Hi, I'm Shao Han, and I work on TTRPGs! Here's some of my current projects: Da Xia (WIP; FitD wuxia & gong'an short stories in WW2 Singapore) Shrine (remaster in progress; Palanquin-based; xianxia, ghosts, death, karma, community) Unnamed wuxia project (WIP; loneliness, melancholy, wandering) - ThreadSky

bigprawn.bsky.social • 56 days ago

Hi, I'm Shao Han, and I work on TTRPGs!

Here's some of my current projects:

Da Xia (WIP; FitD wuxia & gong'an short stories in WW2 Singapore)

Shrine (remaster in progress; Palanquin-based; xianxia, ghosts, death, karma, community)

Unnamed wuxia project (WIP; loneliness, melancholy, wandering)

Comments

epimetrius.bsky.social•56 days ago

The unnamed one sounds rad

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

Haha that is the most Sword and Sorcery one. It's me working off sa small game I made based on @rpdeshaies.farirpgs.com 's amazing Firelights system... This is a wuxia melancholy solo journaling rpg, but I've some new ideas and will be developing it further!

https://www.curiouschimeras.com/product/swordfarer/

rpdeshaies.farirpgs.com•56 days ago

Ok this sounds super cool! Was the initial version published somewhere ? I’d love to take a look!

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

I send you a digital copy :) I'll DM you!n

rpdeshaies.farirpgs.com•56 days ago

Oh amazing !!

nickoten.bsky.social•56 days ago

FitD Wuxia has me interested cause I find the factional drama to be a really interesting element of that stuff. Can you talk more about that project/link to more info?

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

Sure! Let me collect my thoughts. It'll be pretty messy, so here goes:

For this project, I'm using wuxia deliberately as a different way to imagine Asian histories; different literary and genre traditions have different sets of expectations or permissible behaviours audienced are willing to accept.

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

for e.g. in wuxia you'll have people leaping gracefully; you don't really question that genre convention. I mean people do, but then they're not the main consumers of genre? if ppl make cracks about how these aren't realistic or whatever, it's also because they have different cultural expectations?

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

Nothing really about factionalism here yet, which is your main interest point, but yeah, like I'm thinking of using wuxia as a different way to depict and imagine the past, especially in a way which doesn't privilege Western technology, interests (especially cos my ancestors were outgunned so badly)

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

So if I write a story about, say, guns and grit, I personally feel I have to figure out who had the guns (and how they got the guns). For e.g. were they British loyalists, specially trained by one empire to fight another? Then I'll be telling a story where empire features more, in one way or another

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

So as a historiographical exercise; wuxia is kinda pulpy, lowbrow, folkloric stuff, "yellow culture", banned and by both Communists and Nationalists for simultaneously being anti-authority and anti-revolutionary. It's not "realistic" per se, but I think it can be "authentic" to popular imagination?

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

And so WW2 has a lot of existing genres and historiographies to look at it; heroism in the battlefield, resistance, etc, war story kinda big dramatic ham stuff. For WW2 pulp stories, we can accept someone running across a battlefield barely dodging bullets, but flying around rooftops, not so much?

mixuppixels.bsky.social•56 days ago

So interested to hear more about Da Xia! I grew up in SG so that sounds like the sort of game I'd really love to check out!!

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

Thank you! It's been on my backburner for a while but this year, I swear, I'll work more on it. fell down the rabbit hole of listening to oral history archives and ended up paralysed by fear of misrepresenting the dead, and then into another rabbit hole of reading Asian literary and cultural studies

fleetingxe.bsky.social•56 days ago

Do you have any fun recommendations for Asian literary/cultural studies to start with?

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

You have activated my TRAP CARD!

bigprawn.bsky.social•56 days ago

Ok, here's something I enjoyed when working on Da Xia;

"Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature"

https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/products/writing-the-south-seas-imagining-the-nanyang-in-chinese-and-southeast-asian-postcolonial-literature?srsltid=AfmBOoo-emN_qh2aSZqY2F9OyuAbxZXaZoB1GeL8FJGzU8Qzf9DWQ9d1

A review:

https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/writing-the-south-seas-imagining-the-nanyang-in-chinese-and-southeast-asian-postcolonial-literature-by-brian-c-bernards/

Project Muse link:

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/194/monograph/book/81445

fleetingxe.bsky.social•56 days ago

Thank you so much - it looks awesome and I look forward to reading it!

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