Dungeons & Dragons: 9 Tips For A Wuxia Campaign (2024)

The majority of games take place within a generally European medieval-ish setting, but there's no reason you need to stay there. If you're a fan of wuxia, it's totally doable to make a D&D campaign based around the genre. All you need is some research and dedication.

The Dungeon Master's Guide uses the term more generally to mean any fantasy adventure in an East Asian setting, but it's important to note that the term traditionally refers to Chinese media and that other cultures have their own conventions for historical fantasy. Running a wuxia game is a rewarding experience, but there are a few simple tips to keep in mind.

9 Set Expectations

Your Players Should Probably Know You Want To Run A Wuxia Game

It's always important to establish the right set of expectations before starting a game, and running a wuxia campaign is no different. Session zero is a must, especially when it comes to making sure your players bring characters that fit the game. Nobody wants to show up to the first session only to find out their steampunk gentleman vampire hunter doesn't fit the campaign's theme.

If your players aren't familiar with your setting, it could be useful to create a player's guide for them. This handy-dandy document should give your players everything they can use to make a character, such as naming practices or notable lore that they can incorporate into their character's backstory.

8 Do Your Research

The First Rule Of Writing Anything

To avoid the most egregious mistakes, you should be prepared to do a decent amount of research for the region and time period you want to set your campaign in. There are numerous video essays by Chinese (and diaspora) creators that can act as a springboard, and if you're really serious, you can access higher-quality research materials for free if you're a university student or have a library card.

However, real-life history and culture shouldn't be all you research. To get a feel for the genre, use campaign prep as your excuse to binge on C-dramas and wuxia films to your heart's content if you weren't doing that already. Also, take a look at official D&D materials to familiarize yourself with things like relevant monster stat blocks and what monk subclasses are the most broken.

7 Get (World)Building

Put All That Research To Good Use

If you don't want to use a premade module, be prepared for the added effort of worldbuilding. There are a few shortcuts to this: you could, for example, take the plot of your favorite C-drama and change all the names, but that runs the risk of one of your players noticing and calling you out on it.

Don't be afraid to take things slowly and start small. Perhaps your players start out in a remote mountain village, meaning you only have to prepare the village and the surrounding area. As they explore new places, you can slowly start fleshing out more areas. Read more about how to build an organic homebrew world here.

6 Get Brewing

There's No Brew Like Homebrew

Once you have a general idea of your setting and what monsters you want to use, you can start homebrewing. Every DM does this to some extent, but you might find yourself with a lot of work to do. The Monster Manual has some creatures from Chinese mythology, such as the kirin, but plenty of others have yet to see official stat blocks.

If you don't feel like putting in the work yourself, don't worry. There's no shortage of third-party materials, a lot of which are made by Asian creators, available on platforms such as DriveThruRPG and itch.io. A great place to start is Unbreakable, an anthology of shorter wuxia adventures.

5 Don't Be Afraid To Reskin

The DMG Says It's Okay

Let's face it: Dungeons & Dragons was made for a primarily Western-centric fantasy world, and getting it to work for other settings takes a bit of heavy lifting. Fortunately, you don't need to do it all yourself. Page 41 of the Dungeon Master's Guide details several Chinese weapons and the closest Western counterpart, allowing you to reskin standard D&D weapons with ease.

Also, take into account the trappings of your players' character classes. Monks are pretty much made for wuxia, and other classes like the fighter and rogue are setting-agnostic. However, other classes, such as the paladin, wizard, artificer, and cleric, will need some flavor adjustments to feel organic to the setting.

4 Take Older Supplements With A Grain Of Salt

Let's Face It, Oriental Adventures Sucks

You might be tempted to take a look at books from older editions to get a good idea of where to start when deciding on homebrew and house rules. While this is a good idea for most games, doing this for a wuxia campaign has one massive problem, and that problem is called "Oriental Adventures."

Oriental Adventures, put simply, is poorly researched, doesn't contain much useful information, and combines several different Asian cultures into a weird Frankenstein approach to worldbuilding. There are third-party supplements you can look at instead, and the optional rules you might want to incorporate from Oriental Adventures have all made their way into the Fifth Edition Dungeon Master's Guide.

3 Be Judicious About Magic

Decide Early How Much Magic You're Prepared For

Wuxia is traditionally a low-magic genre. Sure, supernatural stuff can still happen, but it's not the focus of the story. This is a bit of a problem for the typical D&D campaign, where high-magic settings are becoming more and more common. Luckily, there are more than enough tips on the internet on how to run a low-magic campaign.

If you want to keep a high-magic setting while still retaining the wuxia flavor, you can also get more familiar with its sister genre xianxia, which deals with more supernatural matters. It's not as well known in the West as its more martial-focused genre sibling, but works such as Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation have brought it into our cultural zeitgeist in recent years.

2 Lean Into Wuxia's Tropes

Get Extra Cheesy

Does your group's monk have a former friend trained by the same master? Did that friend turn evil at some point? Great, make that rival a minor villain for your party. Tropes, no matter how cheesy, make a genre, and if cheese is what your players crave, then cheese is what you should give them.

Additionally, you shouldn't stress too much over whether certain physical tasks are physically possible. Wuxia is full of amazing feats of acrobatics, and you should just embrace it. If wizards are able to bend reality with their spells, martial characters should be able to cut boulders in half or jump from tree to tree with the right ability check.

1 Love The Genre

Or Everything Else Is Pointless

Plenty of people play vanilla Dungeons & Dragons because they love your standard medieval fantasy adventures. Others play Vampire: The Masquerade because they love angsty goth shenanigans or Honey Heist because they love bears. Whatever your chosen game is, you chose it because you love its lore and set dressing.

If you don't already love wuxia, you're going to get exhausted quickly as you discover it takes quite a bit of effort to adapt D&D to a setting it wasn't originally made for. Going into the commitment of running a campaign for the right reasons will help avoid burnout and keep enthusiasm up for the less glamorous parts of being a DM.