Welcome to the Orient of the Fourth World!

When the Cathay Players' Guide for Earthdawn 3rd Edition came out, my wife immediately suggested she wanted to play.  My wife is not as rabidly addicted to gaming as I am, so this was a welcome event, and I agreed wholeheartedly.  Earthdawn is our group's regular game, so this would be a familiar experience, and yet quite new.  Within the space of a week or so, the members of our gaming group had purchased PDFs of the Cathay Players' Guide and began making arrangements to play on New Year's Eve.

Since details of Cathay are somewhat brief and spotty in the Players' Guide, and the Cathay Gamemasters' Guide had yet to be published when we started playing, we decided to make up what details we needed without great concern about everything being 'canon'.  We also briefly discussed our disappointment that, while Cathay was quite interesting, the neighboring island of Jih'Po seemed to be little more than a feudal Japan identical to that of the Fifth World, with only the names changed (a complaint similar to the one we had about the disappointing Theran Empire book).  Thus, I decided to begin creating my own version of Jih'Po, which the PCs will journey to when I sit in the GM's chair, after our first adventure is completed.

Campaign Theme Song – Heaven and Earth, Kitaro