Tabletop Tales: ‘Sengoku’
Sengoku is a rare gem of authors that care about a subject so much they translate it entirely into text with little editing or ease of movement. The tone is rich in history and proclaims itself for anywhere from one to 180,000 players assuming you wish to reenact the Battle of Sekigahara on a 1:1 scale. Sengoku means “warring states” and refers to the period where Japan was in civil war with little true leadership and most citizenry armed and very ready to wage war for personal honor. It’s the time many people think of when you say things like samurai and ninja. While other games view the character by default as heroic and powerful the opposite is true here.
A huge focus of the game is in clan and Japanese politics, including matters of court and honor. The very first rules the game teaches you is the circumstances and process in which you commit the act of ritual suicide known as Seppuku (right after sword etiquette of course!). Honor and Kao (“Face”) are core game concepts, players creating samurai and ninja in the hopes of abusing their rank will quickly learn this game has been designed to root them out just like the system rooted out those that tried so in real life. My big gripe with the honor rules is even in the revised edition the “honor loss formula” can cause headaches; it’s improperly explained. Several circumstances such as many people knowing of what you did can heavily multiply the loss, potentially ruining you. Information is an extremely powerful thing in this setting for that very reason.
Posture and interaction with other actors in the game world is therefore critical to success. The first 94 pages are protocol for almost every aspect of Sengoku society including the caste system, religious points and laws, crime, and the arts. It’s even suggested to use the real parlance of the time, including the times of day, calendar, and more. I always maintain Sengoku as a great simulation of an earlier time. The power structure and most of politics is centered around regional rulers and those that serve them. The imperial caste at this point in history is actually fairly weak outside of the capital; local lords are far stronger and by proxy lords with lot’s of land are the strongest.
Everybody fits in the system. Even Europeans (Nanbanjin) fit in there just above criminal and just under common folk. The game lists pretty much every profession and offers templates for every walk of life, presenting these as character template packages in addition to caste packages. Players can thus play pretty much anybody from a drunken ninja magician to a paranoid schizophrenic fisherman. Even though not samurai this does not restrict the players from fighting, pretty much anybody from the lower castes can become soldiers and thus technically be warrior caste.
This game runs on the Fuzion rule-set created by Hero and R. Talsorian games; a D6 open source system that emphasizes gritty, complex combat and startlingly wide character options. Sengoku has its own variant of the life-path system that can help sort you sort out a fully realized concept. What few actual rules that are represented in the Sengoku rule-book are heavily modified but still based on the Fuzion skeleton. This ends up representing the legality of far eastern steel very well! Sengoku offers a low, medium, and high powered character creation options, with high being the realms of pure fantasy and medium representing martial arts cinema. To accommodate high fantasy games supernatural creatures and magic are present way in the back of the book tucked besides the tiny campaigns section.
Something the game neglects to mention is a system for easing large battles asides from hints laid in the form of skills like “Tactics”. Higher ranking characters by necessity have to employ lots of people! A party of samurai could easily see themselves having twenty or so soldiers and attendants walking the roads with them. In that way Sengoku can be played like a wargame,or really any kind of game you want. Unlike comparative titles there can be a huge disparity between players social status. Players have no real reason to help each-other save for being in the same clan under the same lord. This can be easily fixed by telling the players to pick a certain caste or profession though.
The tendency of tabletop gamers is to roll up an extremely powerful martial character and act like a bully. Samurai in Sengoku all have the complication of being sworn to their liege, and may very well be “invited” to commit seppuku should they break the laws sufficiently. Though this all assumes the characters are acting publically. The rules at least mention social taboo’s only count as broken should others learn of their exploits. What ends up bothering me about the focus of lore and culture is that besides the core Fuzion rules and minor addition there is no real mechanic that sets it aside from other games besides the concept of honor; the games indie roots show.
Combat varies from dangerous to outright havoc. Many weapons deal more damage the stronger the character is and already deal a handful of six siders in damage where the average citizen of Japan boasts around 15 hitpoints. Armor soaks the majority of the damage but utilizing locational damage immediately throws away the hope of being invincible wearing it. Many weapons have specialized attack rules, can be poisoned, and other heavily detailed goodies. With foreigners being around moderately there are even some exotic weapons like matchlock rifles. Other games suffer from too few options where Sengoku almost suffers from having too many!
The game has since been revised and re-released digitally and softcover as the Revised Edition. Some people report buying the new book for less than five dollars and the PDF was on sale for $1.50 when I looked it up. The Revised Edition is purely just re-edited and none of the math or rules have been altered. This is one of the rare times that the reissue of the book is actually far better than the old issue without making the old one obsolete. Since the new edition has more conversion material for that that absolutely need to convert their samurai into second edition DnD.
Being a gigantic head-smasher of a book it’s easy to get intimidated looking at this game. “It must have a lot of rules!” or “Gee that seems too complicated for me…” might be the initial thought when seeing it. It’s 75% Japanese culture simulation built around a system where your actions have personal and social consequences. Where Sengoku becomes less accessible is the fact that you have to find a games-master that *really* loves Japan and is willing to present a complex experience based around hardcore feudal politics with bouts of extreme violence and drama. When you get to the actual rules, it’s basically stock Fuzion with some bells and whistles (lets not forget hundreds of pages of Japanese lore!)
I give it three out of five cups of tea.
