Chinese Campaign
There's all sorts of things you can do to create an interesting game based on China and its culture. The first is to look at various sites that contain historical data and architecture of Chinese history. Another good site is anything based upon the Three Kingdoms, a major point in history which many Chinese martial arts movies are set in. I also find
www.romancingcathay.com to be an interesting site as it has gaming-related material and their zine has tactical and regional maps of China. This should be enough material to be able to find pics and actual good research for developing a Chinese campaign. If you want something a little more skimmed down, find the book Jade and Steel from Avalanche Press that expressly deals with rpging in mythic China.
The second thing is props. You can get chinese characters simply by going to Yahoo!, scrolling down to the bottom, and click the links to either China, Hong Kong, or US in Chinese links. Just highlight Chinese text and you can paste it on your a word processing program. Then you can "pretend" to make official proclamations or handout with a lot of chinese character at the top, and the actual "translation" in English for your players. For videos, watch major theatrical releases from China, Korea, and Japan for movies set in mythic times, and if you like the soundtracks, go to yesasia.com and look up the movie's soundtrack. Who cares what country the music comes from other than it will sound more distinct than Western fantasy music. This route is a little expensive, but at least you're getting music you need for the campaign.
The last thing is that if you're really interested in knowing more, take a Chinese calligraphy class where you can learn to write a few characters in the calligraphy style or take a Chinese Mandarin class. Chinese Mandarin in my opinion the easiest Asian language to learn let alone probably the easiest of any language to learn for several reasons:
1. Their are only four tones and they are very distinct from each other in that the Western learner can learn to differentiate the tones in about 8 hours of practice. This is considerably different than other tonal langauges like Thai, Vietnamese, and Cantonese for example where you would have to practice a set range of sounds to master the tones that don't have definitive tonal breaks and annuciations except to the native speaker.
2. Very little grammar. If you know a few vocabulary words (around 100+), with what little grammar you are taught in class, you can start putting together your own sentences and you will be understood (assuming you continue to pay attention to your tones). This is not true of non-tonal languages like Japanese and more so Korean (the language I'm currently studying) which has a LOT of grammar in which you must follow or else you will sound silly or worse stupid.
3. The characters of Chinese are monosyllabic in meaning that each character carries with it one sound and one meaning. Once you know a character you know how to pronounce it and you will know its meaning when it stands alone or the intended meaning when put with other characters to form a word. This never changes.
The other languages have their strengths and are just as fun (and challenging!) so I'm not bashing them. I hope you have a good time exploring the culture to develop a campaign. For those of you interested in links or schools that teach there are many resources to obtain materials on Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Cantonese though if you search around you can find stuff on the southeast Asian langauges as well.
For those of you who would like to talk to me in Asian langauges, I'm always looking for opportunities to learn from others, but please don't send me romanization; i.e. don't send "Konnichiwa! Watashi no namae wa blah blah blah..." /"Ni hao ma?Ni shi zhongren ma? blah blah blah..."/"Annyonghaseyo! Miguk saram ieyo? blah blah blah" You'll have to be patient with me as I'm playing with this program that allows me to write in different langauges.
Later!!
