Rob Hobart

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I believe I’ve previously mentioned that I had realized the Shosuro vassal family of the Kochako would at some point be crushed by the daimyo Shosuro Hido (“the Spider”) in order to prevent them from stopping his long-term plan to usurp control of the Scorpion Clan. I had written this down in a notebook while brainstorming – I did this periodically both to record module ideas and to rough-out the module release schedule for upcoming months. (The latter aspect of brainstorming was particularly important for planning the schedule around major events like GenCon and WiR.) It was through this brainstorming process that I conceived the basic concepts of this scenario: the PCs must escort the young heiress of the Kochako back to her home, only to discover at the end that the rest of her family has already been wiped out. This would put the PCs (all of them, but especially the Scorpion ones) on notice as to just how bad things were starting to get within the Scorpion Clan, serving as foreshadowing for their eventual final confrontation with Hido and his Fangs.

The location of the module’s opening scene was created largely by my intention that the PCs would be conducting an “escort mission” back through Scorpion lands to the Kochako domain, fighting off various assassination attempts along the way. Since Beiden Pass had not yet re-opened, that meant the NPCs would be coming through the Seikitsu Pass, so the PCs first encounter them in the same village where Grave of Heroes took place a year earlier.

The opening ambush sequence, in which the NPCs and the PCs both can get poisoned by Fang assassins, was an attempt to create a fight that seemed genuinely threatening without crossing the line into table-slaughtering. For the most part it worked, but players who had gone through HoR1 tended to dodge the full effects of the ambush due to residual paranoia about getting drinks at inns. (This rather annoyed me since, of course, their characters in HoR2 had absolutely zero reason to be paranoid about drinks – I had deliberately not done any kind of poison-ambush scenario up until this point.) The various ambushes which take place later along the journey were designed to offer a variety of challenges to the PCs – I wanted to avoid letting the module degenerate too much into an unending chain of “ninja attacks,” although to a certain degree that was unavoidable.

Shosuro Kiyome, the last heir to the Kochako family, was deliberately made to be both sympathetic and somewhat naïve, so as to encourage the PCs to help her but also to make it credible that she would require a fair amount of time to figure out what had really happened to the rest of her family. Her bodyguard, Nagumo, is a classic samurai archetype – the yojimbo in love with his charge – but I also made him serious and competent in order to justify how the two of them had made it this far alive. However, his attachment to Kiyome did allow for dramatic role-play possibilities if any of the PCs pursued a romantic relationship with her (I don’t recall hearing of anyone who did, though).

One of my favorite smaller bits in this module was the reappearance of the bizarrely crazy tattooed man, Hitomi Fuguki, now acting as “sensei” to the Lion-turned-mon Hitomi Choujo. Since Fuguki had clearly emerged as a popular NPC, I made his appearance here a positive one, potentially even rescuing a PC from a lethal poisoning.

Since this module featured “evil ninja” as the main opposition and the Three Old Men plotline meant I was depicting a secret alliance between the Scorpion, the Mantis, and the Thrane, I decided to take a page out of cinematic ninja depictions and give the Spider’s Fangs access to gunpowder. Not only could the PCs get ambushed by ninja throwing hand-bombs (grenades), but the final battle also featured the potential for a huge land-mine to go off under their feet. There were some fun moments at various tables with the PCs running around stamping out fuzes.

The end of this module incorporates an “Epilogue” in which Shosuro-family PCs are able to meet personally with Shosuro Hido – his first actual appearance in the campaign. I did this partly because I felt he needed to get at least one in-game scene prior to the climax of his storyline, and partly as a foreshadowing/preview of what the PCs would be facing in that climax – a descent into a secret lair deep beneath Nihai Tower. I saw this as being a little like the opening of the original Half-Life computer game, in which the you spend a considerable amount of time riding a monorail deep into an underground complex… all the while realizing that you’ll later have to fight your way out of this place.

[Side-Note: The Kochako in Canon]

At the time this module was written, information on the Kochako was limited to what had been published in Secrets of the Scorpion. There was only limited data in that book and I extrapolated from it that the family should have both a public face (as a normal vassal family) and a private identity (as the “watchers of the watchmen”). This led to my depiction of the family having a small valley and a single castle as their official “front” to the rest of the Empire – and to the rest of the Scorpion Clan, for that matter. Some years later, the official L5R storyline made a brief reference to the Kochako in a single fiction, depicting the family as _completely_ secret to the point that they posed as peasants and the rest of the clan did not know they existed at all. Of course, both of us were working from the same starting point (the limited information in Secrets of the Scorpion), so I never grumbled about this little story the way I did about other things in L5R fiction. Weirdly, though, this bit of fiction never went anywhere in the L5R canonical storyline – like many such, it ended up as a throw-away, forgotten and abandoned.

[End Side-Note]