GoCorral

Hearts of Wulin is a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) system made for romantic wuxia stories (Hero, Condor Heroes, House of Flying Daggers). Characters struggle with issues of status, wealth, safety, and violence, just like most other RPGs. But there’s also a strong emphasis on social issues like how to have an honorable relationship with your character’s lost love who is engaged to the evil, foreign merchant. Plus the system was designed with the five wu xing elements in mind so I’m predisposed to like it. Overall it came across as a great system that I’d love to play or GM at some point.

As a PbtA system, Hearts of Wulin is a fiction first RPG. Players narrate the action and only make a roll when the GM calls for it. Rolls are 2d6 plus whatever bonuses the player has. A result of 6 or less is a failure, a result of 7-9 is a partial success, and 10+ is a full success. This keeps the narrative dynamic where partial successes create an interesting narrative with lots of improv opportunities for engaged players.

The stats that provide bonuses to a conflict resolution roll in Hearts of Wulin are the five elements. At character creation each element is assigned numbers from a pool of +2, +1, +1, 0, and -1. Whatever action your character is taking, you add one of the elements to the roll, but it’s your choice which to add. Often that choice is informed by the fiction for which element makes the most sense based off their associations. In addition to the common TCM characteristics, Hearts of Wulin provides some additional adjectives. Earth is cautious, focused, present, obsessive, disdainful, and uncaring. Fire is creative, quick, passionate, reckless, alienating, and scattered. Metal is controlled, calculating, reflective, unsatisfied, inflexible, and scared. Water is vigilant, wise, flexible, uncertain, isolated, and depressed. Wood is patient, growing, curious, overconfident, angry, and licentious. So if a character is rolling while confronting their fear, they might roll +Metal because Metal is connected to scared and fear. Additionally, each character picks one element to be their Style element which is used for all combats the character takes part in.

Hearts of Wulin keeps in the PbtA arena by having a set of basic moves that all characters have access to. Those are Comfort & Support, Impress, Hearts & Minds, Inner Conflict, Study, Overcome, Duel, and Deal with Troops. The names are evocative of what each move does. While there are more specific rules for each one, I don’t think you need a deep dive to get the general idea. As typical for PbtA, on a success the character gets their desired result and on a failure they suffer a consequence. The consequence is typically something within the narrative or the character “marking an element.” Marked elements cannot be used until they are cleared, usually by the use of the Comfort & Support move. What this marking represents depends on how the mark happened within the fiction. Is it an injury? Exhaustion? Deep dramatic embarrassment? Characters can also become Wounded instead of marking an element, but Wounded is much worse as it gives you a -2 to all rolls until it is cleared.

One of the most interesting moves is Duel because of a mechanic called Scale. A character with a higher Scale will always win a duel against a character with a lower Scale. The Duel move isn’t used to decide the winner of the duel between unequal opponents, but rather the long term outcome to the story. A large part of the game can be attempting to improve your Scale against a particular rival using the other moves. This can lead to a climactic confrontation where you stand a chance at defeating them in one big dramatic roll.

Each PC in Hearts of Wulin has a playbook, the PbtA equivalent of D&D’s character classes. The playbooks correspond to different wuxia archetypes, Aware, Bravo, Loyal, Outsider, Student, and Unorthodox. Additionally, each playbook gets to choose from three roles. For example, the Aware has Master, Scholar, and Traveling Teacher. Each playbook has a few special moves that you can choose from and each role has one unique move that no one else in your campaign has access to. The playbooks allow for character differentiation within the game and have a framework for suggested differences within the narrative as well. As characters gain experience points they can increase their element scores, unlock new moves from their playbooks, or even create their own hidden techniques (with guidance in the book for how to design those moves mechanically).

There’s plenty of optional rules to better fit the specific type of wuxia story your group is trying to tell. Many optional moves put more focus on specific parts of wuxia storytelling. The typical Hearts of Wulin game focuses on a group of wandering warriors. Two additional campaign frames provide extra guidance for courtly games and magic games. Courtly games have additional rules for tracking your influence at court and for participating in large-scale battles. Magic games have additional rules for powerful spells and monsters. All the extra rule sets are quite interesting while keeping the core of the game the same.

I was not inspired for any specific story for a campaign while reading Hearts of Wulin. After reading Ironclaw and Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades I had ideas for stories I wanted to tell with those systems, but the same wasn’t true for Hearts of Wulin. Maybe because PbtA systems are so player driven, it’s harder to come up with a defined plot until after the PCs are created. So much of the game revolves around the PCs emotional entanglements with other characters and organizations. I could design a story, but it would probably feel impersonal if I did that without knowing how the PCs fit. Fortunately, once the players are ready with their characters, Hearts of Wulin has dozens of story seeds ready to go in the book. After the PCs are designed I can see how they’d fit into those stories and I have something to get me started. After I get my bearings with the system the players and I could start guiding the story ourselves with less and less reliance on the frames in the book.

Hearts of Wulin is definitely a system I want to try. At the start of this Chinese RPG exploration I half-joked about designing my own system. After reading Hearts of Wulin I don’t think that’s necessary. The rough idea I had in my mind is close enough to Hearts of Wulin that there’s no reason to go through a complicated development process to end up at pretty much the same place this system is. Hearts of Wulin is the system I was dreaming of for playing an RPG set in China. It’s grounded in the setting. There’s rules for all the interesting parts of wuxia fiction and more. The wu xing take center stage and are involved in every aspect of the game. The game can have complex combats and encourages “keeping it personal” so that conflicts are always interesting. Everything I wanted!

If I were to change something within Hearts of Wulin it would be to add the sheng and ke cycles as explicit rules. Challenges would have to be declared as a particular element. Then the use of the correct ke element would make it easier to overcome that challenge (+1 to the roll) or using the wrong element makes it harder (-1 to the roll). Similarly, when you’re helping a friend the sheng cycle could give you a bonus or a penalty depending on if your chosen element is generating or impeding the friend’s chosen element. I think the main concern with this rule is that it might turn players towards deciding their actions based off the mechanics rather than looking to the story first. Probably worth trying in a limited fashion, perhaps only for rolls related to duels in a magic wuxia game. Maybe it’s genius or maybe it sucks. I don’t have enough experience with PbtA games to answer that question right away.

Overall, I think Hearts of Wulin is the perfect Chinese inspired RPG. Simple but great integration of the five elements into the mechanics. Great presentation of the setting. Lots of fun choices for players and game masters to make. All around a well written game and I’m excited to try it out. If you’d like to take a look for yourself the PDF is available on DriveThruRPG.