Rob Hobart

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Ryan’s second module for HoR2 was very, very different from Tears of a Fox’s Heart. Ryan had been writing a series of fictions about his PC, Otomo Sukishi, investigating bandit trouble on the Lion-Unicorn border. The module was intended to “pay off” those fictions, with Sukishi recruiting PCs to find out what is behind the so-called bandit trouble… an investigation that also puts the PCs into a pseudo-conflict with Lion Wardens who are digging into the same problem. (The real villain is a Unicorn landowner who is hoping to profit from an eventual/inevitable Lion-Unicorn war.) Ryan’s initial draft had a single meeting between the PCs and Sukishi, after which they head out to explore the border region. I expanded the introduction to include some investigations for the PCs to pursue, as well as adding a less-than-effective Emerald Magistrate to justify why Sukishi was recruiting the PCs to help out.

The intention of this module was to allow off-beat PC types – merchants, spies, and scouts -- to shine. Commercial PCs could pick up clues that others would miss, and spy/scout types would excel at locating and investigating the bandit’s lair without being detected. Unfortunately, the flip side of this was that parties who were altogether lacking in skills like Hunting and Stealth would find the module rather excessively difficult. Moreover, the presence of the Lion Wardens created a “clock” on the scenario… if the PCs dithered around for too long, the Wardens would locate the bandit camp and bring in Lion troops to destroy it, in the process accidentally eliminating any clues that might point to the true culprit.

Much of the module’s creative effort went into the depiction of the tunnels that the PCs can use to sneak into the bandits’ cave undetected. The purpose of this was to let the PCs investigate without having to take on the very large bandit gang in combat, a fight that was pretty well guaranteed to turn out badly. I put a lot of effort into this rare example of a “dungeon crawl” in HoR, expanding and detailing Ryan’s initial draft concepts; unfortunately, it turned out there was no guarantee that the PCs would actually find the tunnel, let alone explore it, so the effort put into that part of the module was sadly disproportionate to the payoff in actual play.

Overall, because of the general shortage of spy/scout types within the campaign combined with the difficult and in some ways non-intuitive challenge of investigating the bandit gangs, this module ended up being frustrating for most players, and only a minority of tables were even able to figure out who was behind the bandit gang. This meant there was no Lion-Unicorn conflict (without the bandit raids the border tensions died down quickly) and Ryan's extensive fiction-and-module efforts came to naught.

Incidentally, this mod has the dubious distinction of being one of the few in HoR2 to achieve a “table-killer” outcome: one particular group of PCs followed a unique sequence of choices that ended up with them fighting the entire gang of thirty-odd bandits (plus leaders) on their own… a problem made worse because a couple of the PCs were not very combat oriented. Most of the table wound up dead, with two surviving PCs escaping only via dishonorable cowardice. By sheer chance, all of this happened at Origins 2007, where we also had "killer tables" for two other modules... all of them GM'd by Kevin Blake, not normally known for killing off PCs. He was nicknamed "Black Blake" for years afterward.