Feng Shui

Time has a way of sneaking up on you. That's not just a pun about Feng Shui's (Robin D. Laws) setting, it's also a common cliche. And like many cliches about things sneaking up on you, you'll go most of your life thinking it doesn't apply to you . . . until, without warning, it does.

At some point, I can't pinpoint exactly when, I'd crossed a generational rift and the world I remembered from my youth, the technological and cultural assumptions that grounded my view of "how the world work" . . . it all just disappeared. Even to myself. The old world exists in my memories, but not in my daily praxis. I have to remind myself to be a proper curmudgeon.

So I'll read a book like Feng Shui and I'll express a certain cynicism - "ah yes, pirates vs ninjas, how wacky," and that's a very jaded, modern sort of cynicism. Ah, yes, of course, the brakes are off. What other way would I expect them to be? 

But that's not what I would have felt as a kid. When I was 14 years old, I'd have been, "Pirates vs ninjas? That's hilarious! How do you come up with something like that?! So random!" And I would have had a nostalgic soft spot for your rpg until my dying day.

The part that's "time sneaking up on me" is the fact that it wasn't until the final chapter, where Robin D. Laws is fannishly recapping his favorite Hong Kong action movies, that I consciously registered that this book was contemporary with my 14-year-old self and not with the cynical adult that boy had become.

"Pirates vs ninjas" is a bit of a yawn in 2025, but in 1996? A decade before the meme hit the internet? It gave me pause, made think that maybe this thing actually had some audacity after all.

You have to understand, the chapter on Hong Kong cinema actually went out of its way to explain the career of Jackie Chan. He gets a big 18 pt section heading all his own. "One of the jarring things about Jackie movies is their credit sequences: he ends with a blooper reel, except that the bloopers inevitably contained failed stunt attempts. . . At first, you're just enjoying the stunt, as you would any Hollywood shot. Then you realize, holy @#$%! he's really doing this!" 

I'd forgotten how large the world used to be. Mr. Laws wouldn't have bothered to tell us this in a time period where it was simply a well-known fact about one of the world's most popular movie stars. In 1996, we still had to learn about Jackie Chan via word of mouth from our clued-in friends who got to see foreign films in a major market like Vancouver. It would still be a couple of years before I'd receive a dozen Golden Harvest movies on VHS as a birthday gift. This was, in fact, the year when I got my first AD&D 2nd edition Players Handbook. I had no idea something this cool even existed.

I'd used "pirates vs ninjas" earlier, not as a literal description of this book's contents (it has ninjas, but the only pirates are just regular criminals at sea and not the iconic Age of Sail swashbucklers), but as an easy metonymy for the internet's routine variety of excess ("Oh, just toss another trope on the pile, the rabble demands MOAR"). But this is not an internet book. It recommends we learn more about Hong King cinema by subscribing to alt.asian-movies.

Which means its clownish, barely coherent, recklessly inclusive worldbuilding was something Robin Laws decided to do all on his own. And I respect the hell out of that. When you're stupid on the internet, people assume you're doing a bit (for example: this blog's own hot takes are probably some kind of irony . . . is what I'd prefer you believe on those occasions where I put my foot in my mouth). But when you're this stupid over mail order, that takes real conviction.

Keep in mind, I'm using words like "stupid," "clownish," and "pirates vs ninjas (derogatory)" as a compliment. It's just that before I fully comprehended this book as an artifact of the 90s, it was a mild compliment ("oh, it's trope-laden gibberish that takes genre as a dare, my favorite kind of rpg, but nothing I haven't seen before") and now that I've placed it in the context of my own burgeoning cultural awareness, it's an enthusiastic compliment ("oh, it's trope-laden gibberish from long before tvtropes.org was even a glimmer in the milkman's eye . . . that's breathtaking.")

I think the best way to describe Feng Shui is "Kung Fu fantasy epic meets occult conspiracy thriller meets gritty modern crime drama meets dystopian near-future sci-fi" but with the understanding that the strangest part of this description is the word "meets." All the characters from all the named action movie sub-genres literally meet each other. A 19th century Chinese nationalist rebel, a contemporary mafia assassin, and a cybernetically uplifted ape supersoldier all meet in a bar, following the invitation of an ancient Chinese wizard. . . and that's how a completely average game of Feng Shui begins.

Notionally, this all happens because of time travel, but I think the way this setting handles time travel really puts the cart before the horse (Wait, is that why the cart was before the horse originally? A time traveler got confused? New head-canon alert!). You could call it a sprawling time-travel story where secret warriors from throughout history wage a shadow war for control over the history of all humankind . . . but that feels to me like an ex post facto explanation. I think the clash between milieus came first and it turned out that time travel was the only type of plot that could even possibly explain it (except maybe a multiverse, which . . . probably would have worked better, actually).

My main evidence for this theory is the fact that Feng Shui is a time-travel game that really seems to go out of its way to shut down all the major time travel plots. The mechanics of time travel conspire to make all four of its time periods (or "junctures" in the jargon of the game) into semi-stable sub-settings. 

The first guardrail is that there's only four specific points in time you can travel to - CE 69 (which is cast as a high-magic period in Chinese history), 1850, 1996 ("contemporary" times), and 2056. And time passes at the same rate in all four junctures - if you spend a year in 1996 having adventures, then when your calendar says 1997, you'll be able to travel to CE 70, 1851, and 2057.  This means it's virtually impossible to intercept your own timeline. Events in your personal history (especially in the time covered during gameplay) are more or less unchangeable. Although, there's a bit of a loophole in the fact that 1996 and 2056 are both within a single human lifetime. You can't go back to last week and stop yourself from making a mistake, but a 74-year-old from 2056 could visit his 14-year-old self and, say, hand him a copy of an obscure indie rpg he'd probably enjoy, thereby changing the entire trajectory of his life. Certainly, giving stock tips to your grandparents is easily within the grasp of any experienced time traveler.

But that oversight aside, the timeline also protects itself through the power of immense historical inertia. Even if you go back to 1850 and prevent the birth of Hitler (the book directly addresses this specific use of time travel, almost as if they knew it would inevitably come up), some other similar figure will rise up and take his place. In fact, except for certain superficial details, it is virtually impossible to affect history one way or the other. . . without gaining control over the titular Feng Shui sites.

Yes, having powerful feng shui can lead to many positive shifts in fortune, including (apparently) the entire arc of human history bending towards your personal vision (provided you control a significant fraction of all the world's most powerful feng shui sites). You may recognize this as complete nonsense that transparently serves to keep the game's focus on the sort of factional conflicts that can be solved with kung fu and gunplay, rather than a cerebral navigation of temporal paradoxes. Really, each of the junctures feels like its own separate campaign world, that can be influenced by the other junctures with physical force, but which have nothing to fear from time tourists accidentally stepping on the wrong butterfly. You know, as if the time travel were merely a plot device. That's why I think a multiverse setup would have given GMs a freer hand, without tempting the players with the sort of fantastical time-based problem-solving that the book is begging them not to explore.

Still, that's an absolutely wild problem for the game to have had in 1996. "Your time travel mechanics are too optimized towards shutting down meme builds" is the kind of criticism that almost makes me think that Feng Shui itself might be the product of time travel. Like, how are you so over the concept of time travel, when nobody even asked you to put ninjas and cyborgs in the same game to begin with?

I think, overall, I probably love Feng Shui. I can recognize it as the sort of thing that I would have felt nostalgic about, if I'd had a hipper childhood, and I think I'd enjoy both running and playing in a Feng Shui game. However, I think I'd be happier with a book that kept the eras separate and merely used them as examples of how you could fine-tune the rules to allow for multiple sub-genres of action adventure. There's a difference between playing an rpg that feels like an action movie and playing an rpg that tries to be every action move, all at once.

So, you know, 10/10 for the audacity and 1/10 for the audacity. Which I think counts as a perfect score.

Ukss Contribution: I liked the "godhammer" pistol from 2056. It didn't quite live up to the grandiosity of its name (doing 12 base damage, compared to the desert eagle's 11), but I figure I can come up with something suitably epic for its fantasy counterpart.