written by chris pramas
published by ronin publishing
128 pages

Did you see the body? If you didn't actually see the body, I mean really see it and touch it and drive a unicycle over it a couple of times, it's not dead. I don't know how much clearer I can make this. Sure, Daedalus Entertainment is dead. No question there. But Feng Shui? How can a game so sweet, so smooth, so slaperiffic, be dead? I mean, people are still playing The Morrow Project, fer cryin' out loud, so how can Feng Shui be dead?

Well, it's not, Dead, that is. The Blood of the Valiant is the new release from Ronin Publishing, and it's nigh-128 pages of beautiful, ass-kicking life forced into the heart of the greatest of the "alt-action" RPGs. It's welt-laid out and just plain nice to look at. This is the Guiding Hand sourcebook, centering on the Confucian time-traveling conspiratorial Shaolin masters (ad ectives that warm the cockles of any gainer's heart, surely) under the ineffable Quan Lo.

It begins with the history and philosophy of the Guiding Hand, tying them elegantly into the history of China and philosophy of Confucianism. These two chapters alone could serve as models of how to tie campaign weirdness into the Real World. Pramas takes Robin Laws' smackalicious redaction of two decades' worth of kung fu movie plots and weaves in the foundation of the Shaolin monasteries, the Opium Wars, the legends of the Sage Emperors, and keeps it all game-relevant and fight -startlingly fun.

Chapter Four, Operations, does the same with the historical China of the 1850s, seamlessly blending Quan Lo and the Guiding Hand into not only the Taiping Rebellion but two other major wars. Chapter Six, Campaign Resources, lets You run the Guiding Hand as Open Bad Guys, Sneaky Bad Guys, or even Good Guys. I say it again; this is How To Do It, even if you're not playing Feng Shui. Players of Palladium's Mystic China, Steve Jackson Games' GURPS China (or Illuminated Martial Arts), or (of course), Event Horizon's totally-cool Hong Kong Action Theatre! will all find not only a fine, fine conspiracy tunable to Good or Evil and some finely summarized Chinese history and philosophy, but models for putting their own magical backstory into the wok and stirring.

Why'd I skip Chapter Three, Sites? Because I wanted to crow about Pramas' genius in tying the blaxptoitation genre into the Hong Kong genre in The Black Dragon School where Caesar Mack sticks it to the Man. Sweetness. It deserves its own paragraph here, and a whole book of its own somewhere else.

But wait, it just keeps on getting better! Personalities gives Feng Shui statistics not just for Quan Lo, the Perfect Master, and for many other fine figures of Feng Shui fun, but for Wong Faii Hong and Fong Sai Yuk! [Sort of the Robin Hood and Billy the Kid of Chinese action legendry.]

How cool can things get from here? Pretty cool, indeed. There's six new archetypes, including the Redeemed Pirate, the Zen/Guiding Hand Archer, and Shaolin Disciples and Masters. Plus three new Fu schools (including the Path of Flying Steel) and stats for Kickass Guns of the 1850s - the Prussian Needle-Gun, the Colt Peacemaker, and the swell Lefaucheaux Shotgun among many others. Add rules for Mook Bowling and you've got one hell of a twitch left in that supposed corpse.

Now put down that unicycle and start kicking Ascended ass.