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Silk Fantasy

I picked up a book tonight about the Silk Road, as a resource for RPG design. I’m considering something in the vein of the Arabian Nights folktales, a breathless whirl from Baghdad to Macao, with the PCs taking the role of retainers to an Arab prince smitten with love for a Chinese princess. With no more than a hand-painted picture to go on, he equips a trade caravan and sets out, trusting to kismet to cover any obstacles. Plenty of exotica: camels, Persian tyrants, the Sunni/Shia/Ismaili religious schisms, Tibetan ascetics, Mongol bandits, a detour into the Himalayas, the perils of the Gobi and Taklamakan, maybe even a djinn! (And, incidentally, the kind of cinematic action that Spirit of the Century is supposed to handle well.) I’ve already read A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and GURPS Arabian Nights; clearly the next stop is an injection of historicity and information on the Silk Road.

The book that I picked up, though…wow! It looked like a proper scholarly tome, complete with footnotes and attributions, but it contains some very dubious information, to say the least. It identifies the Han empire’s flood control projects with the biblical flood, for example, or at least sets them contemporaneously—an absurd assertion, when the Sumerian tale of Utnapishtim, from which the biblical version is stolen, predates the Han by several centuries, and Utnapishtim, himself a figure of the distant past to Sumerian writers, sets the flood long before his telling of it to Gilgamesh. Even granting the biblical flood happened at all…

It’s such a whopper that I had to double-check on the author, who proves to be a librarian rather than a historian, patching her history together entirely from her readings, without reference to anthropology or archaeology. (Her photo on the back of the book has a crazy-nun look to me, but maybe that’s just my imagination at play.)

It also calls everything else the author says into question: her cavalier equation of Chinese place-names to Rome and Roman place-names to China, her assessments of national characters found along the Silk Road, the accurate measurements of the physical risks to explorers and merchants seeking to travel more than one leg of the route. Happily, historical bankruptcy is no obstacle to creating some inventive fantasies, which is my purpose here. Indeed, historical bankruptcy could be an enormous help!

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