Running Demo Games of Tianxia (My Approach) Part 1

Tianxia Demo Games

I’ve had several people ask me if there are any sample scenarios for running a Tianxia game at conventions or for players who haven’t played Fate before. As we haven’t released our starting adventure “The Twelve Golden Butchers” yet, I thought it would be a good time to let folks know how I run demos at conventions and share my notes on doing so.

The following encounter should demonstrate how I’ve been teaching people to play Tianxia when I show the game off at conventions. I’ll try and include a map to show off Zones in an upcoming post, but for now let me concentrate on the general notes on how I run the game and what kind of challenges I give the players. I often pair this encounter with a second one based on the “Jade-Eyed Demon” scenario found on pages 168 and 169 of Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade. When I refer to the “Second Encounter” I’m talking about the villain from that plot seed.

Format: When I’m running a demo session at a convention, I usually have either 90 minutes or 4 hours to run a game. If I’m running a 90 minute scenario, I usually stick with the first encounter by itself. The “Highwaymen Encounter” has proven useful for teaching a number of things about Fate and about Tianxia specifically. If I have four hours, I’ll run both encounters as a single “Adventure” with the lead-in story that the players are en-route to the village with the goal of stopping a series of murders taking place there when they run into the first encounter.

It’s super-handy if the game is taking place at a table in a relatively quiet space, but I’m comfortable with somewhat busy environments as well. You may want to try and find an out-of-the-way spot to run your games, depending on how good you are at wrangling questions and guiding people through the process of learning a game system and setting while being interrupted by passers-by from time to time. I’ve got some practice with this, but if juggling distractions isn’t something you like doing try to find a quiet space to share with your players.

Presentation: I have the sample player characters from Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade printed out and kept in plastic sleeves. I let the players choose between the characters at the start of the session. Fortunately, the art and Aspects of the characters make them very self-explanatory, so I don’t need to go over the details of how their Kung Fu skills work in order to give new players enough information to make a quick decision about which character they want to play. They can learn how the character’s Stunts work as we play through the scenario.

I usually bring my Noteboard to draw maps on so I can make use of zones and how the players can move through them much more quickly than characters without a Jianghu rank. The Noteboard product (not from Vigilance Press, but available HERE from Indie Press Revolution) is a super-handy tool I was first exposed to at Origins Game Fair this year, and I’ve quickly adopted it for my travel and home games. I actually bought two and cut one of them apart to make a stack of dry-erase-marker-friendly note cards that I can use for writing people’s names or aspects on. At 12 bucks a pop, it was a pretty good investment for me. Your mileage may vary.

Index Cards are super-useful for Fate, as are erasable laminated cards. Some folks use Post-it notes to keep track of Aspects, too, and those can work fine. I find that using the dry-erasable laminated cards makes for less waste at the table and easier clean-up.

I find that having plenty of Fate Dice is useful for demonstration games of Fate Core, because it eliminates a lot of the explaining you’d need in order to use the optional dice rules. They’re simple and intuitive, though you could probably get away with using the Fate Deck instead if you are comfortable with that tool. Personally, I like to stick with more familiar concepts like dice, because it lets players focus on their character sheets and aspects.

Poker Chips are great Fate Point counters, and my preferred way of tracking Fate Points. You can also use the Deck of Fate for this, or any other counter you choose, but Poker Chips are easily seen from across a table. I can see how many Fate Points a player has, and they can look at my own stack and see when it goes down. They’re also satisfyingly weighty and stackable, giving a tactile element to them I like.

General GM’ing Guidelines:  When I’m running a demo game at a convention, I’m very conscious of who at the table is familiar with the game I’m running. I ask the players to let me know if they’ve played Fate before, and if someone hasn’t I let everyone know that I’m going to play a “teaching game.” In other words, I’m going to focus on how the mechanics work and give everyone a primer for what makes Fate different from other games. I then launch into a brief explanation of Aspects, the Four Actions, the Four Outcomes, and Fate Points. I try to keep this explanation under 5 minutes and reassure people that I’ll be walking them through the game as we play so they don’t need to learn everything right away.

If all of my players are familiar with Fate Core, I change the focus to point out the unique rules for the Tianxia game itself. This includes the effects of the Jianghu rank on movement and combat, and I explain what they’ll be using their Chi skill for. If I’m running for folks who haven’t played Fate, I simply let them know that some of the rules for Tianxia are designed for the setting and genre elements, but that they don’t need to know which is which to play during the session. I’ll be happy to point them out if they ask afterwards, however.

Beyond the system elements, I also explain briefly what makes a Wuxia game special, and what their characters are capable of. I talk about how Kung Fu fighters like themselves have near-magical qualities in this setting, their abilities including running through treetops and battling mobs of lesser-skilled warriors. I try to get a feel for how familiar the players are with the genre, mentioning movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I also explain that they are playing characters who have strong moral codes and are motivated to help those who are weaker, for the purposes of the story.

During the game, my focus is on making sure we hit the important encounters and don’t spend a lot of time figuring out “how” or “why” characters move from one scene to the next. I want to be efficient, but I don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun by trampling on their “moments” after we get started, so I let the players know up front that I’m running a condensed version of a story that could easily be expanded to cover a longer game session if they wanted. I let them know that I’ll be treating the encounters as highlights in an adventure, with a transition scene that will allow them to roll one or two Actions in order to Create an Advantage between the encounters. This usually helps avoid people getting hung up on trying to milk the “in-between” roleplaying space too much for the demo format.

Setup: For a 90-minute game, I simply say the players are on their way to a town where they hear the villagers have been having trouble. They are friends, and I have them quickly describe their characters by reading their High Concept and Trouble aspects for each other. Then I present a map of the First Encounter and tell them they’ll be entering the scene after I’ve described the situation. For a four-hour format game, I let them know the trouble they’ve heard about is a series of animal attacks in a small village named “River Bend Village” so they don’t mistake the bandits for the problem that needs solving in the second Encounter.

Also, don’t forget to pass out those Fate Points!

The Bearclaw Bandits Encounter: This is a simple map of a clearing next to a road which runs along a river. This could be a road near the Silk River, or any road, depending where you want to place it in the setting. The important thing is that the players are turning a bend in the road and that they have a river to one side and a forest to the other. They see ahead of them on the road a group of bandits or river pirates who have surrounded a farmer’s wagon and are harassing the poor man and his 9 year old son. The farmer has loaded everything he owns onto the wagon and looks as if he’s trying to leave one life behind to start anew someplace else when these ruffians waylaid them with the intention of stealing everything. Clearly these two need help and the players are just the sort of people to step in!

The Scene Aspects will help players visualize the setting and perhaps give them ideas for Advantages they could create. I suggest: “In Broad Daylight,” and “A well-worn patch of dirt road,” and perhaps “Between a Thick Forest and a Wide River.”

I let the players know these thugs look like displaced soldiers of fortune, mercenaries who have found themselves without work, so they’re “Rough and Ready for a Fight” but “Down on their Luck.” They’re also called “The Bearclaw Bandits” and have painted claw marks on their armor to show their allegiance. Other than changing their Aspects to the two listed above, I use the stats for the Gangsters and Bandits Mob on page 156 of Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade. I set up a mob of 8 thugs for each of the player characters, and then use a “Chief Thug” with the following Aspects as their leader:

Big-Bellied Han

Aspects: Lawless Brigand, Professional Bully, Can’t look weak in front of my men

For his Skills and Stunts you can use the stats for the Big Brute on page 152 of Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade, though you might want to drop his skill ranks by 1 each (Great becomes good, Good becomes Fair, Fair becomes Average, Average skills are dropped from the sheet) if you are running a shorter session. You could also drop his Stunts if you find they slow things down too much.

Incidentally, I don’t have skills or stunts for the Farmer and his Son, but you can give them Aspects. They’re not likely to be helpful during the fight, but players might find a way to use their aspects or place free Invocations on them to their advantage. The Farmer, Chan Ho, has the aspect “My whole life is in that cart!” His son, Chan Li, has the aspect “I won’t let you hurt my father!” You can even use these aspects as dialogue for setting up the scene for the players as you write the aspects onto cards for them to see.

It’s at this point I point to the zone on the map where the players will start and tell them they begin there, and ask each of them how they’ll react upon seeing the trouble. Depending on who is in the group, I frequently have players start off by trying to intimidate the thugs or barter with them. Often someone will attempt to sneak in closer to the ruffians using the trees as cover or (in the case of Sister Chuntao) simply walking along the road and pretending to not be worth noticing. These are all great ways to start the game off and get things rolling. I usually choose to use Dramatic Initiative, from Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade page 147. (In the second encounter, I often have them roll Initiative instead, both to showcase the differences and to give the villain a chance to get the drop on players.)

I also let the players know immediately that the thugs have a Jianghu rank of zero. In fact, you can show them the stats for the thugs, highlighting their aspects to encourage the players to take advantage of those aspects during the scene.

Big-Bellied Han is not likely to back off just because the heroes ask him to, because he has a large group of hungry mercenaries to feed. Additionally, he can’t look weak in front of his men without risking losing his position as their leader. Thus, it is highly likely the players will need to fight these thugs in order to rescue the farmer and his son.

Players should quickly learn the benefits of having a Jianghu Rank higher than that of their foes. In this case, the Mobs do not get any bonus for their numbers when attacking player characters (who should all have Jianghu Rank of 1 if you’re using the sample players). This means when a player character uses an Attack action on a Mob, they are rolling against the stats without any bonus for numbers, and any damage shifts they generate will reduce the number of members in that mob. It shouldn’t take long for even a single player character to defeat a given Mob of 8 thugs!

Players seeking to move to where the Farmer and his Son are standing can use Athletics to overcome the Physique of the thugs and/or Big Bellied Han (if he stands between them) in order to interpose themselves between the threat and their intended victims. This is a great moment for the players to describe running atop the heads of the bandits, or leaping over a group of them, if they want to get the feel for a Wuxia story.

I generally don’t introduce the idea of splitting the mobs or forcing them to join into larger groups for this encounter, but I keep the number of mobs at roughly the number of the players. It is not unusual for a player to get in a solid hit on the first round and reduce a group of thugs to zero threat. This is fine, the players should feel like the amazing Kung Fu fighters they are by the end of the encounter. Big Bellied Han is not much of a direct threat, but he’s clever enough to attempt to Create an Advantage on behalf of his solders or hold one of the Chans hostage. Be careful with handling this situation, however, the goal is not to defeat the players but to show them how the game works. It is better to use your Fate Points to invoke their Aspects in creative ways and Compel the players to let them see how to earn Fate Points of their own. In fact, I try to kick off the encounter with a Compel or two.

Some Compels I’ve used with the sample player characters:

“Smiling Ox, you’re a Boastful Brute, stealth and tact aren’t really your thing here are they?”

“Han Ping, I assume you’re going to Leap Before you Look at the whole situation, aren’t you?”

“Ma Wei Sheng, as a Wandering Nobleman, do you think your wealth will catch the eyes of the Bandits somehow?”

“Sister Chuntao, you’d want to say something like ‘Let’s Not Fight About This,’ wouldn’t you?”

Encourage players to try their Kung Fu stunts, use their free invocations of their Forms, and otherwise learn about the assets they have on their character sheets without spending Fate Points in this fight. Also be sure to have the players roll their Chi Armor the moment things get Fight-y, to see how many Free Invocations they can place on that special aspect (and explain how it differs from other Aspects in the game, per the Chi Armor rules). They should be able to tackle this scene without spending many, if any, actual Fate Points considering the level of opposition. That is, unless you really spend a lot of your Fate Points in order to up the challenge on them. If you’re only running this one scenario, that’s not a bad way to help them learn about the Fate Point Economy. Call attention to how many Fate Points you have left (again, I use Poker Chips to make this easily apparent) and how they can use that pile of Fate Points as a metric for how much influence you have over the scene.

If the scene is running long, or most of the thugs have been defeated or driven off, you can Concede the scene to the players. This is a great time to explain how Concessions work and to show them how you will refresh your Fate Points and gain a bonus for surrendering the scene to them. If you are running the next encounter, that’s another good reason to Concede, so you’ll be able to come at them really hard when they’re facing off against a serious threat.

I’ll talk about the second encounter and any roleplaying leading up to it in a future post, and we’ll see if we can’t include some maps for you as well.

I invite your commentary on this post! Was it helpful? Do you want to see more like this? Do you have any suggestions on teaching or running Fate Core and Tianxia? Comment below!

Until next time, stay vigilant!