Rob Hobart

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The “Shipping Lanes” arc emerged from my own cogitating on a couple of independent module submissions with nautical/gaijin themes (this was the first one) combined with my underlying knowledge of the “Three Old Men” arc, which involved both the Mantis and the Thrane. At this point I had only the vaguest, most nebulous notion of how the “Three Old Men” arc would resolve, but I knew I did not want to depict an actual gaijin invasion of Rokugan. (Among other things, this would completely derail the main Big Bad plotline.) My concept, instead, was that Sven Oldarsson would be trying to “colonize” the Empire by allying with local factions to install a puppet ruler, basically similar to what the British did in India. However, I also didn’t want the story to be a simplistic “gaijin bad” fable, but to have some complexity and depth; this seemed to require at least one sympathetic gaijin NPC. Having already introduced two other player-sympathetic NPCs (Akodo Torokai and Kaiu Sumata) for long-term plot purposes, it seemed logical to do the same for the Thrane, and thus was born Daniel Hatchermann, agent of the Thranish King, sent to Rokugan to find out what Oldarsson was up to. I decided to use Hatchermann as my linking element between the various “Shipping Lanes” modules and their themes of gaijin and Mantis smuggling, meddling, and mischief.

The initial draft of this module submission was short, simple, and combat oriented – the PCs are asked to seek out a missing daimyo’s son, locate him in a remote bay controlled by gaijin smugglers, and fight a battle with those smugglers. In order to flesh it out into a proper module, I added a large amount of flavor/role-play material depicting the Crane sake festival, the theatre troupe Mayakashi, and the first appearance by Hatchermann, as well as expanding the investigative options for the PCs once they started looking for the missing boy. I also expanded the options for the combat itself, both to make it more interesting and to avoid rail-roading the PCs into only a single option for attacking the smuggler base. Since the combat had the potential to be fairly dangerous, I also included the capable ronin Akuma -- who had previously appeared as a contestant in the Emerald Tournament -- as potential hired muscle for the PCs. (At the time, I had some thought that Akuma might become a recurring NPC, but no one showed much interest in him during the play-throughs of this module, and I never came up with another opportunity to use him.)

I threw in the appearance by the ostentatious Kabuki theatre-troupe Mayakashi in response to an idea from my wife – she had inserted a Noh troupe called the Korede Gokko (a combined Crane-Phoenix troupe that used magic as part of its performances) into Bloom of the White Orchid, and was planning to use them again in her next module; we were bandying around the idea of an eventual “battle of the bands” between the unconventional Korede Gokko and other acting troupes, so I created Mayakashi as a flashy but traditionalist Kabuki troupe to set up this idea. The “battle of the bands” would eventually happen, but not until Year Five of the campaign (and by then I would have added a third Shosuro-run troupe to the mix). The fight at the end of this module actually wound up being one of the more enjoyably dramatic combats in the early campaign, produced a number of stories about PCs pulling off creative tactics or spectacular hero-moves. Of course, it also included a sinister temptation for PCs to try to acquire gunpowder and firearms from the defeated gaijin. I suspected there were a few power-gamery players out there who would be unable to resist such an opportunity, so I made the Glory/Status/Honor penalties so severe that anyone who wasn’t Scorpion would be made ronin by the act. Deliberately stepping outside the bounds of Rokugani civilization has a price…