The summer of Nihon is long, and dry, and hot. Your lady love has asked you to bring her snow from Korea to cool her brow. Can you bring it back before it's too late? Will the dragons of the ocean stop you before you return? Will you survive the armies of Korea and the hengeyokai of your own province's outlands?
The characters in Snow From Korea are samurai men, the devoted lovers of samurai mistresses home in Nihon. They have been sent to Korea (or any of the other barbarian countries of the Sunset Kingdoms) to recover some rare and precious thing, which the samurai call the Snow, from a line in the popular story The Tale of the Heike where one of the court ladies says to her lover, "The summer is hot. Bring me snow from Korea to cool my brow."
It is your job as a player to make sure your samurai comes home with enough Snow to make his mistress happy, and to make sure that he isn't so terribly transformed by the journey that she'll recognize him when he gets there.
One player, the Holy Emperor of Korea, (or referee, for a less grandiose title), has the job of describing the samurais' travels to the players. She (I'll always refer to the HEK as "she" and the other players as "he") decides what they encounter on their way, and serves to narrate those things external to the players' characters. It's her job to make the journeys difficult.
Each player (except the HEK) should describe his samurai; he should write a haiku giving some idea of his character. A classical Japanese haiku is an unrhymed poem three lines long; the first and third line are five syllables and the second seven. If you're not Japanese speakers, you may want to write English haiku; don't fret too much about their length. After writing a descriptive haiku, each player should name his samurai, and his samurai's mistress, and decide secretly what the Snow is that his mistress desires.
The next step is to assign numbers to your samurais' Facets. All the players should agree on a number and divide that amount of points among the Facets as they choose, putting at least 1 in each. Each Facet describes a skill that's important in samurai society; there are three, Awaré, Kenjutsu, and Tanka. Awaré is the samurai's sensitivity, his feeling of the sadness of impermanence. It describes any deep emotion evoked by an external object or person. Kenjutsu measures your samurai's steeliness of spirit and his skill with the blade. Tanka measures his spiritual discipline, skill at poetry, and so forth. If you are using the optional Fighting School, Inheritance, and Culture rules, here is when you should refer to them. Record these initial Facet scores.
For keeping track of characters in play, I suggest that you obtain a large pile of change, and use piles of coins to represent Facet and Snow scores. These fluctuate rapidly in play, so it's less complicated than writing numbers down. Finally, you need to decide how long the game will be, in terms of encounters the samurai have along their journeys. I suggest that you play at least ten turn cycles - ten encounters per samurai.
The HEK goes around in a circle, describing a scene with each player where the samurai leaves his mistress to go on his journey. In this scene, the names of those two characters and the identity of the Snow should be revealed. Once each samurai has been introduced in this way, the players take turns describing the adventures of their samurai, with the help of the HEK.
Finally, once all the encounters are played out, the players take turns playing out a scene with the HEK where the samurai returns to his mistress, with or without the Snow. Once all these have been played, you can determine who has won the game.
Encounters and challenges are collectively called confrontations. A samurai may never participate in two successive confrontations of the same type. This restricts the options that challenging samurai and the HEK have when opposing a samurai.
An encounter is a place in the samurai's journey where he comes across something unexpected which tests his abilities and affects his disposition. Any encounter has the potential to change the samurai's Facets. In every case, the Facet being tested is the one at risk; it may be increased or decreased by the encounter. In most cases, another Facet may be affected by the encounter as well, its force being transferred into the tested Facet. We call this Facet the "source." There are three types of engagement:
There are three modes of engagement with confrontations, which Nihonjin call kamae:
To find the result of an encounter, you need a number of 6-sided dice. The samurai rolls as many as his tested Facet, modified by his kamae, while the HEK rolls as many dice as the Facet, unmodified. Count all 1s and 6s as successes for each side. If the samurai has at least as many successes as the HEK does, then he wins the encounter. Otherwise, he loses.
If a samurai has been challenged, that means that he meets one of the other samurai along his journey, and the two engage in a contest of skills. This occurs on the defender's turn, before he has any encounters. The challenger chooses a Facet to test; the source Facet is the same as when an encounter tests that Facet. Then each samurai chooses a mode of engagement and the dice are rolled as usual; the challenger wins if he has at least as many successes as the defender.
Toyotomi Chihiro challenges Izumo no Ennosuke to a meditation contest. Each man will stand motionless on one foot, under the Joong Kyung waterfall. The man standing longest will be the winner. This is a challenge of Tanka.
Chihiro has a Tanka of 4; he is not confident in his spiritual prowess, so he chooses kagai no kamae to get a +2 bonus to his Facet. Ennosuke, having spent some time as a monk in his youth, has a Tanka of 9, and so he chooses mujintou no kamae; he does not want to strain himself unduly. This means he is less invested in his task, so he takes a -2 penalty to his Facet. Chihiro will roll 6 dice, Ennosuke 7.
Chihiro rolls 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, so he has two successes.
Ennosuke rolls 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 5, 6, so he has 3 successes.
Ennosuke beats Chihiro handily; Chihiro loses two points from his already-low Tanka, making it 2, while Ennosuke adds a point; his Tanka becomes 10.
After an encounter where a player rolls the maximum possible successes, he finds a cue that leads him to the Snow. During his next turn, instead of describing an encounter or challenge, he and the HEK should describe together the scene where the samurai obtains the Snow. The Snow when he finds it has as many points as his highest-rated Facet. Whenever a samurai would lose points of a Facet, the player may decide that the Snow is somehow diminished instead and transfer the whole point loss to the Snow.
Once all the samurai have met all their encounters, find the total difference between their initial and current Facets and subtract this number from the score of their Snow. The higher this number is, the warmer the reception that they recieve upon arrival; the samurai with the highest score wins the game.
After the samurai has initially found the Snow, anytime he rolls the maximum possible successes in an encounter, it means that his success has allowed him to somehoe repair the Snow or increase its worth. If its value is lower than his highest current Facet score, it rises to that amount.
Obviously, not everyone in Nihon fights the same way. This is represented through the use of Fighting Schools. Each School has an unusual take on the kamae, a special method with a strength and a weakness. These apply to all types of encounters and challenges, not only those of Kenjutsu; each school teaches a philosophy harmonious with its battle techniques. When creating your samurai, choose one School. To use a School ability, roll a die. On a one or two, the Low effect takes place. On a five or six, the High effect does.
There are a few, rare combat schools which, rather than having an unusual take on a standard kamae, actually have secret kamae of their own. Generally, these are schools of the more esoteric, empty-handed martial arts that originated in Okinawa and China; it is slightly less honourable to be a member of one of these schools than one of the classical schools of sword combat. Using a secret School kamae is no different than using a normal kamae, though some School kamae have applicability restrictions.
Some sample Schools and their abilities follow:
Mirror and Tree School:
The practicioners of the Mirror and Tree School have trained themselves to respond to every situation in the same way, reflecting or standing still as the necessity demands. Any kamae, usable only in Challenges.
Low: Your Facet is set equal to your opponent's.
High: Your opponent's Facet is set equal to yours.
Two Swords One Heart School:
The Niten Isshin Ryu teaches that one can approach a problem from two angles at once. Unfortunately this can divide one's attention. Kagai or Ariake no kamae.
Low: Roll your Facet twice and take the lower number of successes.
High: Roll your Facet twice and take the higher number of successes.
Ocean Flower School:
The Ocean Flower School teaches that strength, like the moon and tide, waxes and wanes. Ariake no kamae.
Low: You do not count sixes as successes, but roll three extra dice.
High: You count threes as successes, but roll three fewer dice.
Eightfold Nest of Serpents School:
The Nest School, founded as a response to the Two Swords One Heart School, teaches that it is often more appropriate to approach a problem twice than tackle it once.
Orochi no kamae: The samurai takes on the aspect of the mythical eight-headed serpent who attacks from every direction. This confrontation is split into two identical confrontations, and each is resolved separately; the samurai recieves a -2 penalty to his Facet each time. Neither samurai may switch his kamae from one confrontation to the next. This kamae specifically breaks the rule that no samurai may be in two successive confrontations of the same type.
Win: Gain a point of the tested Facet.
Lose: Lose a point of the tested Facet.
Scarlet Cauldron School:
The "Akeonabe" School teaches that the best way to defeat one's opponent is to defeat oneself and sublimate the power of this destruction.
Ô-nabe no kamae: The samurai, taking the School's teaching to heart, burns away a piece of himself in the "cauldron" kamae to fuel his action. He recieves a +3 bonus to his Facet for this confrontation.
Win: Transfer two points from the source Facet to the target Facet, lose a point of Snow.
Lose: Lose two points of the tested Facet and one point of any Facet.
Inheritance: Any Inheritance Trait allows you a certain kind of flexibility that is not available to all samurai.
Culture: Any Culture Trait adds 1 to one Trait for encounters and to a different Trait for challenges; it represents a specialization in training.
There are people in the world who dabble in the dark magic of blood, mahoutsukai. Not honourable samurai, of course! But the mad scholars of Qin, the man-eating savages of the southern islands, even the otherwise reasonable aristocrats of Korea have their own inauspicious powers. These rules allow the HEK to create and play recurring characters, in a deeper and more complex way than by simply describing successive encounters as having the same people in them. The HEK may create a mahoutsukai at the beginning of the game, at the same time as the players are creating samurai. This character is her Big Gun; he can be brought out when she feels the need to give a samurai a particularly hard time.
A mahoutsukai's Facets mean something slightly different than those of samurai, since he is twisted by darkness. His Awaré is his sensitivity to the fragility of things, and his fondness of breaking them. It is not empathy and consciousness of beauty. Similarly, his Kenjutsu is not his knowledge of the arts of combat; it is his bloodthirstiness and knowledge of inflicting injury. His Tanka represents his twisted, demonic lore. Finally, his Snow score represents his reserves of unholy energy. If you are using the optional Inheritance rules, the mahoutsukai does not benefit from the "finding the Snow" rule; he must redirect Facet gains to his Snow in order to empower himself.
The first time the mahoutsukai appears, the HEK should reveal his nefarious plan to the players as part of the scene.