I don't know much about ancient asian history, culture, or art. That said, I would like to run a campaign in a setting inspired by the game Jade Empire.
I'm sure I will need to invest a great deal of time researching these subjects, thus I've decided to ask for help.
For those of you who have run similar settings, are there any tools you found helpful when crafting your campaign? Where would be a good place for me to start in my research?
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Oriental Adventures, and the corresponding update in Dragon #318. Simply discard all the info about Rokugan and tailor what's there for your own needs (races, some monsters, a choice few pieces of equipment that aren't in Ultimate Combat.)
I think the ancestral feats can be used as traits, too, with a little tweaking, as well as the Iaijutsu Focus skill.
Heya...
Jade Empire, the game is pretty loosely based on what is called 'Wuxia' fiction, which is a genre of literary fiction in china, as well as now a broader Genre for entertainment(much in the same way say 'Westerns' are in the West).
Basically they frame a sort of world oriented around 'Mystical' Martial Arts, where confrontations between these Marital Artists can be about things as large as conflicts o fnations, or more often, about honour, passion, etc. Anyways, you can look more about this up yourself.
Jade Empire is thus very much based(for the most part) in a Chinese Milleu, which is important, if you know very little about 'Asia' it's important to recognize there are pretty huge historical and cultural differences between the different places.
OKay, so to get to the nitty gritty; There are a few RPG's out there that sort of deal with this topic, not sure if you want to buy into a new game just for the sake of research, but 'Qin' and 'Weapon of the Gods' while having very different tones(the former is more 'realistic' the later more 'gonzo') are both suppose to be pretty good in this regard, and the company that writes the later is making a game specifically about the sort of thing you seem into, I think it's called the World of Wulin or something to that effect?
As far as research goes? Depends really on where you want to go and how in-depth you want to get, for some simple Chinese history, I would focus on either the 'Warring States' Period, The Era of Three Kingdoms, or the Tang Dynasty. Those can give you potential guidelines on the sort of 'foundational' myths and structure.
There have got to be some good RPG sites on this sort of stuff, but I'ma fraid I don't know any and unfortunately have way to heavy an academic background in this subject.
If I were you, I would start by making a list of the things that interest me in the broadest terms and setting them out, than trying to check the 'source' material as much as possible. There is plenty of good stuff on Wuxia and Wulin on the net. Hit wikipedia to get some brief 'history' lessons of the most cursory sort.
I personally am not a big fan of the Oriental Adventures book for D&D but some find it helpful(also not a big fan of seperate 'Asian' classes, but again... well that's another screed.)
If you have speicifc quetsions, or topics your interested in I can try and help you in terms of locating sources or reading or whatever.
On the subject of the Kami, you can do some research through things like Wikipedia and other sources on the Shinto religion, or just look through 'folk-tales of Japan'. Many 'Kami' tales are very localized unfortunately, though perhaps some-one else on teh board might have a good source on those sorts of things, I'll check to see if I can find a ready easy source on that.
Thanks for the tips, guys. Much appreciated.
One of the DMs in my group designed a game based on Xi'an, one of the oldest cities in Chinese history. That might be a good place to start. Other than that, if you don't need to have your game steeped in accurate history, some themes to think about would be dragons, colors that mean a great deal to the people, and spirits in everything whether that thing lives or not.