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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psychotic Jim" data-source="post: 982817" data-attributes="member: 547">I guess the first thing to know about ancient Chinese empire would be to know about its religions, which were directly tied to the empire and the Chinese way of life.  I recommend reading the Confucius' Analects and Lao Tzu' Tao Te Ching.  I reccomend DC Lau's translations (in the Penguin Classics book series).  Confucianism and Taoism have been extremely influencial on Chinese way of life in the past, and were developed to help establish harmony in ancient China, an extremely important desire for a people that were plagued by hundreds of years of fighting between warlord states.  Buddhism also came in later from India, but, in China, it acquired an uniquely Chinese flavor.I also recommend looking at any old college textbooks if you have them or can get them cheap, Religions of the World  is a good example.   The small, paperback book, CK Yang's Religions of China  has a pretty good overview. A translation of Sun Tzu's The Art of War could be very useful too.Since Wang-liangs are lawful creatures, you could keep a more primitive version of the Confucian hierachy system of goverrnment, based on merit.  In real life, the rulers of ancient China were supposed to have passed a civil service exam based on Confucian principles of proper class behaviors/roles and filial piety in order to become rulers.  Perhaps for the Wang-Liang you could replace the civil service exam with something more to your view of how Wang-Liang culture should be like. Good game resources include of course OA and also Green Ronin's monster book Jade Dragons and Hungry Ghosts , which contains a few Chinese monsters.</blockquote>

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