Rob Hobart

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My resolution for the Naga/Daini/Yukihera sub-plot was the first module in the campaign that explicitly required the PCs to act in opposition to Imperial authority, a tricky business that was a difficult choice for many players. Saying “no” and refusing to play through the module was a legitimate choice, especially for players whose characters had not previously played through Tao of the Naga or Twisted Forest. In retrospect I probably should have given such PCs a little more XP to reward them for sticking so tightly to their principles. (The ideal solution would have been to restrict the module to those characters who had played one or both of the earlier “Naga” modules – however, at this point in the HoR1 campaign such a restriction would have left out far too many PCs. Here too, I would learn from the experience and do things better in HoR2, where I would indeed create modules with “pre-requisite” limits.)

The Imperial Prison (the "Palace of Remorse") which the PCs must assail was taken directly from the Otosan Uchi box set, complete with its basic physical layout (although I designed the interior myself). Much like with the Kolat geisha house in the previous module, I presented the PCs with a challenge and waited to see how they would respond. The module had guidance for handling all of the more obvious approaches, of course, including bribing the guards and tunneling in from Otosan Uchi's underground passages.

I left things wide-open as to how the PCs should get their targets out of Otosan Uchi, simply providing the GMs with guidance for the various options (by land, by sea) and how quickly the pursuit would get organized. Of course, ultimately I _wanted_ the PCs to get to the Dragon lands once they succeeded in their jailbreak, so the module deliberately avoided making things too heinously difficult in this section -- the PCs just needed to put in a serious, dedicated effort to escape.

The climax of this module resolved the fate of Mirumoto Yukihera, exposing his Taint and thus allowing Mirumoto Daini to take over as the leader of the Mirumoto (and effectively of the Dragon Clan). The notion of Yukihera eventually succumbing to the Taint was, of course, taken from Soesbee’s novel “The Dragon” rather than from the CCG canon, although in the novel it was Hitomi who exposed and defeated him. My intention for this final scene was that it should be resolved primarily through role-play, but some groups ended up getting more creative with the situation – I remember one table in which a Crab PC threw a bag of jade powder at Yukihera to expose his Tainted nature.