Brilliant China-themed French comic books (cont'd)

I've already mentioned the Juge Bao series published by French publishing house Les Éditions Fei. This very same publishing house has started another series titled Shi Xiu set in the 19th century, at a time of great upheavals in Qīng China. This new series of comics tells the tumultuous and adventurous life of she-pirate Zhèng Shì (鄭氏), possibly the most famous and most successful she-pirate of all times.

Zhèng Shì is so famous that her life has been adapted many times on many media, even in the West. Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, wrote a short story about her titled La viuda Ching, pirata, which was made into a beautiful film in 2003 by Italian director Ermanno Olmi. The film is titled Singing Behind Screens in English, and I very much recommend it. It is quite slow and shows little action, but it is beautifully photographed and gives an idea of why the policy of not building villages on the coast had been enacted.

Random Adventure Generator

Over at my other gaming blog, I have posted about using one's bookshelves (and a few dice) as elements of a Random Adventure Generator.

Go over to my other blog and read the full entry if you are interested, but basically the idea is to randomy choose keywords within your various gaming (or non-gaming) books to fill in the blank spaces of a common pattern describing a possible frp adventure.

Depending on the diversity of the books used, the resulting sentence can be a sensible adventure hook, or a super-gonzo, multi-genre crazy scenario seed.

I have decided to use the Random Adventure Generator to generate such a scenario seed for The Celestial Empire. However, I have also decided to restrict the book base to my East Asian-themed books, so as to respect the setting of TCE.

The resulting adventure is as follows:
Charles-Édouard Hocquard asks the Player Characters to go to Hǎilóng (in Liáoníng) to retrieve a dictionary. The PCs will end up fighting against Toyotomi Hideyoshi in Shāndōng. During the course of the adventure, gold and jade will feature prominently.

The only "gonzo" element here is that French military doctor Charles-Édouard Hocquard was stationed in Indochina at the end of the 19th century, whereas Toyotomi Hideyoshi was active at the end of the 16th century...