Making a Kung-Fu style in Lone Wolf Fists PART 1

Development on Lone Wolf Fists proceeds apace: just put a bow on the GM chapter this week. For those of you keeping score at home: that gives us the holy trinity of Rules, Character Creation and Process that you need to run campaigns. If you’d like access to those rules and you aren’t already, drop me two monthly dollars american and you can start that home game I like to imagine you’ve been planning these last few years.

Yeah it’s a plug. Don’t judge me, this is how I afford art!

As the process for making this game evolves, I’ve found that I’m developing something of a technique for making new Kung-Fu styles. This is exciting for me, because I feel like the lifeblood of this game is going to be an ever-increasing library of styles both official and guerrilla. Up til now I’ve struggled to hammer down anything that’s readily repeatable by others for making styles; some principles have emerged, though, in this latest musing that I think will further demystify style creation.

Step 1: Lead with inspiration

There are three images that got stuck in my brain recently. In no particular order:

I wasn’t, in other words, considering an unfulfilled tactical niche or pondering some high-minded trinket of untapped rules space. I had cool images in my head and I realized the reason they were stuck there was because I hadn’t put them in the game yet.

I think that’s a really important philosophical truism of design for this game: it’s vision-first, mechanics-after. Its real, real easy to bust this game; just throw the cost/reward equation for a Technique and it’s a “one-true-way” and sucks. You have to come to come to the system with good intentions; you have to come to it trying to bring something awesome into it. If you design to break it, it’s fucked.

That was revelatory. To prevent the rules-first design that plagues games like Pathfinder, you just can’t start with rules. You’ve got to start with what a soulless business-type would call a “creative vision” but I’ll have no such charity for: you’ve gotta start with a kickass idea.

In this case, my idea was “Man, wouldn’t it be cool for those five things to be in a style?”

Step 2: Write the moves that leap out at you

Continuing with this unintuitive “stream of consciousness” design, I also discovered that you can’t look at the grid of necessary Techniques that comprise a style and try to fill in the blanks. That way lies fucking boredom; box-ticking and space-filling and mechanics-first decision making.

This thing, which I just created to tell you to ignore it

Instead, I find that trying to articulate those images into the rules was the better doorway. You can think of them in terms of tiers later; getting the big ideas on paper is the more important thing at this stage.

So like, that kickass invisible shield thing that Goku is doing in image 3 up there; there’s actually two ways to articulate that which immediately sprung to mind when I started writing. The first is a kai shout that has a tangible effect; something kinetic like breaking rocks and hurling people away. The second is that incredible image of attacks smashing harmlessly against an unseen bubble or repellant force. From there it was pretty easy to take the tools of Technique and cobble together some brief notes:

Kai shout: scream big, pushes and scares motherfuckers. Breaks stuff

Invisible energy shield: deflects ranged attacks, energy, environmental effect

The scream-beam and lil’ V’s laser-hand, more specifically a chaotic version that you can “spill” if it fucks up, inspired to the following notes:

Power puke: energy-projectile, no limbs required (yes I stole this name from Primal Roar, no I am not ashamed)

Power stream: Kamehameha if you use 2 hands, but you can do it with 1 hand and risk losing control of it

Muscly Maraxus and the relatively tiny Lord Humongous make me want to make Power the focus of this emerging style. Also, I want a power that gets you swole af:

Boring power thing: Cheap, boosts power, maybe also a grab

Swole AF: Boost your Effortless Power, gives you Ferocity, makes you just huge as shit

Man, we got six whole Technique-seeds there! And there’s an implication of more.

Step 3: Uhhhhhh

Yeah this step was kind’ve… Obscure. I just wrote some stuff that felt right for the Supreme and a few Novice Techs. I don’t really remember the chemistry for it, so apologies (I was at work: these are literally on a post-it note).

Pictured: inspiration?

I THINK…. Maybe, that I was trying to box-tick at this point. Fill up that chart I told you to ignore. And Maybe that’s good for this step. Actually, fuck it, do-over:

Actual Step 3: Okay fill in the boxes, fine

I knew I made this for a reason

I’M BACK, MOTHERFUCKERS

Now you can take that stuff from Step 2 and find a place that feels right for it. The breakdown is kinda like:

Forms are tricks and specialties of the non-magic part of the style: IE; crane style would be kicks, drunk monkey would have some rolls or feints.
Novice techs are the signature power moves or a fighting style; Guile’s sonic boom, Scorpion’s rope-dart-grab, Ryu’s hadoken. Flashy but quick and easy to pull off, they’re staples of the style.
Expert Techniques are special power moves, the “Hissatsu waza”, the fucking Kamehameha waves and special-beam-mistranslation-cannons and such that feel awesome to pull off and horrifying to defend against.
Master level are those unfair “boss only” bullshit moves that are way too powerful for puny, pathetic PCs to get their grubby mitts on. Tessai’s stone-skin technique, Goku’s Kioken, or literally anything that cheesy bitch Amakusa throws at you in the first Samurai Shodown.

Fuck you fuck you fuck you ffffffFFFFUCK YOUUUUU

Supreme Techniques are less kung-fu and more nuclear missile. They don’t so much end fights as they end civilizations. Alternatively, they make you into some kind of god. The Spirit bomb/Genki Dhama, Genma’s ludicrous immortality, that last comsic breath that wiped out NeoTokyo in Akira, that kind of shit.

So in this step, you can compare what you’ve written down to those categories and fill in the boxes. It’s also a good time to put some character into the less flashy but more functional parts of the style; throwing a punch or kick can feel a lot different depending on how you characterize it, and even small changes at the small scale make the moves feel really distinct.

So for the big boom, I think a punch that levels mountains works:

Fist of God: Just a big motherfuckin’ punch

And some of the Novice-levels should be savage:

Jaw-Breaking Kick

Gut-Buster Punch

Bone-Ripper Grip

Bullet-Catching Finger

(Names are enough for right now; the full Techniques won’t be much more complex than all the others)

Then we can arrange these space-fillers with those more characterful moves, and we wind up with something sexy like this:

Look at this sexy beast

Now THAT has the makings of a proper LWF style!

NEXT TIME

I’m gonna cut this short, because the next bit is both work-intensive and design-intensive. I’m also gonna discuss where I run into the majority of issues with taking a style from inspiration to reality, so it will take a bit of writing to do some justice. Until then, excelsior!