The absent present

Towards the end of the 1990s I read Robert van Gulik's novel The Haunted Monastery and realized it was an amazingly good fit to our Tekumel roleplaying campaign at the time. Jamie Thomson played the fiefholder Lord Jadhak hiVriddi, who neatly filled the Judge Dee role. All the other characters in the novel, such as Sergeant Hoong Liang, had direct one-to-one matches among the player-characters. (A lesson in archetypes there, I suspect.)

As if I didn't already have enough to do (I was finishing up Blood Sword and probably working on some TV tie-ins such as Knightmare) I took it upon myself to rewrite the novel, setting it in Taikava fief in western Tsolyanu instead of Tang Dynasty China. I had an excuse for wasting my time: Jamie's birthday was coming up, so I decided to print one copy and give it to him as a present. His then-wife Debbie typed up the text of the book (no OCR in them days) and I then rewrote it, adding some scenes and details of my own to make it tally with events in our campaign and to introduce the fantasy element that's not present, of course, in Dr van Gulik's books.

The monastery went from Taoist to one of the aspects of  Thumis. I typeset the text with the help of Paul Mason (who played Karunaz, Jadhak's Livyani Luca Brasi) and got it to the printer just in time to present Jamie with a hardcover copy on his birthday. Alas, his divorce followed soon after and in the ensuing chaos all his belongings were scattered more comprehensively than the shell of the Egg of Time. The book was lost, never to be read, and must have been burned or pulped decades ago. And I didn't even keep the text, because it was on one of the big floppies we used then.

Ah well, we must be Dra about these things. Yesterday I came across these notes I used when rewriting the book, naming the Tsolyani equivalents of van Gulik's "NPCs". It's all that remains.