Use when selecting officials based on capability rather than favoritism or nepotism. Follows Qi Xi's impartial model: recommending personal enemies for their competence and relatives for their merit, with transparent evaluation criteria covering skills, character, and past performance.
Use when responding to internal rebellion, coup attempts, or revolts against legitimate authority. Covers initial assessment of rebel forces and loyalist strength, response options (negotiation, military action, external intervention), and post-rebellion protocols for punishment, pardon, and institutional reform.
A five-part framework for judging whether a political contender has the support, leadership, strategy, people, and moral authority needed to take power.
Use when verifying rumors or sensitive intelligence without direct confrontation. Involves selecting an emotionally reactive proxy, designing a calibrated provocation to trigger unguarded responses, and interpreting reactions to confirm or deny suspected information, as demonstrated by Prince Shangchen.
Use when selecting an heir among multiple candidates with equal legitimacy. Employs a ritual involving a hidden jade bi (璧) to determine divine selection while maintaining fairness. Based on King Gong of Chu's method of testing his five sons through concealed ritual objects.
Use when a ruler dies on military campaign and succession must be secured before news spreads. Covers securing final wishes, maintaining secrecy, road closures, heir retrieval with military escort, and formal installation before announcing the death, following King Zhao's field succession precedent.
Use when negotiating survival after military defeat. Based on Goujian of Yue's approach at Kuaiji: offering humble submission, deploying skilled negotiators like Zhong, bribing corruptible enemy officials (Tai Zai Pi), and leveraging credible threats of mutual destruction to force acceptance.
Use when building a coalition to encircle and weaken a superior adversary through indirect means. Based on Feng Tong's advice to Goujian: conceal intentions, ally with enemy's rivals (Qi, Chu, Jin), flatter the enemy into arrogance, and strike when they are overextended on multiple fronts.
Use when assigning leadership roles to maximize team effectiveness based on relative strengths. Follows Fan Li's advice to Goujian: directly compare each advisor's capabilities across domains (military vs. civil) and assign primary roles where each person excels most.
Use when probing enemy leadership's judgment quality and decision-making state. Based on Zhong's grain-request test against Wu: make a resource request, observe whether wise counsel is heeded or ignored, and interpret the response to assess arrogance and internal divisions for attack timing.
Use when determining the optimal moment to launch a military campaign. Based on Fan Li's counsel to Goujian against Wu: wait for enemy to eliminate wise advisors, assess force deployment, confirm internal decay, verify leadership distraction, then strike with full force. Patience is critical.
Use when deciding whether to exit after achieving major success to avoid becoming a threat. Based on Fan Li's departure from Yue: recognize danger signals ('when birds are gone, the bow is hidden'), assess your superior's character, resign formally, and leave completely with portable wealth.
A strategy for rebuilding wealth in a new location while avoiding political danger. It combines a new identity, trade-route selection, honest work, modest margins, and moving on when fame attracts attention.
Use when rescuing someone from legal trouble through trusted intermediaries. Based on Tao Zhu Gong's attempt to save his son via Zhuang Sheng: provide resources without strings, give clear instructions, leave immediately, trust the intermediary's method, and never interfere mid-process.
Use when evaluating locations for settlement, refuge, or strategic positioning. Covers geographic advantages, political landscape assessment, population disposition analysis, and long-term power projection, with decision rules to reject sites near rising powers and favor those with alienated populations.
Use when protecting a vulnerable heir from systematic elimination by powerful enemies. Covers multi-layered deception: concealment, substitute infant decoys, staged betrayal to convince enemies the heir is dead, long-term secret raising, and eventual restoration when political conditions shift.
Use when persuading a resistant authority figure to take difficult but necessary action. Employs a gradual empathetic approach: build rapport through shared humanity, introduce topics indirectly, present arguments through historical examples, appeal to long-term interests, and let conclusions be self-evident.
Use when implementing transformative reforms against cultural or traditionalist opposition. Covers three phases: strategic assessment of vulnerabilities, building support through advisor endorsement and opponent engagement, and decisive implementation by leading by example with the principle that sages adapted to…
Use when evaluating unexpected benefits or opportunities during crisis or competition. Applies the principle that unearned benefits often carry hidden costs: analyze the source, examine causation chains, assume strategic motivation, and evaluate long-term consequences before accepting or rejecting.
Use when persuading a powerful but hesitant ally to provide military assistance during a crisis. Covers acknowledging the situation, establishing the value relationship, presenting urgency arguments, articulating consequences of inaction, and framing the ally's loss from delayed intervention.
At most 3 mods per repository are shown here, and a mod shipped inside a plugin is left to that plugin's page — the rest are on their repository pages: