Rob Hobart

Author, Game Designer

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Heroes of Rokugan I

Heroes of Rokugan II

L5R Homebrew

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Right at the beginning of the campaign I had put out the idea that the Unicorn Khan held military maneuvers in the Burning Sands every winter, with the idea that I could eventually use this as the background for a module. What prompted me to actually write the module was the inspiration of having Miya Shikan become a khadi; logically, this would mean he would have to acquire the knowledge from a sorcerer in the Burning Sands, and what better opportunity to meet with such a sorcerer than accompanying the Unicorn for their wargames? This module features one of only two appearances by the Seppun daimyo, already described on the HoR website as a shallow dimwit who spent his days re-designing the uniforms for the Imperial Legions. Someone like that was perfect to provide a plot-excuse for the PCs to be attending the Unicorn maneuvers, while staying out of the PCs’ way once the module got underway.

The mysterious Unicorn samurai Shinjo Akujin, who engages in a seduction sub-plot against various female PCs, was actually Moto Yoshi (the missing Dark Moto from Unquiet Graves) – there are a number of hints in the module to his true nature, most notably the Taint he bestows on his paramours. The specific device of having him seduce female PCs (with the potential for an illegitimate child to result) was another beat on my recurring effort to create long-term consequences – having saddled male PCs with such effects with Maeda Oroko, I now employed a similar device with female PCs. Probably the most interesting result from this was a Daidoji PC who arranged a marriage to cover-up her pregnancy and wrote a very cool end-of-campaign fiction about raising a son with some very dark urges…

Somewhat like Bloom of the White Orchid, this module put different PCs on different tracks – Unicorn PCs got to compete in the “Great Race” (a concept I borrowed from a never-used module outline in HoR1) while the rest of the PCs accompanied Miya Hanzu to his rendezvous with a gaijin sorcerer. (Ideally this made for a complete module in which the “camera” switched back and forth between the two groups; unfortunately, if there were no Unicorn -- or in the rare cases where they were all Unicorn -- the module tended to “run short.”)

The Great Race sub-plot featured a chance for the PCs to realize that the inept Shinjo family had been murdered and replaced (by the shape-shifting Yoshi, of course, though I never made that obvious). It also featured an appearance by an extremely unpleasant desert bandit named Jafar who the players disliked so much that I brought him back a year later so they could kill him. Humorously, Jafar shared a name with a villain from a Disney movie, which many players assumed was a deliberate choice on my part – in fact, though, I didn’t realize this at the time, since I disliked Disney’s films rather intensely and never watched them.

The Hanzu sub-plot was my favorite part of the module, both because it allowed me to work in some creative gaijin story-elements and because of the way it set the stage for the future Khadi storyline. In particular, I enjoyed the fact that the module put the PCs in the position of fighting “enemies” – the Doomseeker fanatics -- who would be revealed much later on as heroes. I also had fun working in subtle hints on both my interpretation of gaijin magic (epitomized here by the dust-storm that surrounds the oasis) and my explanation of why the quasi-Roman empire called Yodotai had not ended up attacking Rokugan (the depiction of Yodotai being kept as slaves by the gaijin sorcerer).

The Doomseekers

A side-note regarding the Doomseekers, who first show up here and then get a much bigger role in the later module Journey to the Burning Sands…

I based them on the very brief original discussion in 1st Edition, which showed them as a gaijin order dedicated to “bringing death to the deathless.” During the Gold/Diamond era, the L5R writers had published some fictions that created a weird pseudo-canon suggesting that the Doomseekers had never really existed, but were merely a concoction of a rakshasa who met the Unicorn shugenja Iuchi Karasu. Why they did this was never clear since it really didn’t lead to anything, and the hints were so subtle that the whole thing was more a matter of reader interpretation than anything else. At the time I wrote this module, I was barely cognizant that some sort of alternate concept of the Doomseekers had been created (I rather pointedly did not keep up with all the plot-shenanigans of the Gold/Diamond CCG era) so I simply went with my own extrapolation of the original concept.

Several years later, when I was working on the Second City box set for the 4th Edition line, I took the initiative to officially restore the Doomseekers to what they had originally been. The resident “continuity expert” in RPG Playtest complained about this, which finally led me to read the Gold/Diamond fictions that referenced the Doomseekers and see just how vague and open-to-interpretation they really were. It turned out that the whole “Doomseekers didn’t really exist” concept was basically a fan-created extrapolation from those vague references – a “Fanon” as TVTropes would call it. Shawn Carman agreed with me that the vague story-references were no obstacle to restoring the original canon version of the Doomseekers – another tiny victory in my 4th Edition campaign to restore the 1st Edition concepts.