Rob Hobart

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After the Imperial Funeral Interactive at GenCon 2007, a number of Phoenix players picked up on the odd patterns in the behavior of their clan’s leadership – due to Isawa Amika, the ostensibly-female Master of Void, actually being the covert leader of the Sons of Destiny cult. Some of the players took the initiative to write extra fiction depicting their characters sending letters to the Pheonix Clan Champion, warning him that something was wrong within the clan. I had the vague idea that eventually the PCs would get the chance to destroy the Sons of Destiny, but it was the Phoenix players’ awareness of the problem with Amika that led me to develop this specific module.

The concept of sending Amika and the PCs to seek out the City of Empty Dreams came from one of my late-evening brainstorming sessions, scribbling module ideas into a notebook. I had been intrigued for some time by the concepts of the five mystical Elemental Cities that appeared at the end of the Hidden Emperor arc, and felt their story and role-playing possibilities had never been properly utilized – like many of the weird sub-plots and unique oddities that popped up in the CCG storylines, they ended up simply abandoned by later writers, despite having immense story-potential. The Void city especially interested me because of the association of Void with both secrets and time-travel; this would not only mesh entertainingly with Amika’s dark secrets, but would also let me offer opportunities for PCs to change or “correct” things from their past. This would be a temptation very appealing to some PCs, especially those who had suffered unpleasant long-term consequences during the campaign, but it would not be without cost – after all, Regret is one of the Three Sins, and using supernatural powers to indulge it is an inherently dishonorable act.

Of course, even if the PCs don’t succumb to that temptation, the module still has lots of opportunities for them to struggle with their own secrets, including random magical exposure of those secrets by the Void spirits. (Some players later referred to this as the “TMI mod” and with good reason. :) ) I was never a fan of the idea that there were “Void kami” – I far preferred the original 1st Edition approach in which the Void was much more difficult to define or understand (and restored that version in 4th Edition) – but in 3rd Edition that’s what we had to work with and I made use of it for the story.

I also included a chance for the Void spirits to grant the PCs a vague but ominous prophetic vision of events destined to take place at GenCon 2009 (the battle with the Thrane for control of the capital). This was part of my general pattern throughout the campaign of bestowing prophecies and visions on the PCs that gradually become more specific and more ominous. By now, I knew roughly what was going to happen at the climax of the Three Old Men storyline, although I didn’t know where the Emperor or the Mantis Clan would end up in that story, so I could depict the battle for Toshi Ranbo but not its exact details.

The battle with Amika was a tricky business. As a shugenja strong enough to be Master of Void, "she" (the exposure of Amika as a male impersonator is one of my favorite WTF moments in the campaign) logically should be an extremely formidable opponent, so much so that in a “fair fight” Amika would simply wipe the floor with a group of Mid-Rank PCs. That was not the result I was going for in a module for a secondary plotline midway through a five-year campaign arc… but on the other hand, if I toned him back, experience had shown that a party-versus-solo battle tended to skew heavily toward the party due to the tendency of L5R (especially in 3rd Edition) to favor offense over defense. So I tried to find a compromise in which Amika was quite dangerous (and had “contingency” spells and nemuranai in place that made it hard for the PCs to take him out by spamming him with damage), but was also weakened in various ways by the hostility of the City of Empty Dreams. I also allowed the City’s golem-like Guardian to show up and save the day if the PCs were getting their clocks cleaned. Overall, it seems to have worked in producing the result I wanted (the fight is dramatic and challenging, but did not result in PC slaughterhouses).