On a particular forum I frequent often, The Scholars of Shen Zhou, I've begun writing a sort of collaborative story. So, the forum itself is focused primarily on the Three Kingdoms era in Chinese history, typically dated from 220-280 AD (unofficially "beginning" in 184 AD). This period was romanticized by the author Luo Guanzhong in the 14th century in his most meaningful work, regarded as one of the three Chinese classics, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The period is one of many civil wars in Chinese history; the late Han Dynasty had essentially lost control of the land, with too much power taken from the Emperor and given to the Ten Eunuchs and various regional governors. Instability reigned through the country and local warlords gathered their forces and began warring with each other for regional power. After many were eventually defeated, three major powers remained. Cao-Wei (Cao family, country named Wei) in the north, Shu-Han (named for their desire to restore the Han dynasty to power) in the west, and Eastern Wu ("Eastern" to differentiate it from other states named Wu in history) in the south-east.
Map of the three kingdoms about 262 AD
This is a favorite time period of mine in history, with so many great and interesting stories. So this forum is all about that time period specifically, but can branch off into other things too. Of particular note are the various games made about and around the time period, primarily by Koei - the strategy/rpg-based Romance of the Three Kingdoms series (with 13 games, all told), and and beat-em-up Dynasty Warriors (with eleventy-billion games, all told). I first got into the time period through the games, so I have plenty of experience with the strategy series and limited experience with DW.
Moving on, one thing you can do in these strategy games is create custom officers for the time period and insert them into the games. Here's an example of one screen from one such character. So, I had the thought, since everyone on the forum is interested in the time period, that I could play a play-through of one of the games with created officers from everyone on the forum, just to give us all a way to interact more with each other and have some fun with a thing we all have in common.
So I've pitched the idea, and quite a few people signed up (10, counting myself), and so I've began that. But I also thought to myself, "wouldn't it be fun to write a story along with the gameplay?" So I've also begun doing that, and most people there seemed to like it well enough. I finally had the thought literally minutes ago to share it with you guys as well.
Bold text is eye-catching and sticks out.
Here is a link to the Prologue, Part 1. I wanted to write a prologue to give each of our characters a little time in the spotlight individually, get to know them a little, and then also to explain why we're all working together outside of just fiat.
It probably won't be particularly interesting if you don't know or care about the time period - since this is for fun and I'm hardly any kind of professional or expert writer, I've been keeping things relatively simple, and also assume some baseline level of knowledge about the period in general. But you never know what people will like without trying, so here you go. I'll also finish part 2 at some point (been slacking on it), and then start posting story + gameplay simultaneously. If there's interest from people on here, I'll link it here as well. It'll be the 11th game in the ROTK series, if you're wondering.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read all this. I know it's a lot.
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