半壁江山 (Half the Empire) — An AI-Built Western Jin Roleplay of Six Fates and One Broken River
Final Product: 半壁江山 (Half the Empire)




半壁江山 is a playable political roleplay set in the last years of the Western Jin, when the north had already fallen and the south was still deciding what kind of country it would be.
Luoyang is gone. The emperor has been taken. On the roads south, the great families carry their genealogies and their servants and very little else. In Jiankang, 司马睿 — the Prince of Langya, a Jin clansman with the best southern base and no army of his own — waits for the clans to decide whether a throne is worth building around him. 王导, head of the Langya Wang, is the man who can make them decide, and the man who knows exactly what that favour will cost. 祖逖 has already struck the oar mid-river and sworn to take the north back; the court has given him a title and no grain. 刘琨 is still holding Bingzhou with three sealed letters that no one in Jiankang will answer. 石勒, who remembers every hungry day of his slavery, is teaching himself how to rule. And 荀灌, thirteen years old, is the only one small enough to slip through the siege at Wancheng and fast enough to reach the one general who might still come.
Every way out is built on someone else's dead end. The roleplay never tells you which side of that sentence you are on — it gives you a perspective, a room, a set of people with their own plans, and two to four moves with visible costs. Nothing is decided for you and no ending is assumed.
The weight of the scales. A short ink-wash scene from the same world: at a grain stall in Jiankang, a prince in plain travel robes rests two fingers on the beam of an old balance and learns what the city actually weighs.
Game Features
- Live LLM Narrative Direction — nothing here is a fixed script. A deepseek-v4-flash agent reads your move, keeps each historical voice in register, and writes the next beat, the subtext and two to four actionable choices with their costs. It knows that 王导 does not speak plainly, that 刘琨's reports are more hopeful than his position, and that a favour from a great clan is never a gift. The same agent planned the premise, the relationship graph, the four investigable threads and the attention rule that forbids it from narrating your choices, speech or feelings.
- Six Lives, Six Halves of the Truth — choose 司马睿, 王导, 祖逖, 刘琨, 石勒 or 荀灌. Each starts in a different room with a different kind of power: a banner without an army, a family without a throne, a general without grain, a city without relief, a warlord without a system, a child without permission. The same event reads differently from each seat, and what one perspective calls a victory another calls the beginning of the end.
- Four Investigable Threads — the political geometry is playable, not decorative. 王与马 asks whether the crown is a partner or a hostage; 并州那盏灯 asks why three desperate letters went unanswered; 中流击楫 asks who is quietly starving the northern expedition; 从奴隶到帝王 asks whether 石勒 can build an order that outlives his cavalry. Each thread carries clues, actions, discoveries, a reveal and consequences that change what people will admit to you.
- Everyone's Way Out Is Someone's Dead End — the relationship graph has eleven edges and no clean ones. 司马睿 depends on 王导 and resents the dependence; 王导 promotes 祖逖 and withholds his supplies; 祖逖 needs the court that fears his success; 刘琨 waits for a rescue that would cost Jiankang too much; 石勒 respects 祖逖 as the one variable he cannot predict; 荀灌's father would rather die than send her, and she is the only route left. Trust is a resource, and every promise has a price attached somewhere off-screen.
- History Without Plot Armor — the setting is the 4th-century Jin court, not a fantasy version of it. Clans, clients, grain, titles, marriage networks and the cavalry of the steppe do the work that magic usually does. The attention rule keeps the prose restrained and era-appropriate: no hot-blooded fantasy, no modern idiom, no convenient last-minute army. Choices are offered with their costs, and a refusal is respected immediately.
- Transparent Sprites, Painted Rivers, Zero Install — all six principals were cut out into true transparent PNGs with a birefnet-general segmentation pass, so they stand cleanly over the river pier, the ruined palace, the walls of Jiankang and the snows of Bingzhou. Every scene plate is a painted background from this world's own asset space, generated in the same gpt-image-2 ink-wash house style. The whole experience is a mobile-first page that runs in the browser, free to start, nothing to install, and impossible to spoil by reloading.
Character Sprites
Production Process Breakdown
The world began as an empty stage and was filled with a single historical argument: what does it cost to keep half an empire, and who pays it? The AI wrote the era, the political geometry of the Jin court, the machinery of the great clans and the northern military crisis, then the character bibles for 司马睿, 王导, 祖逖, 刘琨, 石勒 and 荀灌, plus the locations that anchor each life — 洛阳废墟, 建康, 乌衣巷, the north-bank camp, 并州晋阳 and 宛城. The rule from the first page: strict historical restraint, no fantasy, no modern idiom.
From that canon the agent wrote the playable spine of 半壁江山: the premise, the core conflict, an eleven-edge relationship graph, four investigable threads with clues, actions, discoveries, reveals and consequences, six locations and four opening hooks. It also wrote the attention rule the whole experience runs on — two to four choices with visible costs, never narrate the player's choices or feelings, never assume a political position, never import characters from another story, and keep the prose in the register of the period.
Each of the six principals was painted from the world's established references with GPT Image 2, preserving the same face, hair, build and wardrobe across every image: 司马睿's black gauze cap and crimson court layers, 王导's grey-blue robes and brush, 祖逖's bronze scale and broken oar, 刘琨's sword and snow, 石勒's fur and scar, 荀灌's light armor and sealed letter. The portraits were then cut out with a BiRefNet segmentation pass into transparent PNGs with clean silhouettes, so they can stand over any painted room without a halo or a clipped shoulder.
The world was painted as cinematic ink-wash plates: the ferry pier at deepening dusk with torches kindling along the quay, the burned skeleton of Luoyang, the grey-green breadth of the Yangtze before Jiankang, the deep lanes of Wuyi where the Wang clan does its quiet business, the besieged walls of Jinyang, and the market where a prince weighs rice against a pitted iron counterweight. Every plate keeps the same sumi black, warm rice paper, restrained vermilion and celadon palette, leaves negative space for dialogue, and keeps the three core visual nodes — Luoyang, Jiankang and the northern fortress — legible at a glance.
A 16:9 key-art cover was generated for this work — the prince at the broken pier, the general with the splintered oar, the girl with the sealed letter, and the north burning behind them — then the finished experience was captured at 1280×800 in a real browser: the opening screen, the six-perspective selector, and 荀灌's first-input state. Three distinct Studio views (World overview, Character constellation and a character detail card) were captured from this world's studio, and the page was published in one pass.
Scene Backgrounds






Asset Prompts
"Chinese ink-wash painting (shuimo) with muted mineral color glazes, brush masses resolving forms with omission and negative space. Epic cinematic wide shot at deep dusk, late-Jin dynasty Yangtze river ferry landing of Jiankang. Center-right foreground: a large wooden river barge glides bow-first toward worn timber pier piles; standing motionless at its bow a dignified middle-aged prince, likeness and wardrobe taken from the attached reference @司马睿 — black gauze scholar-prince cap, layered black and deep-crimson formal court robes with wide sleeves, hands folded inside sleeves, calm steady gaze aimed at the shore. He is facing away-quarter view so his features read in elegant ink silhouette. At the foot of wet stone steps a courtly herald in grey-green official robes and black futou cap bows deeply toward the barge. The crowded jetway teems with northern refugee gentry clutching bundled scrolls and saddlebags, a gaunt horse led on a rope. Porters light torches along the quay one by one, warm ember-orange flames kindling, firelight scattering across grey-green jade water. At the far end of the pier a plain grey-blue cloth-canopied horse cart waits half-shadowed, curtain lifted a sliver. Beyond: silhouetted tiled rooftops and city wall of Jiankang, paper lanterns kindling along a winding lane, far upstream horizon smouldering faint orange under a low band of smoke. High indigo dusk sky, ink-black mountains dissolving into washed mist, pale negative space between far shore and sky. Expressive dry-brush texture, splashed-ink tonality, restrained palette of ink blacks, grey-jade greens, dusky indigo, sparing vermilion-gold accents on flame and lanterns. No text, no signature, no watermark, no border."
"@王导, Chinese brush-ink painting: a tense night camp outside the mist-shrouded walls of Jiankang. A robed royal messenger leans in close, mid-speech, his face half-lit by a crackling torch he holds aloft, sparks scattering as dry-brush flecks of vermilion. Beside him a composed young prince in pale silk robes listens with a calm, unreadable expression, eyes narrowed in thought; behind them a bent refugee old woman lingers in shadow, offering a steaming bowl of boiled water. The city walls and dark pines dissolve into layered wet ink wash and generous negative space, the night rendered through deep sumi blackness and ink concentration implying faint torchlight. Restrained mineral-color accents only: warm vermilion on the flame, celadon green on silk folds. Calligraphic pressure-varied brush lines, controlled dry-brush edges, wet ink bleed, absorbent rice paper grain; contemplative, quietly charged atmosphere of political intrigue at night, no text."
"Use the two attached portrait references: reference 1 is the young prince Sima Rui (black gauze scholars cap, layered dark and crimson court robes), reference 2 is the elder minister Wang Dao (grey-blue official robes, tall black gauze cap, slender grey beard). Keep both faces, hairstyles and wardrobes exactly consistent with the references. Chinese brush-ink painting on warm rice paper, weighted calligraphic brush masses, ink bleed and controlled dry-brush edges, monochrome sumi palette with restrained vermilion and celadon accents, rice-paper grain. Scene: late-afternoon southern market of Jiankang, a refugee prince in plain travel robes pausing at a grain stall. Foreground: an old wooden balance scale on a low counter, its dark iron sliding weight pockmarked, the beam tipped; a pale fan of rice spills from a tilted bamboo dou measure onto the counter, chalky white against ink-black shadow. The prince stands in three-quarter view from behind, one wide white sleeve reaching toward the scale beam, calm and watchful; behind him the minister Wang Dao in grey-blue official robes watches with a deep unreadable gaze, hands folded in sleeves. Around them a hazy crowd of vendors and buyers dissolves into wet-ink wash silhouettes, low eaves and a cloth awning frame the top, slanting afternoon light implied by layered wash depth and generous negative space in the sky. Quiet, tense, contemplative political atmosphere of weighing and measure. Wide cinematic 16:9 composition, clear focal subject on the scale. No text, no signature, no watermark, no border."
"@王导, Chinese brush-ink painting on warm rice paper: a river ferry pier at deepening dusk during the Jin dynasty southward crossing. Weighted calligraphic brush masses resolve a weathered wooden trestle pier stretching over dark, broad water, its posts suggested by bold dry-brush strokes. Along the pier, newly kindled torches bloom as restrained vermilion accents, their flames scattering broken gold-orange flecks across the inky current. At the far end, a low traveler's carriage draped in muted celadon cloth rolls quietly toward the hazy silhouette of a walled city on the horizon, its curtain lowered, only a faded old family crest hinted in pale ink. On the near steps stands a young exiled prince in travel-worn noble robes, composed and still, while his attendant leans close whispering at his shoulder rendered half-dissolved in wash; below, a waiting envoy holds a small lantern, face left as an unfinished void. Behind them, a loose crowd of refugees presses as blurred wet-ink silhouettes, a few heads turned with watchful intent. Atmospheric void dominates the upper sky, layered wash depth implying recession; ink bleed, damp mist over water, dry-brush breakup in reeds along the bank, subtle rice paper grain throughout. Monochrome sumi palette with minimal vermilion firelight and celadon accent conveying secretive political tension, quiet calculation, and the weight of a first step about to be taken."
Why Choose Neta Studio
Professional — a cloud harness runs the whole production from world building to roleplay direction to browser QA and publishing, with no local setup. Stable access to the latest models: GPT Image 2 · deepseek-v4-flash · birefnet-general.
One-click generation — officially tuned skills drive every step: world building, roleplay drafting, portrait and scene generation, transparent cut-outs, in-browser visual QA and one-click publishing. Fork the world, rerun a single card, swap a model, or regenerate the cover without rebuilding the rest of the production.
Built for stories that stay in character — the world bible is not a prompt you paste once. 司马睿, 王导, 祖逖, 刘琨, 石勒 and 荀灌 live as character atoms with their own art, histories, wants and weaknesses, and the roleplay agent reads the same canon every turn. That is why 王导 can be generous in one scene and ruthless in the next without becoming a different man, and why 荀灌's age is never used as an excuse to take the decision away from her.
A community of worlds — publish a playable link anyone can open, keep the world editable underneath, and let other creators remix the parts that work. 半壁江山 sits inside 世界模拟器 beside its sibling histories, sharing a visual language of ink, paper and restrained colour while keeping its own cast, its own river and its own accounting of what the south cost.
Studio Interior



Play 半壁江山
Luoyang has fallen, the river is wide, and six people are waiting for you to decide what the south is for. Choose a perspective and take the first step onto the pier. No coding, free to start, nothing to install.