My wife and I finished watching "Empresses in the Palace" and "Story of Yanxi Palace". These are two Chinese quasi-historical television series that feature tales of concubines in the Forbidden City. They are both full of melodrama and beauty, and are not entirely historically accurate. Nevertheless, they have inspired me to build a new custom campaign that features royal concubines in the storyline.

"Pinfei" is the pinyin spelling of the Mandarin phrase for "imperial concubine". I have chosen the campaign title to be "Voices of the Pinfei". The missions will be written as diary entries from different concubines. I will use the early Ming dynasty as the setting, and inject some actual historic events.

I have already put together the skeleton of the campaign. It will include 5 missions set on 4 new custom maps. One of these maps will be an adaptation of the Forbidden City! For that one, I will not be re-using the same map from my "Imperial Forbidden City" campaign. Instead, I will build a new map that is smaller in size. Part of the reason I want to build a smaller map for the Forbidden City is that this campaign is going to be rated at 'normal' difficulty, so a smaller map will be less intimidating and challenging in that regard.

I am still in the early stages of this design but I can forsee a release sometime later in the summer of 2019. Look for further updates on this thread (and in the Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom Facebook group).

I have also created a teaser album in the Emperor Heaven Gallery; I will post more images to it later as I get further along in the design and playtesting. You can find the album here:

http://emperor.heavengames.com/gallery/album25

As always, please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, encouragement, etc., in this thread.