Hey all. I'm currently in the middle of preparing for a fresh Jade Regent campaign, and I have been thinking a lot about making the game and its travels feel more organic, especially once we get to the latter half of the story.
Insofar as I'm aware, what we have on Minkai is limited to about a handful of pages in "Tide of Honor" and half a page in the Dragon Empires Gazetteer. Sadly, mostly what gets mentioned are the major cities in Minkai, but nothing of the villages and settlements that doubtlessly dot the massive countryside.
My question is: Are there any products, threads, etc, that have further developed Minkai? Do we have any additional information on local rulers, threats, and so forth? Anything you guys can share would be great!
Hmm, that's too bad. I heard a rumor once about a Dragon Empires Book sometime in 2015, but I guess we'll see what gets announced at GenCon. Thanks!
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Hmm, that's too bad. I heard a rumor once about a Dragon Empires Book sometime in 2015, but I guess we'll see what gets announced at GenCon. Thanks!
There will be a section in the Distant Shores Gazetteer - the hobgoblins of Kaoling, I believe.
Other than that? Anything coming out this year is almost certainly already announced. There might be a couple of end-of-year softcovers yet to be announced, but that's about it.
I'd love to see more done to expand upon the Dragon Empires as well, but there have been no hints of such.
The Advanced Race Guide has races found only in Tien Xia, which gives insights into the parts of the continent where those races abide. However, Minkai itself appears to be primarily human in its villages and cities, except for oni disguised as human. Tengu crop up in the story, so I guess each city would have a tengu neighborhood.
I played through the Ruby Phoenix Tournament module, set in Tian Xia but not in Minkai. It was set on an isolated island and had so little about the local culture that I could move it to an isolated mountain valley in another country without trouble.
I, too, wanted to fill in the landscape of the Jade Regent campaign. For the most part, I stole from the same source material that Paizo was copying. Hongal is based on Mongolia, northern mainland Tian Xia is based on China, except the empire there broke apart 500 years ago, and Minkai is based on Japan. Thus, historical Japan provides me with the details.
The article on Minkai in Tide of Honor does contain information about regional villages that let me individualize them to more than a typical historical Japanese village. For example, the section on the Higashita Coast said, "Even beyond the forest, tales of the kami and ancestral spirits have ensnared the imaginations and traditions of what might otherwise be a string of poor coastal fishing villages." Thus, in those villages, every house would be decorated with art depicting the kami, and every week would have a festival honoring a particular kind of kami.