Rping on the Silk Road

Welcome! This is the second installment of my historic scenarios using RPG Forums. Hopefully, you’ve already read and played through my previous scenario and want to continue through history. If not, you can find my previous scenario and RPG Forums guide here. In this scenario we’ll be covering chugach standards SS 7.6- 7.7. This covers “Classical Traditions, Major Religions, and Giant Empires Era 1000 BCE- 1500 CE”. The objectives of these standards once more is to “understand significant ideas, institutions, people and events” from the period.

To demonstrate these standards we’ll be using The Silk Road as our RP’s context. The Silk Road can be considered the first act of globalization, linking trading routes between Rome and China. Leading to the centralization of culture, technology, religion, and resources into bustling trade cities along the route. I’ve chosen this as our context because it signifies the development of trade and commerce between separate nations, building demand for various luxuries, food, and art. This fueled the expansion of empires that this standard covers.

The Silk Road was first defined by an eastern emissary, Zhang Qian, who was sent by emperor Wu around 138BCE to locate the Yuezhi people. He wanted to obtain their aid in defeating the Xionghu, a local group of harassing marauders. Zhang headed west, leading him into contact with several great empires. One of these included the Dayuan, descendants of Alexander the Great’s army who had been in the region X number of years previously. When Zhang returned home and let emperor Wu know about the western lying kingdoms, trade routes between western and eastern worlds were established. Trading flourished, among the many goods that were traded none were more revered than silk. Notable technologies such as paper and gunpowder were also traded. The popularity of the silk trade led to the naming of the trade route- The Silk Road. Which was coined by Ferdinand von Richthofen, in 1877 CE, a german geographer and traveler. An image of the route can be seen here.

To successfully role-play this scenario, you’ll need to research how people traveled along the routes, to understand how to play your characters. Basically what this means is that when you choose your character, you’ll need to learn and infer about their professions, potential personality, likely ambitions, daily concerns, and life choices.

LIfe on The Silk Road:

• Culture:
• http://gallery.sjsu.edu/silkroad/culture.htm
• General overview of The Silk Road:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road
• Good example of writing for playing a merchant on the Silk Road
• http://college.holycross.edu/projects/himalayan_cultures/2004_plans/atouhey/student_resources_the_merchants_tale.htm
• Description of the environments of the Silk Road:
• http://www.advantour.com/silkroad/trade-culture.htm

To create your character you’ll follow a character sheet. I’ve set one up below as an example:

Character Sheet:

Name (Your character's Name, make sure to keep in historically accurate):

Age (Your characters age, keep in mind the average lifespan of people back then) :

Gender (Male or female):

Job (Merchant, mercenary, guardsmen, highwaymen):

Skills ( What skills would help your job, keep it realistic):

Appearance (Writing up two to three paragraphs that describe your character is common):

Personality (Same as the appearance for descriptive):

Biography (Same as the descriptives for personality or appearance, just read up on the life of traveling on The Silk Road):

Now that we have covered the context and character sheets, where do the role-players come in? Well the goal of the RP is to have students role-play their character as traveling merchants, mercenaries and various other traveling folk. That travel from settlement to settlement. Where the teacher who will be the important NPC’s like royalty, that give out tasks and challenges for the player to complete earning rewards. The students goal, or the goal of the role-players is to perform and complete tasks given by the teachers NPC.

Teachers tasks:

• Assign jobs and quests to players. Aligning the quests or jobs to the role the players have chosen. So if the player is a merchant, have a local merchant guild order the player merchant to travel to another city and deliver x goods for a certain amount of money.
• As they are traveling throw in problems that the players must deal with, making sure the problems are historically accurate (I.E bandit raid or mudslide)

Player roles:

• Suggestions for the player roles are:
• Merchants,
• Traveling adventures
• Explorers
• Merchant guards
• Mercenaries

Thats pretty much it, for comments and questions feel free to email me at cymeks.hun@gmail.com or post in the comments section.