The creator of the Suikoden video games passed away recently. The Suikoden games are a JRPG franchise loosely based on the Chinese novel 'the Water Margin', about 108 heroes bound together in destiny to defeat a corrupt government official. The games take this as a starting point to build up a surprisingly detailed and expansive fantasy world populated by all kinds of strange and interesting peoples, with a cosmology bound under the 27 'true runes', personifications of fundamental natural forces that also serve as the source of magic in the setting.
Magic is based around having magical runes embedded in the human body. The higher a person's magical aptitude the more runes they can carry. Typically this is only one or two, but the most powerful spellcasters in the setting could potentially carry dozens.
Each game interlocked with the next in indirect ways while focusing on a different region of the same fantasy world, showing the cultures and conflicts of each one and how they interlocked in sometimes surprising ways. It made for a surprisingly deep and involved setting compared to other video games.
I always thought it would make for an interesting tabletop game, but never figured out a good system to run it in.
In honour of the guy who made my favourite games dying, I was going to try and figure it out to run a memorial campaign in.
Anyone else interested?
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in honor of the fallen I'll go and replay the vidya
unfortunately the remasters look like shit
I don't think any kind of DnD would be good for emulating the Suikoden system, but I'm stuck on other options. Maybe homebrewing it myself is the way to go but I don't have much experience in that.
>spoiler
Many such cases.
I looked it up and they're better than I expected, but I'd still rather have consistent graphic style and PS1 era pixelart pushed to a high level.
This is why I just bit the bullet and spent the cash to get a copy of Suikoden 2 finally. Because frick the new art.
>emulating the Suikoden system
For me it's not the runes (except maaaybe the higher(?) runes that play a major role in the setting? maybe), but the part of having and developing your own castle and a shitload of playable and supporting characters to recruit. Keep that and you can change 95% of the rest and it'll still be recognizably Suikoden to me. Any TTRPG that do the castle building part right?
>Any TTRPG that do the castle building part right?
I think Pathfinder had a fiefs and domains supplement, which amounts to the same thing. But imo Pathfinder has all the same problems any DnD system has.
The reason the magic system is important is I don't want to run a Suikoden 'themed' game, I want to run games in the setting. In that way the magic system is important both for gameplay reasons and the fact its the cosmology of the setting.
to elaborate on what this guy said one of the major elements of the Suikoden games is the PC coming into possession of a rundown castle or fort, and rebuilding over time while repopulating it by recruiting various npcs from cooks and merchants to circus folk and guardsmen.
it would make a good hub for long term campaigns, with the results of the players' various adventures adding improvements and new followers to their base.
>it would make a good hub for long term campaigns, with the results of the players' various adventures adding improvements and new followers to their base.
Oh frick, I just realized I can steal material from Ars Magica's system of multiple parties.
>I just realized I can steal material from Ars Magica's system of multiple parties.
I had that thought too
I don't have that game yet, should I grab it? How does the multiple party thing work?
Suikoden 2's castle wasn't as cool as Toran castle.
The base/castle development aspect of the game is one of my favorite parts, and something I would like to emulate in a game I ran if I were smart enough.
ACKs is the best system to play a Suikoden game with.
>Lightning fast combat and easy hirelings
>Rules for building and/or running a stronghold
>Trade goods and modifiers if players want do a buy low and sell high arbitrage campaign
>Runes are easily added because ACKs is built on B/X D&D and you won't destroy the game if you add/take things away
>Rules for mass combat
It's so curious to me how the Japanese vehemently despise the Chinese, but all their traditional culture is either coped or taken verbatim from China.
>A Rich Country
I like when we can see the exact place where the worldbuilder's creativity ran out.
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Suikoden is kino, sad to hear this. rip and thanks you for making an awesome game.
What's fun about suikoden is collecting characters. I guess you could do that in a ttrpg. I'm not exactly sure how. What would make it fun? That the GM allows you to switch who you're playing between an entire cast? You'd have to have enough different mechanics to make that worthwhile, but a simple enough system that players would understand/care about the differences. Seems hard.
Collecting NPCs to interact with, I guess?
in my system you basically just get henchmen/followers, but generally its based around having a warband of soldiers you do stuff with and they level up seperately/differently than you do. Just about everything has 1-3 wounds thoughincluding the pcs and you need miniatures to make it work, so maybe..
>Just about everything has 1-3 wounds though including the pcs and you need miniatures to make it work
In other words, it's mass battle mode Suikoden?
I'm going to go through the extended cast and try to figure out a class system, but I don't think, based on how magic works in the setting, there should even be a strictly 'spellcaster' class like wizard or sorceror, but something more like an occultist who gets a buff to using runes while otherwise specializing in specific arcane knowledge.
It seems like it would work better with a classless system, where people can have magic if they want, although the way runes typically work in the game is kind of Vancian where you only have so many of certain levels per rest.
I've always liked the idea of classless systems but have always struggled to get players to figure them out.
What's a good classless system to work with for a fantasy setting like this?
Genesys has a pretty simple magic system, though the system itself can seem a bit complex getting into. Warrior, Rogue, & Mage is a simple system overall - you have only three stats. The weakness there is that it doesn't really have any social skills, so it's more about dungeon crawling.
>The weakness there is that it doesn't really have any social skills
interesting. I don't mind homebrewing stuff if the system lends itself to it
>The weakness there is that it doesn't really have any social skills, so it's more about dungeon crawling.
Rogue is the social stat, generally.
The only suikoden I played was 3. Fricking loved it. RIP my man. Hope you are in Buddehec castle, chillin with all those great characters you made.
okay so there are a couple of archetypes hard to pin down in a traditional rpg structure, but they're sort of summoners. in each game there tends to be a girl with a robot or a girl with a monster they control. rather than fight directly they usually fight through these proxies.
so some kind of summoning-ish class, but restricted to a single creature might be the way to o. like the eidolons in pathfinder (not sure, only know about them, don't know how they play irl)
>JRPG-
did a 360 and walked out of the thread
Obviously not, you stupid Black person, seeing as how you made this post.
sup gays
Video games go on Ganker and anime goes in the /trash/.
Nobody cares about some dead weeb.
I'd heard illiteracy is a growing problem but seeing it in the wild sure is something
kids these days assume you're using chatGPT if you post more than two paragraphs
That... doesn't seem to have any bearing on anything.
I had found a half finished homebrew ages ago based on 3, and just found a wiki that has the rules. It might be a good starting point.
https://suikoden-tabletop-rpg.fandom.com/wiki/Suikoden_Tabletop_RPG_Wiki
If it were me though, I'd probably use something classless. Part of me says HERO would work, other than Endurance kind of going against the feel, and it not being built for mass combat. Another option is Dark Heresy, since it has rules for most systems you need, but you'll still need to build the careers for the class types, as well as rework magic to follow the rune system, as well as do the non-magic runes like Boar Rune.
its worth keeping in mind the cosmology of Suikoden is heavily influenced by Michael Moorwiener's Eternal Champion series (the creator was a fan and put a ton of Moorwiener references in the world)
the future of the universe is stark, the goal of the true runes is to reunite, which will lead to the desolation of all life in the suikoden universe.
the purpose then of true rune bearers is to prevent that from happening by carrying the runes for as long as possible, passing them on to new bearers when needed. its also possibly why some true runes were deliberately split, to delay the reunification of the true runes a little longer.
https://suikoden.fandom.com/wiki/The_27_True_Runes
there's also not that many canon runes overall, so it wouldn't be too difficult to stat them out
https://suikoden.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Runes
forgive me if I'm mistaken but I was told at one point that at least some of the inspiration for suikoden is old school runequest and the glorantha setting, with their shared red moon empires and runic affinities and such
I can see it, particularly with the Duck Clan from Suikoden 3