The Spawn of Fashan



The Spawn of Fashan was a tabletop role-playing game created by Kirby Lee Davis in the early 1980s. Only about a dozen copies sold, and the game would've vanished into obscurity had not an April Fool's edition of Dragon magazine decided to publish a review of it. The reviewer could not tell if the game was supposed to be serious or not.

The game's name appeared many times in the classic "Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies, and Munchkins" list as being the favorite game system for The Loonie. There's a reason for this.

If you actually want to see what the game's rules were like, an online review is available on RPG.Net. It's not pretty.


 * Contemptible Cover: A bizarre, blocky artwork, a title in a stock Letraset rub-on character set, and other than the price, everything else on it was added using a typewriter. All this on a thin fawn-colored faux-parchment stock.
 * Dancing Bear/Watch It for the Meme: The only reason anyone seeks out this game today (indeed, the only reason anyone ever sought out this game) was because of just how bad it was or to find out why it was The Loonie's game of choice.
 * Fail O'Suckyname: Just about every unique name in the game's setting. The land of "Boosboodle"? Monsters called "maki", "gruf" and "foklom", among others?
 * Fictional Currency: Davis's ability to come up with ridiculous names somehow failed him here, as he resorted to calling the game's monetary unit the "Bank Note".
 * Game-Favored Gender: As noted below, female characters halve their strength, constitution and hit points.  The blank character sheet provided with the game also assumes your character will always be male, as there's no place on it to indicate your character is female.
 * Giver of Lame Names: Davis. See Fail O'Suckyname, above.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: PDFs of the booklet can be found with a simple Google search. Certainly no one in their right mind is ever going to reissue this turkey. Except Davis, who did so in 1998 so he could charge $20 (and then $50) a copy for it.
 * No Woman's Land: Male characters roll their characteristics "normally", but women have their dice for strength, constitution, and hit points halved, while their dice for charisma are multiplied by 1.5, and they automatically get an undefined ability called "intuition".  And there's no place on the character sheet to even note that your character is female.
 * Random Number God: Hell, it's an entire War in Heaven of Random Number Gods. It seems like every sentence in the game has its own table to roll on.
 * Rouge Angles of Satin: The author had at best a casual relationship with English grammar, usage and spelling.
 * Sequel Hook: Its cover claims that it is "Book One of the Fashan Role-Playing Series". Section IX of the book is a one-page listing of the "Games of Fashan Cooperative" planned release schedule for 1982, but the only further work in the Fashan series promised is a newsletter. (Suffice it to say, it's a one-book series.)
 * The Six Stats: Averted. A Fashan character has the stats Strength, Dexterity, Reflexes, Constitution, Intelligence, Charisma, Courage, Courage, Courage, and Senses. And yes, that's not a typo -- there are three Courage scores; apparently the second and third ones were only used if the character had a special (and undefined) set of combat skills. These numbers then become the basis for upwards of fifty additional calculated statistics.
 * So Bad It's Good: Not as a game, of course, but as a piece of (unintentional?) comedy.
 * So Bad It's Horrible: If you actually try to use it as a game.
 * Stealth Parody: One of the suspicions about its origins, though there's no proof either way.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial: The author goes out of his way to insist he and his rules aren't sexist. Really.  See No Woman's Land and Game-Favored Gender above, though.
 * Word Salad: Parts of the rules are so dense and incomprehensible that they approach this trope.