Rob Hobart

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This was HoR2’s first outside submission (and the first of two modules from author Ryan Reese) – the fact that I got one of these within a couple months of launching the campaign (as opposed to the two years it took in HoR1) shows how much our player-base and energy levels had grown since we left the RPGA. A further proof of our growth would come at the event where this module premiered – Weekend in Rokugan in January 2006 – which was more than twice as big as the first WiR. Clearly we were doing something right.

I really liked the basic concepts for this module, which hit on my ever-favorite sub-themes of “love sucks” and ghost stories. I especially liked introducing a kitsune-tsuki, a type of ghost not seen before and one drawing very distinctively on Japanese folklore, as well as the appearance by the nine-tailed old fox who serves as a subtle Clue Rickshaw. (In fact, I liked her so much that I made a point of bringing her back years later for the module Reverence for Chikushudo.) I also liked Ryan’s meticulous depiction of the various customs and ceremonies surrounding a wedding, and the way he subtly addressed the discontent of the Lion Clan (and especially the Matsu) in an era of enforced peace. Although this module did not in itself have any long-term plot effects, it did provide me with a number of new NPCs to populate the campaign, such as the womanizing Mirumoto samurai.

Originally, Ryan’s draft set this module during the Setsuban Festival, which meant the PCs could not actually draw their swords without dishonorably violating the festival truce. I liked this constraint, but realized it would conflict with the timing of when the module would be released (I was trying to avoid the jumbled, incoherent calendar of HoR1’s first year) and re-set the module to a different festival in the spring. This made things slightly easier on the PCs, but the fundamental problem – violence is not actually a viable solution to the kitsune-tsuki’s behavior – remained.

In regard to that… it may be noted that I tried to minimize the amount of mandatory combat in the campaign’s first year – although the PCs could certainly choose to draw their swords in mods like this or Writ of Justice, they could also solve the problems without any resort to violence. Partially this was to specifically avoid HoR1’s problem of overly-lethal mods killing off numerous PCs in the first year, but it was also a more general policy of reduced lethality that I followed to some degree throughout HoR2. I wanted the second campaign to have a stronger sense of a unified storyline with the PCs as the “stars” of that storyline, and that meant toning back the anyone-can-die-at-any-time deadliness that had characterized the previous campaign.

Digression: Combat Lethality in L5R and HoR

L5R has always suffered from an inherent schism between its story-driven ideals and the random lethality of its combat system, a schism which can probably be traced back to the conflicting views of original designer John Wick on these topics. From the beginning of 1st Edition, Wick made a point of calling the adventures “stories” and emphasizing plot-and-character-driven gaming, but he also wanted swords to kill you with one hit. (The rest of the AEG team prevailed on him to tone that back somewhat, but he eventually used the concept in his self-published samurai game “Blood and Honor.”)

In the first LR/HoR campaign I had allowed the “any combat/injury can kill you at any time if the dice say so” concept to dominate, but over time I came to feel that this had impeded my ability to get the players emotionally invested in the stories. For HoR2, although I did not explicitly tell the GMs not to kill PCs, I adopted a policy of under-powering most of the combats in order to minimize PC casualties. Only a few mods (such as Grave of Heroes and some of the Shadowlands mods) were written to be actively dangerous, and the vast majority of PC deaths in the campaign took place in those mods.