Martial Arts in the Project Jade Serenity Supers/Technothriller Campaign

[sir_pudding]

My point was more to illustrate the Army's culture in regards to combatives in the 80s-90s. Also it's a funny story.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

As it occurs to me that you have the time period and plotline of a Chuck Norris movie

I resemble that remark!

We prefer to think of the campaign as The Suicide Squad: The RPG: The Non-Terrible Version.

Granted, the opening adventure is set at the Manhanock* Asylum for the Criminally Insane, located at a New England island that was taken over by the Army in WWII and is reachable only by ferry. Apparently, the background for the asylum pretty much exactly matches the delusions set forth in the movie Shutter Island, with secret experiments on patients for military and intelligence purposes, falsified records and even shallow graves for the 'accidents'. On the other hand, those experiments were in the past and, in fact, it doesn't seem that anything happened there that didn't happen at the real-world St. Elizabeths, Danvers State Hospital or as part of the MKULTRA project.

Actually, the campaign isn't very 80s movie. It's set last weekend. And because of the physical vigour induced by the various drugs and chemicals of Project Jade Serenity, people who would otherwise be senior citizens more likely to fight incontinence than black ops teams will be hale and hearty.

Mackenzie Chase Taylor, my character, for example, is born in 1979, but no one who isn't told this will estimate his age at much over 25. Sherilyn Bell still looks nineteen, at most, after seventeen years in a mental institution. Former CW3 Raul Vargas is in his mid-sixties at least, but by all accounts, seems to be pretty spry. There's no reason to assume that (former) SGM Than Yamaguchi could not be still limber, if desired, assuming that the notoriously unethical, irresponsible and unscientific Mad Science vibe at the Project prevailed and allowed him access to the substances even though he was there as a trainer, not test subject.

The campaign is meant to allow the GM** to indulge his love for superhero comics and movies, but in a way that doesn't cause me any heart-attacks and allow me to play in his setting. Impossible powers exist, but seem to have just one source, not 'any old thing that happens and might cause superpowers according to the incoherent ramblings of a comics-writer with no background in science'.

The 'super soldier serum' of Project Jade Serenity is actually a range of different drugs that were developed and tested through DARPA, the US Army Chemical Corps and the CIA, but the eventual effects cannot be scientifically explained and the emerging powers of test subjects decades later might have more to do with alchemy or magic than any physiological effects.

I'll tolerate rubbery science, especially if there is good enough handwavium to enable disbelief-suspenders to function***, but I'd rather avoid any rubber jurisprudence, rubber psychology, rubber economics or rubber political science, at least if its rubbery enough for laymen to notice. Cinematic tropes are welcome, but should be justified through in-setting logic that makes sense and may be turned on the head when campaign world reality doesn't work like the movies.

Because there are characters with supernatural powers, I'm**** trying to rigorously ground their origins and background before receiving powers in reality. Not necessarily mundanity, however, it is perfectly fine for some of them to have backgrounds that are wildly rare, as long as they are possible and the rarity is addressed in the setting.

Hence, I'm trying wildly to justify the US government allowing convicted or suspected criminals to do adventuring-type stuff on their behalf. What I've come up with so far is that no one planned to allow this, but that various NPCs find themselves in circumstances where the unthinkable becomes sligthly less so. We are not part of Plan A. Plan A died a natural death some time ago and the alphabet is working overtime keeping up by now.

No committee of rational bureaucrats ever actually signed off on this. They signed off on highly edited proposals which skillfully concealed the full insanity being contemplated in order to get approval for the release of necessary assets, with the people who wrote those proposals already planning how to edit the after-action reports and/or come up with cover stories for how the disaster that occured was someone else's fault.

An important incredient in allowing for criminal PCs as an eventual black-op team that no one really wants to survive are rival factions of conspirators who may all be lying to their nominal superiors for various reasons, some of those being, in no particular order; to cover up their own criminal culpability, in order not to compromise ongoing research with extremely promising results or because they are convinced that they know better than their elected or appointed superiors and that only extreme (and technically illegal) measures will serve to keep their country safe from a threat that no one outside their organisation would even believe in.

*Manhanock means 'Shelter Island' in Abenaki.
**One of my regular table, usually a player.
***Our handlers are trying to explain things through conventional science, but some of the powers are clearly accessing power from an alternate dimension or otherwise cheating. Alchemy. I'm calling it.
****Wearing the dual hats of my assigned extra roles, aside from player, of 'Assistant GM for GURPS Mechanics and Minutia' and 'Research Assistant for World Plausibility, NPC Backgrounds and Organisational Complexity'.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I hereby recommend some school of Okinawan Karate in his honor.

Pure Te and 3 of the listed descendant Karate schools have TA(Exotic Hand Strike Vitals) and/or Lethal Strike listed among their Cinematic Skills. MA does comment that Techniques like Lethal strike Aren't realistically impossible as very difficult and seldom taught. So some school of Okinawan Karate could have some of all of the above, possibly as Secret techniques.

Karate and taekwondo are certainly very likely styles for a martial arts enthusiast to pick up sometime between 1970 and 1989.

It seems very appropriate for Vargas' primary training and experience being in either of these or perhaps some other form of Korean martial arts popular in the 70s and 80s among military personnel stationed in South Korea. A hard, linear striking style seems like it would fit his personality and offer an interesting personality contrast/mirror with Taylor (my PC).

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Throw from Lock feels rather contemporary to me and while it is potentially a lethal move I wouldn't rate it as being a "sentry removal" Technique. A Secret Sword Hand that ruptured Vital Organs sounds more 80-ish to me.

Feeling contemporary is not at all a negative, as long as it could have been realistically learned in the 80s and 90s.

It should be 'sentry removal' in the sense that the guy who is always bragging about his deadly martial arts claims that if he ever had to kill someone with his bare hands, he'd perform a certain technique that he's always more than willing to demonstrate in sparring* or with a bayonet dummy.

The twist is that the guy is actually damn strong and an expert martial artist, even if he mostly knows a striking style and that one advanced grappling move which he spends entirely too much time fantasising about using.

Is there some gimmicky 'deadly' style that might have taught Head Lock + Throw from Lock and come to the attention of CW3 Vargas in the 80s or 90s, causing him to add this one advanced grappling move to his black belt karate or taekwondo striking?

SCARS was allegedly demonstrated for SEALs, not Delta or 'regular' Special Forces, but perhaps Vargas managed to attend some courses. It's exactly the kind of thing he would be into.

If anyone knows of an Ultimate Commando Death Style that was advertised in Black Belt magazine or even Soldier of Fortune in the 80s and 90s, but might actually have just enough real fighting involved for it to be possible to learn Wrestling at DX, Technique Mastery (Head Lock) and Head Lock at Wrestling+4, please suggest it.

*Theoretically without actually executing the Head Lock + Throw on a living person, though always slightly too fast and painful for the person dumb enough to allow him to throw them even in a modified version meant not to hurt.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

My point was more to illustrate the Army's culture in regards to combatives in the 80s-90s.

For what it's worth, I realise this. The freestyle hand-to-hand sparring culture at this particular training camp was an outlier, due to saya SGM Than Yamaguchi, even before the whole super soldier serum thing. And CW3 Vargas and SPC Taylor were outliers even among outliers, in being serious about their martial arts (albeit for radically different reasons).

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Also it's a funny story.

That it is.

It does, of course, beg for the kind of addendum that Career Sergeant Zim supplied in Starship Troopers. Or the lower-tech version which a scary Serbian veteran teaching jujutsu/BJJ/aikijutsu-based grappling once told me: "Need unbroken fingers to pull trigger."

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Warlockco

Some people do learn martial arts as a "hobby" especially a soldier that wants to "broaden" their knowledge base.

So the PC could show an interest in hand-to-hand especially after the NCO took down someone hard (i.e. a trainee was a bit better than expected and had to resort to non-standard moves), which got the PC to start asking the NCO about his moves.

That is exactly the background I'm going for here.

Than Yamaguchi, the Sergeant Major of the training base where Project Jade Serenity was carried out, was a Kachin Bando stylist long before he joined the military, because his maternal grandfather, the male role model in his family after the death of his father in Korea, was a sayagyi (grandmaster) from the Kachin State in Burma and passed on his philosophy and skills to Than (along with Than's brother and uncle).

My character, (then) SPC Chase Taylor, was curious about the way the diminutive SGM Yamaguchi could manhandle recruits during the short period of training devoted to hand-to-hand, bayonet and aggression instruction. He asked questions and was generally a humble and likable guy, willing and able to learn anything they might have to teach from infinitely wiser senior NCOs. During the language school part of his training, he spent his free time studying with SGM Yamaguchi, in a context that in a more regimented military posting would probably have flirted* with fraternisation.

After Project Jade Serenity was closed down and SGM Yamaguchi somehow managed to get posted as the ODB Sergeant Major of A Co/2 Bn/7th SFG(A) despite being over fifty, the two remained friendly, if necessarily more distant. SGT Taylor kept training Bando and SGM Yamaguchi would manage some instructional sessions, justified as 'training-the-trainer', in getting SGT Taylor prepared to act as a combatives instructor in 2001-2002.**

(Then) CW3 Raul Vargas would also have shown interest in cool martial arts tricks, but he'd have been more interested in bragging about his own prowess and showing off his black belt / competative level striking skills than humbly learning from someone else. As an obedient soldier and a former high school athlete with a deep respect for his coaches, Taylor would have listened to both of them and tried his best to learn from both, but over the year he spent there, he eventually learned the true value of each teacher and their lessons.

Which... sounds very 80s martial arts movie. As with other things in this campaign, we'll try to take the fundamental aspect of the common fictional trope that appeal to the GM and the players and play with the external incidentals a bit to make them less cliched and more interesting. Also, try to justify everything with more research than Hollywood does.

*Phrasing! I know. But, no. It was, at least as far as Chase was concerned, initially a respected elder/teacher to pupil relationship and ended up as a quasi-paternal friendship. How Yamaguchi felt toward SPC/SGT/SSG Taylor might differ, of course, but Taylor is convinced it was paternal affection.
**SGM Yamaguchi has Style Familiarity for MAC and LINE as well as Kachin Bando and taught Taylor the fundamentals of all of these styles. Taylor actually knew some early Matt Larsen stuff from his 1st Battalion/75th Ranger background.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Icelander

If anyone knows of an Ultimate Commando Death Style that was advertised in Black Belt magazine or even Soldier of Fortune in the 80s and 90s, but might actually have just enough real fighting involved for it to be possible to learn Wrestling at DX, Technique Mastery (Head Lock) and Head Lock at Wrestling+4, please suggest it.

Well the 80s-90s is the ninja-craze, but most of the various "ninjitsu"s weren't grappling styles. Muy Thai was something of a ultimate style in that era and does have some grapples and throws. Krav Maga and Sambo are grappling heavy styles with a bit of an ultimate reputation especially in international military circles at the time, tied up in the mystique of Mossad and Spetnatz respectively, so maybe one of those?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Well the 80s-90s is the ninja-craze, but most of the various "ninjitsu"s weren't grappling styles.

If I could find an actual ninjutsu-craze style teaching neck snapping in the period, I would be extremely happy. It is a perfect fit for the character.

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Muy Thai was something of a ultimate style in that era and does have some grapples and throws. Krav Maga and Sambo are grappling heavy styles with a bit of an ultimate reputation especially in international military circles at the time, tied up in the mystique of Mossad and Spetnatz respectively, so maybe one of those?

Would Sambo be a reasonable style for him to have learned? I somehow assumed that it was later, with the immigration of former Soviet Bloc people to the US, but I admit I have no information on the subject. Sambo or Systema would seem to be ideal, especially if he learned mostly that one 'ultimate unarmed killing move'.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Would Sambo be a reasonable style for him to have learned? I somehow assumed that it was later, with the immigration of former Soviet Bloc people to the US, but I admit I have no information on the subject. Sambo or Systema would seem to be ideal, especially if he learned mostly that one 'ultimate unarmed killing move'.

I remember reading about it in the mid-to-late 80s with the usual bullshido fluff.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Would Sambo be a reasonable style for him to have learned? I somehow assumed that it was later, with the immigration of former Soviet Bloc people to the US, .

You need a defector. Someone played by a large bald character actor with a huge moustache.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You need a defector. Someone played by a large bald character actor with a huge moustache.

There was an international association in 1968, so not necessarily, but yes the Chuck Norris movie world would have maybe Michael Ironsides or Rutger Hauer as the former Spetnatz instructor.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You need a defector. Someone played by a large bald character actor with a huge moustache.

And part of the deal with defectors to justify the pay they get afterwards is teaching this is what the OPFOR uses. So it makes perfect logical sense. Either that or he runs a ethnic restaurant and teaches a few promising students on the side to keep from getting out of shape.