Third Edition Oriental Adventures

First, I think an Oriental setting offers a lot of potential for fantasy adventuring. There's a lot of good stuff in the AO (Oriental Adventures) book. Sure it's not traditional fantasy, insofar as Dungeons & Dragons goes. However, this isn't a bad thing in my opinion; Planescape is an example of a good atypical fantasy setting. The possibilities for an Oriental campaign are every bit as varied as that of a standard pseudo-European setting, and can form the basis for a strong campaign even after the novelty of a new thing wears off. I also felt that the races presented in OA, while interesting, were underdeveloped and badly needed fleshing out.

Second is the issue of game balance. I always liked the classes and races presented in OA, but in my opinion they were too high-powered for a typical AD&D game. First off, everyone had martial arts and ki powers. And it's easy to see that a standard fighter couldn't stand up to a samurai of equal level and expect to win, or that the standard races couldn't compare with the natural shape changing abilities of hengeyokai. I also didn't feel like going and converting every class single into its 2nd Ed AD&D equivilent (I know others have done conversions, but I wasn't impressed with some of them). Because of these things, any attempt at crossover between standard AD&D and OA were headaches for everyone involved. However, this has changed with the latest incarnation of D&D. The overall power level of basic characters has increased (for better or worse) to the point that the OA races and classes aren't so obcene now. On top of this, the D&D game is more flexible than AD&D, and many of the special abilities of OA classes can be simulated with feats and the new multi-classing system. The samurai and kensai classes practically begged to be converted to 3e format, and they did so very smoothly IMO.

While working on all this, I've played around with race and class abilities until they fit my vision of them; basically, they are more adaptations than true conversions. Feel free to fix what I've done if you don't like it, or use my version of OA if you do. In any case, please let me know what you think of it; I thrive from feedback, and will incorporate any good suggestions into my game.

Races: The revised and highly detailed profiles of spirit folk, hengeyokai and korobokuru.

Classes: Thoughts on the roles and abilities of classes in an Oriental setting, plus two new 3e classes: the samurai and kensai. Included is a new version of the monk.

Monsters: No new monster statistics are included here, but I've compiled a list of monsters particularly appropriate to an Oriental campaign, complete with comments and simple conversions.

Deities: These are quick and dirty adaptations of several deities from the Chinese and Japanese pantheons from AD&D's Legends and Lore. The information is given with shujenka and sohei in mind, though these deities are ideal for any Oriental character. Please feel free to do research if you want more information.

Honor: An optional honor system for use with Oriental campaigns.

The Oriental Adventures Project: