Rob Hobart

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This was the first of an eventual total of three mods that were collaborations between me and my wife Rebecca. She came up with the basic ideas and plot outlines (and sometimes wrote a first draft), which I then expanded into full-fledged modules. In this case, her inspiration was the idea of bringing back the White Orchid tournament, which had originally been depicted in the L5R 1st Edition adventure “Code of Bushido.” Like many cool things in 1st Edition, this presumably-important event (a tournament for shugenja from all over the Empire, with a giant crate of spell-scrolls awarded to the winner) disappeared when the Gold-era writing team took over, and wasn’t even referenced anywhere in the 2nd Edition, d20, or 3rd Edition RPG books. My wife and I both disapproved strongly of this sort of ret-conning and thus the notion of bringing back the White Orchid tournament was instantly appealing to both of us. Of course, we had to depict the tournament as having changed somewhat over the course of 350 years, since the original version was a “best of the best” contest that would have no place for low-Rank PCs. I revised it into an event designed to showcase bright young shugenja talents from around the Empire, and scaled back the winner’s prize to a single spell rather than a crate full of them.

Since the tournament was traditionally set in the Shrine of the Ki-Rin, I brought back my description and map of that shrine from HoR1’s “Fury of the Elements”, updated it for the year 1500, and added a tournament field (which I had left out of the previous version – oops). In the original “Code of Bushido” adventure, the shrine was located conveniently close to a secondary castle called Shiro Gisu which was the setting for that adventure’s winter court segment. Like the White Orchid tournament, Shiro Gisu completely disappeared from later editions of L5R (I finally managed to bring it back in 4th Edition); for this module, I decided to supply a reason for this by depicting the year-1500 castle as having been ruined many generations earlier by an earthquake. The ruins also provided a conveniently evocative location for the module’s secondary plotline (the tormented ghost) -- which was in the module primarily to ensure there would be something for non-shugenja PCs to do while their fellows were busy trying to win the tournament.

Running a shugenja tournament meant we needed competitors. The campaign up to this point didn’t give me a lot of options (though I did bring back two shugenja NPCs we’d seen before) so I had to spend a lot of time and effort creating an interesting selection of fellow competitors. I also realized that I needed to “pre-roll” the outcomes of the various competitions – otherwise, the module would take six hours to run while the GM endlessly calculated die-rolls, decided who was spending Void and how many Raises they were making, and so forth. I could have just chosen arbitrary outcomes, but in fact Becca and I actually sat down one afternoon and rolled-out all the NPC results for the entire tournament.

One other creative requirement for this module was that I had to fill out the rest of the Phoenix Elemental Council (up to this point, I’d only created two Masters, Air and Fire – the Master of Air was the Jade Champion and one of my poster-children for inept leadership, while the Master of Fire was a tribute to a PC from HoR1 who I felt had not gotten enough attention). Since at this point I had no specific plot-plans for the Elemental Masters, I simply tried to come up with vivid descriptions/personalities with some vague plot-hook-ish aspects that I might be able to use later. As it turned out, the only one which germinated into something more was the Master of Void.

The Name-Changing Moshi

One of the NPC competitors in this module was Moshi Amiko, daughter of the Moshi family daimyo; she later dies a rather grisly death in the module Winter Court: Shiro Hanagensai. However, in the initial release of this module she was named “Moshi Amika” instead. This led to some confusion among players who had gone through the module’s original version, and gave rise to a theory that the Moshi daimyo actually had twin daughters.

In actuality, “Moshi Amika” had been submitted as an NPC in a fiction by a player who wanted her to marry his own character (a Tsuruchi). This might have been a worthy long-term campaign goal under normal circumstances, but the player in question was part of Bayushi Makesu’s group, which instantly called his motives into question. I decided that I would treat this submission in the same way as I did ideas from true dedicated role-players – as an opportunity to create samurai tragedy. Thus, Amika was slated to die a tragic death, and in order for this to have impact on the rest of the campaign player-base, I introduced her in this module. My view was that if the player was a good player stuck in a bad group, he would embrace the opportunity for role-playing a samurai story, and if he was (as I suspected and as turned out to be the case) a bad player in a bad group, he would rage-quit when Amika died. Win-win. In the event, I didn’t even have to wait until she died, since the player went ballistic-nuts the moment he found out that “his” NPC had appeared in a module where other PCs could interact with her. (I had specified in the module that she was honorable and would never engage in an illicit love-affair, but that didn’t matter – as far as he was concerned, other PCs shouldn’t even be able to talk to her.) Name-calling and impotent threats ensued, leading very quickly to his being banned from the campaign, with Makesu and the rest of the group following him out the door.

As a result of this, I changed the name of the NPC slightly (partially to remove any lingering claim of campaign-influence from this player, and partially to head off any future problems if he tried to make further trouble)… thereby giving rise to confusion among later players.