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Well, that's my pitch. And it's a good one.  Cover art is 'Female Human Samurai' by Sly Tiger Art Studio artist S. Farebrother You can find the rules on drivethrurpg or Amazon A few months ago I brought out the classic RPG Bushido and started running trial games. Bushido is one of those RPGs I owned in my callow youth, but never got to play. It gathered dust on the shelf, taunting me from afar. 2025 was the year to settle my account with FGU's famously impenetrable game.  It's a classic, but my Maths brain is now mush I wrote about my experience with Bushido on a previous blog. Long story short, there's been a reversal. Back when I was 15, me and my nerd friends weren't at all daunted by Mathematics; it was the cultural strangeness of Bushido that frightened us off. I couldn't think of any stories to GM in such a setting; the one published scenario (Valley of the Mists) was impenetrable. My players baulked at roleplaying inexplicable characters like Yakuza gangsters and Gakusho priests. This would have been 1982. My mum had watched the TV series of Shōgun with Richard Chamberlain - and that was as far as anyone's awareness of feudal Japan went, at least in my postcode. Now, we're forty years later. There's been a new TV series of Shōgun with Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai. I'm pretty au fait with all things Oriental, as are my gaming buddies. No one would bat an eye at roleplaying a Yakuza or a Ninja or a Ronin warrior. It's the Mathematics that frightens us.  Bushido is a bit of a bookkeeping burden. Combat is fine: it's just D&D with extra steps. The magic system is OK (although uninspiring). The system for studying skills or building gimmicks is delightful. But the numbers overwhelm. Creating a character involves numbers trickling down from core stats to derivative skills and abilities in a way that makes me marvel how people did this in the days before Excel spreadsheets. Once your character starts gaining experience and honour, studying, and training, it all gets a bit out of hand. But in a very slow, ponderous way, since Bushido doesn't want you to get anywhere too quickly. All of which is to say, I ended up writing my own Bushido rules using the D&D-derived 'Hack' system I love so much. Here it is: the Yōkai Hack. I started the project under the working title 'The Bushido Hack and my intention was pretty simple: adapt the D&D-inflected Black Hack rules to cover Feudal Japanese combat conventions and Japanese-themed magic, then develop some granular rules for training and research to capture that distinctive aspect of Bushido. I thought it would be a throwaway sort of product between more serious ventures. But it turned into another consuming obsession. It also took on its own tone and direction. Perhaps it was the cover illustration I sourced from Sly Tiger Art Studio - did you look carefully? The lady Samurai looks terrified, surrounded by shadows, strange mist roiling around her, her hand on her katana seems to tremble. It looks like the cover of a horror story. This is what brought the Yōkai to the fore and gave the game its new name. What's a Yōkai ? And why do we care ?'Yōkai' are magical critters in Japanese folklore - the word covers phenomenon as varied as poltergeists and cursed objects through to faeries, ghosts, and demons. Yōkai is a word that doesn't feature in Bushido, which prefers the dull term 'Supernatural Beings' instead (Bushido is written in a wargaming rules style that is positively allergic to romance). Bushido seems to be distinctly ambivalent about the supernatural. Yes, there's magic, cast by Gakusho priests and Shugenja sorcerers, but it's all small scale stuff, nothing that transforms the feudal setting or disrupts the historical plausibility. The Supernatural Beings are low key entities. Bushido seems to want you to play a game revolving around politics, feuds, military action, and crises of duty, with a few monsters and spells thrown in to make the transition from D&D a bit less jarring.  Tengu Samurai by Jacob E. Blackmon - the sort of antagonists that Bushido seemed to downplay I didn't want that. I wanted PCs to be courtiers and entertainers and fortune-tellers and exorcists, people with lots of social skills but very little to offer in a combat situation, who could still negotiate an adventure. That's why the Yōkai loom larger in my game. I wanted a more apocalyptic setting, where the political turmoil of the pre-Edo world is mirrored by an invasion of supernatural monsters - the Yōkai - who can impersonate people and spread corrupting Pollution by their very presence. Immediately, the game takes on a detective theme. In many scenarios, the insidious spread of Pollution is the problem. There are gateways to the Yomi World that must be sealed. There are cursed items that must be cleansed. There are supernatural intruders who must be exposed and driven out, dispelled, destroyed, or exorcised. You can't do all of that with swords and ninja flash-bombs. Of course, you can, in you prefer, play the Yōkai Hack with a Bushido-sensibility: downplay the supernatural, focus on court intrigue, duels, and skirmishes. The game allows you to do that. But I've written it to be more like Call of Cthulhu in feudal Japan, with the Pollution replacing Sanity. What's In The BookAt 240 pages, The Yōkai Hack is by FAR the biggest of my Hack-RPG books. Why so big? The Skills and Spells take up space, but it's not just that. There's a much more expansive treatment of combat, taking the light and frothy Hack-rules about as far as they can go in the direction of granular, tactical decision making without abandoning the Old School sensibility entirely. Then there's the consideration of the setting, culture, religion, technology, all of which needs exploring. Finally, I wanted lots of tables to generate encounters, NPCs, and whole stories randomly. Character ClassesMuch will be familiar to anyone who knows Bushido or Oriental Adventures (the 1e AD&D expansion). Of course you can be a Bushi warrior, a Yakuza rogue, a Shinobe assassin, or a Sohei warrior monk. The Taoshi martial artists have a made-up name but inhabit a recognisable archetype. Majutsushi are elementalist sorcerers. Other character classes required me to be more creative. Geinōsha are entertainers, which includes classic geisha but also poets, actors, clowns, and artists. Onmyōji are magic-users focused on prophecy and omens. Reishō are diplomats and negotiators, anything from a slick courtier to a gangster extorter, they excel at making deals. Seishinban are entirely made-up for this setting: spirit-wardens and exorcists whose focus is squarely on exposing the Yōkai and cleansing Polluted people and places.  Vengeful Geisha by Bradley K McDevitt These character classes have ways of dealing with many problems that don't involve swordplay. Geinōsha can extract favours from someone who sees them perform (whether that performance be a song or poem, the creation of beautiful calligraphy, or an exquisite tea ceremony). Reishō can lie irresistibly. Even Yakuza can design their body tattoos to give themselves a bespoke set of abilities. Tests & Usage DiceLike standard Hack-RPGs, most tests are done by trying to rollunder your Stat (STR, DEX, CON, WIS, INT, CHA, the old gang) on a d20. Level differentials give you a bonus or a penalty, making it difficult to succeed against high-Level NPCs or high-HD monsters. The real innovation of the Black Hack was the Usage Die. This is a die representing a resource of some sort (arrows, energy, magical power). When you roll it, it shrinks to a smaller die if the highest two numbers come up. The original Black Hack had the die shrinking if you rolled 1-2, but there are various good reasons to make the shrink happen when the highest two numbers come up. My various Hack-RPGs really lean into this mechanic, since Paul Baldowski’s The Cthulhu Hack opened my eyes to just how far you could take it. In Yōkai Hack, Honour is a Usage Die. When you put your Honour on the line (to demand respect or a favour), you roll it to see if it shrinks; likewise, dishonourable behaviour forces you to roll it too. Instead of keeping track of money, you roll your Wealth Usage Die, which might shrink after the purchase. Ki, that mysterious Inner Power, can be tracked as a Usage Die too. Pollution is a bit different, because it's a Usage Die gets BIGGER instead of shrinking. Each increase in size triggers an episode of derangement, bring your corrupted personality to the fore. When it balloons past D20 size, your Utter Calamity befalls, a tragic doom overtakes your character, from which there is no coming back. I encourage players to choose (or roll) their Utter Calamity right at the start of play, so they can bring a bit of foreshadowing into their roleplaying. Training & StudyOne of the signature tropes of Bushido and the wider 'feudal Japan' setting is the focus on skills and training. It can't just be about going up Levels and getting more powers. Players in this sort of game want and deserve more agency than that. But squaring the circle of skill-progression and level-progression is something that has bedevilled D&D for a long time. Here's what I came up with. You pick a skill or magical spell or Stat increase that you are working on. The GM gives you a Usage Die for your training. You roll this Study Die between adventures and at certain points during a scenario, such as during a 'training montage' or a moment of insight. Once the Study Die has shrunk away to nothing, congratulations: you have learned your skill or spell. Then you choose your next skill/spell/Stat and get a Study Die for that, but the catch is, it's always starts off a size bigger than the last one. This means each skill or spell becomes more laborious to acquire. Going up a Level is great, because it resets your Study Die to a smaller size. This simple system is festooned with variations. Some characters get more 'study periods' between adventures and others get more 'study points' during adventures. Some skills are difficult, automatically increasing the size of your Study Die when you set out to acquire them. Having great teachers or teaching scrolls lets you roll extra times. Every time your Study Die shrinks, Duty comes calling. Each character has a Duty towards some person or group and they have tasks for you that are certainly inconvenient, sometimes dangerous, occasionally lucrative. Each character builds their own 'Duty Table' from elements taken from their Character Class and Social Superior. Neat! Create Your Own Poetry!I include the normal milestone-based Levelling system for a Hack-RPG, but also an optional system based on discovering the meaning of your own personal poem! In the appendix, there's a bunch of tables of words culled from Japanese haiku. You can roll your own 3 word line as a 1st level character. The pale butterfly lingers Or how about: Grief softly dances You level up once you can explain the meaning of your poem to the GM and how it relates to something meaningful to your character that happened in the scenario. Then, at 2nd level, you get a 4-word poem, such as: The chrysanthemum dreams of the ancient garden Longer lines might take more scenarios to interpret, but eventually you will have a multi-line poem describing your PC's adventures in a beautifully cryptic way. Cultural ConsiderationsI know you cannot win with this, but I'll do my best. Look, I'm not Japanese. I'm not a scholar of Japanese. I've not even been to Japan. I'm conscious of the critiques of 'West-splaining' and 'Orientalising' Japanese culture and history. But hear me out! I'm not trying to write a game about Japanese history or society, just one set in a fantasy world that draws on archetypal themes in Japanese media and mythology. To that end, I don't identify the setting as Japan: it's just 'the Archipelago.' There are no real-world states, cities, or rulers mentioned. Buddhism isn't mentioned, but there are monasteries devoted to the Lotus Path and its Sages. I steer clear of Shintō, but include the Torii Path of shrines and spirits. I agonised for a while over Kami, those gods and demi-gods of nature. They are real objects of veneration in real religious practice. But I figure the term has also crossed over into general usage in the fantasy genre, like 'angel' or 'faerie' or 'djinn.' I came up with new names for the Kami of the Archipelago to avoid appropriating Amaterasu or other real-world divinities. GMs and players who bring the game to the table can make their own peace with these issues. I suspect most people are going to call Buddhism 'Buddhism' and the Heavenly Mountain 'Fuji' and call the Archipelago 'Japan' or (as Bushido does) 'Nippon.' One area that occasioned me reflection was the 'outcaste' group that spawns the ninja subculture. Bushido terms this caste 'Eta' - a term I learn means 'filth' but perhaps derives from animal feeding - whereas the modern term is 'Burakumin.' Their status is still a political concern in Japan. There is a Buraku Liberation League. This isn't material to be carelessly handled. Nevertheless, players of Japanese-themed fantasy RPGs want their ninjas - and rightly so - and ninjas need to come from some sort of outcaste community. My solution is just to name the outcaste subculture 'Tsumi,' a name hinting at sin or misfortune and describing a caste that does work that is ritually Polluting (butchery, tanning, handling corpses).  Ninja Throwing Star from JE Stock Art Where Does Yōkai Hack Go Next?There's already an introductory scenario available: The Bride With Two Faces. It's free to download from drivethrurpg and sold at-cost on Amazon.
The Bride With Two Faces takes its plot from Beneath An Opal Moon. I needed a quick scenario to playtest The Yōkai Hack and was reminded on Beneath An Opal Moon, which is a great little scenario in just a dozen pages, created by Mongoose Publishing for their Samurai of Legend RPG. Samurai of Legend is an Open Content RPG that explores an early period in Feudal Japan with admirable focus: the rise of the Samurai class that the weaponised Buddhism that came to define them. It uses a version of the Runequest/Basic Roleplaying system, which suits Samurai pretty well. Beneath An Open Moon is likewise Open Content, and invites readers "to reproduce this text and build upon it with your own scenarios and mechanics," adding: "You can even print and sell such work, if that is your desire (and we would wish you the very best of luck if you choose to do this!)." I rewrote most of the text and added more political layers to the plot, as well as encounter tables, stat blocks, and suggested magic items for dealing with the demonic Yōkai that are the root of the problem. I think that, even if you prefer Samurai of Legend to The Yōkai Hack, you will still appreciate the expansion of this scenario. I'm putting together a setting book, for a coastal city, its Daimyo and clan politics, and the local Yōkai nemesis, and a few plot threads that tie them all together. If you enjoy The Yōkai Hack then I'll enjoy your feedback. 
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I blame Shogun. If you watched the slick Rachel Kondo/Justin Marks adaptation of the lumbering James Clavell's potboiler about Renaissance-era Japan, you too will be gripped with the romance of Nippon: honour versus duty, forbidden love, betrayal, tea ceremonies, ritual suicide, all that stuff.  Oh, and quality memes. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a forever-GM inspired by a new film or TV series must be in want of a RPG experience to pursue it further. Which brings us to Bushido.  Chef's kiss! Ah, Bushido. Like Leo Woodall's Roxster in the latest Bridget Jones film, I was too young to appreciate you when you came into my life back in 1982. I was a callow youth of 15 and you, you were ... err ... well, you were three years old, and that sort of age gap doesn't work. But now, in my fifties, I think I'm ready to commit.  Tell Me About Bushido When You Were Young, GrandadBushido is a TTRPG from 1979, when it was published by Robert Charette and Paul Hume through Tyr Games, later to be picked up by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU), in a beloved boxed set. Mike Polling's review in White Dwarf, which was then my Bible for RPG wisdom, awarded it 10/10, saying "maybe the best game I have ever seen." That was why I went out and bought a copy. A copy that gathered dust for decades.  The beloved 1981 boxed set, with two rulebooks (players guide and GM's guide, as is only proper), campaign map, character sheet, tables and charts - lots of tables and charts ... You see, Bushido was very much ahead of the curve, as few reviews in 1979-1982 could appreciate. It was a pretty early entry into the RPG scene, especially as a non-derivative product in a quasi-historic setting. D&D co-creator Dave Arneson had been planning to shame his rival Gary Gygax with a feudal Japan RPG called 'Samurai' but Bushido got in there first. Not that Arneson would have finished 'Samurai' even if the genre had been entirely ignored by other designers. Nor were the game rules easy to pick up. A review in Dragon (not, perhaps, the kindliest critic of indie rivals like FGU) stated that the "rule books ... make advanced nuclear theory texts seem like light reading by comparison." That's too harsh, but the rules are not only unfamiliar but make too much use of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and are scattered around the densely-paragraphed books. All of which is to say that, if you were an adolescent RPG fan in the early '80s, Bushido was a deeply unfamiliar sort of game, both in mechanics and setting. Sure, feudal Japan had touched popular consciousness in Britain and America. Clavell's Shogun novel came out in 1975 and the popular TV adaptation with Richard Chamberlain in 1980, so we all sort-of knew about samurai and ninjas and seppuku.  But there was no Internet search engine to fill in the gaps and not a lot of books in your local library. Bushido does a creditable job of laying out the world of Nippon in the 'Warring States' (or Sengoku) period of the 15th-16th century, deducting Portuguese Catholics and gunpowder, and adding in magic and mythical monsters. But it's a huge step away from the accessible world of medieval fantasy, dungeons, and the Keep on the Borderlands. I often see Bushido referred to as 'Japanese Pendragon' which perhaps reflects the fans' love for both games, but it doesn't strike me as quite right. Bushido isn't trying to tell a dynastic saga that will enable players to perceive a cultural sweep, from Sengoku to Edo, and take part in the great events of the era. Its focus is low-key and personal: your particular samurai or monk or yakuza, perhaps his feudal superiors and clan (though these details are a bit sketchy) and what he can accomplish over a few years of adventuring. A better comparison is with another late-70s RPG with a rigorously historical setting and dense rules. Bushido is the 'Japanese Chivalry & Sorcery.' C&S was a D&D-clone with a heavy focus on medieval France, Catholic religiosity, and heraldry, that evolved into a complex game in its own right. It was published in 1977, also by FGU, and designed by Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus. The two went to GenCon'77 to present their game to Gary Gygax, but ended up pitching it to FGU founder Scott Bizar (supposedly because they took a dislike to Gygax once they met him in person, which by all accounts was not an uncommon experience). Early editions of C&S were certainly complicated; some called it 'unplayable.' Yes, Bushido has dense rules. Not unplayable though. Combat is more technical than D&D, but still boils down to a d20 roll to hit and a damage roll to reduce your enemy's Hit Points. No, the complexity is in the variety of skills and the algorithms that link them to your stats and derived stats (there are a lot of derived stats) - and how all of these lock into a rigorous system for training and study. Years later, I picked up Ars Magica and it reminded me of Bushido.  Besides the similar approach to 'mythic history' (a historically accurate setting, except that wizards and supernatural beings really exist), both games offer a sort of never-ending character generation system, where you deploy your downtime to study and train and only go off on adventures when the resources to study and train run short. On the back of every Bushido character sheet is a calendar, so you can tick off the weeks you spend training and the ones you are forced to spend travelling or adventuring instead. Book-keeping is important in Bushido. In fact, book-keeping is the beating heart of Bushido. All of which is to say that Bushido went quite over my head as a young 15-year-old. Character generation was a fraught business of flipping between half a dozen sections in the first rulebook: newfangled personal calculators were essential, given the maths involved, and every tweak to a stat altered dozens of derived stats in unpredictable ways. You have to be pretty committed to bring a game like that to the table and once you have, well, I just didn't know what to do with it. There's an intro scenario where you slaughter bandits at a tea house (at least, that's what I recall happening) and I had no sense of where to take things from there. And so the dust settled. Flash Forward Forty Years ...Here I am in 2024, contemplating the Bushido rules. I'm not planning anything time-consuming, nothing ambitious. Just a low-key mini campaign, maybe one or two PCs, something easy, no stress. So of course I spend a month fiddling around with a spreadsheet to help create characters. Who am I kidding. I'm still fiddling around with that spreadsheet, six months later. You see, I had to learn how to do Excel formulae first, so it took a while. 
Here's where I'm up to so far. Bushido has elements of both random character creation and point-allocation, but it's a maddening synthesis. Yes, you allocate 60 points between your six stats - Strength (STR), Deftness (DFT), Health (HLH), Speed (SPD), Will (WIL), and Wits (WIT), remember I said about TLAs? - so a 'Classic NPC' has 10 in each, but players will want to tweak. That's easy enough, right?  Your choice of character class imposes a bunch of modifiers to your choice, such as Bushi (warriors) getting +10 to Strength and Deftness, +15 to Health, +5 to Speed, but -5 to Wits. There's also a ton of derived stats, which are usually based on your Stat Saving Throw, which is a 1-20 value that is actually used in game play, calculated from 1/3 of your raw stat. These saving throws are then added or averaged or manipulated in various ways to produce more characteristics - and your raw stats are added or multiplied to produce your skill scores - and those are then divided by 5 to create 1-20 skill-based saving throws. Long story short, even a small change to one of your raw stats has a 'trickle down' effect, altering all sorts of saving throws, derived stats, skills, and skill-based saving throws. Seriously: how did we do this back before spreadsheets?  And then there's the stuff you can't control. A percentile dice roll determines your caste and your rank within that caste. From this derive various starting skills, equipment, money, and whether you are eligible for classes like Ninja. You might roll a high-ranking samurai with a horse, cool armour, a finely-crafted heirloom sword, and lots of sophisticated skills. Or you might be a low-ranking heimin (peasant) with a stick and an aptitude for popular dance. Did I mention you level-up? Yes, there is a reason to go adventuring rather than just train perpetually. Levelling up grants you more Hit Points/Magic Power Points, and generous bonuses across all your class-related skills, plus boosts to complex derived stats like 'Zanshin' which enables you bto take multiple actions. The granularity of all this is very satisfying. Once you get familiar with the rules, you start to see how training in THIS leads to gaining points in THAT which leads to trickle-down benefits in something else entirely. It's a finely-tuned machine indeed. Or a tutorial in Reaganomics. It was the early-'80s, after all.  Now here's the thing: not only do the random and non-random aspects of character creation influence each other in interesting ways, but they also dictate the sort of story you can tell. A scenario for a bunch of aristocratic samurai will be different from one for a mob of yakuza gangsters, or Shinto priests, or peasant martial artists. Some of these combinations are deeply implausible: any D&D party can feature a paladin, a cleric, a thief, and a monk, but it's hard to propose a good reason for a samurai to team up with yakuza and a mob of peasants. Or at least, I find it hard. One option is to ditch the dice-rolling and simply choose your caste. Fair enough. The whole 'roll your background' trope comes from a bygone era of RPG praxis. We don't need to do that any more. We can just sit down, knuckle our foreheads, and compose compelling Bushido characters out of thin air. Except, of course, we can't all do that, especially if we're not particularly au fait with Shogun and feudal Japanese adventure fiction. Everyone defaults to being a Ninja or a high-ranking Samurai. The other option is pre-generated characters: the trusty GM rolls up characters and presents them to the players, maybe inviting them to tweak a few stats and watch the numbers trickle down the spreadsheet. Bushido, One Shrine At A TimeMy friend Karl rolled up his character to launch the mini-campaign. Nakatame Atagi is a low-ranking peasant bushi (warrior), equipped with ashigaru armour, some mediocre weaponry, and a big tetsubo cudgel. He selected iaijutsu as a skill so he can perform lightning fast sword draws in duels. In many ways, Atagi illustrates the problem in Bushido: a character of such lowly provenance will struggle to interact with the political end of the game, with court, with samurai culture. In Pendragon, everyone is a knight, but in Bushido, the likelihood is you will be someone like Atagi: basically, henchman material. You might say: sure, why not? Why not run a 'thug' level Bushido campaign, far away from the haiku-swapping pretensions of the samurai. After all, I ran a One Ring campaign where the PCs were hobbits and the action revolved around Bree and its satellite villages, and an encounter with a solitary goblin was a big deal. You could run Pendragon where everyone is a peasant and no one ventures more than a day's journey from their village: the scenarios are all about missing pigs, contested land enclosures, the local druid versus the local priest, the tyranny of the knightly landlord, lusting after the miller's pretty daughter.
But maybe I misjudge the limitations on the life of a medieval peasant? Hang on, I was moved to do this by watching Shogun, remember? So haiku-swapping is de rigueur. Also: elite culture throughout history is quite easy to approximate (or stereotype) in a RPG because we're familiar with it; working class culture is always underrepresented in the historical record. Pseudo-medieval peasants are mysterious enough, but pseudo-medieval Japanese peasants? That's asking a lot. My campaign solution goes like this. Nakatame Atagi has been plucked from obscurity by the eccentric Compassionate Master Jigen of the Heavenly Retreat temple. Atagi must accompany a hapless young priest named Koji on a pilgrimage round five ancient shrines. They take with them many prayers to be recited, documents of safe passage, and a truculent ass named Fuku. The visit-five-shrines structure lets me devote a scenario to five different aspects of life in Nippon: so, Ninjas will feature, and Yakuza gangs, also noble Samurai, war, the supernatural world too. The pilgrimage conceit gives Atagi the opportunity to access elite society as Koji's bodyguard - and Koji's blunderings will occasion conflicts and problems to solve. Between adventures, there is downtime at each shrine, so opportunities for training with elite tutors. The whole thing borrows from 'Journey to the West' (or 'Monkey' if you watched British TV in 1979).  OK, Monkey was set in China - and Journey To The West is a Chinese classic - but it was a Japanese show and it makes a great RPG template. Along the way, Atagi will pick up oddball fellow-travellers. After the first scenario, the manic-depressive ronin Kurotatsu has joined the group. This will enable me to fold in new players as we go. Even with this campaign concept, there's still not enough haiku-swapping for my taste! So I came up with this 'bookend' structure. Each scenario kicks off with a scene between the pivotal NPCs, with the player getting to represent one of them. In the opening scenario, this was a meeting between the Daimyo Hoshikawa Tadanori and his courtier Takemura Haruto who is instructed to make a gift of the courtesan Lady Akane, a woman renowned for her political genius. Later, when Akane is kidnapped and Takemura is disgraced, the wandering pilgrims enter the plot at ground level. Similarly, a coda scene lets us roleplay the Daimyo's reconciliation with the villainous lord Ishida Akihiro, setting in motion events that will shape the future scenarios. I like this bookending structure. It feels very appropriate for a game like Bushido, partly because it lets the players view the plot from different social altitudes, but also because it allows an opportunity for freeplay-style roleplaying. Bushido has wonderfully granular mechanics, but like a lot of games of its era (that's the '70s and '80s, not Sengoku), it has assumptions baked into it that the PCs will spend most of their time sneaking and stabbing. There are no mechanics for social interaction beyond skills like Tea Ceremony or Poetry Composition. Rather than bolt on more rules, it feels more natural to wave them away, and engage in a bit of improv during the prologue and epilogue. That's Bushido: another 'lost game' from my youth reclaimed. Now excuse me: I have to get back to work on that spreadsheet ...
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I'm a teacher and a writer and I love board games and RPGs. I got into D&D back in the '70s with Eric Holmes' 'Blue Book' set and I've started writing my own OSR-inspired games - as well as fantasy and supernatural fiction.. Stuff I'm GMingStuff I'm ReadingGames I'm LovingStuff I Wrote
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