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Wuxia Adventure · TV-MA
JIANGHU: RIVERS AND LAKES
Wandering heroes of the jianghu. Sects, escort jobs and blood debts, where your name is worth more than your sword.
Wandering heroes of the jianghu. Sects, escort jobs and blood debts, where your name is worth more than your sword.
Past the magistrate's reach lies the jianghu, the rivers and lakes: sword schools on misty ridges, armed escort agencies, beggars who know everyone's business and blood debts handed from parent to child. You are its wandering heroes, and your word is the only law you carry.
Guard a coffer three parties want to buy, steal and burn. Find who put a needle in your master's neck. Win a duel in three exchanges or one sentence over tea. Play a human, a fox spirit, a yao or one of the returned dead, because here the old ghost stories are true.
Most of the jianghu: farmers' children, ruined scholars and soldiers' orphans who picked up a sword and a reason.
Home province River-south · Northern-plain · Western-pass · Southern-hills · Eastern-shore
A fox of a few centuries in human shape, with amber eyes, a tail that is hard to hide and a bargain it keeps to the letter.
Den Tomb-mound · Garden-study · Roadside · White
A serpent, crane, tiger, carp or peony that cultivated into a person and still wears the scales, feathers, stripes or blossoms it had.
True form Serpent · Crane · Tiger · Carp · Peony
The child of a human and a yao, at home on neither side, with one inherited mark no hat or collar will cover.
Blood Fox-blooded · Serpent-blooded · Tiger-blooded · Crane-blooded · Flower-blooded
River folk of dragon descent: horn buds, pearl eyes and scaled hands, kept under a headcloth because only the Emperor may claim that blood.
Water Great-river · Lake · Tide
Someone who died with a thing undone and came back in the flesh to do it: grave-pale, cold, in burial clothes and careful about promises.
Manner of return Debt-held · Borrowed-body · Unburied
ALSO IN THIS WORLD tigers, wolves and stranger beasts, hopping corpses, hungry, drowned and wronged ghosts, spirits of hill and old tree, flood dragons, stone guardians.
A sword for hire to no one. You left a school, a household or a grave behind you and took to the road with one blade and a name you are still deciding whether to keep. People send for you when the law will not come.
A sworn student of an orthodox school, trained from the first day in breath, stance and the empty hand. You carry your master's teaching and your school's good name wherever you go, and you answer to both.
Chief escort of an armed agency that hires out to carry what must not be lost. Your flag on a cart means the cargo arrives, and that promise has been kept so many times that half the bandits on the road would sooner let you pass.
A healer trained in the one art that is also its opposite. You know which root closes a wound and which stops a heart, and that they are often the same root in a different dose. People are glad to see you and careful what they drink near you.
A knot-holder of the beggars' guild, with a bowl, a staff and a seat by every gate in the province. Nobody looks at a beggar, so you have seen everything. What the magistrate will learn next month, you heard this morning.
You passed the examinations and held a post, until you wrote one honest memorial too many. Stripped of rank and struck from the rolls, you now carry the law in your head and a fan in your sleeve, and you put both at the service of people the courts forgot.
The oldest orthodox school in the lake country, seated on Nine Pines Ridge above the mist. It teaches the empty hand first and the straight sword second, and it teaches obedience before either. Its disciples are courteous, well trained and certain that the jianghu would be a better place if everyone followed Nine Pines rules. The school hosts the Autumn Assembly, where every sect sends its best to be measured, and it has not lost face there in forty years. Its master, Elder Song Baihe, has enemies he has never mentioned to his students. Lawful and proud.
A school on an island in Heron Lake that teaches medicine, needles and the properties of every plant that grows in the marsh. Half the province owes a life to a Plum Rain physician and the other half suspects them of a death. The Pavilion takes anyone with steady hands, asks no questions about their past, and expects its students to treat whoever comes to the landing. It keeps a register of every poison it has taught and every student it taught it to, and that register is the most dangerous book on the lake. Neutral, sworn to heal.
An armed escort agency three generations old, with a walled compound in Willow Ford and a yellow triangular flag that most of the greenwood has agreed to respect. It carries silver, silk, salt permits, brides and coffins, sealed and unopened, to wherever the contract says. Its chief escorts know every bandit chief between the Great River and the western pass by name and by price. The agency has never lost a cargo. It has lately taken a contract that may be the first. Lawful neutral, bound by contract.
The beggars' guild of the lake country. Every beggar at every gate, bridge and temple step belongs to it, and wears a rope belt whose knots show rank, from one knot for a newcomer to nine for the elders who meet in a roofless temple outside Willow Ford. The guild feeds its own, buries its own and remembers everything its members see, which is everything. It sells what it knows to people it likes and gives it free to people who are owed. Its chief, the Rope-Holder, has not been seen in a year, and the elders are not saying why. Chaotic good, loyal to its own.
The magistrate's court, jail, treasury and tax office for the county, behind a gate with two stone lions. Magistrate Qian Shouren is clever, lazy and for sale, and he has bought his next promotion with money he does not yet have. His runners and constables are local people, underpaid, some decent, who enforce what they are told to. The law here is real and detailed, and a case properly brought and properly witnessed can still win. It can also be buried, and the magistrate knows which he is being paid for. Lawful in form, corrupt in practice.
The throne's secret police, named for the black paper lanterns its agents carry at night. It answers to the palace and to no court, opens any letter, enters any house and holds anyone it likes in a prison no magistrate may inspect. Its director in the province, Eunuch Director Feng, is a patient man and one of the most dangerous fighters alive. The Office has come to the lake country looking for something, has not said what, and is interested in every school that owns an old book. Lawful evil, in the throne's name.
A bandit fortress in the hills west of the post road, home to three hundred outlaws who call themselves heroes of the greenwood and are sometimes right. Most came because of a debt, a famine or a magistrate. They rob merchants, toll the escort agencies and leave the poor alone, by a code their chief, Lei Dahu, enforces with an iron mace. A faction inside the stockade thinks the code is why they are still poor. Chaotic neutral, with a code.
Sworn brothers and sisters who run untaxed salt through the Reed Maze in flat-bottomed boats. Salt is the throne's monopoly and its price is why people starve, so the Brotherhood thinks of itself as a charity with knives. Its members swear an oath of kinship over incense and mean it. They know every channel of the marsh, pay the magistrate to stay out of it, and leave offerings at the deep pool where something large lives. Chaotic good, sworn kin.
A house of assassins that takes its name from the bridges of Willow Ford, each of which is said to belong to one killer. A contract is made by leaving payment and a name under the right bridge. The Bridges do not explain, do not refund and do not take a second contract on a client. Nobody has seen the holder of the Thirteenth Bridge, who is said to accept only the contracts the other twelve refuse. Neutral evil, strictly professional.
The followers of a masked master who is collecting the forbidden manuals of every school, one stolen half at a time. They copy, return the copy and keep the original, so that for years no school knew it had been robbed. The master wears a blank white mask, uses a different school's technique in every fight, and has never been heard to give a reason. The copyists who serve the House are scholars, thieves and ruined disciples who were each promised one page of their own. Neutral evil, patient.
The fox spirits and yao of the old tomb hills, who keep a great house inside a burial mound that looks, from outside, like a burial mound. They have lived beside the people of the lake country for a thousand years as neighbours, tenants, tutors, wives and husbands, and they hold to their bargains with a strictness that embarrasses humans. On moonless nights the Household opens the Ghost Market, where the living, the dead and everything between trade in what cannot be sold by day. Its head, the Old Lady of the Hill, is a white fox of nine centuries who is never rude and never forgets. Neutral, courteous, exact.
The monasteries and abbeys of the lake country, of which Clear Bell Monastery on the south shore is the largest. They are places of prayer and study first. They also keep the only free hospital in the county, bury the unclaimed dead, shelter anyone who reaches the gate, and hold in trust what quarrelling families cannot leave with each other. The Quiet Houses take no side in the jianghu's feuds. Both sides of every feud have at some time been grateful for that. Lawful good, apart from the world.
Gather 2-6 friends. Jianghu: Rivers and Lakes meets on Discord - pick a hero, give your name and your teacher's, and decide together what your word is worth.