I've yet to play the fabled campaign, as I'm still in the process of catching up with the FM scene in general. I've read that it makes references to all the Thief stories, but also to some fan missions. Which missions might those be, without spoilers?
I did some analysis of the available I Ching translations (in English) that I know of, and I was amazed at how few of them actually include all of the content in the source text (which honestly isn't that long), namely the Ten Wings commentaries which are an official part of the text called I Ching which combines the Zhouyi oracle text and the Ten Wings.
Here are the complete translations that include all of the Ten Wings in untruncated and unparaphrased form:
That's it, unless I've missed some publication.
Here are some honorable mentions:
What to do with this information? I'm not entirely sure, but I wanted to share this. If you want to mention more publications, please do!
P.S. The Ten Wings are as follows:
This monumental piece of sinological scholarship remains unpublished by any traditional means, and it's unavailable (or at least very expertly hidden) on University Microfilms International's successor ProQuest. How to obtain a copy of it?
Instruction: When divining with yarrow stalks, before the first remainder counting of each line of the hexagram, simply put TWO stalks instead of one stalk from the right-hand pile into your hand. For the second and third countings of each line, stick with the traditional one stalk from the right-hand pile. That's all.
This has the effect of giving you a 50/50 chance of getting either 3/yang (5 stalks) or 2/yin (9 stalks) as a line's first subresult, equalizing your statistical chance of yin and yang moving lines compared to the traditional 75/25 chance in favor of yang. In other words, you will now have the same probabilities as with the standard three coins method.
The technical difference comes into play whenever you're left with 3 stalks from the left-hand pile in the first counting: in the traditional method, the right-hand pile would then give you 1 stalk (totaling 5 stalks: 3/yang), whereas in this method, it will give you 4 stalks (totaling 9 stalks: 2/yin).
***
As for the rationale of using this modification, while some may consider the yarrow stalks more traditional than coins – and as a physical medium, they are – the actual method we're left with is a reconstruction by the Song dynasty I Ching commentator Zhu Xi (1130–1200) based on guesswork and extrapolation from ambiguous passages in the Ten Wings commentary. Truly ancient yarrow stalk methods have been lost to time. There is no evidence that ancient pre-imperial methods would have given slanted probabilities favoring yang moving lines: the Zuozhuan (published ca. late 4th century BC) includes one of the oldest extant records and analyses of Yi divinations, and its 14 hexagram results (that I've managed to count) have a total of 7 moving yin lines and 4 moving yang lines.
I know people who've been reluctant to use yarrow stalks precisely because of the uneven probabilities that reduce advice from yin lines by half, while still being fascinated with the yarrow stalk medium. Of course, I've also read about mad lads who use an alternative coin method to retain yarrow stalk probabilities. In any case, the method is ultimately your choice, just know that it's a possibility to combine the ritual of the yarrow stalks with the equalized probabilities of the coins with very little trouble.
***
I asked for the oracle's assessment of this alternative yarrow stalk method (using the alternative method), and it gave 29.5/7.
>䷜ 坎：習坎，有孚，維心亨，行有尚。
Chasm: Repeated chasms; there is faith; a steady heart/mind succeeds; there is excellence/honor in practice/action/travel.
>九五：坎不盈，祗既平，无咎。
9 in the fifth: The chasm is not filling up; it has been evened out; no mistake.
>䷆ 師：貞，丈人，吉无咎。
Troops: Constancy and correctness; grown-up people; fortuitous without mistake.
Master thieving is not a bad profession because it has big payouts for relatively few working hours (planning and preparation included). That would mean that Garrett has a lot of free time in his hands, and enough money to at least make rent (however extortionate) and buy equipment and books.
What do you figure he fills his non-thieving life with?
I kind of hate it, but I would guess that his life is empty besides the thieving and thieving-adjacent noble quests. Maybe reading, maybe drinking, maybe courting Basso's sister, maybe brooding in his chair, maybe edgy and shady strolls down the street, but nothing that really fulfills him like getting to other people's stuff.
Video description:
>The work of Alan Watts has helped countless people take the first step on their spiritual journey. In this critical appraisal, I hope to encourage you to take the next step by sharing with you in 20 minutes a bit about Alan Watts the man, the philosophy he developed, and some interpretive and practical limitations to the vision he preached. > >Overall, while Watts has done immeasurable good for the world in terms of opening people's eyes to new spiritual and personal possibilities through his own unique approaches, while also serving as a much needed window into Eastern traditions as well, it's best to exercise caution when enjoying his lectures, and attempt to tease out the distinction between Watts' own views and the traditions he draws upon, and carefully scrutinize the practical upshot of his program of action.
My take:
Lots of people have learned about Taoism from Alan Watts' lectures or books, but there are downsides to treating him as a reputable source on the subject. As I've studied Taoism (and previously Buddhism) over the years, I've noticed more and more how Watts actually tended to cherry-pick and overemphasize certain parts and concepts of various traditions, usually also (re-)interpreting them in a one-sided way, usually to accommodate his pre-existing personal philosophy that absolved or even justified his own shortcomings and misdeeds.
Watts heavily influenced the now-popular view that wuwei means "don't expend effort and just go with the flow", and that such an interpretation of wuwei takes precedence over anything else that Taoism might teach. Hence, further study of Taoism often involves a jarring phase of unlearning the misconceptions left by authors such as Watts (or more recently, Mitchell and other "creative" interpreters of the Tao Te Ching).
The linked video addresses many of the issues I've noticed and have had trouble articulating when it comes to interpreting Taoism through Alan Watts (which has virtually become part of western popular understanding of Taoism). It's not a bashing, but rather a caution and reminder to consider the context and facts of the matter rather than blindly take him as your beyond-the-grave Taoist sensei.
The ☱ 兌 Duì trigram, the name of which means "joy", "opening a passage" and "going through", is associated with the natural image of 澤 zé, meaning "marsh", in the I Ching commentary on the greater images (i.e. the one that tells what the noble person or a king of old would do in each hexagram). It's most often translated as "lake", but that is a mistranslation.
In ancient Chinese, 澤 zé means low-lying and well-watered open terrain: marsh(y), marshland, mere; palustral, according to Kroll's Classical Chinese dictionary. Actual words for "lake" would have been 湖 hú or 潢 huáng, or possibly 池 chí (meaning pool or a small lake). The Ten Wings commentary writers (in ca. 4th to 2nd century BC) had every opportunity to use another word for it if it was truly intended to mean "lake". It may be worthy of note that the Zhouyi (the core oracle text) makes no mention at all of trigrams.
This would mean that the translations that insist on "lake" did not do their homework on the terminology, or opted to continue a misguided convention likely stemming from an oversight in Richard Wilhelm's 1924/1950 translation; previously in 1882, James Legge translated it as "[waters of a] marsh".
Furthermore, many translations replace the trigrams' actual names with their associated images, occluding the fact that the trigrams' names have their own separate meanings – e.g. Creative/Forceful/Masculine becomes Heaven, Shock/Arousing becomes Thunder, Clinging/Intertwining becomes Fire, and so on.
Just something that has recently bothered me in the I Ching translation scene.
I wanted to find out whether records of ancient divinations support the assumption that the yarrow stalk method was originally supposed to have weighted odds in whether the moving lines are yin (25 % chance) or yang (75 % chance). As we know, the yarrow stalk method we currently know was a standard-setting reconstruction by Song dynasty I Ching commentator Zhu Xi (1130–1200).
The Zuozhuan (published ca. late 4th century BC), a commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, is one of the oldest records of Yi divinations, and as such it may serve as a good data point. I looked at Zuo Tradition – Zuozhuan : Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals” (translated and introduced by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li and David Schaberg) and searched for instances of "hexagram" in the text, writing down the hexagrams gotten in the mentioned divinations. The results are as follows:
䷓ ䷋ 1 moving yin line
䷂ ䷇ 1 moving yang line
䷍ ䷀ 1 moving yin line
䷑
䷵ ䷥ 1 moving yin line
䷍ ䷥ 1 moving yang line
䷶ ䷝ 1 moving yin line
䷆ ䷒ 1 moving yin line
䷗
䷮ ䷛ 1 moving yin line
䷗ ䷚ 1 moving yin line
䷣ ䷎ 1 moving yang line
䷂
䷂ ䷇ 1 moving yang line
According to this data (the gathering method of which may be faulty and hasty, I'll admit), the instances of yin and yang moving lines in the example divinations are 7 yin and 4 yang, which would be hard to attain with the Song dynasty yarrow stalk method. A conspicuous peculiarity in the examples is that there is ever just one moving line, never more, which may be due to a different method in generating a single moving line for an already-built hexagram. A counterargument for the evidentiary value of this set would be that the examples were hand-picked, and that the set is ultimately quite small.
Regardless, this was a very interesting finding, and it may be used to argue against the historical faithfulness of Zhu Xi's yarrow stalk method's yang-leaning odds.
Might there be any other ancient divination records that I could take a peek at?
I did this to pass the time, and I thought that maybe someone else might be interested in looking at it. I tried to see whether there is rhyme or reason in the King Wen sequence based on the structure of the paired hexagrams. Though some patterns or semblances thereof did form, the result was quite inconclusive.
Edit: It seems I missed a marking for 3 yin & yang lines in the 59/60 pair. Sorry!