Rowan Tree and Red Thread

I was reminded by sleepyscholar that I hadn't posted about our recent change of roleplaying entertainments. We wrapped our Grand Theft Starship game a few weeks ago and the generous sammywol stepped into the breach so we have...

Judge Dee: The White Lotus Rebellion

sammywol has kindly offered to GM a game from the casebook of Judge Dee. Drawing on the books by Robert van Gulik, she has the PCs in the employ of the good magistrate Di Renjie, in the district of Lan Fang, on the Northwest border close against the Uyghur hordes.

Recent events have thrown the whole district into disarray. A rebellion led by the mysterious White Lotus Brotherhood has shattered the local Imperial Army, driven the judge from his tribunal, and left the town under the brutal martial law of the rebels.

Into this mess come the player characters. They are an odd assortment of assistants, followers and hangers-on to the tribunal of Lan Fang. They are:

Miss Ting/Mrs. Kang (irishkate): the wife of missing Mr. Kang, she is an ex-acrobat, now respectably married, who lost contact with her husband during the recent unpleasantness after falling into a river.

Bo Jiang (marzut): ex-soldier with a heavy conscience and a habit of singing drunken songs. He has an unfortunate weakness for 'ripe fruit' (buxom lasses).

Win Gao (The Mysterious alaimacerc): disgruntled ex-bureaucrat and herbalist. The only local in the group, now fled from Lan Fang and offering help to the magistrate.

Chen Mi ('Pete') : Sensitive poet and ladykiller, sporting sleeve arrows and a winsome smile.

Zui Quan (moi): Drunken fallen Daoist priest with a sturdy constitution and mighty drunken monkey style gong fu.

The judge set up camp in the woods some distance from the city, and there began to organise the resistance. Our band were put to the task of investigating strange marks on some of the trees, evidence of a secret society at work perhaps?

I hope to post more here when I get the sessions properly written up. It's been fun so far, and I'm finding playing a drunken daoist surprisingly easy. (No sniggering at the back!)

[ETA: we're using Ghost/Echo, John Harper's adaptation of Vincent Baker's Otherkind Dice idea.

ETA2: Removed Alai's True Name for fear of naughty mages, so I thought I'd tidy up the rest.)