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.

The Seven Causes For Repudiation

In Imperial China, according to the Táng Code, married men had seven criteria whereby they could repudiate their wife, called the Seven Outs (qīchū 七出):
1- barrenness (not giving birth to children)
2- lasciviousness
3- disobedience to her husband's parents
4- indulgence in gossip
5- thievish propensities
6- jealousy
7- a disfiguring illness

The Míng code added that a woman who hadn't any living relatives, however, could not be repudiated [that would have made her free of any male dominance, which is contrary to Confucian orthodox thought]. Neither could be repudiated a wife who had mourned three years for her husband's parents. Husbandly repudiation was also forbidden in the case of a husband who had become rich having been poor previous to and at the time of the marriage.

Needless to say, repudiation only worked one way: a woman could never require the marital relation be dissolved, no matter how miserable her life. Miserable women would routinely commit suicide instead, thereby shaming their husband who would lose face.

A man who had repudiated his wife without her falling in one of the seven criteria would have had to take her back, and he would have been punished by 80 strokes of beating with the heavy stick.

A woman who ran away from her home would be sold by the State if caught. If she had been married during her absence, she was sentenced to death by strangulation.

The laws were either identical or extremely similar in the other countries of the East Asian cultural sphere: Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

Under the Qīng, the Code added the possibility of a mutual divorce. Here again, the asymmetry of the male and female positions in society was apparent by the fact that a divorced man could remarry, whereas a divorced woman could not. Another kind of divorce, and then under all dynasties, was the state-mandated annulment of marriage; it would be pronounced by a magistrate if either spouse had committed any of the following offences:
- murder
- adultery
- assault and battery upon an in-law

The Ten Yāma Kings

The Ten Yāma Kings are well-known and respected personages in the pantheon of Chinese Folk Religion (they are also widely present in Korean and Japanese myths and beliefs). In Chinese, they are known as the 十殿閻王 (shí diàn Yánwáng, the Ten Yāma Kings) or as the 十代冥王 (shí Dàimíng Wáng, the Ten Lords of Hades). They are represented as grave-looking magistrates, which is in line with the Chinese view of the Underworld as a well-ordered and stern place under the jurisdiction of the Jade Emperor; a concept very far from the Western view of Hell as a disorderly place ruled by horrid devils wreathed in flames. The Ten Yāma Kings are not monsters, they are honourable magistrates!

In The Celestial Empire, I briefly mentioned them in the section about Chinese Myths and Beliefs (p34-35). In particular, I have written the following on p35:

Evil whitesouls are brought to the ten infernal tribunals, ruled by the ten Yāma Kings (閻王 Yánwáng), the judges of the Nether Region, who decide the kind of punishment to be undergone in the City of Ghosts (Fēngdū 酆都).

The scope of this blog entry is to give some more detail about the Ten Yāma Kings and their halls, should your foolish players travel to the Underworld!

Here is the roster:
1 - the King of Qínguǎng (秦廣王蔣). He rules the very first hall and is responsible for a preliminary review of the deeds from the whitesoul's lifetime. The actual punishment is then carried out in one of the nine other halls.
2 - the King of Chǔjiāng (楚江王歷). He rules the court reserved for thieves and murderers, and his hell is ice cold.
3 - King Sòngdì (宋帝王余). He rules Black Rope Hell.
4 - King Wǔguān (五官王呂). He rules Blood Pool Hell.
5 - King Yāma (閻羅王包). He rules the Iron City and oversees the nine other Yāma Kings.
6 - King Impartial (平等王陸). He is in charge of discriminating between ghosts according to their behaviour, and deciding affairs such as grades and transmigration.
7 - the King of Mount Tài (泰山王董). He rules the Black City of Shadowy Fiends. He is No.2 in the hierarchy of the Yāma Kings.
8 - the Metropolitan King (都市王黃). He rules the Suffocation Hell and the City of the Dead-by-Accident.
9 - the King of Biànchéng (卞城王畢). He rules the City of Innocent Deaths.
10 - the King of the Ever-Turning Wheel (轉輪王薛). He rules the tenth and last hall and is responsible for meting out retribution. Like in the first hall, there is no place of torment here. The Terrace of Oblivion is part of the tenth hall.

Note that depending on the sources, the order of the judges between 6 and 9 is not always the same.