Rob Hobart

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The campaign’s first specific “Winter Court” module was inspired by a number of different things (including the simple reality of the release schedule), but a key idea was to try to make a normal wild animal into a genuinely scary threat to a group of samurai. Men and women who carry three-foot razor blades and are raised from birth to die in battle are not inherently frightened by dangerous animals in the same way as Westerners, and their players in an RPG even less so. How could I make an animal into a frightening threat? My solution was to isolate the PCs in a snow-bound castle with no weapons and no spell-scrolls, leaving them with nothing but their bare hands to face an arctic tiger systematically hunting for human prey. (I chose a tiger because they are not only dangerous skilled hunters but also, unlike almost all other large predators, have a specific preference for hunting and eating human beings.) I also made sure the tiger’s two NPC kills were as gruesome and shocking as possible. Ultimately, the goal of making the PCs genuinely scared of a “mere animal” still came up a bit short – most players tended to treat the whole thing more as a tactical game-challenge rather than a horror scenario – so perhaps I was chasing a will-o-wisp.

In order to pull off the complete disarmament of the samurai, I had to pick a Winter Court setting that would be thoroughly pacifistic. I decided to use this opportunity to showcase the Hanagensai vassal family of the Crane, which were created by a player in HoR1 (he played their daimyo in a couple of smaller regional Interactives); I had carried them over to HoR2 to pay tribute to his efforts. The Hanagensai were one of several ways I added specific details to Rokugan 1500 to set it apart from “generic Rokugan” – other examples included the Minor Clan of the Tiger, the incorporation of the Kaeru into the Ikoma (which later happened in canon!), and the ronin Maeda family (the latter a tribute to one of my favorite ronin NPCs from HoR1).

Of course, Winter Court also means intrigues, entertainments, and competitions to help samurai while away the long hours of winter. I made a betrothal competition the center of the event, with the PCs scheming against various NPCs to marry one of the Hanagensai daimyo’s six daughters (I deliberately gave him six different marriageable daughters, rather than a single one, in order to eliminate the possibility of a future “discontinuity” if two or more PCs showed up at the same table with Hanagensai Bride certs.) I had fun coming up with the different NPC rivals for the marital prize, especially the extremely dishonorable and ruthless Crane couple, whose shenanigans offered another in-game symbol of the Empire’s overall moral corruption. Amusingly, at least two tables of players decided to forsake pursuing a bride for a PC in favor of campaigning for a bride to marry Otomo Hiroshi, my NPC “avatar” within the campaign; as a result, I depicted Hiroshi as having a Hanagensai bride in later modules.

The other winter entertainment depicted in this module was a Go tournament, inspired by the previous Go storyline in Unquiet Graves (and with the Crane grandmaster Kakita Fujimura making a return appearance as the judge of the event). I actually made a point of giving many of the NPCs a “Dan” rating to reflect their skill in Go and their involvement in the tournament scene, and a lot of them would make return appearances in later modules (along with more Go tournaments) – most notably the Kuni whose frail daughter is gifted/cursed with the power of prophecy. I was already playing around with the idea of using prophecies more aggressively in this campaign than in the last one, and these two NPCs became part of that theme.

Of course, the most notable NPC of all in this module was O-Doji Koneko herself, shunted off to a minor Winter Court by her inept and unstable son Sarutomo. Koneko’s awful, awful jester, Kakita Kumiyuzu, was a character I had brainstormed with my wife one evening when we were talking about Koneko – she could get away with all sorts of obnoxious behavior by virtue of her age and rank, and sponsoring a jester who was a supremely awful human being seemed like a very amusing way to show this to the players. Kumiyuzu would make a couple of return appearances and on one occasion I played his even-more-awful aged sensei at a regional Interactive.