Rob Hobart

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And thus we come to the end. This event was very different from the earlier Shiro Usagi battle interactive, and indeed very different from anything I had done before. Like the Day of Thunder at the end of HoR1, it was intended to be an epic battle against the forces of evil, climaxing with a showdown between select PCs and the Big Bad. However, this time around I went in with a much different and specifically story-driven plan. Instead of presenting a series of challenges that were supposed to be “difficult but beatable,” I chose to confront the PCs with a literally unwinnable battle.

The concept here was that Kobe’s army was massively outnumbered, so the only chance for the Empire to prevail was a suicidal wedge attack to allow a few samurai to reach and kill Akodo Gintaku. The main battle scenario was designed to depict Kobe’s followers -- the PCs -- sacrificing themselves heroically for this purpose. To that end, I presented an endless series of extremely difficult combats, one after the other, continuing until each table suffered at least 50% casualties or until time ran out. (We did have one table that had no casualties at all, an outcome I blame on a soft-hearted GM, and one other table that lost only one PC. OTOH, we also had one GM who took my “make it tough” dictate a little too much to heart and ticked off his table… nothing turns out perfectly, alas.)

If the courtiers had failed in their mission, of course, the fights would have been _even worse_, including a mandatory battle with the Akodo House Guard. Even without that, though, the fights were deliberately horrific, intended to create tragic-heroic deaths. Moto Yoshi returned for a final time (and could potentially mind-control female PCs who had succumbed to his sinister charms way back in Charge of the Baraunghar), and other notable scenes included Lion Deathseekers and an appearance by Oni Lord Tsuburu. Probably my favorite touch, though, was the appearance of the legendary Ashura (in this timeline, they are created during the sacrifice of the Jade Dragon), who violently explode when they die. To simulate the havoc this would wreak on a battlefield, I instructed the judges to shout "BOOM!" every time an Ashura died, and all adjacent tables would then suffer spillover damage from the explosion.

Going in to this event, I had planned to use my laptop speakers to play a piece of elegiac music at the start of the battle in order to establish a suitable tone of heroic tragedy. However, a couple of our players stepped up to make big “let’s do this, fellow samurai!” speeches at the beginning of the battle, and I felt that playing music after that would step on their efforts. So, instead, I improvised a different idea: we recorded the names of all the PCs who died in the course of the event, and at the end of the main battle I read out all the names while the music played. This actually worked really well, with lots of tears and hugs among the players, so – hey, yay improvisation! (I know someone recorded a video of my reading of the “rolls of the dead,” which they uploaded to the HoR YahooGroup, but I don’t know if it ever got posted anywhere else.)

You may recall that at the end of HoR1 I had chosen the Seven Thunders in person to face down Fu Leng, but this had resulted in considerable backlash from players who felt their characters who unfairly overlooked. Accordingly, for the climax of HoR2 I decided to have each table send one (surviving) character to fight Akodo Gintaku, with these characters chosen by table votes. (Players of dead PCs still got a vote.) This seemed to work out reasonably well – at least, no one complained about it afterward!

I ran the final fight between the twenty chosen champions and Akodo Gintaku as an improvised semi-narrative scene, with the only die-rolling being the PCs’ attack rolls. (They had to roll quite high to strike him.) I didn’t bother to track Wounds but instead simply recorded “hits,” with strong or clever attacks inflicting additional ones. Gintaku crippled or killed the PCs one by one while the “hits” accumulated, eventually leading to the point that he was weakened enough to be able to be killed – but at that point the PCs still had to fight more in order to inflict a suitably dramatic final death on the villain. Overall, I was quite happy with how this all turned out, though inevitably I found myself imagining better ways that I could have depicted the last fight. (In particular, I later came up with a better way to “pay off” the Thunder-blessed sword that wound up lodged in Gintaku’s gut. Hindsight is always 20-20…)