Masque of the Jade Dragon / Jade Horror

DeepShadow

It was about 85-90% finished when it was cancelled, at least from where I was sitting. My part was over 95% complete.

Pieces cut early from the work are still owned by the respective authors, and thus have a chance to see the light of day elsewhere. In particular, look for a creature I cut from the Monsters chapter early on to appear in a future work.

Rucht

Masque of the Jade Dragon was intended to be a stand alone system that would have tangential ties to the Masque of the Red Death. It was intended to be a game that you could play on your own, or play as a supplement to MotRD.

The Jade Horror would have been a mysterious force similar to the Red Death, and we would have left questions to whether it was a separate entity from the Red Death entirely, or just another aspect of it.

Matt Barrett was coming up with the class system when the project was canned. I can tell you that the class system was wildly different from the MotRD system. The magic system would have been different as well.

I think that Jade Horror had potential. When I first heard about the idea, I thought it sounded off-base. Were Ravenloft fans lining up to get a setting set in Asia? But then I started looking at all of the great horror movies that come from the East. Ringu, The Eye, Jun-On... Not to mention great video games like the Fatal Frame series or even the Tenchu series.

DeepShadow

I was working on MotJH, and I will also agree that the class and magic systems were very, very, very different from MotRD. I tried to pay attention to the feedback from fans, and I agreed with many of their criticisms of Red Death 3E. I tried very hard to avoid those problems and make Jade Horror a different setting all its own.

And then it was cancelled. So much for my debut into the world of gaming. Next time it will be different!

Q: What was it covering?

DeepShadow: Ummmm..not sure how to answer that question without either retreading the details or going into details I'm not allowed to get into. With everyone speculating on what MotJH was or wasn't though, allow me to go out on a limb myself: Masque was a separate setting, meant to be played on its own as often as it was to be combined with MotRD. Based on the discussions I had with other authors, I think many of the authors saw it as a chance to redeem themselves from the disaster that was MotRD. By buying the second book, players got a new setting, sure, but they also got a second set of rules that fixed the old ones where they were broken (classes, skills, feats). All the authors I worked closely with were aware of the problems with the old setting and were eager to fix them. Filipino monsters got some coverage, I can at least tell you that much.