# Gubat Banwa *Created:* 2025-08-02, *Modified:* 2026-10-07 ![[Gubat Banwa - First Edition (cover).jpg|600]] You've stumbled into the war realms, and good on you. **Gubat Banwa** (Tagalog, roughly "War Realms") is a tactical martial-arts and war-drama tabletop RPG from Joaquin Kyle "Makapatag" Saavedra — a self-declared "gamified love letter to" wuxia, Southeast Asian epics, and the crunchy lineage of Final Fantasy Tactics. It pointedly rejects "default" fantasy, which is the polite way of saying it noticed the hobby spent fifty years building castles and mostly forgot the other three-quarters of the planet's stories. You play the Kadungganan: honor-bound wandering warriors, the knights-errant and tide-turners of The Sword Isles, caught between five great powers and their own hard-won convictions. And by 2026, the whole operation has hit the hobby's favorite machine. The itch self-published First Edition got stamped **LEGACY**, its content loaded into a moving van and driven to a new **Sword Isles Studios** page, and a reworked Second Edition — kickstarted in 2023, still arriving in pieces three years on — is now the thing you're apparently supposed to want. The edition that once *was* the whole game hasn't been cancelled, exactly. It's just been renamed and shown the door. ## Setting Gubat Banwa opens the way any good wuxia should — with a parable. Sri Paduka Batara, an ancient king who has suffered his way through more reincarnations than he can count, asks a servant-girl with one missing finger whether Glory will ever finally release him. She gives him soup. "You do not find Glory," she tells him. "You live, fight, struggle, love, eat, suffer, enjoy, fall, and rise until Glory." That's the thesis, and the game never stops repeating it: **Violence Until Glory** is the motto, and conviction is the blade you're meant to wield. It manages to be both the point and a hell of a marketing slogan. The Sword Isles are the center of the world, says the book, which is the only honest way to describe an archipelago of a million polities conjured out of precolonial Southeast Asia — Philippines-as-part-of-the-Malay-Archipelago at its core, before colonial borders drew their lines through it. Five great mandalas tower over the rest: the **Rajahnate of Gatusan** (999 chiefdoms swearing to a single warlord-king), the **Confederation of Apumbukid**, the **Sultanate of Akai**, the **Kingdom of Ba-e**, and the **Lakanate of Virbanwa**. Trade, faith, and divine striving radiate outward from their centers and get you stabbed in the process. You're a **Kadungganan** — cavalry, wandering swordsmen, knights-errant, the ones you call in the darkest night. Free to switch allegiance but bound by your own **Conviction**, the thing you'd kill and die for because it's the reason you took up a blade at all. The drama is unashamedly personal: sons killing fathers who defected to an enemy power, best friends crossing blades atop a mountain in a storm because their ideologies finally came to a head. The map hands you a place to stand; your Conviction is the reason the map is on fire. The Second Edition re-draws the same world as "a fantasy Southeast Asia by way of porcelain-era Philippines," its great Mahamandala re-imagined as concentrations of social and political power — the Sultanate of Akai gathering its holy warriors in moonlight white to serve the Sultana, consort of the moon. Same archipelago, sharper factionalism, fresh coat of Kickstarter. ## Mechanics ### Divining the Powers The core roll for anything risky, dramatic, or violent is called **Divining the Powers**, and it refuses to be a plain pass/fail. You take a single d12 — your Skill Die — and four d8s, the Divination Dice. Name the skill that fits the moment (Wrath, Poetry, and so on), then throw those four d8s to set your own difficulty. Base Difficulty is 5, and every odd d8 is an **Ill Omen** that jacks it up +2, leaving you to stew in whatever Good Omens were kind enough not to show. Then you roll the d12, add your skill, and hope. Meet or beat the number and you pull it off; miss and you miss, plus whatever your guardian spirit (the **Umalagad**) thinks you've got coming. And here's the twist, because of course there is one: an **even** d12 cuts you a break even when you fail, and an **odd** d12 lands a setback even on a success. You can magnificently impress the Raja and still spend the win accidentally insulting his prized cockatoo. The dice are every bit as dramatic as you'd expect from a game whose entire point is melodrama. ### Kadungganan Creation Character creation is a mini-lifepath walked as **The Path**, rollable or choosable at every step. You pick a Folk (purely cosmetic, which the game is admirably upfront about), a Culture with its Subculture, Lineage, and Social Standing, then write your **Conviction** — the reason you toil in the wheel of violence at all. From there: a past **Conjuncture**, one person you owe a **Debt**, one **Complication** you share with the band, an Alignment spread of 2/1/1/0/0 across the five elements (fire, water, metal, earth, air), your Discipline and its first Technique, a starting kit, and finally your Warband. Start at Legend 0 with your name on the saga-singers' chant. Eight steps, and the game makes each one something you'd rather think about than skip. That's vanishingly rare in a combat-forward book. ### Combat — the 3-Beat System The grid is the **3-Beat System**: three actions a turn, some costing more than one Beat, with movement, terrain, and positioning mattering as much as the swing itself. It wears its lineage loudly — *Final Fantasy Tactics*, *Tactics Ogre*, *Fire Emblem*, and **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** 4th edition all get name-dropped, and it earns it. Under that sits the **Discipline System**, the class engine: mix and match Techniques, swap Disciplines with a single Downtime Action, and stack the weird — **Enlightenments** (passives), **Liberations** (ultimate attacks), and three **Anting-Anting**, magical charms that work like very strong feats. The whole thing is built so your techniques set up somebody else's, because synergy is the only way to run a proper warband. ### War Drama The narrative layer is called **War Drama**, and it's the part most games like this quietly skip. You accrue **Debt** to people and convictions, spend **Honor** to make the world do what you want, hold fast to **Passions**, and lean on your **Conviction** to defy fate itself. Honor gets you favors; Debt is the knot that keeps you entangled — and lets a conviction manipulate you right back. The engine doesn't just permit the melodrama; it's arranged so violence becomes inevitable, every thread of who you love and what you owe converging on the grid. It's a wuxia soap opera with a battle map bolted to it, and it knows exactly what it is. ### Solo & Gambits It also quietly runs without a table to sit at. **Gambits** are enemy-action tables: roll a foe's Gambit die to decide what it does when it Riffs, and the fight more or less runs itself. A fat **Divinations** oracle section generates just about anything you might stumble over while wandering the Isles — locations, NPCs, vibes, social classes — and a small mountain of solo tooling rides along in the core. The book ships with a starter adventure, **The Sword Devil**, first in a planned module series called **Violence Blossoms Like A Lotus**, and the whole thing plays beautifully solo. This has been a game you could pick up and run by yourself since long before the Kickstarter taught everyone that was fashionable. ## Editions - **First Edition** (2021–2025) — *In the library.* The original, self-published on itch by Makapatag, iterated steadily through 1.61 before the studio handoff re-filed it as **LEGACY**. The library holds the early builds and playtests, a v1.42-era core, the Rules Reference (v1.51), and the character sheet. - **Second Edition** (Kickstarted Oct–Nov 2023; rolling out through 2026) — developed and published by **Sword Isles Studios**; a full mechanical and lore rework set in "fantasy Southeast Asia by way of porcelain-era Philippines." The corebook is still coming together as of 2026; its released previews — the 123-page **Quickstart+** (with the *Grasp the Dragon's Maw* adventure) and **Kadungganan Creation (True First Edition)** — stand in until it ships. *A "First True Edition - Quickstart" preview file is held in the library.* ## References Where to pick it up, watch it get discussed, or keep an eye on the handoff. The old blog-review links have since rotted to 404; here's what's still alive. - [Sword Isles Studios — current official page - itch.io](https://gubat-banwa.itch.io/) - [Gubat Banwa Quickstart+ - itch.io](https://gubat-banwa.itch.io/gubat-banwa-quickstart) - [Gubat Banwa First Edition [LEGACY] - itch.io](https://makapatag.itch.io/gubat-banwa-legacy) - [Gubat Banwa First Edition - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/359868/gubat-banwa-first-edition) - [Gubat Banwa — the Second Edition Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/863660422/gubat-banwa) - [Gubat Banwa official site](http://gubatbanwa.com/) - [Gubat Banwa system module - Foundry VTT](https://foundryvtt.com/packages/gubat-banwa)