Path Of The Peerless is the wuxia rpg I recommend. It's a classical take on the genre, and it's got a very GM-is-a-designer ethos that might not click with everyone, but if it clicks with you it's probably going to be one of your favorite ttrpgs, full stop.
The PDF is 107 pages with a clean, extremely readable, professional layout. Everything is well organized and presented clearly, and while there aren't really illustrations, the section headings are ornate and keep the visual impression from feeling plain.
Lorewise, Peerless doesn't have a canon setting. It has anchorpoints you use to establish your own setting. The basics are chivalry (respect people stronger than you, don't bully people weaker than you, it's okay to fight equals) and a fairly prosperous and stable empire. There are martial arts sects who wield political and martial power, but none that can afford to start a beef with the army. Killing anyone is discouraged.
Within this framework, you're encouraged to fill in the details (who are the sects? what is the emperor like?) and also to make any alterations that better fit your view of what heroism is.
The core rules are simple. D6 + Stat vs TN. 7 is a success. 13 is a crit. There's a few bonuses that can also apply.
In another game, I think this would make for a bland feel, but Peerless uses this as an extremely solid foundation to build on, and every block is simple but meaningful. You can wield equipment, and it gives you powerful bonuses, but lowers your odds of succeeding. You have multiple resources to spend to deal with incoming attacks, with hp as a backstop for anything that makes it through. In combat, information about your opponent is obscured, but you have a stat that lets you act faster than them, and gives you small bonuses for doing so, and lets you make guesses about how their techniques work.
The meat of Peerless' mechanics is techniques, and though the book gives plenty of examples, these are meant to be custom things. To put it another way, when creating a PC, you present the GM with your character concept and they homebrew a bunch of powers to fit it.
I haven't seen anything like Peerless' character creation in another system. It's a deliberate back and forth between the player and the GM, where the GM also acts as a designer and the player helps calibrate this process. The game's system for character advancement reinforces this, with PCs improving when they lose fights, and this improvement allowing them to work with the GM to add more techniques to their kit.
It sounds floaty but feels very concrete, which I think is how I would describe this system as a whole.
In terms of GM and player resources, there's a lot. The book understands that it has to teach everyone how to design the game in order to also play the game, and it does a good job of this. It also provides a lot of resources for randomly generating content or intuiting what sorts of things to include in the setting. There's even a bunch of mechanical levers that they players can use to do things that are normally the purview of the GM, like changing the arc of an NPC or adjusting the history of the setting.
Again, this sounds floaty, but in practice it's extremely grounded.
Peerless doesn't have an example scenario, but it does have lots of example material, including sects and techniques, fitting with its spirit as an aggressively DIY system. Creating your own content isn't too hard, thanks to the simplicity of the core mechanics, but starting a campaign does take a lot of work---since you're making custom powers for every player and also every major npc. I think a boxed setting with statted npcs, canon locations, and more sample martial arts could be a boon for the game, and would help groups that are less comfortable doing design dip their feet in.
Overall, though, if you like martial arts and you like both GMing and game design, you should really, *really* take a look at Peerless. I don't think there's currently any other game that will out-of-the-box give you the kind of campaign that Peerless will.
I had the honor and pleasure of playing a short campaign of Peerless. Some of my favorite things:
The setting. I am not a huge wuxia fan, but the vibe is totally here. What impressed me more about the setting is how elegantly it supports everything else in the game, particularly combat. In many TTRPGs, the "heroes" are expected to win every fight. In Peerless, that's very much not the case—and it totally works, because in this world, the "strong" do not bully the weak, and losing battle is part of progress. It also makes combat genuinely exciting because there isn't plot armor or PC-skewed mechanics protecting you from losing.
Organic character progression. As fun as it is to "theorycraft" and build ideal/superpowered characters in other games, in Peerless, you're encouraged to inhabit this world, and your character's abilities and sensibilities flow naturally from that. There is a great sense of progression, but it feels natural, attuned to your character's actual experiences and failures.
Creative martial arts. The game provides building blocks to create an infinite variety of martial arts, and the results feel genuinely expressive and thematic. The mechanics sit at a nice level of complexity—there's quite a bit of feinting, reacting, and resource-management, but rolling the dice is quick and the math is easy.
If you're looking for a wuxia game, or just looking for something different from the sea of D&D/PF, PbtA, BitD, L&F, and other well-trod acronyms out there, I highly recommend Peerless.
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Path Of The Peerless is the wuxia rpg I recommend. It's a classical take on the genre, and it's got a very GM-is-a-designer ethos that might not click with everyone, but if it clicks with you it's probably going to be one of your favorite ttrpgs, full stop.
The PDF is 107 pages with a clean, extremely readable, professional layout. Everything is well organized and presented clearly, and while there aren't really illustrations, the section headings are ornate and keep the visual impression from feeling plain.
Lorewise, Peerless doesn't have a canon setting. It has anchorpoints you use to establish your own setting. The basics are chivalry (respect people stronger than you, don't bully people weaker than you, it's okay to fight equals) and a fairly prosperous and stable empire. There are martial arts sects who wield political and martial power, but none that can afford to start a beef with the army. Killing anyone is discouraged.
Within this framework, you're encouraged to fill in the details (who are the sects? what is the emperor like?) and also to make any alterations that better fit your view of what heroism is.
The core rules are simple. D6 + Stat vs TN. 7 is a success. 13 is a crit. There's a few bonuses that can also apply.
In another game, I think this would make for a bland feel, but Peerless uses this as an extremely solid foundation to build on, and every block is simple but meaningful. You can wield equipment, and it gives you powerful bonuses, but lowers your odds of succeeding. You have multiple resources to spend to deal with incoming attacks, with hp as a backstop for anything that makes it through. In combat, information about your opponent is obscured, but you have a stat that lets you act faster than them, and gives you small bonuses for doing so, and lets you make guesses about how their techniques work.
The meat of Peerless' mechanics is techniques, and though the book gives plenty of examples, these are meant to be custom things. To put it another way, when creating a PC, you present the GM with your character concept and they homebrew a bunch of powers to fit it.
I haven't seen anything like Peerless' character creation in another system. It's a deliberate back and forth between the player and the GM, where the GM also acts as a designer and the player helps calibrate this process. The game's system for character advancement reinforces this, with PCs improving when they lose fights, and this improvement allowing them to work with the GM to add more techniques to their kit.
It sounds floaty but feels very concrete, which I think is how I would describe this system as a whole.
In terms of GM and player resources, there's a lot. The book understands that it has to teach everyone how to design the game in order to also play the game, and it does a good job of this. It also provides a lot of resources for randomly generating content or intuiting what sorts of things to include in the setting. There's even a bunch of mechanical levers that they players can use to do things that are normally the purview of the GM, like changing the arc of an NPC or adjusting the history of the setting.
Again, this sounds floaty, but in practice it's extremely grounded.
Peerless doesn't have an example scenario, but it does have lots of example material, including sects and techniques, fitting with its spirit as an aggressively DIY system. Creating your own content isn't too hard, thanks to the simplicity of the core mechanics, but starting a campaign does take a lot of work---since you're making custom powers for every player and also every major npc. I think a boxed setting with statted npcs, canon locations, and more sample martial arts could be a boon for the game, and would help groups that are less comfortable doing design dip their feet in.
Overall, though, if you like martial arts and you like both GMing and game design, you should really, *really* take a look at Peerless. I don't think there's currently any other game that will out-of-the-box give you the kind of campaign that Peerless will.
I had the honor and pleasure of playing a short campaign of Peerless. Some of my favorite things:
If you're looking for a wuxia game, or just looking for something different from the sea of D&D/PF, PbtA, BitD, L&F, and other well-trod acronyms out there, I highly recommend Peerless.