Feng Shui 2

by Robin D. Laws

Ancient sorcerers. Slick conspirators. Control freak monks. Cyborg apes.

Armed with the secrets of Feng Shui, all aim to conquer the past, present, and future.

Only you have the guts, guns, and flying feet to stop them!

It’s back in all its explodey, chi-blasting glory — Feng Shui, the classic game of Hong Kong–inspired cinematic action — refurbished with a fresh bag full of ammo for a new roleplaying generation! Original designer Robin D. Laws rushes your way on a bullet-riddled gurney to serve up the thrills fans remember, furiouser and faster than ever.

Choose between 36 action flick archetypes. Be an icy-cool killer, a determined martial artist, a maverick cop, a crusty old master, a clanking cyborg, a highway ronin, or a melancholy ghost.

Fight with free-flowing bravura! Take out mooks, foes and bosses with guns, fu, magic, creature powers or the genetic mutations of a blasted future. Deploy smarts and skill to find your next fight!

Bolster your abilities by capturing special sites of power, the key to the Chi War that secretly commands history’s course.

Journey through time portals from contemporary Hong Kong to the Tang Dynasty, from the rebellion-soaked Opium Wars era to scorched, post-apocalyptic roadways.
Loaded with Game Master advice, easier to run than ever, and including a fully fleshed, mayhem-rich introductory adventure, Feng Shui 2 is more than ready for you.

Are you ready for it?

Genres: Role Playing Games, Gaming, Games, Nonfiction

354 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Writer and game designer Robin D. Laws brought you such roleplaying games as Ashen Stars, The Esoterrorists, The Dying Earth, Heroquest and Feng Shui. He is the author of seven novels, most recently The Worldwound Gambit from Paizo. For Robin's much-praised works of gaming history and analysis, see Hamlet's Hit Points, Robin's Laws of Game Mastering and 40 Years of Gen Con.

Reviews

[Brian Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

The original edition of Feng Shui is a masterpiece - easily one of the top 5 books in its impact on my gaming style. The second edition is an attempt to revamp it with 20+ years in changes in gaming technology and, to my mind, overshoots the mark. The big issue surrounds character creation, which is now so directed for immediate play as to deny player agency in a lot of places. Yes, it's great to be able to start play 15 minutes into the first game, but some people like building characters for fun, and you're going to be playing these characters for longer than 4 hours, so the time savings of 15-30 minutes at the cost of having a character that's going to irk you for 3-12 months isn't a great one.

The second issue with the templates is that the book goes to great lengths to balance the 36 templates against each other for niche protection. The problem is I will never have 36 players. I'll have 3-6 players meaning I need the templates to be broad enough to cover more than is set up for the 36 options. There's also wacky decisions like the Highway Ronin (someone who specializes in Driving and heroics in the post apocalyptic future juncture) is a different template entirely from the Driver (someone who specializes in driving, who could be from any juncture). Really? See, if you let players have some initial character customization it would be pretty clear these are the same skill set with different chrome. Or Sword Masters who are totally not Martial Artists focusing on sword. The backstory assumptions are so specific for each template that it initial blinds you to how many of them are copies of the same thing that Robin reskinned but you aren't allowed to.

A lot of other stuff in the book is good, but is it needed? maybe. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with Feng Shui first edition, but there's stuff in here you can use to strip out some of the mid 90's unneeded complexity. But on the whole it's an inferior copy of a classic.

Merged review:

Another game where the decades between editions didn't really help....

There's a lot to like in 2E (the new rules for featured foes, bosses and uber bosses make sense and speed play, for example) but two decisions mar the book from my perspective

1) the 1st edition had a very simple path through 'you can take this archetype and use our default build for a nicely balanced character, or shift it around in these ways' to 'some people made bad choices when they moved away from the default build, so we're tripling the number of archetypes and making them super-specific and DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH THEM OR YOU WON'T HAVE FUN' (seriously, when there's a sidebar indicating that once you're in your second campaign playing a martial artist or old master maybe it'd be ok to pick different fu shticks, but don't say we didn't warn you when it doesn't work out your character creation system might be too rigidly constrained)

2) 1st edition has several different levels for engaging with the system as a player - from "you have a couple shticks that are just things you can do, with no resource management" of the Karate Cop and Big Bruiser to refreshing per session Fortune die pools to open ended, make it up on the fly magic to really potent but focused and static creature powers to high resource management Fu pools for martial artists. This let players pick and choose from their preferred methods of system complexity. This was a _big_ selling point for my game group. 2nd edition instead standardizes all shticks on a single resource pool so in theory everyone has to learn one moderately complex system of resource management, except the points can be spent in different ways to do different things. It makes the OVERALL system less complex while putting an extra burden on players who don't want the system to be complex at all. As with 4th Edition D&D, there's no simple Fighter anymore, the player with the Fighter character has to manage resources as if they were a Wizard. And that turns a lot of people off.

It's a mixed bag - there's a lot that got fixed and rightfully so, but these two changes are killer for my table, and I had to reverse engineer them back out.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note-I was a Kickstarter for this book.

Great game, well written, but it tries to do everything in one book and there are no planned supplements or additions, which leaves it at a bit of a dead end. And, while you can customize the pre-built characters inside and improve upon them to an extent, you can’t really create your own.

Solid game for conventions and short campaigns, falls a bit apart in the long run..

[Benjamin]

How? Found a reasonably-priced bundle of all the books:
* the core book
* the quick start rules Hong Kong Task Force 88
* three adventures:
* We'll Temporarily Have Paris
* Burning Dragon
* Apeworld on Fire

What? I've semi-rhapsodized about Feng Shui: Action Movie Roleplaying, the first edition, which

* came out in a time when the English-speaking masses were just waking up to the possibilities of Asian cinema;
* was all about genre emulation and cool stunts (as in the genre of Asian cinema from wuxia to gun-fu it was pulling on) -- if your character needs a prop for a stunt, then that prop is there;
* had this great setting which allowed players to mix and match from the wide setting of Asian historical fantasy wuxia to hard-boiled assassins in the modern day to future cyborgs; and
* had a few too many rules for me as a reader. (I did listen to an actual play podcast, which seemed to keep things moving.)

This 2nd edition updates the 1st a bit, but not in the ways I would expect:

* The rules? There might be some things smoothed over, but in general: there are still a lot of rules. So much so that they offer a (paid) app to help run combat, and Laws adds a few sidebar tips to keep things moving. But I do like that characters have a melodrama trait that dictates whether they act out in operatic ways.
* The inspiration? Well, it's all of Asian genre cinema still, but the one appendix that gives a list of new movies to see looks great.
* The setting? The setting is updated a bit -- the time period is pulled forward from the 1996 default modern setting to 2016, and the other time junctures are played with a little bit:
* instead of the AD 69 juncture, those evil eunuch sorcerers escaped through time to AD 640 and are subverting the Tang Dynasty -- which is fine;
* the 1850 juncture remains the same -- which is fine;
* the modern day setting is updated to 2016 -- which is fine;
* the future dystopia (defined by the fight between the tyrannical government and the take-no-prisoners uplifted apes) has been replaced by a post-apocalyptic Planet of the Apes, where the apes were victorious and now have been riven into two factions, one regretful (led by Battlechimp Potemkin) and one messianic (led by Furious George) -- which is... not so much fun.

The adventures here -- from the now-canceled Feng Shui subscription service -- are a mixed bag: Burning Dragon is about disrupting an evil ritual at a Burning Man-style event; We'll Temporarily Have Paris is about having an adventure in Nazi-occupied Paris, including some new and largely unusable archetypes -- the best thing about this might be the name; and Apeworld on Fire involves stopping an evil ape plot in the future.

And as of a post from Feb 2023, that's the end of the Feng Shui 2 line.

Yeah, so? My capsule review of the 1st edition was (1) brilliant core concept with (2) uneven supplements.

My capsule review here is... well, on an RPG discord I belong to, the topic of metacampaigns came up -- those are the big story happening in published material that changes the world regardless of what your PCs did -- and I joked that they fell out of style because everything is a nostalgia play these days, so how can you have a metacampaign when everyone already knows what happened and mostly wants the original original setting.

I feel that way a bit here: there's still something so fun about the setting. (As John Rogers says in his intro, the brilliance of this is that it ties together all these Asian genre movies as a meta-genre.) Except for the update from "fight against tyranny" to "failure of the revolution" in the future which makes me sad. (Maybe another aggravation there is that the post-apoc genre doesn't seem that well represented by Asian cinema?)

But the system... feels a little heavy and old-fashioned. Another review noted that this 2nd edition felt a little like a reprint, and I see where they got that feeling.

Now, even so, there's things to like -- and steal -- from these books, from the liberal use of sidebars to give playtest tips or explanations; to the inclusion of "what might happen" lists in scenes, detailing all the fun/crazy things that might happen during an action scene if this were a movie -- which is what this game tries to be.

(That said, I do feel a little let down that the core book notes "lots of players want to go punch Nazis, but here's some reasons why that's complicated in a game like this"; and then one of the three adventures they produce -- not written by Laws -- is a WWII setting.

I might still play this, but I don't know.

[Ernesto I. Ramirez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent system. The book is both easy and fun to read. Laws gives us a different take in roleplaying games, an entertaining read and a cathedra in Hong Kong cinema in general.

My only bias would be the lack of more concrete rules for creating characters for advanced players, while I know one can twitch all the archetypes, I am the kind to work from zero to building character ideas on my head, and sometimes its easier to work from the ground than twitch what has been done.

[Scott wachter · Rating 5 out of 5]

for the record: it was me that shot Thrill Kill Mandril. I have two reason, it was too poetic and foreshadowy to not do it and that ape needed killing anyhow.