Three Kingdoms: A Lady's Tale
The great lords play at empire. You were born a bargaining chip. Become something the histories cannot ignore.
It is the first year of Jian'an (196 CE). The four-century Han has rotted from within; the Yellow Turbans tore the mask off the peace, and now governors, magnates and great clans divide the land with private armies and inherited prestige. You are an original woman of this age — sixteen, a daughter of a real and storied gentry house (rolled at the start: the Xun of Yingchuan, the Zhuge of Langya, the Zhen of Hebei, the Lu of Jiangdong, and the like).
You are, at once, your clan's most carefully cultivated asset and the most useful piece it can trade. One month per turn, you live it:
- 📊 Six refinements — Wit, Grace, Virtue, Cunning, Resolve, and a hidden Fortune — raised by study, music, ledgers, hardship, and the choices you survive
- 🏯 Clan & coin — guard the family's prestige, your private purse, your web of connections; a wrong allegiance or a broken betrothal can ruin everything
- 🗺️ The realm at war — Guandu, Red Cliffs, Hanzhong; the map's borders shift as warlords rise and fall, and your house's fate rides the tide
- 💞 Love in a hard age — courtship, marriage, and the men who shape the era
- 🪶 Many roads — the wise helpmeet who lifts her husband, the strategist who rules from behind a screen, the woman who takes up arms when the walls fall, or the legend who outlives them all
Win: carve out a life that lasts — a name made, a house preserved, a love or a legacy — and live to see the realm settle into three. Lose: the cold, the plague, a childbed, a city's fall, a broken match, or a wedding gone wrong.
