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#1 mylund_the_mad Apr 14, 2009 18:03:08

So, when a friend of mine first showed me the fourth edition rulebooks- It occured to me that the minion enemies, the healing surges, the elite and solo monsters, and the c, omplicated skill encounters would all lend themselves really well to a large scale historical/mythic war epic, such as that of the "sanguo yanyi", or "Romance of the three Kingdoms" in english. The book was also the basis for a whole bunch of videogames including the most popular 'Dynasty Warriors' series. This brings me to the heart of my post: How would one go about making a 3-kingdoms playable campaign world? The classes wouldn't need much tweaking, although the 'dungeoneering' skill should probably be replaced with some kind of mass-warfare troop management & strategy skill (not many caves, ruins, dungeons or abberations in the 3 kingdoms world). Also the races in D&D could be replaced with a 'starting social cast' kind of thing since everybody would be human. For example, the high nobility class might +2 to Cha and Con (since they need to be personable and their status allows them the best medicine of the time to be healthy), they would probably get +2 to diplomacy and history checks, the 'group diplomacy' ability that half-elves get, and a 'retribution-strike' kind of thing that the tiefling gets. Someone starting out as an outlaw (like Gan Ning, Guan Yu, or Zhou Tai) might get +2 to Dex and Cha, +2 on stealth and intimidate checks, deal an extra 1d6 damage with a combat advantage (like a bugbear) and maybe something else minor, like an initiative bonus. Other starting "races" might include Scholars (Pan Tong, Sima Yi, Zhuge Liang, Zhang Liao), Military (the Xihao brothers, Sun Ce, Hua Zhong, ect.), and perhaps one or two peasant starting "races" for those with humble beginnings (like Zhang Fei, Xu Shu, and who can forget Liu Bei- who started off as a sandle-weaver?). The peasant races might be split into something like 'laborer' and 'merchant', but I havent really gotten that far fleshing the idea out yet. Running with this campaign idea, what other ways can 4th edition be tailored to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms? I'd love to hear everyone else's ideas.