Rob Hobart

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This module, which ended up having a fairly significant long-term impact on the campaign (inasmuch as it resulted in multiple sequels), was built from an outline submitted by one player and a sub-plot from a module submitted by another player. This sort of “scavenging” was something I would do quite a bit in HoR2 as I gradually moved away from my earlier policy of automatically using any module that I got. The subtitle (“Fathers and Sons”) was taken from the outline, while the main title was of course derived from a card.

The outline was built around the idea of some sort of villain burning down a portion of Traitor’s Grove in order to free the souls therein (targeting one specific soul for nefarious reasons). The PCs would get involved due to attending a Scorpion gempukku ceremony as guests, and the freed souls would serve as plot-hooks for future modules. I liked this idea, but since the outline did not actually identify the villain, I had to come up with one; I settled on Akodo Gintaku, dispatching one of his loyal “anniki” – the general Akodo Mako – to set the fire. The specific targeted soul is a Scorpion traitor who would hopefully try to assassinate their Clan Champion (this was finally revealed in Winter Court: Shiro no Shosuro, the last of the sequel modules). Arranging the arson incident in such a way that the PCs could be fairly convinced of Mako’s perfidy without giving them a basis to actually go after him was tricky, but made easier by his high Status rank… a method I would employ several more times over the course of the campaign. I was already mentally cogitating on other ideas for encounters in which the PCs would have no choice but to back down in the face of higher-Status or more skilled adversaries, creating a burning sense of humiliation and samurai vengefulness for the future.

(BTW, the term “anniki” is a Japanese slang-term for “brother,” typically used by lower-class and criminal-class folk in reference to comrades who are brothers-in-arms rather than blood relations. A benign – e.g. non-yakuza – usage of it can be seen in Kurosawa’s film “The Hidden Fortress,” where the two peasant schmucks use it in reference to the general played by Mifune. It seemed appropriate for Gintaku to use this term to identify the loyalists he had been cultivating within the Lion Clan – men willing to subvert their sense of Honor into absolute loyalty to Gintaku. It also gave me another way of hinting at what was going on within the Lion Clan, not only in the storyline itself but also in the NPC stat-blocs.)

Kyuden Bayushi is a cool setting for a module – the hedge-maze, the sinister but beautiful gardens, the castle with its movable interior walls – and I’m actually surprised I hadn’t made more use of it before this module. Of course, at this point the PCs were still pretty low on the Status-pole, so I had them interact with a hatamoto (Bayushi Kyodai) rather than the Clan Champion, who appears only briefly. I came up with the idea of the Scorpion using their famous maze to “entertain” (unsettle) their guests by challenging them to get through it without help, and this provided an opportunity to insert some troublesome NPC drama with the Scorpion duelist, Shosuro Sora. She was a lesbian, and thus rather miserable in Rokugan’s pre-modern traditionalist society – a character theme I definitely could not have depicted back in the RPGA days.

The sub-plot of Kyodai’s son running out on a duel with a Phoenix was lifted more-or-less unchanged from an otherwise rejected module (the mod’s main concept was okay but the execution was lacking). I really liked the idea of a “true Scorpion” willingly sacrificing his son for the needs of the clan, but the son himself being less willing to pay the price. This was primarily a role-playing challenge (to persuade the son to go back to Kyuden Bayushi and accept his near-certain death), with the Skill roll’s difficulty dependent on how the PCs approached the conversation. I was a big fan of these sorts of interactions between role-play and Skill rolls, intended to encourage players both to role-play more actively and to make sure they bought up the Skill Ranks to support that role-play.

The climactic fight with the possessed son of Bayushi Ippei was designed both to be an interesting challenge in itself (a fight with a “low-Rank” opponent who is nonetheless dangerous due to the guidance of the possessing spirit) and a foreshadowing of what could be expected from later possessed NPCs. However, it would be some months until the first of these sequel stories appeared… in the module Kharmic Vengeance, about which I will have much to say when the time comes.