About 12 Rooms
12 Rooms is an English-language working reference for Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數) and BaZi (八字) — two Chinese chart systems that are rich, systematic, and badly served by most of what exists about them in English.
Who runs this
12 Rooms is built and written by Charlie Chien, a Taiwan-based product maker who publishes under the name dvdmaru. If you buy the PDF report, the Gumroad checkout says "Charlie Chien" — same person, real name. The writing documents a learner's path through these systems, checked against classical sources and native-language material, rather than claiming a master's lineage. Where the historical record is uncertain, the articles say so.
How the terms are translated
There is no standard English vocabulary for these systems, so this site maintains its own: every Chinese term gets one English rendering, used the same way on every page, always shown alongside the original characters. Some renderings are ours — "Friction Activation" for 化忌, "the Warlord" for 七殺's archetype — chosen for readability over literalness. The cross-system tables that map terms to Western astrology and 16-type language are heuristic on-ramps, not claims of equivalence, and they are labeled as such.
The house rule: descriptive, not deterministic
Nothing on this site predicts fixed outcomes. Charts are treated as structured frames for self-reflection — a vocabulary for describing tendencies — not as verdicts about what will happen. That rule applies to the glossary, the articles, the AI reading, and the paid report alike. Where the tradition itself makes claims that can't be verified, the text says 'the tradition reads this as,' not 'this is true.'
How the tools work
The Zi Wei calculator is powered by the open-source iztro library; the BaZi engine is our own implementation of the standard solar-term rules. Both run in your browser — birth data isn't sent to a server to compute a chart. The optional AI reading is generated by Anthropic's Claude, grounded in this site's glossary framings; the paid report is generated by the same interpretation engine from your exact birth details, then delivered by email. See the privacy policy for exactly what data goes where.
Contact
For purchase-related questions, reply to your Gumroad receipt. For everything else — corrections especially welcome — message via Substack.