The Untried Blade

THE UNTRIED BLADE A solo wuxia journaling game of ten winters on the rivers and lakes. Text drafted with AI and edited by us. No AI images. (Details under "How this was made" below.) Ten years ago you climbed the mountain as a child. This morning you walk down it with a sword that has never once been drawn in earnest. The Untried Blade is a solo journaling RPG for one player, a standard deck of playing cards and one six-sided die. You play a young swordsman who leaves their sect and wanders the jianghu, the "rivers and lakes" of wuxia stories: duels and debts, inns and ferries, poison and love, war, and the long argument between you and your blade. Every card you draw is a moment from those ten years, and every moment becomes an entry in your swordsman's journal. HOW IT PLAYS • Roll for your sect and its one rule, your reason for leaving, your sword, your master's last words, and something you carry. • Each year, roll the die to see how many cards you draw. Each card is a prompt: 52 of them, one for every card in the deck. Spades are the Sword, Hearts are Bonds, Diamonds are the Road, Clubs are Shadows. • Keep a Ledger of Kindness and Grudge: the people bound to you by good turns and by wrongs. They come back. • Duels take one roll of the die. Win cleanly, win at a price, or lose and carry the scar. Three scars and your road ends early. • Each year ends in winter, with a line of Tang poetry in Chinese and English and one question to answer. • After the tenth winter, your Ledger (or your Scars) decides which of four ending tables you roll on. WHAT'S INCLUDED • The game as a screen PDF (37 pages, 6 x 9 in) • A printer-friendly edition in US Letter and A4 (26 pages each) • A one-page quick reference, in US Letter and A4 • A printable Ledger and journal pages • 52 prompts, 5 setup tables, 10 winter poems, and 4 ending tables with 24 endings • A short game: five years in about an hour THE POEMS Every chapter and every winter opens with lines from the Tang dynasty (and one Song couplet): Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Liu Zongyuan, Jia Dao and others, in the original Chinese with new English translations. The Chinese text follows standard public-domain editions; most of the Tang poems come from Three Hundred Tang Poems. YOU NEED A deck of 52 playing cards, one six-sided die, a notebook or the printable pages, and about two hours (one hour for the short game). Play it in one evening or one winter at a time. CONTENT NOTES Violence and death (duels, war), poison, grief, the loss of a parent figure. The game never needs you to write anything graphic, and it tells you to skip any card you don't want. HOW THIS WAS MADE The text was drafted with AI assistance and edited by us. No AI images: every ornament in the book, from the mountains to the sword and the seals, is drawn in code from simple lines and curves. The poems are in the public domain. Fonts: EB Garamond and LXGW WenKai TC (SIL Open Font License).