General Horoscopes

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These are the results of Yanyu generating horoscopes for various people. In order to do a horoscope some basic information is needed. (Yes, it's a Power 5 information shtick, but alas we can't just get a horoscope for the Obsidian Warlord or whomever unless we also have his date and place of birth.)

Contents

PCs

Zhu Cai Wen

(Done between A River Befouled and Compass Rose)

His great strength, and his most auspicious futures, come from his building connections - both to himself and between others. Because of this, he is less well suited to a single strong connection to one person, and this is kind of sad (from your point of view) - he's most likely to have lots of girlfriends but never marry.

He was set up to oppose Lucky Chang by the Butterfly, even before the run started. The Hand of Fate will likely help some, but it will not bring him to that crux by itself. If he doesn't have a good set of connections by the time he engages Lucky Chang, he will lose.


Shen Wei Han

(Done after Compass Rose)

If the location of his birth (a village in the foothills of the Roof of the World - near the Qin Chao Steppes border) is correct then he is considerably older than 30 winters.

Deng Zhihao

(Done during Book 2)

There are two different things that his life has the potential to entangle with, and both of them seem fairly likely. One is clearly the complicated path tied up with the rest of the party - there are chances for glory there, but also death; high honors or ignominy. The other path is in many ways more personal, and you think this has to do with his vendetta against the tongs. This also has different ways it can go - there is an opportunity for love, but also heartbreak and betrayal, of loyalties greatly tested and questions about family. There are at least several possible threads of his future in this tangle, in which he kills someone who he shouldn't / didn't want to / immediately regretted / something.

Arata Kasumi

(Done after Ting Ting's Gambit)

You cast the horoscope for Kasumi, and at first, it seems to say she'll grow to be a minor ladyling, marry reasonably well, be a little happy but never quite satisfied, raise more or less good children, and die.

That can't be right.

You look closer, and lo, there is a minor unlikely encounter which wildly diverts her path. Yup, *that*'s the one she followed. Much of the rest of her path seems to follow that initial unlikeliness - she has the gleeful randomness of the Monkey, but she is touched by the Wing of the Butterfly, and her small randomnesses will amplify into storms countries away.

This is a knife edge to walk - which is appropriate, because her nature is the knife - too much craziness and she will topple things she really didn't mean to, but too little craziness, too much second-guessing, and she will lose the random path that gives her such power.

She is the razor knife of the Butterfly - able to destroy what she touches and the Butterfly needs destroyed - amplified by the madness of the Monkey. She is possibly more terrifying than anyone else whose horoscope you have ever read.


Li Merit

He's had a complicated life, and it doesn't get simpler in the future. You can see how he starts fairly simple, a lot of Magpie tactical influence, a bit of Butterfly strategic influence. He does thing, his life gets more complicated, he gets more powerful, encompasses more plans and plots and contacts. He's starting to spread himself a little too thin - a little *too* many plots and contacts to juggle, when you see a strong influence of someone else becoming a more major part of his life. Probably a lover, possibly just a very dear friend, possibly a spouse. That partnership seems to give him more confidence and more energy, but that may actually be overconfidence - his life gets even more complicated, and then there's a Bad Thing that happens. The other person is gone after that - either dead or completely out of contact with him - and his life spirals more out of control, as all the balls he has in the air start dropping. It's about a year later when things all go crash, and it seems like something tears whole parts of his self away.

Then when he starts travelling again, it's less Magpie, more Butterfly, but not intentionally Butterfly on his part. More recently, he's more actively embraced Butterfly, but also actively embraced Magpie again. You wonder if he's starting to put too many balls in the air again - you can see possible futures where there is another crash, and other possible futures where he keeps things smoothly in play.

Wu Shuyan

(done after Traveling with the Butterfly Prince's Servant)

Yanyu charts out Shuyan's horoscope - the exact location and close time makes it pretty easy to get fairly detailed. It's a very meandering path, but the interesting thing about it is that there are a *lot* of low-probability important possibilities, most of which don't seem to go much of anywhere. She's in the right place and the right time a *lot*, like plots find her weirdly magnetic. You can trace out the connection where she was in the right place at the right time to hook up with the Si Fan, and that's interesting and important in the future. Then there's other possibilities - recently, she was in the right place at the right time to be very significant to the Immortals plot, but that possibility seems to have faded out. There are a lot of possibilities in the past which have faded, and there are more coming in the future, but it's not that there is one possibility, it's that there is a huge potential for importance that seems to get her tangled in things very easily.

Tokai Takanata

(done late in Book Five)

Overall the arc of his life is "a whole bunch of Butterfly wandering early, then a nigh-tortouse-like middle, then a whole bunch of Butterfly wandering late in life."

The early wandering is a little bit more classic Butterfly -- lots of encounters, which change the world in small ways and change him in small ways, but are not Obviously Significant. The one obvious counterexample to that is his connection with the Jasmine River, which changes him significantly, both in the near future (deepening him, his art gets better) and in the farther future (his path inclines more towards the unusual and weird, sending him in the direction of the I Ching rather than staying only an artist).

The later wandering is more what astrology would term a Storm Butterfly -- random encounters and wandering causing much more significant effects. There's an extent to which his wandering is less random now, but even so, the most important things he is doing are not specifically the ones that are part of a deliberate path, but the ones that are kind of the random side effects of the whims that take him as he wanders. (The freeing of the Ice Pagoda is probably the biggest example, and slightly less whimful than some of the others, but you can see a lot of smaller lives that are going in a totally different direction after encounters with Takanata, like Ando, Jin and the Black Duke.)

Circus Folk

Mystic Mondo

(Done early in Book 7)

Mondo is a Tortoise. In some sense he is like a rock (the way some tortoises are); the water of the world washes over and past him and he maintains equanimity. And in some sense his un-movingness makes him almost kind of Butterfly - he does not move, but the world passes by him randomly, which is in many ways the same as moving around randomly. Of course, he does move around - he travels with the circus - but mystically, he remains still, nearly as much as you imagine Li Kao or Quan Lo does.

As you think about it, you realize that you are pretty still as well. The circus moves around and you follow them, but in essense all is the same from your point of view much of the time. You've seen Mondo, you've seen Li Kao, and they have never seen each other. You see how the Tortoises move and are still, know and are known, but are ever isolated from each other. You could bring them toge...

Then you blink and notice that one of your Tao is gone (spent until the end of the puttering). You're also very tired - much more so than after a normal reading.

NPCs

Please treat all horoscopes for NPCs as party secrets, not to be shared lightly. Some of these are pretty sensitive in nature.

Minoru Katsu

As mentioned before, he's a Dog with hints towards Phoenix; that manifests as a nigh-unbreakable sense of duty which constrains his actions and his life quite a bit. He does seem to have a decent shot at becoming Firelord - if he marries Kuan-Xi, it's pretty much guaranteed.

If he doesn't become Firelord, his possibilities branch out a lot, though almost none of them take him off of the Shrouded Isle permanently.

Looking at the farther-future possibilities for if he does become Firelord - it's more complicated, because it depends a lot on how the future goes in the Empire-wide case. To digress a bit, his is one of the first horoscopes you've seen that seems to be impinged upon by what you *think* is the question of whether or not the PCs succeed in thwarting the Spider - it's hard to directly see that sort of thing in astrology, because the Great Cycle is the underlying assumption, and astrology isn't designed to address "what happens if the Cycle changes?" any more than football odds are designed to take into effect what happens if gravity changes.

Anyhow, you *think* that if the PCs fail (and it becomes the Empire of the Spider, or whatever happens in that future), then he's not at all the right Firelord - the Shrouded Isle would be better served by someone much more ruthless. If the PCs succeed, he's much more appropriate.

"Lucky" Chang Wuyong

Original

He's definitely a Spider.

His early years taught him to hate being poor. A shaping event when he was young taught him to hate being the manipulatee rather than the manipulator, and taught him the value of manipulation.

These two forces drove his early path, towards the gathering of wealth and control (though it took him a while to actually get good at it).

About ten winters back, his path took a sharp uptick from "general gathering of wealth and control" to "alliance with others for much greater wealth and control", and that has continued since.

He is very ambitious, very smart, very charismatic, somewhat vindictive, and always calculating the odds.

Looking towards his future, the next ten years are momentous - they will shape both his own destiny, and that of the whole Empire.

He could become Emperor. (There are really not very many people about whom that could be said, so it really stands out in the horoscope.)

Version 2.0 (Done after Bear For Sale)

He's definitely a Dragon.

His early years taught him to hate being poor. A shaping event when he was young taught him to hate being the manipulatee rather than the manipulator, and taught him the value of both manipulation and decisive action.

These two forces drove his early path, towards the gathering of wealth and control (though it took him a while to actually get good at it), and of the value of betting on the winning side.

About ten winters back, his path took a sharp uptick from "general gathering of wealth and control" to "alliance with others for much greater wealth and control", and that continued for some time. His alliance was severed relatively recently; he was unable to reforge it, so he spent no more time pursuing the bets he had already lost, and has made a new alliance with what he perceives to be the side now likely to win.

He is very ambitious, very smart, very charismatic, somewhat vindictive, and always calculating the odds.

Looking towards his future, the next ten years are momentous - they will shape both his own destiny, and that of the whole Empire.

He could become Emperor. (There are really not very many people about whom that could be said, so it really stands out in the horoscope.)

Suzuki Kuan-Xi

(Done between Over the River and Through the Woods and Touched by the Dragon)

Reading her horoscope, you get the strange feeling that you're looking at one you've seen before. Not so much that you've ever encountered one like her before, it's just that her horoscope is filled with "stock answers". Like she's in the world to fill a specific role, rather than to create and shape a destiny of her own. The role is not fixed, but it's dependent upon others, not herself. She can be someone's wife. She can be someone's prize. She can serve as inspiration or goad, but it will all be for other's benefit or harm. The main choices available to her is who these other people will be.

The more she tries to choose for her own reasons, the less successful she will be. You find yourself tearing up a little at the sadness of it.

Ti Wren

As you start laying out her horoscope, the first thing that comes up is the horrible realization that she is about to die. Or maybe has just died, moments ago. In a bit of a panic, you look closer at the details, and realize that it's not that at all - it's that her past is fixed (as well it should be), but - it's not that she has no future, but that it's not clearly laid out. There is *nothing* in her Yet. You think you might be able to push through and staple some of her Yet down, but you're not sure what that would do.

Anyway, some interesting features of the past in her horoscope:

One, she really is extraordinarily random. None of her lines are straight, even though they often drunkwalk in graceful curves that you can only see in retrospect.

Two, there are four important people in her life: her brother, her husband, her best friend, and her son.

When her brother left the Isle of Beauty, it took one of her guiding stars and fixed it ever at the Hidden City, or at the Spider, you're not sure which. Ever since then, her randomness has been influenced by that - not *guided* by the Spider, not that at all -, more like ever opposed to it, as a spinning sling stone is always pulling *away* from the central hand it is tied to.

Now her best friend is dead, and her balance is wildly disturbed; it isn't clear how that resolves, since there's no Yet.

Zhao Feiyan and Zhao Wu

First, their horoscopes fit together very well over the course of time. Sometimes they're lovers, sometimes allies, sometimes something like rivals, but each of them is always part of the pair, whatever the pair is. Second, their overall path is strongly tied to the path of the country; this is something that has been increasing over time, and continues to increase in most of their potential futures. If the country prospers, they will prosper even more. If the country succumbs to problems, they will crash and burn badly.

For both of them, the subject of children is complicated, and it's one of the few places where they don't totally match. There are potential futures where there are children, and there are other potential futures where there are not, but it's not as simple as infertility, you're pretty sure.

For both of them, you think there's a desire for children, but that it's countered by other complexities. For him, it works out a little bit more simply - one way to have children would be to take a second wife, but in most of the potential futures in which he does so, it's disruptive to the pair balance the two of them have. You suspect he suspects this. For her, there's a big tangle that is hard to parse out - about the only thing you tease out is that she wants daughters but does not want daughters, and you're not sure what to make of that.

You don't think there's anything that falls out of the the horoscope as a great burning desire for either of them - there's ambition there, the desire to achieve more than they currently have / are doing, the desire to not fail in various different ways...

Hsen Kei

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Siew Zhuai

He's the loyal scion of a house with a Doomed Destiny. In the past, he's been groomed to be the heir and one of the future house decision-makers, but he was young and didn't actually make any decisions. He's clearly under other people's fairly strong control until pretty recently, when a lot of his family, including the person in his family who controlled him most directly, died, and his choices opened up some.

(Looking back, you can see the signs of this Family Doomed Destiny going back for cycles and cycles.)

From here, there are three obvious paths.

Path one is he dies pretty soon. Kawaii kills him, or Shen-Ji murders him, or he gets wounded and Shuyan doesn't bother to heal him - there's any number of choices kind of floating around.

Path two is he leaves again, and his path goes back to his family. He probably doesn't kill Lijuan personally, or anything like that, but he becomes part of a Family Destiny to oppose her family. Maybe his kids will kill her kids. Maybe her kids will kill his kids. It's all a future muddle, and the future keeps going like the past.

Path three is he marries Lijuan, and his destiny gets swamped by hers. There's hints of future trouble with his family, but they seem to fade, especially if/when kids appear in the picture. The marriage seems to ground out the conflict, if not disperse it (to use a metaphor that Yanyu wouldn't...)

There's a path four, but it seems unlikely and weird and epic, and it's something that your astrology doesn't seem to cover very well.

Looking at path three in more detail - you're actually surprised by how well he seems to work as a husband for Lijuan.

The Steward of the Roof of the World

He's a Dog - it looks like the sort of thing that's a common trait of the family line.

In general, it looks like he's a good steward, though that is not totally the same as being a good king - he's invested in protecting and maintaining the status quo. Things that have always been good stay good, things that have always been bad will probably not be on the fast track to being fixed. He's a protector rather than a leader.

If the line of kings returns, that will be very hard for him personally. First, it's something that he will resist - he'll think of it as not wanting to relinquish the country to someone who is untried and unworthy, but his bar for unworthy is going to be very hard to clear. Someone with "Successful king for a decade, did amazing things for country" on their resume, he might grudgingly be forced to accept, but there's obviously not anyone with that on the resume who's likely to be a candidate. Second, if he is ousted, he'll have lost the Meaningful and Important and Loyal thing that he was doing, and that will crush him. Dogs do not take well to being fired.

Xinfu Yin-Xiang

Half-spirits tend to be one of two types - more or less normal mortals, possibly with interesting talent, or particularly unusual people (still technically mortals) with a much stronger spirit-ish nature. Xingfu Yin-Xiang is the latter, and as such, he is powerful, long-lived, and comparatively fixed in his nature. Like the moon, which is especially bright at night by virtue of being surrouded by darkness, he is powerful compared to the average mortal, but is also more convinced of his own power and importance than he really is. Much of the rest of his personality is like this - he really was powerfully smitten with the Daughter of the Sun, but to his own mind, he was more smitten than anyone in the history of love had ever been, and the epicness of his love justified whatever he did in the name of it. He has a grudge against Takanata for thwarting him, which magnifies to Righteous and Epic Vengeance. In the past, his over-dramatic and over-reactive nature has been bent to the cause of more reasonable goals - there is a town in the Roof of the World that owes the lives of a generation to his efforts on their behalf, before his obsession with the Duchess, and there will be times in the future where the full force and fury of his attention will be turned towards more beneficial ends again.

His current path has two major ways in which his future can branch. First, his goal of vengeance against Takanata will drive him to dangerous possibilities and potential dangerous alliances, which could take him in different directions. Second, his explicit severing from a connection the Duchess does leave the potential for another connection, which might be more easily made now than waiting for his nature to naturally and slowly bend towards another.