This obsession with cleanliness (see also Japanese bath houses, and taking off your shoes when you enter a house) is somewhat relevant in the present pandemic. When you go to a shrine and wash your hands at the little shack for that purpose, it's a ritual washing to rid you of kegare. It would translate as impurity or uncleanness.
Fabled lands publishing how to#
I then asked Paul about how to represent defilement. So in Tetsubo, kusa became the apprentice level of the kanja (not ninja) profession. Interesting that it includes none of the Wiki ones apart from rappa and shinobi. Regional terms include some of those period based terms as well as suppa, ukami, dakko, kikimonoyaku, and kurohabaki. It lists shinobi, ukami, kanja/rappa, onmitsu and ninja as the terms used by period (the last is listed for Taisho: ie the 20th century).
My source for terms was the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum. Paul responded : Wikipedia has kusa as another term for ninja, but unfortunately no context behind it, whether it's period-based or regional. And the best way to go back to the roots of the profession (if indeed it has any that we can isolate from all the modern myths) would be to ditch the name “ninja” in favour of something more historically accurate. The kusa were a sort of precursor to ninja, but I also wanted Tetsubo to dispense with the notion of ninja as feudal-era special ops that was popularized after World War 2. I began by asking Paul about kusa, a group of medieval Japanese saboteurs-cum-mischief-makers that I read about in a martial arts magazine. Also, he has lived in Japan for over thirty years so is ideally qualified to advise me on both the rules and the culture. I have been adapting it to work with Paul Mason’s Outlaws RPG. That’s the Japanese-styled RPG that began as a Warhammer supplement and then began turning into a much more authentic game of its own during lockdown. There’s new news about Tetsubo coming soon. You get eight signed prints, an art book, and some extras - a real collector's edition and a window onto a magnificently evocative vision of fantastic places.
Now Jon has a boxed set of DW art coming out in a limited edition of just fifty copies. Thirty-some years later, I saw Jon's art for the new edition of Dragon Warriors, masterminded and produced by James Wallis, and I knew he'd seen into the same imaginary worlds as we had. It was the kind of view we could imagine our characters having as they travelled the byways of Ellesland. Anything could have been out there in the twilight.
A haze of rain was blowing in across the downs, trees swaying, grass rippling in the wind. It was at the top of a meadow with the landscape of southern England spread out below us. Oliver and I were working on the first DW book at his mother's place in Frensham. Jon Hodgson's artwork looks to me like Dragon Warriors was always waiting for it.
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