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I'm going to just ignore this disclaimer entirely, especially when we reach the foxes at the end of this book, because otherwise it's just no fun.īlah blah stuff is different here blah blah "They take tea with their enemies and treat their friends with coolness rather than passion" blah blah Kuei-jin are freaking weird but the new shapeshifters are like the old ones with a new coat of paint (except often more broken) blah blah Westerners are "Sunset People." "Yeah we fucked up all the lore we were basing this stuff off of, but it's okay because this is the World of Darkness! We can just make shit up!" Yeah. There are myths aplenty in the East about those who Change of where the fox-spirits keep their souls, or how the tigers conducted their business when the world was young.Īhaha. Now in the introduction, which translates the title as "The Changing Phantoms," they start with a quote from Sun Tzu, then land with this.Īsia is not without its stories of the beasts who walk as men. I'm skipping over the introductory written fiction because it's pretty standard (It's called An Inauspicious Burial), but this thing greets us on the facing page:Īpparently tiger-men are freaking gigantic. I'll get into the cosmology later I'm sure it'll cover stuff that Kindred doesn't. I think they were going for Yami kings but missed this is a common problem in this book. ) which are very powerful Banes (evil spirits). The reason is that the War of Rage never made it to the East, and instead everyone basically got their asses handed to them by the Yama Kings (mountain kings? Pictured: a typical shapeshifter "sentai" After all, this is the East unlike the uncultured West, the various changing breeds trust each other and work together, even the Hakken (the werewolves over here). Typically they contain one of each Auspice and only one member of any given Changing Breed. In Hengeyokai, sentai almost always come in groups of five. In the real world, the word "sentai" is often used for naval squadrons, which usually have a lot more than five members. Maybe it is.Īnd trust me, they got the "sentai" thing from Super Sentai. It's very silly, and I'm not sure if it's in character for the rest of the book or not. If you want me to post the whole thing, and it won't count as
Changing breeds inklesspen full#
It's full of animesque crap, calling out attacks and formations in the tone of Super Sentai or a super robot show, and then takes a sharp turn for the dark at the end to remind you that yes, this is a World of Darkness book, you're not playing Exalted or something uplifting. "Luna Beast Sentai Gaiamon." The cover of this little mini-comic pretty much sets the stage for everything in it. So now that that image is burned into your eyes, we open the cover and Never mind the stories of Fox in various Native American myths, never mind Reynardine, or anything like that the only foxes that act human anywhere in the old World of Darkness are in Asia. Why? Because apparently the fox shifters don't exist outside of East Asia, for. These guys take up about a third of the book, in the back, rather than getting their own book separate from this one. So there's their representative for the Kitsune, on the back cover. (Linked because awkward and possibly mildly NWS) However, beside the little blurb about what's inside, there's this image. It mostly looks the same as the front (the title's repeated, the background's the same, etc). Did D&D 2nd Edition use this term in their Oriental Adventures supplement? I know 3rd Edition does, but I haven't heard about the earlier edition.Īnyway, the next thing you'd see, if you pick up the book, is the back cover. So it makes me wonder where they got the name from. So literally, this phrase means something like "shapeshifting ghost phantoms." It's hilariously redundant, and I've never seen the term used in anything Japanese. Youkai refers generally to ghosts and goblins. Henge refers to shapeshifting beings of various sorts, mostly changing animals and ghosts. It's made up of two words in Japanese, henge and youkai. This is actually correct, for the pronunciation. The title uses a Japanese-sounding word, which is repeated in the writing on the cover: 変化妖怪. The strokes are even correct this time, unlike the Kindred of the East cover of course, that's probably because it's a I assure you it looks a lot brighter in real life. It's got that glossy faux-gold ink in the dark brown sections you see here, and they scan horribly. I can and will look up more information as I need to. Before I start, a slight disclaimer: I have studied a little bit in both Chinese and Japanese, and have a passing knowledge of myths from the various Asian countries. Hengeyokai: Shapeshifting Ghost Phantoms of the East
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Introduction posted by Goggle Fox Original SA post