Rob Hobart

Download The Adventure
Download the Emerald Magistrate Cert
Download the Possessed Cert

The first of two modules written by a two-man team of local players, Nemesis of Justice picked up a number of plot- and character-threads from earlier modules and carried them forward. Usagi Hayai (the “traditional” Emerald Magistrate from The Tortoise and the Hare) and Hoshi Haitoku (the Shourido-influenced monk from Mark Biffin’s two modules) both re-appeared here, and the Shourido shrine from City of the Lost returned in the form of the ghost of its founder, Hiruma Kyojitsu, who the PCs could potentially gain as a Haunted certificate that would push them down the path of Shourido. The authors also worked in a minor cameo by one of their PCs, Shiba Mitsuhide (I liked the fact that they chose to depict Mitsuhide as passing through and possibly offering a single moment of support in the courts, rather than succumbing to the temptation of making him the “star” of the module).

The basic concept of this module was a murder investigation involving the death of a Unicorn samurai at the hands of his Scorpion lover. Of course, this was complicated both by the fact that the Scorpion were actively infiltrating the local Unicorn embassy and by the fact that the Unicorn were about to mount an invasion of the Scorpion lands. (One of my additions to the module was the final sequence in which the Unicorn embassy hastily evacuates amid news that their clan is attacking.) I liked the ways that the writers used Usagi Hayai – he provides the avenue for the PCs to get involved in the case, but the module then plays on the PCs’ tendency to assume he is going to be wrong in his conclusions. Hayai actually identifies the true murderer, but PCs can construct an alternative case that is strong enough to stand up in court, and if they are pre-convinced that Hayai _must_ be wrong – after all, he was wrong in The Tortoise and the Hare, and he’s a thoroughly unsympathetic NPC – they can kill Hayai in a duel and force their own case through to completion. Unfortunately, by so doing they are actually forsaking Bushido, committing an injustice, and marking themselves as potential recruits for Shourido… a very nice twist. Several PCs did indeed wind up with the cert to be haunted by Hiruma Kyujitsu, which made for some fun character moments down the stretch.

The mystery/investigation in this submission was actually fairly well put-together overall, a pleasant surprise after having so many mediocre or outright unusable mod submissions over the previous couple of years. I did still have to do a fair amount of revision and clean-up to round out all aspects of the module and get it into a satisfactory final version, but since I was working from a good foundation this process was significantly easier than with many of the other submissions. One editing change that did compare to almost all other module submissions, though, was the need to tone back the amount of read-aloud “boxed text” – pretty much all the submissions I got, regardless of author, were overloaded with this.

[Side-Topic: Writing and Editing]

This seems like as good a place as any to discuss the practice and process of revising and editing that I followed throughout HoR2.

For me, “editing” a module did not mean merely going through it for grammatical errors or continuity problems. It meant a comprehensive line-by-line review and rewrite, often to the point where the bulk of the text in the finished document was my own. (This was also my practice when editing the L5R 4th Edition line, which sometimes led to hurt feelings among certain of our more self-important freelancers. :) ) You can actually get a clue as to how much rewriting I did by looking at the author credits on the cover – for the minority of modules where I purely revised the existing text and did not make any substantive changes or additions to the contents, I put a smaller-font “edit/rewrite by Rob Hobart” on the cover, whereas for the majority of modules where I made significant changes or additions I listed myself as co-author.

Regardless of what level of changes I ended up with, the process took time. A good module submission typically took me about three full days of work to revise and clean up, while a weaker module often took over a week, sometimes even longer. Writing a module from scratch usually took about two full weeks if I wasn’t rushed and everything went well, maybe three if it was very complex, I had a lot of interruptions, or I got stuck on something. Conversely, if deadlines were tight and I really pushed things, I could get done in a week or less, although quality could suffer.

Of course, throughout the time that I was running HoR2 I was also working seven days a week on my two full-time jobs – working at Wal-Mart on Friday through Monday, working in my store on Tuesday through Thursday. Most of my writing happened while I was at the store, since I often had extensive periods of free time there, but I also could write during the evenings of all seven days; during crunch times it was not un-typical for me to power-up my computer at home every night around 8pm and work until midnight.

All of this became much more difficult once I started working for AEG as a line-editer on L5R, advancing to co-designer of 4th Edition in the summer and fall of 2008. This was a third part-time job, and meant I now had additional paid writing/editing work that had to get done within the finite amount of writing time I had available. By late 2009 – when 4th Edition core was in final edits and we were starting work on Enemies of the Empire -- this was creating an unsustainable situation. At one point in March-April 2010 I spent five weeks working continuously on HoR2 modules and EotE edits/rewrites, laboring from after dinner until midnight every night and all day in the shop. My decision to walk away from HoR after the conclusion of the second campaign in 2010 was made in large part because it was simply no longer possible for me to keep doing this sort of thing… I was burning the candle at both ends.

[End Side-topic]