Rob Hobart

Download Round One of The Adventure
Download The Round One Cert
Download Round Two of The Adventure
Dowload The Round Two Cert

The title of this module (one of the rare non-card ones) was intended as having a double meaning: the “legacy” is both the Unicorn Clan’s foreign ways (celebrated in the tournament) and the sinister presence of the Lying Darkness, which the Unicorn first encountered in foreign lands before they returned to Rokugan. (Of course, the Shadow had already arrived in Rokugan with Shosuro way back in the days of the First War, but the Unicorn didn’t know that.)

This was the campaign’s first true two-round scenario, as opposed to earlier modules such as Kyuden Asahina and Lies, Lies, Lies that probably should have been two-round, but weren’t. Design-wise, my basic intent here was to do a “tournament” scenario similar to Satsume’s Tournament, but with enough time, variety, and detail to let it actually play out properly. Since the hosts were the Unicorn Clan (another stop on the “tour of Rokugan”), I themed the contests around things that Clan would value, such as battle and horsemanship. I also took the opportunity to put the major Unicorn NPCs on stage – Shinjo Yokatsu, Otaku Kamoko, and Iuchi Daiyu.

Structurally, I erred in putting too many of the tournament competitions in Round One, with the result that the first half of the mod ran long and the second half tended to run short. In retrospect, I should have moved one or two of the individual contests into Round Two. On the other hand, while writing the module I did realize I needed to “pre-score” the tournament competitions to reduce the burden on GMs running the module – otherwise the whole thing would bog down in the GM making endless die-rolls while the players twiddled their thumbs. The fact that I realized this _before_ the module was finished was, in retrospect, a sign that I was developing more expertise. It worked well and I would take a similar approach to later tournament scenarios in HoR2.

This mod marked the long-delayed return of Shosuro Tajiki, this time acting as a “hit man” to take out another NPC who had earned the enmity of the Scorpion Clan. Ironically, due to the long delay in the release of A Chance Meeting, players actually perceived Tajiki as making two appearances within a short time, whereas I saw him as having been off-stage for much too long. Still, the mod did accomplish the goal of making everyone (who wasn’t a Scorpion) really, really dislike the guy.

In the long term, the most significant aspect of this module was the first appearance of the Shadow. The sub-plot of a Goju being imprisoned beneath Shiro Iuchi was actually based directly on one of the stories in the classic 1st Edition supplement Way of Shadow, in which the Unicorn escort a captured Goju back to their lands. I had a lot of fun coming up with the sequence of the PCs descending into the gaijin-influenced dungeon and waging a desperate battle against a Goju. (This sequence was influenced to some degree by the “rescue of Griffith” sequence in the anime series Berserk.) At the time this module was written, I had not yet come up with the idea to combine the Clan Wars storyline with the subsequent Hidden Emperor storyline. The inclusion of the Shadow in this mod was intended purely to introduce its concept to the players and to hit them with a villain who did not conform to anything they had encountered before. Later, after I settled on the meta-plot that would guide the campaign’s final two years, “A Foreign Legacy” assumed much greater significance as a prologue to later struggles against the Lying Darkness.