Rob Hobart

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This module originated from a joking conversation between my wife and I, in which we speculated on where the “vile jester” Kakita Kumiyuzu would end up once he lost the protection of O-Doji Koneko. We concluded that he would most likely be exiled to “Rubble Village,” the remote town where the Crane dump those of their samurai who are too schmucky to be allowed anywhere else but who have not done anything shameful enough to merit seppuku. I had done an updated write-up of the place for AEG's "Masters of Court," so it was fresh in my mind, and I realized that it could be an ideal setting for a darkly humorous murder-mystery – since everyone in Umoeru Mura was a horrible human being, they would all hate each other and there would thus be an infinite array of suspects and accusations for any murder. As a further bit of fun, I decided to incorporate an idea from a player’s othersise unused module submission about a daimyo who is furious over the “murder” of her pet tropical fish – this seemed like a suitably weird and petty incident to inspire an actual murder among the samurai of Umoeru Mura.

In order to justify the PCs investigating the crime, I had them acting on behalf of my favorite incompetent Emerald Magistrate, Toku Irui (with her infuriating yappy-dog now canonized as well), so even the external authority figure in the module was contemptible.

Needless to say, I had a lot of perverse fun in coming up with the most awful array of samurai possible to populate Rubble Village. Some of these were played mainly for laughs, but others were more serious, such as the horribly dysfunctional married couple where the man is a brutish abuser and the woman is a self-loathing serial adulterer. Kakita Kumiyuzu made his return apperarance, of course, and so did Bayushi Makesu (the in-game avatar of our notorious cheater) and Doji Mizuki, the disgraced Go grandmaster. My goal with the NPCs was for the PCs to end up feeling pretty much total disgust toward everyone in Rubble Village, and given that a lot of players wound up expressing a strong desire to burn the whole settlement to the ground, I would say that I succeeded.

Since the NPCs all hated each other, I set things up in such a way that no matter who the PCs ultimately accused of the crime (whether or not they got the right one), one of the NPCs would immediately step forward and offer (false) corroborating testimony. However, I did not “cheat” on the investigation itself, and constructed a full-scale classic murder-mystery that dedicated PCs could unravel if they worked hard. Of course, such meticulous PCs would also realize that any “confirming witness” who stepped forward at the end was lying, but be unable to do anything about it. I had one table where this caused the PCs to doubt their own investigation and worry that they had condemned the wrong person!