Rob Hobart

Download The Adventure
Download the Cert

The Mid-Rank counterpart to Harsh Lessons, this module takes place at the same time but allows the more experienced and prominent PCs to witness the Mirumoto tournament and to get involved in the fate of its eventual winner, Mirumoto Daikabe. I had been contemplating some sort of module set during this tournament ever since it had been announced at the Imperial Funeral at GenCon 2007, but it took some time for me to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. The key impetus came from the submission of Harsh Lessons, which gave me the idea of presenting the tournament from the viewpoint of both low-Rank and higher-Rank characters in two separate modules.

The tournament to choose the new family daimyo was designed to climax in an explicit clash between the two different aspects of the Mirumoto family – the proud aggressive warriors (symbolized by Mirumoto Daikabe) and the mystical enlightened sword-saints (symbolized by Mirumoto Kanjo). The intention for the scenario was that the “default” outcome would be a victory for Daikabe (showing how the Dragon Clan as a whole was being driven by anger over the War of Bleeding Flowers), but Kanjo could win if a majority of tables failed to prevent Daikabe’s assassination. Of course, this meant that PCs who worked to prevent Daikabe’s murder were also working on behalf of a future eruption of massive war in Rokugan, an irony which I enjoyed. This module saw the return of Kageko, Miya Shikan’s assassin, as well as a return appearance by the Scorpion agent named Shosuro Adoka who had appeared in a few previous modules and would also show up in some of my later campaign fictions. Adoka was necessary because there was no way for the PCs on their own to know that Daikabe had been targeted for assassination; of course, while the Scorpion protecting the Mirumoto could be excused in-game by the loose alliance between the two, the situation put the PCs into the position of being pawns in the clash between the Three Old Men (who want a war at all costs) and Miya Shikan (who wants peace at all costs). Players who paid _very_ close attention to all the modules could also pick up the patterns connecting the Scorpion, the “Spider’s Fangs” ninja, and their combined operations against Miya Shikan, although this required spotting and remembering a variety of subtle details over time – I still have no idea if anyone actually picked up on all of this as it was happening.

I was very fond of Mirumoto Daikabe’s character, since he represented a type of fellow who is quite prominent in Japanese samurai fiction but distressingly rare in L5R: the loud, boastful, cheerful and exuberant warrior who is nonetheless completely traditional and honorable. In fact, I liked the guy so much that when I felt the need to give the Dragon Clan some guidance at a later Interactive, it was Daikabe who I played rather than one of the other top Dragon NPCs.

Of course, this module also offered a far more serious counterpoint to Daikabe in the form of the retiring daimyo, the tormented Mirumoto Jinzaki. The sub-plot in which Jinzaki speaks with Dragon PCs, expresses his despair and failure, and ultimately commits seppuku was one of my favorite little meta-plot moments in the campaign – with the icing on the cake being the “Puzzle Box” cert, with the chosen PCs facing the decision of whether to open it or not. The scenes with Jinzaki were deliberately designed to evoke a powerful sense of gloom and failure in the players who went through them, and seem to have been at least somewhat successful in this regard. My hope and intention was that the contents of the box (Jinzaki’s confessions of having cuckolded the Emperor) would come out in the key moments of the finale for the Shipping Lanes/Three Old Men arc, and in this I was not disappointed.

Kageko and Miya Hanzu both reappear in this module after lengthy absences. In fact, it was specifically this module which led me to the decision that these two were actually identical twins rather than the same person under different aliases. The main reason for this was that I wanted to allow the PCs to legitimately fight and defeat Kageko as part of preventing the assassination, rather than forcing a contrived “bad guy escapes” outcome. At the same time, however, I still needed Hanzu to remain in the storyline as Shikan’s chief agent, and I really wanted to depict Shikan as “rewarding” his closest allies with the khadi ritual. So, I decided on the “twins” idea and planned that once Kageko died, Shikan would turn Hanzu into a khadi to ensure he would always have one reliable assassin on call.

This module was as close as I ever got to my personal dream of a module set entirely within a geisha house. Although I couldn’t actually do that here, all the key plot-moments of the module – the meeting with Jinzaki, the meeting with Adoka, and the attempted assassination – take place at the Jade Reflection, which I deliberately made into a very large and elaborate house with sprawling gardens to facilitate its importance to the plot.

[Side Note: Kageko’s Techniques]

Since I was making it possible for the PCs to fight Kageko, I had to finally create his and Hanzu’s previously-mysterious secret Assassin School. However, I didn’t want the PCs to definitely learn that Kageko and Hanzu were twins until the plot had advanced somewhat further, so I decided that one of their Techniques would allow them to destroy their own faces at the moment of death, preventing identification. This was inspired by a scene from the much-underrated movie “The Hunted” (depicting Chris Lambert fighting traditional ninja in modern-day Japan) in which a female ninja, facing capture, literally cuts off her own face to both commit suicide and conceal her identity from the authorities. Seemed like the kind of Technique a secret fanatical Rokugani assassin would have…

[End Side Note]