Click, click, click. Light from the naked bulb reflected off polished brass as bullet after bullet found their way home into the magazine. A man in a nicely tailored suit dropped the full clip onto the bed next to his MP-5 and started filling the fourth one. Nearby, a large man in jeans with a cricket bat paced around the small room.
A small wisp of a woman sat cross-legged, with her eyes closed, balanced on the edge of a worn desk. “Will you please stop pacing? Breathe. Focus.”
“I can’t,” the man replied, taking a swing at the air with his bat. “I’ve been waiting for this chance. It’s time to get back into the action.”
The suit spoke. “Then let’s go. It is time to let The Jade Wheel knows we are back in town.”
Tomorrow, at 8pm EDT, the Kickstarter for Feng Shui 2 will launch. I have waited a long time for this, and it is going to be amazing. My love of Feng Shui, goes back to the original edition. We were just finishing up a play test of GURPS Reign of Steel, when my good friend Lou Prosperi said, “Hey, we should try this next. Action movie roleplaying. Steve, there’s this killer archetype they made just for you…”
It was quite a jump from the gritty reality of GURPS to the cinematic melodrama of Feng Shui. However, once I tried the game, there wasn’t any going back. I did everything. I ran events at Gen Con (back when Gen Con was in Milwaukee). Wrote an article for Pyramid Magazine and started my first gaming website with more content for the game. I even toyed with the notion of starting a game company and publishing Feng Shui products under license back in 1997.
But people move, kids are born and new games appear. For years, I ran the occasional one-shot adventure, while hoping that someday a new edition would appear. When I heard about the Feng Shui 2 play test, I jumped on board. Now, two play test sessions, several thousand words of feedback and 4 Gen Con demos later; the Kickstarter is finally upon us.
To Celebrate this auspicious moment, I will release a series of short blog posts for Feng Shui 2. Some of the content comes from my original website, upgraded for new awesome. Much of it, however, is new material I toyed with over the intervening years. I’ve got an enormous pile of bad guys who need their butts kicked, cool locations to kick those butts, and new weapons to use in the kicking.
Lock and load, it’s time to rejoin the Chi War.