ZHB2:What has changed since ZHB?

Zaijian Honey Blues Year Two: What has changed?

Conceptually - anime down, wuxia up

Some of you might be familiar with the earlier incarnations of Zaijian Honey Blues and the other expressions of the Nihao Honey-verse, other might not. Safe to say that they were pretty wild games that took its´ parent game (Weapons of the Gods) as well as it anime influences pretty far - the students of the Black Crane counted a catgirl and a robot, for example, and one particulary epic storyline saw a whole district of Shen Zhou City destroyed, becoming a "shadowland" populated with ghosts and zombies.

With the advent of Legends of the Wulin, things have been toned down some; altough it shares the narrative of the "legendary China that never was", the game takes a lot more cues from the classic wuxia stories by giants such as Liang Yusheng, Jin Yong/Louis Cha and Gu Long. The mythological past of the land, where ghosts and spirits walked, is far away indeed - there might be a grain fo truth to them or it might just be stories that have grown with time, but safe to say that they won´t impact the game in any overt and meaningful manner. This, of course, affects Zaijian Honey Blues in turn.

This is not to say that we´re going to go all drab and boring on you, but simply that some of the crazier concepts such as androids with orbital rail gun-fu or god-weapons crackling with power are out the window so that we can focus on what is important here - conflict between humans with human desires. Wulin teens with Wulin teen desires at that, which ought to make it interesting! Following the lead from ZHB, all the things that are in the LotW book will probably exist in SZ City as well, in one form or the other; new Loresheets will supplement the material within the core book, but we´re still rocking the "City that never is" vibe. I´m convinced that you will find this exciting enough.

Story: Reconceptualizing or soft reboot?

Well, both. Neither. Maybe?

Some of the stories past is baggage that we don´t want to handle, mostly because they tend to edge into areas like immensely powerful God-Weapons and other stuff mentioned above. On the meta-level of ZHB the animated series, we´ve started animation in China instead of Japan and are all a little fuzzy on the exact letter of the law when it comes to copyright and IP and such, and since we´re not exclusively Chinabased we must actually care about that stuff! In the actual game, this means that we might be a little vague when referring to our past. Think of it like rings on the water; close to the characters and their intra-character relationships things are pretty clear, but the further away we get with indirect stories and the larger-scale stuff... things get kinda muddled. Just a little. Think about the future, eh? And be lucky that you get pants.

The characters themselves, the ones who´ve come from "before", might also be a little streamlined - since I as a Sage want to get the most out of this swell new game, every PC will be built as a starting character and then develop from there. Many character details, convoluted stories and excessive backgrounds might also be trimmed down some. The ZHB characters varied pretty wildly when it came to the scale of "fairly grounded" and "OMG anime", and we+´re aiming for something a little more level in scale. As an example, Iron Seraphs family were a long line of demon-hunters, and his nights were usually spent Buffying it up with Hollow-esque demons that needed to be sworded back to the hells. This time around, the Jin Shen are an archaic society of mystical Daoists with a much more low-key approach to things, so what is kept is the social situations that this puts Seraph as a character in - his family is old and prestigious on one hand, but pretty poor and weird in others. He must try not to get crushed under the massive weight of the expectations of his Elder Uncle, the family head, and somehow manage to make an identity for himself. So no demon fights, no glowing prayer-strip combats and (at least initially) no magical glowing eyes (for the uninitiated, everyone in ZHB as in Nihao Honey hads a special "Bloodline" power - a "Legacy"). Still, the core of his character is still there even without some superficial trappings.

And so on.

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