Rob Hobart

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By the start of 2009 I had more-or-less settled on how the plot of the Three Old Men would come to fruition, and this module was designed as the lead-in to the climactic GenCon 2009 Interactive where that climax would take place. (GenCon 2009 was an extremely storyline-heavy con, with Doom of the Crab, the Hidden Heart, and the Three Old Men resolution all happening at once.) I had been toying for years with the idea of a module in which the Tortoise would send the PCs to a gaijin port in order to learn what the Three Old Men were really plotting, and I eventually realized the only way to make such a module work was to set it immediately before the conclusion of the plot arc – otherwise it would be impossible to justify the PCs doing anything else once they knew what was about to happen. Also, just like with the earlier module Journey to the Burning Sands, the storyline for A Long Journey required this module to be “no Mantis allowed.”

I really enjoyed creating a scenario set in an exotic gaijin port city, where the PCs would be “fish out of water” and would have to figure out ways to resolve the module without the normal safety net created by Rokugani civilization. To this end, I made sure to kill off the Tortoise NPC who accompanies the PCs to the city, leaving them largely on their own. (Side-Note: The assassination scene put the PCs up against a team of Ivory Kingdoms dacoits, which was fun. However, this scene and the module more generally did incorporate a setting/continuity error – at the time, I mistakenly thought the term “Ruuhmal” referred to the people and language of the Ivory Kingdoms, but in fact it was the name for the Cult of Kali-Ma that was about to threaten the Empire in the canonical CCG storyline. L5R had never actually come up with an official name for the IK peoples – Shawn Carman actually referred to them a few times with the extremely awkward term “Kingdomites.” A few years later, when we were working on the Second City box set for L5R, I dug back through the older L5R books and found a brief reference in the Exotic Arms Guide to the IK’s language as “Ivindi,” so I decided this meant the people were the “Ivinda,” and this became the official in-canon term.)

The visual design of the gaijin city – located within the flooded bowl of an extinct volcano – was actually inspired by a city I had designed for a D&D campaign many, many years earlier. The culture depicted in the module was a sort of Chinese/SE-Asian mash-up, and the whole concept of the place drew on the historical development of European-controlled trading cities during the age of imperialism: places like Goa, Singapore, and Luzon. This fit in with the general theme of the Thrane being a Dutch/English hybrid culture that was building a global empire through trade and sponsorship of local puppet rulers. In that regard, one of my favorite smaller elements in this module was the potential scene where the PCs could meet with the Merenae ambassador, a dissolute nobleman who knows his own nation is in decline, shouldered aside by the dynamic and aggressive Thrane.

The module included a potential scene in which the PCs could talk directly with Yoritomo Ogawa, one of the Three Old Men. Ogawa had been around since the start of the campaign and appeared several times in fiction, but he had never actually been depicted in a module, and I felt it was important for him to do so at least once before the conclusion of his plotline.

Statistically, Ogawa was interesting to build… as an old man, his physical Traits were relatively low, but he had massive Skills and a very high Insight Rank. The Mantis were actually somewhat short on Advanced Schools and Paths that would fit Ogawa, but they also had several notoriously potent kata, which made Ogawa quite potent if a fight took place. Of course, I really didn’t _want_ a fight, since it would be thoroughly anti-climactic for the PCs to kill off one of the ring-leaders before the storyline actually resolved. Thus, I deliberately wrote in options for the pragmatic Ogawa to escape if the PCs tried to kill him.

Finally, as a side note, this module was a fairly heavy “beat” on the sub-theme of metaphysical differences between Rokugan and the gaijin world. For example, the PCs could not burn the Thranish fleet with spells because the foreign ships (in a foreign port) would inherently resist the effects of Rokugani magic. Although this was an idea I had been working on since the start of the campaign, it also had practical value in this module since it meant that shugenja PCs with over-powered spells (3rd Edition was IMO the worst of the later L5R versions in terms of letting magic run amok) would not be able to short-circuit the scenario.