Bavarian State Library's Collection of Digitised East Asian Books Available On-Line

Well, the information is in the tile :-)

The Bavarian State Library has a huge collection of 'Sinica' (i.e., China-themed) books, and apparently they have finished scanning them and making them available on-line. My German is rusty but apparently the collection contains 230,000 printed books and 3,000 manuscripts. At the moment they have digitised more than 1,000,000 pages... quite impressive!

Here is the link: Digitale Sammlungen Ostasien

There is a nifty search tool that accepts Asian characters, and I have already started looking for cool editions of the Water Margin [水滸傳]. Have fun!

Random Prefecture Generator

Judge and Retainers

Whenever I have been GM'ing using The Celestial Empire or Oriental Monsters & Magic, I have found that character parties built around a judge accompanied by retainers, bodyguards, etc. have worked really well in a Chinese context.

In a highly civilised society such as China, with little personal freedom, little motivation to transgress the boundaries of what one is restricted to, and especially in a society that frowns upon the use of violence, the only possibility for the kind of anti-social behaviour that RPGers enjoy is law enforcement.

Well, a judge in China was assigned a city where he would work as a magistrate, carrying out sentences and settling disputes, but also collecting tax, repairing broken bridges, repressing banditry, and suppressing unorthodox cults.

So the first thing to draw up for your judge PC and his fellow PCs is the prefectural seat he's going to spend the next three years in! For that purpose, I have developed a hack of Éric Nieudan's own more generic classic fantasy random wilderness generator.

What you need:
 - A standard 52-card deck with French suits (♠♥♦♣); remove the jokers and the 2's.
 - Dice.

1. Draw cards to make a 7×7 grid; leave centre of grid empty. The centre is your city:

2. Terrain the remaining 48 areas according to card suit; face cards mean there is a steading. See tables below:

Terrain
♦ plains or steppe
♣ woods or swamp
♥ hills or desert
♠ mountains or canyons

Steadings
Jack: village, hamlet or camp
Queen: temple, shrine, other holy place
King: manor or mansion
Ace: town or harbour

Choose or draw another card for subtypes, e.g.:

Second Card Drawn	Village Sub-Type	Temple Sub-Type	Manor Sub-Type
♦	Hàn Chinese	Confucian	Retired Mandarin
♣	Hàn Chinese	Buddhist	Guildhouse
♥	Hàn Chinese	Daoist	Head of Local Lineage
♠	Ethnic Minority	Folk Religion	Wealthy Landowner

Third Card Drawn	Buddhist Sub-Type	Daoist Sub-Type
♦	Pure Land	Complete Orthodoxy (Zhèngyi)
♣	Chán	Quánzhēn
♥	Tantric	Xié
♠	other	other

3. Encounters and events. Now, whenever the judge and his companions are travelling throughout the prefecture, random encounters may happen! For each card, roll d20 and compare to card value (Jack = 11, Queen = 12,  King = 13, Ace = 14). If the die roll is ≤ card value, look at the encounter on the table below.

Variant: Use a d10 in the light grey area.

Die	Civilised Encounters Die roll < card value	Events Die roll = card value
1	Farmers ♦travelling ♣foraging ♥poaching ♠fleeing
2	Fishermen ♦working ♣mending nets ♥famished ♠building a dam
3	Merchants ♦caravan ♣lost ♥being robbed ♠loaded with silver	Ambush or trap
4	Monks ♦preaching ♣looking for help ♥begging ♠on a pilgrimage	Impromptu market
5	Soldiers ♦labourers ♣conscripts ♥militia ♠press-gang	Freak weather
6	Ethnic minority ♦mercenaries ♣traders ♥confidence artists ♠clan	Blocked roads
7	Nomads ♦Steppe ♣Forest ♥Desert ♠Mountain	Fire
8	Adventurers ♦bruised & beaten ♣hostile ♥friendly ♠richly equipped	Flood
9	Indigenous people ♦warband ♣migrating ♥raiding ♠hiding	Battle
10	Koreans ♦merchants ♣ambassadors ♥prisoners ♠seamen	Ghosts
11	Bandits ♦river raiders ♣on the run ♥hiding ♠carrying plunder	Country fair
12	Thieves ♦street thugs ♣running from the law ♥spies ♠burglars	Bandit Lair
13	Vietnamese ♦merchants ♣ambassadors ♥prisoners ♠pilgrims	Siege
14		Plague

Feedback and suggestions welcome.

The Celestial Empire No Longer Available

Unfortunately, for reasons way beyond my control, The Celestial Empire won't be available from Alephtar Games any more, as they can no longer offer items with a Chaosium trademark on them.

On the other hand, Chaosium can still sell the Alephtar Games books and PDFs. However, it seems they have disappeared from Chaosium's catalogue on their web shop.

Bottom line: if you're interested in TCE and see the book in a shop or on a web-site, do purchase it! It will become impossible once the current stock has been sold out.

Also, given the amount of work that it would involve, I have currently no plans whatsoever to re-write the book to make it compatible with another set of D100-based rules. I'm also way too busy with writing and playtesting Oriental Monsters & Magic.

Big Sale at Chaosium!

Chaosium have just announced a big sale through their web-site. With the change in management, they have decided to concentrate on their in-house core lines and are thus selling their non-Chaosium stock.

The Celestial Empire and Wind on the Steppes are amongst the books on sale, so make sure you grab your copy— here!
(NB: the 50% reduction is applied to the cart upon checking out)

Poye Polomi!

I absolutely adore A Chinese Ghost Story. It's the very first wire-fu film I've ever seen, and I have very fond memories of it. I think it was this film that started my insatiable appetite for everything Chinese, which would end up with my writing The Celestial Empire because of my dissatisfaction with all the other 'Oriental' rule systems I'd tried.

Anyway, one of the recurring funny scenes of A Chinese Ghost Story is when the mad Daoist magician casts offensive spells at the demons and blasts them whilst chanting the mysterious POYE POLOMI mantra.

I have been wondering for years if 'Poye Polomi' was some kind of crazy invention by Tsui Hark or some Cantonese mumbo jumbo. Well at last I know what it is: it turns out that it is the Cantonese pronunciation of the five first syllables of the phrase 般若波羅蜜多 (bōrě bōluómìduō), which is the Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit word prajñā-pāramitā, which appears in the Heart Sūtra.