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For those of you who don’t know anything about Qin, it is a mythic-historical game set in the warring states period of Chinese history. I don’t know a great deal about the history, but perhaps this is the first point of excellence about the game – it’s section describing the world, the different nations, factions, society and culture, are wonderful – informative, clear and inspiring. But don’t get bogged down here, because Qin is not just an historical setting, it’s also mythic, and the mythic elements are very nicely blended into the setting. It has a chapter on the world of martial arts, the shadowy world on the fringes of the civilised, legalistic domains. It is these fringe areas where magic is strongest and mythic creatures roam. This is an excellent idea for a roleplaying game – it makes the setting adaptable to a variety of different styles of play, even within your campaign. Lets say you want to run a courtly intrigue game, you can, or if you want to run a monster-slaying epic quest you can do that too. You can even take your courtly characters out of their comfortable palace and have them fight the monsters in the forests if you so desired. This is the perfect game for playing what Nigel refers to as “old school wuxia” (which I know nothing about) and the more recent martial arts-house style (Crouching Tiger, Hero, etc) games, and has plenty of scope to vary between your preferred subgenre, or genres, thereof.
The system for Qin is also really nice. I’ll begin with character creation, as this is one key area that very nicely captures the genre. Character creation is essentially a fairly simple structured point-buy system similar to what you might see in Savage Worlds or storyteller/ing system games. You get 14 points on your core aspects, based on the five elements of Chinese philosophy: earth, fire, metal, water and wood. These are nicely themed to cover a range of different stats you might find in other games, whilst also telling you something of your character’s personality. What’s interesting here is that you have one aspect, metal, that is completely devoted to combat, so no having to split your points if you want to be able to both shoot and hit things. You might think that this might lead to everyone having maxed-out metal scores, but the system is much cleverer than that. You must keep your scores in balance to achieve greatness. By finding the difference between your metal plus water and your fire plus wood you get your balance score. A low balance score is great and means that you will likely have lots of health and plenty of Chi to fuel your powers. A high balance score means you are sickly and unable to channel Chi to fuel your kewl martial arts. There are also other calculation based on combinations of aspects that mean that if you want to be good at something there is always a price. This is something I really love about the game, not only does it put pay to min-maxing, but also helps create the classic martial artist as a paragon of all attributes.
The skill system is fairly basic, but has an exponential costing scale that makes higher levels much more expensive than lower levels. However, having high skills is also very useful, particularly in a combat skill (see below for why). In practice (with our group at least) this means players tend to pick one fighting skill as their main skill and buy it to level 3, and then just pick a bunch of other skills at level 1. Whilst this seems a little odd, I again think this captures the feel of the genre, and I’ve certainly not seen a character created that didn’t feel right for the game.
You also get to spend points on magic, taos and fighting techniques. These are the various cool stuff your character can do, and these are the key thing that makes your character into the martial arts monster you wanted. Techniques are similar to D&D feats and give you cool tricks with your weapons, Taos are close to WoD disciplines, and magic works in a fairly common way (you spend points to know a spell and spend your Chi points to cast it). All of these are really nicely flavoured, and there’s plenty in the Taos for non-combat characters: you can develop your social skills, stealth, investigation, metal prowess, etc. Again many of these Taos require different aspects and help you find the right balance point for your character. For example, if the stealth Tao requires a decent score in Fire, whilst the stealth skill itself uses Water, so you can’t get away with a sink stat in Fire if you want to be an assassin.
The basic dice rolling system is also nicely flavoured for the genre – it even specifies that you should roll one black dice and one white dice for the yin and yang of your action. Your dice result is the difference between the two, with doubles being critical successes (or critical fails for double zero). You then just add your aspect and skill levels to the result to find your overall score.
Now, for a martial arts game, it’s important to have a good combat system. Qin certainly meets that criterion. Combat rounds are divided into a number of exchanges. Characters act in a number of exchanges equal to one plus their combat skill, but lose actions if they choose to make an active defence. A liberal application of Taos and fighting techniques make this a quick and very descriptive combat system. I like combat systems that are blow-by-blow, so that you get a really good idea of what’s happening and that give players plenty of options to describe different manoeuvres in combat. These systems can often drag, requiring too many rolls and too complicated systems to describe the different actions. In Qin this is not the case, as there is plenty of room to manipulate things with your taos and techniques, whilst still only requiring one roll per exchange – damage is handled within the yin-yang dice roll for the hit without requiring an additional dice roll. It’s a perfect system for the genre.
There’s absolutely nothing in the system that I can fault – it’s the perfect system for the genre as far as I’m concerned. Add to that not just how well described the setting is but also the stunning presentation and you have possibly the greatest roleplaying game ever created. But, if you read this review and are convinced to go out and buy Qin, and indeed fall in love with it as I have, prepared yourself for frustration! Qin is a French game, and whilst it has an English translation partner in Cubicle 7, the rate of production of supplements for it is very slow. We are still awaiting the first supplemental release in English after 16 months!
[Review first appeared at webjam.com/the_black_orifice]
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