The Jade Princess

By Hywel T. Phillips
Original inspiration by Toerag

It is the year 10201. The Jade Emperor Huang Ti Tien Chih Li, the hundred and fifth Son of Heaven from the House of Tien, sits in state in the Hidden City, ruler of a vast stellar empire a thousand light years across. The Imperial bureaucracy, headed by the Chancellor, Imperial Counsellor and the Nine Ministers of state that make up the “Outer Court”, administers the prefectures, provinces and planets on the Emperor’s behalf. The Emperor’s peace is enforced upon the tens of thousands of inhabited worlds by the Imperial Marines, the Chun Jen, lead by General Sui Mou Sha, Command-in-chief of the Emperor’s military forces and head of the “Inner Court”.

Countless billions of people, thousands of different races, acknowledge the power of the Son of Heaven and rely on the protection of the Chun Jen to guard their planets and trader ships from the depredations of the pirates and barbarian races which seek to rape and pillage the prosperous worlds of the Middle Kingdom.

Administering such a huge volume of space taxes even the great intellects of the Outer Court. Even the ethereal organic ship-swarms of the J’Dyn, the fastest starships in the Kingdom, take decades to cross the vast empire. Of necessity, then, most of the empire runs under the civilian guidance of local prefects and the military protection of the local nobility.

Tien Chih Li is not a young man and he has no son to succeed him. Twenty years ago a cabal of the Inner and Outer Courts tried to assassinate Chih Li and bring the Tien dynasty to a premature end. Chih Li’s force screens  deflected enough of the blast from the gamma-ray fusion bomb that destroyed the Summer Palace to save Chih Li’s life – but not enough to avert the total devastation of the Emperor’s genetic material. Chih Li was left physically weak... and sterile.

The coup was put down inside ten days, but the conspirators had wreaked havoc in the Royal House of Tien in that short time. Only three of Chih Li’s children remained alive- all daughters. The wolves inside and outside the house of Tien ravened. The Imperial throne might just be up for grabs for the first time in a millennium, and few are willing to let the opportunity pass by. The tradition of ten thousand years demand that the Emperor be male, even though past emperors have been drawn from dozens of races. An empress can only rule as regent for her husband or son. Power must reside, at least in name, in one capable of siring hundreds of offspring. The eminent sense of this tradition has been in everyone’ mind in recent years- if Chih Li had only had a few offspring, none would have survived, and the Empire itself might have been brought down.

Now the eldest daughter of the Royal House of Tien has come of age, and it is time for a suitor to be found. Tien Chih Li has sent his daughter on a royal progress to meet those who seek her hand. The ancient ordinances that rule every aspect of Imperial life forbid her to marry in the House of Tien, so she must seek a husband from further afield. Race is no barrier, because the ancient ordinances were written before the conquest of space.

A thornier question is the fate of the dynasty. If a strong and willing candidate can be found, he can marry the princess and then when he assumes the throne he can choose to assume a royal name of the House of Tien. But at that moment he will be emperor, and how could anyone stop him from choosing a new royal name and founding his own dynasty? The task of Chih Li and his daughter is no easy one.

BACKGROUND

In the Earth of this campaign, Columbus never discovered the New World and the wealth of the Americas was not exploited by the Europeans, who were all but annihilated by wars of religion and terrible plagues. In the Earth of this campaign, China colonized first the Americas, then Asia, then the world... then the stars. There was no Marx and no cultural revolution. The stellar empire of the Jade Throne is based on ten thousand unbroken years of Chinese culture. When humans encountered aliens, war, trade and civilization spread both ways, but the sheer inertia of Chinese society and tradition meant that, in the end, even the most barbarous alien races came to covet the peace and fantastic prosperity of the Middle Kingdom. That is not to say that the history of the stellar empire has been a succession of quiet years. Many periods have more than qualified as “living in interesting times”, in the words of an ancient curse.

These latest problems in the imperial house are surely no more interesting than those of the Kuang dynasty, whose strange five-sexed biology caused dynastic succession wars based on hereditary so complicated it gives scholars nervous breakdowns.

The threat from the barbarians “beyond the Wall” is great, but no greater than during the reign of Chu Yao Te when the Octopoid Kuai Wu in their hidden dark ships stormed the Gates of Heaven and reduced the Hidden City to faintly glowing rubble. (The Kuai Wu are now highly respectable citizens of the empire who specialise in accountancy and do not like to be reminded of their barbarian heritage).

The plots of the ambitious within the Imperial bureaucracy are many and twisted but there is no mastermind like the great Ching Shen Ping whose intellect was so acute that he predicted not just the day but the hour, the minute and the second of his ascensions to the Jade throne when filling in the “aspirations” section of his Imperial bureaucracy examination... at age twelve.

No, the current minor dynastic difficulties of the House of Tien will probably just be a minor footnote to the scholars. Unless something goes horribly wrong.

THE PLAYER CHARACTERS

You will be playing the princess or part of her retinue as she makes her way along the worlds of the Middle Kingdom. This voyage, part debutante circuit, part royal progress, will of course take in the most fashionable, the most spectacular, the most remarkable and above all the most wealthy locations that the Middle Kingdom has to boast. Most of the other characters should be suitors, hoping for the princess’ hand, the first step up the staircase to the Jade Throne. Some may be outstanding sons of minor houses hoping to shine by personal merit. Others will be backed by the weight of great kingdoms and powerful races who ruled dozens of planets before being subsumed into the great empire.

You will have a bit more work to do in character generation than usual because you’re going to have to create not just your player character but the whole race and culture from which he springs.

As I hope you can tell, the setting is intended to be a wild space opera full of weird beings with incomprehensible motives and quasi-magical technology. Please let your imagination run riot when it comes to creating your race! Even a crystalline silicon stellaroid from the Oceans of liquid mercury could become Emperor if he has the right qualities, a little luck and a lot of determination.

Dippy Players

Most people have their own style of playing role-playing games. Since few of us are fortunate to have dozens of players to choose from, one of the GM’s most important jobs is to allow players with different styles to get along in the same game. A critical problem can be how the players “get into character”. Some people love to sit down for hours before the game and think out their character in advance, sometimes even writing pages and pages of notes. These players like to “develop at start”, and they are generally regarded as a blessing for the GM because all that background provides lots of interesting ways to involve the character in whatever’s going on.

The other sort of player turns up with a few vague ideas, scratches his head whenever asked to make a decision during character generation and generally doesn’t seem too inspired- until play starts, at which point the notes get discarded and the player start to throw himself into the role with great gusto. This sort of person prefers to “develop in play”, exploring the character as it interacts with other people. Most GMs don’t value such players as much, which is a shame because they can often come up with startlingly original characters. They just need other people around while they do it.

Jade Princess is designed to allow you to develop as much or as little as you like during character generation- you can write a dozen pages of background or start play at once, with no more than a name and a description of what you look like. You’ll fill in any details you haven’t yet decided on when it comes up in play. Of course, most people fall somewhere in between those extremes, so you can decide to stop the character generation process at whichever point suits your style.