# Sengoku Isekai: A Sketch tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/loner Yes, this is another one of those things that were inspired by me dealing with X. But unusually, this is from the Japanese side of X. It's shockingly from the Japanese side of X. Don't worry, I'll get a translation for you.  > "Why does isekai fantasy have to be styled after medieval Europe?" > > This is surprisingly interesting, because, for example, if you set it in Japan's Sengoku period, it turns out that the "essential elements of fantasy" just don't come together all that neatly. > > Sure, you can have warrior classes that fight with swords or mages, and feudal lords work fine, but what do you do about the monsters that serve as the punching bags? > There's no yokai that really fits as an equivalent to goblins. And quietly, because of the cremation culture, you don't get undead rising from graveyards, which is a hassle lol. > > And above all, there aren't really these massive dungeons that correspond to the "ruins of ancient civilizations," or ancient treasures and magic swords and stuff like that. > > You could just make them up, sure, but it still can't quite compete with the medieval European Dark Ages, which are built on the real-life romance of ancient Roman ruins and their treasures… > > There's no continuity in the civilization, you know? > > Of course, since it's fantasy, you could just invent each element one by one and call it a day, but that somehow ends up feeling like a punk creation, and it stops fitting into the context of pop culture, right? I would say that this answer fails to encompass something important about isekai fantasy, which I find kind of hilarious considering. It definitely *doesn't* have to be styled after medieval Europe. You can isekai to any time or place that's different from that of the protagonist. One of these days I want to sit down and do something with an isekai main character who has come back to the modern era as a result of his death by being hit with a hover car on Mars in 2275. There's no reason that can't work. The architecture is there. The story structure is there. The impetus is there. It's good to go.[^1] But let's think about an isekai fantasy that has a protagonist from the modern era pop back to Sengoku Japan. The essential elements of fantasy absolutely come together just fine. You don't actually need monsters to serve as the punching bags. There was plenty of interesting things going on in Sengoku-era Japan, but if you *did* want to go high fantasy rather than low fantasy (which would be my inclination) for the experience, there's plenty of yokai which move in swarms and have unpleasant habits. You could go with ko-oni. Knee high, brightly colored, lesser demons. Oni consider them largely beneath them, totally into swarm tactics, and they love the crude warfare. Really turn up the unpleasantness of the bunch and have them essentially an almost environmental threat. Or if you want to lean into the undead that I'm going to run into here shortly, you could go with the gaki, hungry ghosts. They scavenge filth, eat corpses, human feces, garbage of all sorts. They need to eat constantly, and because they're technically a form of undead, you're never going to run out of them. Or even [amanojaku](https://yokai.com/amanojaku/). If you want to go with something spiteful and unpleasant and generally a huge negative social influence. If there's one thing that we can say in Sengoku-era Japan, there's *plenty* of nasty, horrible little things that you can have be killed by the tens of thousands. Personally of this lot, I would go with the gaki. That really stimulates my pleasure centers. But let's tackle some higher level undead, because I love undeath as a narrative element. Cremation really wasn't all of that popular during the Sengoku era. Sure, if you happen to be an aristocrat, or rich, or just incredibly well-known, you could be burned. But most everybody, and most certainly the ashigaru bleeding out in the mud, engaged in "wind burial," which is basically just leaving the corpses outside to rot on the battlefield after the battle. If you won, you hacked off the heads of the formation you were dealing with and left the bodies there in the mud for the crows and wild dogs. Maybe if they were lucky, someone would come along, steal the remaining stuff on them, and dump them into a mass grave. Firewood is expensive, rotting is free. Since we've got a ton of bodies hanging out without proper funerary rites, that's when we bring out the [Gashadokuro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashadokuro). You've got a huge battlefield with corpses everywhere and unquiet spirits who died of violence. Why don't we just have the remnants of their spirits drag their corpses together into a giant, skeletal, nasty, undead horror? Especially one that can walk silently through the countryside at night and pluck people straight off the roads to bite off their heads. (Okay, so the Gashadokuro is technically a 19th-century thing, but it fits our needs visually and stylistically.) Combine this with the warlords of the era making pacts with demonic entities or delving into forbidden arts. You've got a great framework for some guy from the modern era to drop right into the middle of high stakes, socio-political maneuvering, the potential for a complex, magical economic system, perhaps tied to the literal geography of the islands, like the flow of ley lines. If you want to get creative about the protagonist's "special something" that sets him apart from everyone else, you can even make him largely technologically useless in contrast with the expectation, but have him be a young psychologist with the ability to bring his understanding of human motivations and manipulation to bear in a context where sociopolitics is going to be absolutely vital. You don't need ruins of ancient civilizations or ancient treasures (though it's not like Japan doesn't have plenty of magic treasures in its folklore). It's kind of interesting to see someone literally from Japan playing down the folkloric possibilities of Sengoku-era Japan in favor of a more alien Western European aesthetic, especially given all of the material that's possible to reference. In Sengoku-era Japan, that would be cool as *fuck* to explore in whatever media you might like. Is it a punk creation? In the most literal original sense of the idea, yes, because punk was cool as fuck. This would be metal. Absolutely brutal. You could lean heavily into the gore and psychosexual aspects if you really wanted to. This could literally be an adult class isekai with all sorts of cool ideas dangling off the sides. It actively pains me to see people fail to understand how they can explore and capitalize on an idea, especially one as juicy and fruitful as this. Hell, you could just about drop it straight into **[Loner: Kwaidan](https://lonersrd.zotiquestgames.com/geared_towards_loner/kwaidan_revised.html)**[^2] and hit the ground running. ![[Loner - Kwaidan (cover).jpg|300]] Guys, get out there and play some games and be creative. Unlike, and I'm going to say it, the majority of isekai writers out there who really can't get beyond trying to do the same thing as everybody else. I don't know if that's a Japanese trait or just a media trait, but damn, at a certain point, stop writing shows and manga with 30-word titles that tell you exactly what's going on in the story, and then writing the same story as the other 20 guys who came out this week. Do something cool. Do something punk. Get on it. [^1]: Seriously, this is an idea that I really need to do something with at some point. Future isekai back to the modern age has so much material. [^2]: I love the fact that you can have the entire text of all of the **[[Loner]]** games for free right on the web, because it means that it's really easy to point people in foreign countries to in order to pick it up, read it, or have their machines translate it for them. They don't need to buy anything. They can get into playing a really cool game right away. We need more of that in the world.