GoCorral

I got the Swords of the Middle Kingdom as part of my journey through TTRPGs set in China. While I enjoyed reading the book I don’t have many positive things to say about the actual system. So buckle up for a mostly negative review.

Style

The presentation of the book is a bit dated. As you can see from the paperback cover, it looks like a 90’s web page. And if you missed it, the cover art is also off-center. The book itself has a few pieces of art, but they’re all low resolution line art or blurry gray scale stills from Hong Kong action movies. The author also used a LOT of circular shaped sidebars. At some points it seemed like the text was taking a bubble bath with a two page spread containing seven circular sidebars. The organization of the book is only slightly off, with character creation being three chapters later than I expected. Nothing really wrong with all of this content-wise. It simply indicates the book is a labor of love instead of a professional production.

Swords of the Middle Kingdom has an established fictional setting that is analogous to Qing dynasty China. The evil Manchus are in charge and are oppressing the good people of Wulin. The player characters are powerful martial artists or magicians who defend the innocent against injustice. The setting itself is close to China, but with odd differences. For example, the last emperor of the stand-in for the Ming dynasty is named Kang Xi. In the real world, Kang Xi is the name of one of the conquering Manchu emperors. The change makes it seem like the authors don’t really know Chinese history or they’re culturally insensitive. What they did get accurate is China’s rampant sexism during the 1700’s, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

I can just ignore all the setting issues though. If I were to run the system, I wouldn’t use its established setting. I can use a more historical version of China that my players can understand better and remove the annoying sexist elements, even if they are historically accurate. I’m also more interested in the pre-Tang setting where the emperor is powerful but not malevolent. All easy things to ignore in the book. We take what’s useful and leave the rest!

Actions and Combat

For the actual system, Swords of the Middle Kingdom uses a d20 action resolution system. Every character has seven stats and they’re ranked from 11-20 for PCs. There are also specialties that go from 1-5. When you take action, you add together the relevant stat and specialty and add that to the d20 roll for your final result. Target numbers are known by the players and range from 10 for easy tasks up to 40 for impossible tasks.

Combat in Swords of the Middle Kingdom feels insane. At the start of combat you roll a d20 plus your Speed stat and subtract a number based off what you plan to do. The result is how many actions you get that turn. The subtracted number is usually 15, so with varying Speed stats you could have 25 actions or just 1 in a turn. These actions can be combined to improve your effects. So instead of attacking 25 times, you could attack once with a +24 modifier from the other 24 actions. There’s an additional Chi pool that lets you take on more bonuses beyond what you rolled.

On the face, this makes sense and you can understand it, but it sounds miserable to actually play. First, if your Speed stat stinks you might be stuck with never getting to do much. So from a game theory perspective, everyone should prioritize the Speed stat. Second, the authors didn’t seem to consider that characters would deal more damage by attacking 25 times than making one big attack. With target numbers being a known quantity for players there is always an optimized choice that players should be making on how many points should be used for extra attacks versus boosting the attacks. So combat becomes a pure math problem to discover your optimum choices instead of a fun game.

There’s plenty of odd fiddly bits for combat as well. If you roll a 1 on an attack, then your enemy gets to make a free attack against you with a +5 bonus. You’re allowed to use your actions for defense, but its actually difficult to roll a higher defense roll than your passive defense, so that seems useless. There are a lot of attacks that trip people, but there’s no stated benefit to attacking a prone person. It just denies them 1 action next turn, but I used an action of mine to attempt to impose that condition. Why would I ever spend an action if the only benefit is it might cause my opponent to spend an action as well?

Actually getting hit in Swords of the Middle Kingdom is a more interesting experience than in D&D. Characters have effectively two hit point pools, Form and Focus. When you are hit you can assign damage as you choose between Form and Focus. Form is for physical damage. As you lose Form your physical stats get weaker. Focus represents your will to fight. As you lose Focus you find yourself unable to use your best kungfu moves as you give in to despair. Every character is also constantly regenerating their pools as the fight continues.

I’ll summarize combat here. At the start of a round in Swords of the Middle Kingdom you regenerate some of your wounds. Then you and everyone else rolls Speed. Your decide what you want to do based off your roll and it also decides the order you act in. You might get to take 25 actions and destroy all the bad guys. Or you might get just 1 action and use it to cry. You could use your actions to do special kungfu moves, but most of them aren’t better than just a basic punch because they take multiple actions and are thus inefficient.

Experience Points and GMing

Experience points are yet another bizarre part of Swords of the Middle Kingdom. They’re called Hero points and they have a rate of diminishing returns to increase your stats. The smallest increase from 11 to 12 costs 60 Hero points. Doesn’t seem like much, but the ONLY way to gain Hero points is by performing stunts. Stunts are used to adjudicate anything that the rules don’t normally cover. An average stunt of difficulty 20 gets you 1 Hero point while an impossible stunt of difficulty 40 gets you 5 Hero points. Really an abysmal rate where it seems like you’d never level up unless you’re constantly doing stunts. But stunts are an inefficient use of actions in combat because they do everything except remove enemies. So the game has an incentive to do cool, but ineffective stuff. The best use of your actions for leveling up would be to do cartwheels around a low level bad guy while he constantly misses you with his sword.

GMs get lots of resources for understanding the setting and designing adventures in Swords of the Middle Kingdom. I feel like many independent TTRPG books forget that the game master also needs to be taught what they’re doing with the book. There’s plenty of help in Swords of the Middle Kingdom. There’s about 50 pages of general guidance on how to construct fun adventures. And there’s another 100 pages of setting information that is chockful of adventure ideas you can use. The game also encourages keeping a loose hold of the plot as players can also assert control. Hero points have an additional use for “rewriting the script” where a player can change a fact in the narrative. Different changes have different costs in Hero points, but the mere existence of this mechanic is a helpful reminder that RPGs are cooperative games where players and GMs work together to have fun.

Personal Preference

Swords of the Middle Kingdom does a good job of representing Chinese cultural concepts but not the ones I’m interested in. Wu xing and the zodiac are present, featuring in the game’s calendar of historical events. The elements are also used to describe some abilities, but there’s no mechanical effect associated with them. The Three Ways are absent because it’s a fictional setting. What is present is the I Ching, the ancient Chinese guide to divination. The I Ching is still used today for a Chinese equivalent to tarot reading but with greater cultural status as many prominent figures refer to it openly. Swords of the Middle Kingdom based its magic system off the different readings from the I Ching. For all the general Chinese culture, Swords of the Middle Kingdom misses the mark on some pieces and it’s set in Qing which I’m not interested for my future China campaign.

Swords of the Middle Kingdom isn’t the right game for me. You might think it’s the right game for you though, even after all the flaws I’ve exposed. If that’s the case, it’s getting harder and harder to get a copy. Swords of the Middle Kingdom never had a digital PDF release, possibly because the copyright owner is no longer clear after almost 30 years. The best place to get the book for yourself would be to go on eBay.