of what the general areas are. For example, the map of Himeji Castle indicates different compounds but doesn’t provide any detail on what’s in those compounds. How many people guard the walls? What type of equipment do they use?
The last section showcases the maps of China and provides similar detail to the previous section. Overviews of maps with indications of what the map is with no detail.
So what about the bit, “For use with any game system”? Well, that’s true to a limited extent. You see the material itself has a non-system specific damage rating which allows the GM to convert the material. It’s truly ‘generic’ and in that sense, useable with any game system.
It’s too bad that Palladium didn’t decide to cash in on the Rogukan D20 system and provide d20 statistics in addition to the standard ones. By expanding the information on the castle section and augmenting the book with d20 rules, this book would’ve been a nice addition to any d20 fan’s collection.
The art is good and is still crisp after almost twenty years. Some of the material might’ve used some updates but it works. The layout suffers a little though as methods and techniques have changed through the years. The cover for example on this printing is far improved over previous printings.
This book is like most of the series in that it’s nice eye candy and provides the GM with some visual resources that he can plunder for his own game regardless of the system.
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