OA Family Backgrounds and Honor

Free time means delving into various books on my shelves, books containing rules and such that I intend to one day use.

In the case of this post, I suspect this might be the only time I use these, but still, it will be fun.

The AD&D Oriental Adventures hardcover contains several interesting bits, notably the chapters on Families, Clans, and Caste (p31-34), Honor (p35-36), and Events and Encounters (p107-114).  The last one is ideal for generating calendar events in the campaign world, broken down by year, month, and daily events. It reminds me heavily of the Battletech charts in ... one of the books.

Regardless, I want to play around with the first two chapters mentioned, so here are a handful of backgrounds using those tables, because rainy mornings are ideal for rolling dice and theorycrafting.

Since determining starting personal honor requires knowing the PC's lowest characteristic, I rolled them up using 4d6 drop lowest, then arranged to meet class requirements (pretty stringent requirements for several of them); furthermore, Comeliness is part of the stats for OA, and that roll is affected by Charisma score.  

All sample PCs are human, all names come from the OA name generator in Dragon #121 (which also includes a great article on the various lotus powders, for those wanting some drugs in their campaign).

Dragon #121 cover art by Jim Holloway

Note that some of the PC honor entries read X or Y.  This is because I rolled up families for all of these folk.  If a PC in OA has no family, they instead get a class-based bonus to starting honor (the higher number of the two), but lose ALL ancestry and birthright.  Personally, I would make the family-related things integral to a game, so would likely disallow loners. 

Miki Moroe, Samurai 1 - S15 D8 C14 I14 W13 Ch7 Co13 

10th rank; family honor: 15; PC honor: 22

ancestry: ancestral feud, none, land modest farm, none, common bloodline; birthright: none, none, none, none

Oshikoji Nagachika, Samurai 2 - S15 D9 C15 I14 W13 Ch6 Co10 

8th rank; family honor: 11; PC honor 19

ancestry: curse, none, small estate, none, common bloodline, none, famous holy man; birthright: none, none, none, weapon of quality, none, none

Wada Kauesue, Samurai 3 - S16 D10 C13 I15 W13 Ch18 Co17 

7th rank; family honor: 40; PC honor 52

ancestry: none, merchant fleet, ancestral feud, land in small town, none, ancestral alliance, ancestral feud; birthright: 2d6 cash strings, 2d6 cash strings, none, none, weapon of quality, none, none

Serizawa Yoshiyasu, Kensai - S15 D15 C13 I10 W14 Ch12 Co15 

middle class; family honor: 10; PC honor: 45 or 20

ancestry: land small farm; birthright: none, none

Yuasa Issai Bushi - S15 D16 C13 I12 W12 Ch9 Co10 

upper middle class; family honor: 16; PC honor: 37 or 27

ancestry: none, land in small town; birthright: property share, none

Tachibana Tampaku, Wu Jen - S9 D16 C13 I18 W15 Ch12 Co12 

upper middle class; family honor: 1; PC honor 25 or 10

ancestry: criminal, land in small town; birthright: none, none

Miruanosuke Keisai, Ninja - S9 D18 C10 I17 W12 Ch16 Co15 

upper class; family honor: 29; PC honor: 43

ancestry: small castle, none, land in large town, none; birthright: d4 horses, armor of quality, armor of quality

NOTE: ninja must split classes, so doing the math, I went with wu jen.

Table 38 is an interesting one, dictating which dice and how many are rolled on follow-up tables.

Table 39 is the first follow-up table; Table 38 tells what size die and how many times to roll it.  PCs do not start owning any of the results on this table, but living family NPCs do.

Table 40 is the second table; Table 38 tells us which die to roll and how many of them.  These are bonus items the PC may start the game with.

Using the above information, I can build quite the background for each of the PCs, but to be honest, the ones that intrigue me the most are the ninja and samurai 3; their Comeliness scores potentially make things more interesting, but to use them properly, I would need to know the wisdom scores of people checking them out, which sounds way too fiddly and math-related for my tastes.  Still, a smitten npc is almost a free henchmen, as near as I can tell from reading.  Having never actually used Comeliness, I cannot speak from experience.

All told, if I (or someone else) were to rework the tables to make it applicable to mainstream 5e (or other) DnD games, I think it could result in some pretty nifty PC backgrounds without going over the top.