D30 Local Magistrate Table

China is an immense empire. Although it is an empire, it lacks feudality: there aren't any local rulers below the emperor.
China is a centralised empire: the emperor sends out magistrates to rule the various provinces in his name. The magistrate is a lonely person who must perform day-to-day governance, mete out justice, oversee tax collection, road repairs, and churn out reports for the bureaucracy in the capital, and who changes location every three years to avoid becoming enmeshed in local politics.

These magistrates are hence quite lonely individuals. Some of them are over zealous, some others spend their time reading poetry whilst ignoring the local bumpkins. Some of them are incorruptible, some others amass bribes...

So whenever your PCs arrive in a new city, you may want to roll on this table to have quick and fast ideas for the behaviour of the local magistrate. This is especially useful if the PCs have ran afoul of the laws of the Empire.

D30 | Local magistrate is...
01 | ...a very thorough investigator. He explores all paths, interrogates all witnesses irrespective of their social class, and keeps all suspects in gaol during the investigations.
02 |  ...incorruptible.
03 | ...exaggeratedly social and friendly.
04 | ...a bookworm obsessed with antiquity. For each case, he'll try and find a similar case in the annals of the district, and try and align his verdict on the earlier one(s).
05 | ...obsessed with  the chivalric stories from the Rivers and Lakes. Should the PCs behave in a chivalrous way, the magistrate will highly respect their opinion.
06 | ...disgusted with having been assigned to this backward district. He keeps complaining about the weather/the food/the local dialect.
07 | ...a womaniser. Should the party include a female PC, the magistrate will try and sleep with her.
08 | ...gay and openly interested in the most handsome male PC.
09 | ...crazy about alchemy. His private quarters within the yámen are full of dangerous substances.
10 | ...convinced that murderers do not act by their own volition but because they are under the spell of evil spirits. In case of a murder, he will do his utmost to find an exorcist.
11 | ...only interested in complex cases and bored by straightforward ones.
12 | ...extremely wealthy and uses his wealth to further his peculiar interest or obsession (roll a second time to determine it).
13 | ...fascinated by yìqi and by the world of the Jiānghú (see p9 of The Celestial Empire). If the PCs are Rivers-and-Lakes types, he'll constantly be pestering them to hear their stories from the Rivers and Lakes.
14 | ...mostly interested in the mastery of the four pastimes. Anything else bores him. Should one of the player characters show interest in any of the four pastimes, the magistrate will become very friendly to him.
15 | ...a bigoted Buddhist.
16 | ...a good practitioner of wǔshù. Should one of the player characters be well versed in martial arts, the magistrate will try and challenge him to a fight.
17 | ...a superstitious Daoist.
18 | ...an austere Confucianist. He'll make the life of any religious PC miserable.
19 | ...a gambler.
20 | ...formerly from the Green Forest (see p9 of TCE) and lives in the terror of being exposed.
21 | ...a glutton.
22 | ...extremely distrustful of the world of the Jiānghú. If the PCs are Rivers-and-Lakes types, he'll make their life in his district miserable.
23 | ...extremely poor and always saving money on everything.
24 | ...from an ethnic minority. It's almost impossible to understand what he says.
25 | ...involved in local politics, being allied with a local clan against another local family, and always trying to take advantage of his position to hurt the interests of the latter.
26 | ...very distrustful of adventuring types. He'll try to indict the PCs.
27 |  ...an active, young judge, carrying out the investigations by himself.
28 | ...stern and aloof.
29 | ...ever expecting to collect bribes.
30 | ...eager to get rid of the case. As soon as he gets someone who seems to be the culprit, he closes the case.

Crane Frightens Kūnlún (鶴驚崑崙)

Of course you all know the 2000 wǔxiá film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee. The film was a huge box office success and helped spread knowledge of Chinese wǔxiá fiction to the ignorant Western barbarians (er, us). For me, it was the initial spark that would eventually lead to the publication of The Celestial Empire.

The scenario of the film was inspired by the fourth novel in a five-novel cycle written by Mainland wǔxiá novelist Wáng Dùlú (王度庐, 1909-1977). Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the novels have been translated into English. There is a 'bootleg' translation available on this blog for those who are interested.

Luckily for us French speakers, the first two novels in the cycle have been translated into French; each of them in two halves, so that's four books in total. Sadly, it looks like the third to fifth novels will never be translated. I am currently reading the first half of the very first novel, 鶴驚崑崙 (La vengeance de Petite Grue), variously rendered into English as The Crane Startles Kūnlún or as Crane Frightens Kūnlún. It's really a fantastic telling of life in rural Qīng China, and of the relationship between the various people at the heart of Jiānghú (江湖), the parallel world of the "Rivers and Lakes" (see TCE p9), most notably between members of escort agencies (biāojú 镖局, see TCE p41). It also sheds light on gender relationship under the prudish Qīng, and explains how the men from the Rivers-and-Lakes could go about armed to the teeth even though it was theoretically forbidden.

Heartily recommended to anybody who runs or plays in a Rivers-and-Lakes or even merely in a rural TCE game.

Outlaws of the Water Margin

This post is about Outlaws of the Water Margin— no, not the book: the role-playing game. Set under the Sòng in the milieu of the derring-do outlaws of the Rivers and Lakes, this is in my opinion the best 'Oriental' role-playing game ever. It was actually a combination of Outlaws of the Water Margin, for the immersive cultural context, and of Rome: Life and Death of the Republic, for the system engine and the layout, that spurred my working seriously on The Celestial Empire, whose manuscript had been sleeping in draft format for such a long time, in the first place.

The only problem is that Outlaws of the Water Margin has never been published. Paul Mason started to work on it years ago (before widespread use of the internet, when there still were paper rpg fanzines) and, Paul being the procrastinating perfectionist that he is, the fully-fledged game never saw the light.

Some draft versions of it did circulate as PDFs generously handed out by the author, but alas there isn't much left online.

Draft versions of the main chapter are available here. I don't know if these are the latest PDFs that have circulated, but it is a good start. Paul would also often discuss progress in the game in the pages of imazine, the fanzine that he edited and published until 2002.
The gaming system was extremely simple, efficient, and elegant. Success of an action would depend on an ability plus a modifier and the roll of 2D6 against a given difficulty; in case of success, the highest of the 2D6 would also give the degree of success. Today this is the bread-and-butter of a lot of games, but at the time (the mid-90s, when elegant design and a single mechanism to cover all game-related actions were almost unheard-of) this was quite a revolution.The game also stressed the importance of a PC's family and guānxi, again at the time when this was not exactly what game designers had in mind. Wealth was an abstract measure, not the exact computation of how many coppers and silvers the PC had amassed; again, something really, really revolutionary at the time.

Paul also made available the write-ups of a series of gaming sessions, which have also been extremely inspiring when I was writing TCE. The write-ups are available here.

Viktor Haag is known to have GM'ed an Outlaws of the Water Margin campaign, whose sole [as far as I know] campaign log-cum-fanzine is available here.

If you find more information about Outlaws of the Water Margin, please let me know!

Míng China Discovered America!

This is the claim made by pseudo-historian Gavin Menzies. While I do believe some of the theories he put forward in his first book, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, I think that he's simply kept presenting more and more over-the-top theories in each of his following books.

Irrespective of their historical accuracy, though, his books are great fun to read, if only for the great ideas they provide for an ocean-going role-playing campaign using The Celestial Empire.

This article is about Gavin Menzies, his books, and his theories. As I said, I think it can be a fun source of inspiration, especially if you want to incorporate Fúsāng (扶桑) as a Chinese version of the continent of America in your TCE campaign.

New Rules, New Campaign

I am currently writing a new East Asian-flavoured role-playing game. This new book won't use the Basic Role-Playing System like The Celestial Empire does, but the Effect Engine (used in Monsters & Magic) by Sarah Newton.

Another major difference with The Celestial Empire is that the new book, whose working title is Oriental Monsters & Magic, will focus on a particular time period, namely the 16th century. Also, instead of having China as its central focus and depict the neighbouring countries from a Sinocentric point of view, Oriental Monsters & Magic will try and focus in equal mode on the four civilised countries that surround the East China Sea: Míng China, Joseon Korea, Muromachi/Azuchi-Momoyama Japan, and the Ryūkyū kingdom.

I have started a playtesting campaign for the new rules set in Míng China. You can find the campaign log here (beware, it's in French!).