An Adventure for Sword’s Edge by Fraser Ronald

Graphics by Woojin Kim, Tithi Luadthong, Wan Chiang Tan

Developmental & Sensitivity Editors Clio Yun-su Davis and Daniel H. Kwan.

This campaign framework is a product of a Patreon eff ort which you can join at https://www.patreon.com/FraserRonald

Sample file

Copyright 2019 Fraser Ronald Four cops. One hundred criminals. Countless broken bones.

Elevator Pitch Three cops and an intelligence operative in South Korea’s industrial heartland face off against a local gang involved in a heroin smuggling ring. The cops have only one order: bust the ring, but no one realizes the true depth of this particular cesspool.

Of Possible Interest This is an adventure for Sword’s Edge, a role-playing game. The adventure is written based on the expectation that you will have already read Sword’s Edge. The mechanical information – the information regarding the application of the rules – will make little sense to you without knowledge of Sword’s Edge. The narrative – the story of the adventure – might be of interest, but his adventure will have very little practical use if you do not understand the Sword’s Edge rules or at least basics for how role-playing games in general work.

You don’t need to know anything about Korea to enjoy this game. I chose South Korea as the setting for this adventure because I have personal ties to the country and I am a fan of current Korean action cinema. I’ve included some of the movies that have made an impact below in Inspiration.

The adventure itself can be set anywhere. The plot is very heavily inspired by Korean action cinema, but can definitely be transplanted. Every culture has unique characteristics and every location its local flavour, so try to inject those if you move this elsewhere.

South Korea is not the same as the United States or Canada. That’s obvious. WhatSample might not be obvious is how some of those differences file change how action movies – and this adventure – unfold.

Guns Although this is meant to be an actioner, this is a Korean actioner, meaning there are very few guns. Only one of the Player Characters (PCs) uses firearms. Korea has very strict firearm regulation, and that means neither Page 1 cops nor criminals are generally armed. There are special armed police, and gangsters do get their hands on guns to use in the commission of crimes, but these are uncommon. An example is a recent crime actioner, Bad Guys: Vile City, which has lots of fisticuffs, knives and bats, but not firearms. I like how the absence of guns changes the focus of the action. It makes the scenes different from what one might find in American cinema. Guns might be more common in movies like Veteran or The Villainess, but they remain an anomaly among South Korea’s police and criminal underworld.

All this to explain that there are very few guns in this adventure. When they appear, they are significant. Guns can be added without really changing the plot, especially if one is moving the location to someplace like the USA.

Police and Thieves While this adventure has the police as heroes, many Korean action movies that involve crime are point of view of the criminals. That is one facet that will set this adventure apart from Korean action cinema. It would be possible to change the story around so that the PCs are with a different gang, or possibly even in the same one. Still, I think the adventure works best with the PCs – and therefore the good guys – as the police.

Although this adventure is set in the city of Ulsan, the police in Korea are a national force. Rather than have the Ulsan Metropolitan Police or something similar, the police in Ulsan are all part of the National Police Agency. The police in Ulsan still functions very much as one would expect a metropolitan force to, however the officers within that force were not necessarily recruited in Ulsan.

One set of villains in this story are gangsters, and that term is used a bit differently in Korea than in the United States. There’s no “capo” or “godfather” in Ulsan – or really in any city or area of South Korea – but most of the gangs in Ulsan either work or have an understanding with the 칠성파 (the Seven Star Gang), based in Pusan nearby. The Seven Star Gang are closer to what would be called Organized Crime, with links to the Japanese Yakuza, whileSample gangs like the main opposition in this adventure – thefile Hong Song-Ho gang – are closer to American street gangs, who have a small geographic region which they control.

A seminal gangster movie from South Korea is A Bittersweet Life, with the always excellent Lee Byung-Hun in the lead role. Another that delves more deeply into the workings of organized crime in South Korea is Nameless Page 2 Gangster: Rules of the Time, starring Choi Min-Sik, possibly one of the finest actors working today, and co-starring Ha Jung-woo, one of my personal favourites who also stars in the Berlin File – a fantastic spy/action movie – and Assassination – an exquisite thriller-actioner set during the Japanese occupation of Korea.

Another set of villains are secret operatives from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – the DPRK or North Korea. That explains the one intelligence operative among the pre-generated player characters. This operative would likely work for the National Intelligence Service (NIS). The NIS operates in Korean entertainment media much as the CIA does in American entertainment – the agency for whatever kind of spy the story desires. It is the main intelligence agency in South Korea and whatever its actual capabilities, in this story it serves only as window dressing for the spy character.

Drinking Culture There are a few times when the PCs will be involved in scenes at places that serve alcohol. In South Korea, one doesn’t just order a drink, one always gets food as well. Food served alongside alcohol is called anju (안주). Common anju dishes include dried squid, fruit, or pajeon (파전) which looks similar to a pancake but is made with eggs, wheat and rice flour, and onions. Pajeon is very common in South Korea and can include seafood, various vegetables, or meats.

Although beer is common in South Korea (called maekju 맥주), soju (소주) is ubiquitous. Soju is similar to vodka and while traditionally made with rice, potatoes are usually used now. Not as strong as vodka, it can be used in cocktails but is generally drunk straight. A common trope in action movies and TV series are scenes with drinking, and while the characters are usually eating pajeon, dried squid, or some other anju, having a character disregard the food and focus on the alcohol is sending a message about that character’s emotional state. GivenSample that police aren’t necessarily paid extremely well, a scenefile with the PCs sharing a drink will likely happen at a “pojangmacha” (포장마차, po-jawng- ma-chaw). These are tents set up around wagons that sell food and alcohol. These are popular spots for late night drinks. The Korean word means covered wagon, but this does not capture the flavour. There is a tent, there are mobile cooking and refrigeration units, but unlike a food stall which is generally permanent – until the police or some other authority moves it Page 3 along – the pojangmacha disappears during the day to reappear after sunset, or later. Pojangmachas (known as pochas) both offer lower price options and pick up the late-night drinking crowd who arrive after other establishments close down. People sit around on cheap plastic chairs at cheap plastic tables, drinking soju and eating whatever anju the pocha specializes in. The villains have their meet in a pocha in the scene “the Meet.”

All this is important as if there’s a quiet moment in a Korean action movie in which the characters reveal themselves and bond, it’s almost certainly over soju and is very likely to be in a pocha. An extra scene is provided at the end of the adventure for inclusion if this is intended to begin a campaign, and this is a scene in which the PCs share drinks. It’s a completely narrative scene used to help bring the characters into focus and justify their coalescing as a team.

Inspiration Korean action cinema – and really Korean cinema as a whole – seems to be in a Samplegolden age. I love actioners like The Man From Nowhere file, Commitment, and The Berlin File. I’ve already mentioned Veteran and The Villainess, but there is also Cold Eyes and Confidential Assignment – the latter a kind of South Korean Red Heat which teams up a North Korean and a South Korean detective. There have been some absolutely amazing crime thrillers as well, like A Bittersweet Life and Nameless Gangster. Streaming services in North America have caught on to the popularity of South Korean entertainment,

Page 4 so you can probably find the TV series Bad Guys: Vile City or Stranger. Then there are the neo-noirs, which intersect with another of my loves (being the guy who wrote the game Sword Noir). Old Boy is rightfully famous, but I would also strongly recommend The Yellow Sea.

But nothing can overcome my totally unfathomable love for a movie that pretty much lacks plot and is very much style over substance. Nowhere to Hide made me a love Korean action cinema. For others, it was Shiri, which was also good, but Shiri seemed to be trying to be an American action movie, whereas Nowhere to Hide was totally doing its own thing. And you just can’t get better than Park Joong-Hoon (who is also the star of Bad Guys: Vile City) and Ahn Sung-Ki. These guys are two of Korea’s best actors, and who I had in my head when I was creating this adventure. Nowhere to Hide is about a cop hunting a criminal over a long period of time and through various tenuously connected scenes.

If you feel you need some background before running this adventure, watch any or all of the movies I mentioned, but Nowhere to Hide is closest in tone to the adventure. It’s probably also the hardest to come by, but that just means you’ll savour it more.

Right?

Notes on Playing a Korean If You Aren’t Korean by Clio Yun-su Davis Adapted from her LARP, The Long Drive Back from Busan

This game was written for players of all ethnicities and genders. The characters are all Korean, however knowledge of the Korean criminal underworld, Korean culture, and the Korean language beyond what is covered in this document is not required. In fact, tidbits of cultural information that are irrelevant to a scene should not be brought up, and the use of Korean vocabulary not mentioned in the text is discouraged. This is in order to both keep the game friendly to those who are less familiar with KoreanSample action cinema and South Korea more generally, and fileto try to prevent anything insensitive from being said. The focus should be on playing people whose dedication to their jobs drives them forward even in the face of danger, not on how to best show that they are Korean.

Here are some examples of appropriate and inappropriate ways to

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