I spent this weekend getting location pictures, battlemaps, NPC stats, and other random things ready for my wuxia game. We're using Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades. I did a run-through of the combat by myself to get a feel for things. I'm really excited about it!
The one thing that I'm going to have to get used to is that the combat is fairly minimalistic (you have lots of abilities but at the end of the day, you just roll to see if you hit, then roll to see if you wound). So that means it's more narrative and descriptive. I'm used to the crunchy combat of 5e where there's lots of rules and combos and positioning is very important and there's opportunity attacks and all sorts of things. Basically in 5e, you benefit heavily from using a grid for combat. In this game, you don't NEED it.
This ends up being a boon for me, since there's actually not a ton of ancient Chinese location battlemaps available. Most of what I got is focused on temples or waterfalls or shrines or bamboo groves. Not the mundane locations like city streets, restaurants, houses, etc that will really come up more often and pull their weight.
There are, however, a ton of REALLY incredible photographs and artist renderings of ancient Chinese locations! Pinterest and Artstation are flooded with the stuff. I'm going to try experimenting with using pictures like these as the map backdrops for fights. There can still be a grid to show the relative positions of players and NPCs. But I get to be more loose with the movement and positioning of things!
