Playtesting...

 I have tried playtesting, it is fun, unless you are stupid and your game sucks. Then it is not. 

Some notes on online playtesting: 

Printing out the notes you have helps a lot. While electronic documents are easy to edit and have search options, when you have a printed out page, you can see it all. It helps to find stuff that you want to find. 

Having a blank piece of paper helps. I never have one when I play. I make notes and draw maps on the other side of my printouts, character sheets, uncut paper minis, and that's suboptimal. 

When making a map it's a good idea to keep one sheet for a map and the other for notes. While it's good to write stuff on the map when you're making a module, when you're actually playing, it's more convenient to put a number or a symbol on the map and write the note on a different sheet, rather than make your corridor squirm around the "GIANT SPIDER HERE!" text. 

My attention span is short. After three hours of playing I start cutting out paper minis in worrysome quantities. 

Also, cutting off a head of the paper mini that looks like the monster you've just killed is amusing for the party.  

We crawled through a Nebulith (soon to come Okinawa-themed LotFP-compatible book) adventure. The new character classes are seriously cool. I liked how the professions worked in Usagi Yojimbo game, and these are doing a similar thing, only better. 

And it's always nice to meet an NPC that you know and like. 

P. S. 

"So the floor is lava?" 

"Yes". 

One combat round later: everyone is in lava. 

Two combat rounds later: everyone checks if you can swim in lava. 

Son of the Immortal Zoo of Ping Feng

The Immortal Zoo is my comfort zone. When I'm too depressed to invent something or to dig into a new adventure, this is the place that I know and like. This is where the characters find themselves. 

Things that make revisiting the adventure more fun: 

- A new player who hasn't been here before. 

The more experienced players have the pleasure of muttering "Aha, and now this!" - they know what's happening, but the new character - and the new player - doesn't. 

- There are things  that the players don't remember well - or things that they just didn't encounter in their previous visit. 

The Zoo is basically a sandbox with immortal creatures, you can explore it in a dozen different ways. 

- The characters have grown but this place has stayed the same. 

The Immortal Zoo was built to stay the same over the years, decades, centuries. It can give you this warm, fuzzy feeling inside when you step into the familiar corridors, and hear the rustling of the Narcissus Peacock's feathers. Well, this time you've got something special that you prepared for this birdie. 

- Or maybe the whole place had changed, too.

Because why not? If the whole world changes, so can the Zoo - there can be a new manager, new animals, new monsters. Even a twist to the Zoo's magic keeping everyone alive. 

And since we're playing "Edo-era Japan with antropomorphic animals", I changed things a bit. 

The singing toad is an amazing creature in Vornheim, but it can be just a singing girl who happens to be a toad if your party consists of a fox, a pig, and a cat. I think Em, Becami and Zak discussed how replacing goblins in a dungeon with humans immediately changes the atmosphere. A maniac is scarier than a monster. Though in this case, I think the players were just creeped out by my singing every time - they never try to interact with the singing creature, they just sneak by and pretend they weren't there.

 

The goat-headed scorpion strangely fits right in our game. 

Keep some of the parts that make the creatures of the Zoo fun, and replace the other parts with something different but similar enough. The peacock became a capricious women wearing a magical kimono, the snail became a very Blue Caterpillar-like old man sipping tea. 

The drunk gryphon stays, though, he just acquired some personal traits from Zatoichi. 

Note 1: No, I don't know why did the kappa keep a copy of "What should a normal human have". He cares about his diet, I guess. 

Note 2: You think translating the song about little monkeys loving their red clothes from Japanese via English subtitles into Ukrainian is easy?!

A Fistful of Ryo

As I said before, the games we play are weird mixtures. Imagine the core system of Gold Rush's Usagi Yojimbo, the adventures written for LotFP, the characters that I pull out from every story, comic book or cartoon I've ever laid my eye on, and the names changing as we play because it's easier that way - the Sleeping Crane castle became Sleeping Buffalo castle (untranslatable wordplay between the king's English, the tyrant's Belarusian, and our own Ukrainian), which later became Sleeping Boobalo castle because I like boobs. 

And also the homerules that I also pull out of different places. Lucky numbers kung-fu from Zak, "spend XP - add dice" from Xena Roleplaying Game, weapons - I honestly can't tell anymore, I'm pulling weapons stats literally from everywhere. 

Anyhow, we played a Cube World adventure named "A Fistful of Silver". Which is a reference to a spaghetti western movie which was a plagiarism of Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" which was inspired by Dashiel Hemmett. I love it how eastern and western culture influence each other. "Fistful of Silver" takes place in the Land of Southern Daimyos, which is the closest thing to LotFP Japan that we have (since James E. Raggi the Fourth, life, prosperity, health, said there are currently no plans to publish adventures set in Japan). 

The lords are gathering in what became the Boobalo castle in our game to discuss the threat of invasion from the Emperor (who rules what is the closest thing we have to LotFP China). Coincidentally, several of the lords and ladies secretly want to hire the adventurers, each for their own reasons. One of them needs a bodyguard for his sweetheart. Another wants to start a civil war. And someone wants to side with the invaders. 

Miyamoto Usagi doesn't advise you to side with the invaders. 

Art by Stan Sakai

 

Zak's Cube World adventures are good material, in the way that "I don't necessary understand if and why this part is necessary, but when I use it, people at the table react in fun and interesting ways and the game goes well". I took the basics offered by Fistful of Silver and ran with them, and I must say that when the wounded princess mutters "I know who the traitor is...", it's very pleasant when the players gasp "Who?!" 

And it was even better when they realized that the clue to the traitor's identity that they found fits not one, but two people. 

Note: in the end, I'd say we only used about half the of the adventure's potential. You could play it like "Yojimbo", offering your services to one side and then the other and then confuse both and then hide underneath the floors while bleeding all over; you could be good little samurai and pick a lord to serve, and face the horrible consequences; or you could just steal everything and run. 

There's always a fun way to play it out when the material is good.

The Plague Pyramid of Geishu

 

 

Very dedicated standup comedian by Zak S. 

 

It's all fun and games when your players' characters become legendary figures, and songs are sang about how they saved Japan from thousands of ghosts and millions of bandits (poets are prone to slight exaggeration). But sooner rather than later, it begins complicating their lives, and your work as a GM. The characters are effectively celebrities now. People recognize them, even some spirits recognize them, and their rich and powerful enemies who want them dead because that's what happens when you help a daimyo's daughter escape and then marry her? They hear the news of your exploits almost sooner than you finish beating up another undead army. 

So I gave the characters a chance to go dark. One of the poets mistakenly wrote about how the  heroes perished in their greatest battle ever. They enjoyed hearing about it, and added some details about the heroic deaths of, uh, their teachers and icons. 

Besides, there were more troubles brewing in Japan... 

"What kind of troubles?" 

"Coronavirus... I mean, uh, plague. An eeevil plague!" 

A plague spread by a cult, which is something that the characters decided to investigate, since it was rumoured that the cult has a base of sorts somewhere in the wilderness of Geishu province, and one of the characters was good in Tracking. On their way, the party discussed if the whole plague thing was started by one of the characters who dabbles in necromancy ("I didn't do it!" "Maybe it was your evil twin". "I don't have an evil twin!" "You said you don't remember your family". "Well... I think I don't have an evil twin...").

Which led them to a pyramid surrounded by hundreds of half-mad cultists, with Dance Macabre Skeleton Musicians playing their horrible music on one of the levels (apparently this is Zak's version of bards being cool), and the Plague Standup Comedian dancing and giggling on the top. 

The characters then proceeded to make reasonable decisions. They chose not to fight with the cultists, because the cultists didn't get in their way and let them come closer to the pyramid (since the cultists are merely mind-controlled victims, killing them is easy but leads to loss of XP). They also chose not to fight with the Skeleton Musicians, because guys are just jamming a session and having a really good time. 

At the top of the pyramid, there's this comedian skeleton who yells magical jokes at people. And also the doubles of all the characters. 

"Oh my god, it's true! It is your evil twin! And your evil twin! And your evil twin!" 

"And your evil twin!"

"My evil twin? That's ridiculous!"

So, the party decides to fight their evil twins but very soon recognizes that the doubles don't really do anything, so they leave the doubles alone (if a double is hurt, the damage is magically transferred to the person that the double is imitating). 

So they fought the skeleton jokester. 

Now, his magical jokes work like this - if the victim of the joke fails the save, they are pushed back and take damage. But if they immediately reply with a better joke that makes someone at the real table laugh, the skeleton's joke fizzles. The players didn't know that but they figured it out.

After having two of his jokes blocked like that, the skeleton got rather upset. 

"He looks at you, and yells: "Your mama is so... oh, forget it!" He just swings his stick at you!" 

By the end of the fight, the NPC bard was thrown off the pyramid by the magic of the joke - then the fox samurai jumped off the pyramid to save the bard from the necrolarvae - then the pig monk grabbed the skeleton jokester and jumped off the pyramid to crash the jokester against the lower platform. Then the cat courier shrugged and jumped down, just because she had the best acrobatics and landed perfectly on her feet. 

And this, my friends, is how coronavirus was defeated in medieval anthropomorphic-animal-inhabited Japan.