The climactic battle scene of Curse of the Emperor's Stone takes at the hillside Sifengshi monastery - the House of the Four Winds - where the PCs will fight alongside the Sifeng monks against agents of the Lushou and their allies for possession of the Emperor's Stone.

The image (at right, click for a larger view) is the map of that area, which will appear alongside the encounter details. The trail to the right leads up the mountain to the Temple of Heaven, to which the PCs will travel in hopes of ridding themselves of the curse of the Emperor's Stone for all time.

In the opening scene of Curse of the Emperor's Stone, the PCs will arrive in Haibianr onboard the Scalante, a cargo caravel out of Florennia. They'll spend the first couple of days of the adventure in and around the docks where Scalante is moored.

The image (at right, click for a larger view) is the map of that area, and will appear on the inside rear cover of the adventure. This is a PC-friendly map but there will be a key for GMs detailing most of the establishments and points of interest in this part of Haibianr.

Let's turn now to the upcoming adventure, Curse of the Emperor's Stone, an adventure about an artifact: The Emperor’s Stone. While this long-lost treasure of the First Emperor offers its bearer, over time, great power, it often brings more woe than weal. When one of the adventure’s heroes, through an unfortunate series of events, winds up becoming the artifact’s “Chosen One” he and his associates quickly find themselves on a run-away rickshaw ride that just won’t end…at least until they find a way to rid themselves of the Emperor’s Stone once and for all. 

So, that's the marketing copy, but I've included a preview of the introduction to the adventure below so you can get a feel for its flavor - as you might imagine, the PCs will be on the ship mentioned in the last paragraph when it docks.

Huangdi Shi has resurfaced – this time in the cosmopolitan Dazhou port city of Haibianr. Also known as the Emperor’s Stone, Huangdi Shi is a jade statue depicting a heroic figure, triumphant in battle. Its origin is unknown, although some suggest it first appeared in the treasure vaults of the First Emperor, who united the various Min nations nearly 6,000 years ago through force of arms and personality. Respected scholars have variously noted the statue’s presence in the possession of many famous historical leaders: Learned Zhu claims it resided for a time in the saddlebags of Grazak Khan and his descendents, the orkish worg-lords that terrorized the post-Imperial city-states between 3,500-3,900; meanwhile, Honorable Ling believes it rode in the treasure palanquins of Emperor Wu during his crusades to unite the warring three kingdoms in 5,235-37.

Whatever its genesis and history, Huangdi Shi functions as its common appellation “Kingmaker” implies. This minor artifact only works for certain bearers, those it deems “worthy” of its ministrations – usually a person with a talent for martial endeavors and the ambition to see them through. Once it has found a beneficiary, its “chosen one”, that person undergoes a meteoric rise in power, challenging all comers until she either resides at the top of the heap or falls to her foes in battle.

Adventure Background

Huangdi Shi lay forgotten for many centuries in the tomb of a would-be conqueror named Le Wushi. Le failed the Kingmaker’s test, falling to his foes in a great battle on the windswept plains of southern Helei. His followers recovered his slashed and arrow-riddled body and laid it to rest in a carefully prepared tomb along with his many worldly treasures, including Huangdi Shi – and there the artifact vanished from official notice for more than five hundred years.

A group of professional treasure-seekers recently breached Le’s tomb, braving its formidable traps and arcane wards with the loss of only one expedition member. The artifact, along with the rest of the tomb’s loot, was piled into a treasure cart and brought to the lucrative antiquities markets of Haibianr. There it was sold, with many other, less-remarkable objets d’art, to Hanford House, a prestigious foreign auctioneer dealing in exotic artworks and patronized by the wealthy nobility of distant nations.

Hanford frequently distributes lists of available lots via its network of sellers. The lot containing Huangdi Shi came to the attention of the Prince Mikkel of Iskandia, who purchased it sight-unseen for the tidy sum of 1,000 gold Crowns. The Prince arranged for his purchase to be delivered by ship to the port city of Florennia and thence overland by regular caravan to his palace in Brekka.

Had Hanford’s appraisers realized the true value of the unassuming jade statue, however, the Prince would certainly have paid much more.

Actually, one of those appraisers, a scholar of Min antiquities named Li Pantu, did recognize the worth of Huangdi Shi. While Li was ignorant to the true power of the statue, he was somewhat familiar with the artifact’s auspicious past and its association with the successes of its former bearers. He didn’t inform his employers at Hanford, marking it on the manifest as “Jade statue, small; 150 gold Crowns”. Instead, Li sent a message to the Lushou telling them that he had located an “item of interest”.

Thus, for a few pieces of platinum, Huangdi Shi came to the notice of Grazak Liu, a half-orc crime lord behind the Lushou, or “Green Hand”, one of Haibianr’s most notorious underworld organizations – dipping its clawed fingers into criminal enterprises ranging from illicit drugs to the flesh trade. Liu isn’t interested in Huangdi Shi for its monetary value, however. He has aspirations that well exceed his current grasp and believes that the artifact will bring him the power he needs to reach his goals.

While Hanford House’s extensive security presents an impossible barrier to smuggling the treasure out or taking it by force of arms, Liu is betting that the foreign ship that is set to take Huangdi Shi to its new home will prove an easier mark. Thanks to Li Pantu, Liu knows the name of that ship and where it will be docking and has already laid plans to get his claws on this valuable piece of Min history.

Designing an entire world is a difficult undertaking, and time-consuming - unless you happen to be a deity of some sort, in which case I understand the process can be shortened to around a week, give or take. My concept for Shijie was to offer a place for fantasy adventurers to explore Asian-inspired cultures and stories so I started there, with a story: Curse of the Emperor's Stone. Of course, that story is set in a city, which needed fleshing out; and on a continent, which provided important background; and on a planet, which gave everything a context. It's hard to stay on a single level - design is very much an iterative process.

Introducing your world to others is nearly as tough as creating it. Do you start at the macro level and zoom in or start small and fill in the details? I'll just begin in the middle of the continuum, introducing the world of Shijie by offering a peek into the lands of Dazhou, that world's primary reason for being. The map of the continent of Dazhou and its surrounding areas is shown to the right (click for a larger image). The major political entity on the continent is Minguo, so it's fitting that we take a look at that nation first.

Minguo

Major cities: Donghu, Haibianr, Lihe, Nanshan, Xihu, Zhongjing

Minguo is the oldest nation on the continent of Dazhou and, with Prakash, is the source of much of the cultural influence on the continent. It is not a unified nation, instead featuring five major political regions ruled by contenders for the Imperial throne, with their capitals at (from west to east) Xihu, Zhongjing, Nanshan, Donghu, and Lihe.

It also encompasses several city-states, though usually with ties to one of the main regions. Haibianr is the only city-state that is wholly independent, thanks mainly to its near-monopoly on trade with the nations of the East. Trade goods flow west to east from the Nihon Shogunates and Prakash through the elven kingdoms and dwarven clanholds and east to west from lands, such as Florennia, which lie over the ocean from Dazhou.

Minguo is frequently beset by raiders from the lands of orcish Worg-Lords, though organized conquests are rare – occurring every century or two when the clans are united under a charismatic leader. Several of these periods have seen Worg-Lord raiders reach and occupy as far as Haibianr and Dahai, though they rarely spread west past the dwarven territories due to geographic barriers and stout dwarven resistance, and rarely last for more than a few decades.

On culture...

The humans of Dazhou descended from common stock, known as Min (which means "people"), and are believed to have migrated outward from the area that has become Shamoxian, now a barren, ruin-dotted wasteland. Millennia of divergence, enforced by geographic distance and natural terrain barriers that inhibited regular large-scale interaction, has created a number of "pocket cultures" across the continent. The most distinctive of these are found in Prakash and the Nihon Shogunates. The people of Shamoxian, though nomadic, share many of the same cultural features as those of Minguo.

And language...

The language of Minguo, minhua, serves as the common trade language for most of the continent of Dazhou – though most nations, and even regions, have their own languages as well. Within Minguo itself, there are many distinct dialects of minhua. The language is tonal and contextual, allowing a relatively small number of distinct word-syllables to be combined to form a great range of meaning. In written form, minhua is characterized by its stylized pictographs, each representing a word-syllable.

Though derived from minhua, the language of the Nihon Shogunates is unintelligable to a present-day speaker of minhua. Kashi, the native tongue of Prakash, is similarly distinctive, bearing no resemblance to minhua at all. Scholars theorize that it may be a created tongue, introduced sometime following the settlement of Prakash as a means of differentiation. Indeed, the variance between Prakash culture in general and the others of Dazhou supports this theory.