Certain charms and effects - namely the totally awesome and infuriatingly vague Hidden Judges of the Secret Flame - depend on whether or not a given act is against Divine Law. And Divine Law is never precisely written down or even summarized particularly thoroughly. This page is an attempt to solve that. Each SEVERITY level of infraction is given multiple examples and a comparison to a modern crime of analagous severity.

• SEVERITY 1 crimes are minor misdemeanors, comparable in scope and severity to a significant traffic violation.
• SEVERITY 2 crimes are major misdemanors, akin to drunk driving or public indecency.
• SEVERITY 3 crimes are lesser felonies - armed robbery, trespassing on government property, impersonating an officer of the law.
• SEVERITY 4 crimes are greater felonies - murder one, kidnapping, etc.
• SEVERITY 5 crimes are akin to high treason, or shooting a missile at the Pentagon.

Yu-Shan and Genre

Heaven is dirty politics, bad business, and skirting the nose of lions who nobody wants to get involved not necessarily because they'll get in trouble but because the Lions are so damn expensive to bribe it's not something you want to make a habit of. It's where the guy around the corner deals in crack not because the cops are paid to look the other way but because if he doesn't they'll knife him in the back for past crimes and they could take him in at any time in the future, and he damn well better remember that, do his job, and listen to any interesting gossip, and that still won't protect him if they decide to haul him in. It's where a single misstep gets you worse than dead - it gets you -audited-.

It's every mafia romantic story with the thickest veneer of grit you can possibly imagine wiped across every single character and it's every story about bureacracy you've ever heard amped to the nth degree. It's a government that works by being everything a government shouldn't be and then some, with a king with his nose in the drugs and enforcers who don't like the people they're supposed to protect, with laws so arcane only special lawyers can figure them out and they're ignored half the time by anyone who's an aristocrat anyway not because they've got the right but because they have too much power to question and if they want to do it they're gonna do it so it's too much trouble to police them. It's the capos sitting in the speakeasy talking to the judge about wiping the evidence from the last hit off the map because they happen to have some dirt on the judge from when the judge snorted some good stuff from a rival family and if he doesn't play along he's gonna get hauled up the river.