Shinto-Based Fantasy

How would I do a Shinto-based fantasy campaign?
Urban fantasy, high fantasy, whatever.

Well a few ground rules would need to be put into play:

  • The gods (kami) are everywhere. You have the celestial gods (amatsugami) , the terrestrial gods (kunitsugami), you have the little gods (mikogami). See a tree? It's god a kami in it.  A rock?  A sword?  A song?  All have their own spirit. Just in most cases, these spirits are quiescent unless you do something to get them going.
  • None of these are Good or Evil. The universe and all it holds has a vested disinterest in you and what you're doing. Go about your life. The only thing that matters is that you're being spiritually pure (pure in thought, pure in word, pure in deed). If not, you annoy the kami. If you are, cool.  Good and Evil are mortal constructs, indicating what is good for harmony and society, and what is harmful, causing strife in society.
  • All kami have two aspects: benevolent and wrathful. A kami in its benevolent aspect will be kind, rewarding, and peaceful. In its wrathful aspect, it is a literal manifestation of divine punishment. The personality between 'benevolent' and 'wrathful' are different enough that they might as well be two different individuals.
  • The supernatural is a force of nature -- it isn't meant to be battled, its meant to be survived. Speaking of 'evil' and the supernatural, any 'bad' event can always be traced to a mortal's action -- somewhere, somehow, someone screwed up and pissed something off, and now everyone's paying for it. The trick is to placate the supernatural force before too many people get hurt.
     
  • Things are not 'disposable'.  Everything has a spirit, and it's best to treat that spirit with the respect it is due.  You don't discard your sword because you found a magical one - that's not how it works. You use your sword because it's your sword. Go get it blessed, or enchanted. Or do heroic deeds so it awakens. Don't piss it off.

To give an example, however.
There's a shrine to the Spirit of Storms.  You keep the spirit happy, and the spirit prevents storms from crushing you, your family, the town, and the local villages.  All good.

Someone breaks in and steals something from the shrine.  The Spirit of Storms is pissed off.  This means a typhoon is coming in, and will flatten everything in the vicinity.  Maybe two or three people know why this is happening.  Everyone else is going 'storm's coming, batten down the hatches'. They don't see the Spirit of Storms as evil.  They don't see the typhoon as evil. It's just how things are.

You want to stop the storm?  Find the thief, get the item back to the shrine.  Do a ceremony to appease the Spirit of Storms.  The typhoon goes away, and it's all good again.

J-Horror
J-Horror is an interesting duck. If you've watched it, the usual thing is this:  people go about their lives.  Supernatural thing comes in and screws everyone up.  It isn't really caring who's there or what they're on about, and what they're on about doesn't help them in the slightest. They either survive, or don't.

In most cases, said supernatural is, in fact, undead, and those are considered to be creatures in an unnatural state. So, most heroic deeds will be in dealing with the undead - and most undead are pretty much forces of nature (The Ring, The Grudge). It will typically involve trying to find out why the thing's wandering around and how to put it to rest.

We think it would make for a very different style of campaign.  You can use angels, archons demons, and devils as flipsides of each other:  the 'angel' is the benevolent aspect, the 'devil' is the wrathful.  It isn't 'good' or 'evil', but that's how it manifests to people.

It wouldn't be 'go out and kill monsters for treasure' - you're more dealing with people - selfish people, evil people.  You're trying to keep the community in a state of harmony and keep the bad people from pissing off the kami.

That'd make for a very different D&D game.

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