Rob Hobart

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Ah yes, THIS module.

Kharmic Vengeance became my poster-child for “stop automatically using module submissions” – my experience with this module not only showed that I needed to NEVER announce a module for release before I had received and reviewed the draft, but also red-flagged the author as someone whose material I should never use again. In fact, he subsequently submitted another full module, several outlines, and a giant pile of fictions (all of them designed to absurdly inflate the importance and power of his character), all of which I declined to approve.

So why did this module get used at all? The basic concept/outline which he submitted seemed pretty cool – one of the Scorpion “escaped souls” from Traitor’s Grove tries to unleash a magical plague in the Scorpion lands. I thought this was a fine idea for an adventure and his initial outline seemed decent enough, so I told him to write up the module and I announced it for release in November. However, in retrospect there were some clear warning signs: the same player had also tried to pitch the idea of a new Minor Clan, the “Cobra Clan,” which would be tasked with watching over the Scorpion. I rejected this because (a) the campaign was already launched and thus I could not ret-con a new Minor Clan into the setting, and (b) the Scorpion already had a vassal family, the Kochako, with the specific role of “watching the watchmen.” (In fact, I was already contemplating the idea that Shosuro Hido’s subversion of the Scorpion Clan would force him to destroy the Kochako.) Instead, I suggested that he make his “Cobra Clan” into a Soshi family vassal family, serving the same role for the Soshi that the Kochako vassal family served for the Shosuro. I thought>/i> he had agreed to this counter-proposal and that all would be well…

The the module draft came in.

It was a train-wreck – full of clunky writing, bizarrely anomalous scenes (mourners openly vomiting at a funeral), desperately lacking any depth of plot or story, and railroading the PCs in a straight line to the end. Even worse, the module’s real heroes were not the PCs but the two “Kobura vassal family” NPCs, blatant Mary Sues who solve all the problems and then “reveal” that… they are actually the super-secret-secret Cobra Clan!

Under normal circumstances I would simply have rejected this nonsense out of hand, but I had already announced the module for release in November and I did not have anything else available to replace it. Plus, while the module was trash, the plot outline was viable. So I spent four weeks tearing the whole thing down to bedrock and comprehensively rewriting it. Very little of the original survived – basically only the names of the NPCs, the basic concept of the villain spreading a magical plague via flowers, and the plotline starting at Shiro no Soshi and then going to the lands around Kyuden Bayushi for the climax. Everything else was rewritten completely, with many entirely new sections added in; the opening scene that explains why the PCs are in Shiro no Soshi, the entire investigation plot in that city (the original draft had only the funeral and the meeting with the vassal daimyo Soshi Keilani), and the entirety of the final encounter. (I was rather proud of the idea that the villain should have fanatical minions who would throw themselves in the path of PC attacks – long experience had shown me that in a party-versus-villain fight, I had to do something to k

eep the PCs from simply overwhelming their opponent with superior numbers.) And of course all the original absurdities were completely purged. The end result of all this was actually a decent module that served as the first of several sequals to Bayushi Lineage and also added some nice depth to the Scorpion Clan by showcasing the normally-obscure Soshi family. In fact, I would end up re-using Keilani, the Kobura vassal family daimyo, and her minion Honzo in Year Five for the climax of the Scorpion plotline (in the module Spider’s Lair). The villain’s plot of spreading a magical plague by means of flowers also let me turn this module into another exercise in long-term consequences, with some PCs winding up saddled with a cert for the “Curse of the Black Orchid” and facing the possibility of later death by disease.

A subtle meta-plot element of this module was the depiction of the Empire suffering severe spring flooding, following on to the previous year in which I made a point of mentioning hot weather and drought in several modules. All of this was setting up that the Empire would be suffering poor harvests and food shortages, which would not only imply Celestial disharmony (in Rokugan, “natural” disasters always have spiritual causes) but would also set up future diplomatic plotlines.

One final note of amusement: the original author evidently had a Mary Sue attitude not only toward his two heroes but also toward the villain, Soshi Sakiko. He really, really wanted her to stick around as a recurring threat, so he gave her the spell Cloak of Night… without actually reading the spell, merely assuming from its description that it would let her conceal herself and escape. Of course, the spell did not actually do this at all (it hid an item, not a person), but when he GM’d the mod a couple of months after it had released (long after Sakiko’s fate had already been decided by the premier tables) he still tried to use the spell for that purpose, and got dreadfully agitated when the players pointed out that it didn’t work that way. He even wrote to me, pleading for Sakiko to be able to escape because “that’s what I wanted to happen.”