BTW Gryph, what was the creative spark behind the Katsujinkenryuu?

I would also like to express my enthusiasm for the latest few installments of SOS. The christmas episode was hilarious! Especially Wapiko! The image of a large table making its way thru the crowd brought me to tears.

--Solnoid

Still stuck in the Bowels of Hell that is Camp Roberts, CA.

Assuming that the kanji of "Katsujinkenryuu" is as I'm visualizing it, "katsujin" comes out as, literally, "Living Human." Of course, this is a VERY literal interpretation of the kanji, and I can always be wrong (after all, Gryphon never included the kanji characters in his stories, or at least I don't think he did), and it might be another set of characters that have the same pronunciation but a different meaning.

Translating (or transliterating, as it is) Japanese sword styles can be immensely frustrating at times, and it's best not to dwell on them too much. Such as, for example, while watching Rurouni Kenshin.

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Jeffrey McIntyre
"Only two things are infinite--the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the universe."

Well, it had fairly humble beginnings; I just thought it would be cool if Our Hero learned a samurai sword form during the Exile. (This is why it originally had such a stupid name - because I made it up on the fly, so it was a bunch of meaningless syllables. Fortunately, Chairman Stalin showed me the way to true historical accuracy. :) It has its genesis mainly in Dave Lowry's book, Autumn Lightning (about his boyhood training in the Yagyu Shinkageryuu, in, of all places, St. Louis), and the original non-crippled edition of Palladium Games' Ninjas and Superspies, which had a kenjutsu form available as a player skill that was basically Shinkageryuu with the serial numbers filed off. :) (A reference to this appears in the origins of Katsujinkenryuu - it evolved from an earlier style called Shinjinkenryuu, which was the one in N&S.)

Over the next few years it evolved further, acquiring things like the twenty-first-century Jedi influence (and the somewhat-modified attunement to the Force that comes with that), and since I've started working extensively with Kaitlyn it's taken a much more solid form in my mind. Where she and her students take it, both I and my avatar will be very interested to see.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/