Blame this.
The Problematical Prophecy of the Goujian Sword
Oh, this is awkward. For those unfamiliar, the Goujian Sword is a Chinese bronze sword over two thousand years old which was found in more or less pristine condition fifty years ago. The current non-dynasty dynasty considers it to be one of China’s most precious cultural artifacts – which is reasonable, because it is. The Sword is a masterpiece of the jian (double-edged straight sword) style, and is not only still unrusted: it’s still sharp.
It’s also rather embarrassingly magical. There’s an inscription on it that was mostly translatable: something about the King of Yue (an old Chinese kingdom) and how the sword was made for his personal use. But until last week nobody knew what all the characters meant, thanks largely to the Great Leap Forward (turns out that being a scholar of ancient Chinese texts was not a survival characteristic under Mao’s reign). It was eventually discovered that the full inscription is a spell, which – in classic Sword of the Stone style – designated whichever Chinese national that first drew it after it was unearthed to be the rightful King of Yue. For those following at home, that detail potentially affects, magically speaking, about 125 million people or so, including the city of Shanghai.
Maybe. Modern magical analysis is not exactly an exact science, or indeed a science at all. It could be more, it could be less. It could be that whoever drew the Sword first is the rightful Emperor of China, or ‘merely’ the King of Taiwan, depending on whose side you take when it comes to that particular civil war. The point is that, somewhere out there, there’s a man – or woman! – who is being unknowingly supernaturally primed to manifest his or her destiny, should it become clear that the current not-dynasty dynasty has lost the Mandate of Heaven.
The various intelligence agencies of the People’s Republic of China are not pleased to contemplate that particular scenario. And who can blame them? A war to put a True King on the throne sounds all very well, but the last time something like that happened in Chinese history it was called the Taiping Rebellion, and it’s easily the worst disaster in human affairs that most of the West cares almost nothing about. Unfortunately, nobody really knows who handled the stupid sword first. Or even how specific the spell is. In fact, the PRC is still having difficulty convincing its best agents that there’s a real threat; it also turns out that dialectical materialism has difficulty explaining away things that explode utterly the second half of that term.
The gaming possibilities for this should be obvious, yes? The True King/Queen is the McGuffin, and once people figure out who s/he is, the fun starts. And the chases. And possibly the frantic back-room negotiations over what everybody’s place would be in the upcoming Imperial dynasty…
*bookmarks page*