Rob Hobart

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This module was where I really started to “find my feet” with HoR2 and get past my initial creative block. The underlying inspiration here came from the idea that the PCs would form a multi-module alliance with an admirable NPC (the Lion magistrate) who would eventually be killed by the forces of corruption – a way of bringing home emotionally the Empire’s moral/legal decay. This mod was the magistrate’s introduction, and I deliberately brought him into the scenario in a way that was designed to be sympathetic and appealing: sharing a seat at a ramen stand with the PCs, slurping noodles. I also made him pudgy and good-humored, both to be more sympathetic and also because I wanted him to show that Lion are not all one-dimensional stern paragons. He is an entirely honorable man, but not cold or harsh or humorless, and I felt that sort of character needed to be seen in L5R. I also had a secondary motive for making him a Lion, which was that one of the major campaign villains was also a Lion, so I wanted to have at least one positive Lion NPC as a counterpoint.

The main scenario is focused around yakuza gangs and gambling houses. This sort of storyline is largely absent from canonical L5R because the setting does not really have a place for yakuza – the closest it ever gets are local groups like the Fireman Gangs in Ryoko Owari. Introducing yakuza into “Rokugan 1500” and making them into a major recurring problem was a way of driving home that the Empire was struggling with social upheaval and moral decay. It also let me do all sorts of fun plotlines based on “samurai noir” fiction such as the Zatoichi films and manga like Lone Wolf & Cub and Samurai Executioner. A particular recurring sub-theme that first showed up here was that the yakuza were not in any way afraid of samurai, and indeed tended to exhibit fearless contempt for them – which came as a shock to players accustomed to watching commoners bow and scrape.

I deliberately made the victim of the yakuza gambling/kidnapping crime into the son of an Otomo Imperial in order to emphasize the depth of social rot in the Empire. The “pay attention to me” arrogance of the Otomo also provided me with a useful way to keep the NPC magistrate occupied and thus put the entire burden of the investigation on the PCs’ shoulders.

Mature-content alert! The leader of the yakuza gang is depicted as an aged, decrepit pedarast who has a teenage “boy-toy” as his second-in-command. This was done as a rather deliberate “squick-out,” emphasizing the overall theme of corruption by portraying the abusive sexual exploitation often found at the bottom of both feudal and criminal society (and which regularly appears in Japanese pop-culture depictions of those societies). It was definitely territory I would not have been able to go if the campaign had still been part of the RPGA, although I left it up to the GMs how overtly to depict it in-game.