Rob Hobart

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Having visited Chikushudo, now I decided it was time to hit the Realm of Mischief. In the process, I decided to bring back the Remorseful Seppuku plotline from three years earlier. I believe I mentioned in my discussions of that arc that Parvez had proposed an idea for a fifth and final module in which the PCs would track the last lingering portion of Toritaka Yamamiya’s curse to his family wakizashi, the blade that his ancestor Tonozaka used to commit seppuku (and thus the source of the arc’s name). Unfortunately, Parvez had dropped out of the campaign after finishing Part Four of the arc, but the idea he pitched had lurked in my mind ever since, and eventually I came up with the notion of combining it in some way with a Sakkaku (Realm of Mischief) storyline. Like Reverence for Chikushudo, this was a “light” module without much connection to the campaign’s larger metaplot, so I made it a Low/Mid-Rank scenario and encouraged people to run their secondary characters in it.

Although the central plot of this module was a semi-humorous quest into the Realm of Mischief, the framing device was far more serious: the PCs are in the Lion lands for the funeral of Matsu Nimuro. I did this in part because, having shown an event as important as Nimuro’s apparent assassination in a campaign fiction, I felt I should at least put some aspect of that plotline “on stage” in a module. In fact, this mod contained a couple of opportunities for PCs to realize that Nimuro faked his death with the assistance of family daimyo Kitsu Shuji – who commits seppuku at the end of the module to ensure his actions remain secret.

Writing a mujina is always fun, of course, and I set up the module to give the GMs more-or-less free reign in how to have the creature lure the PCs into Sakkaku. This led to a lot of enjoyable role-playing and some pretty hilarious stories (like the table where the mujina stole all the secret “seductress kimonos” that the Scorpion and Crane female PCs were hiding in their travelling packs).

A bit of a continuity/canon error crept into this module in the form of the orochi Icewave who the PCs encounter in Sakkaku. At the time I wrote this mod’s first draft, I believed that orochi – as denizens of the Realm of Mischief – should be funny and weird (but also threatening) in the same manner as other creatures from that place. In fact, I had written the orochi way back in Devoured by the Sea as exhibiting traces of humor and mischief in their behavior. Accordingly, I wrote the orochi in this module to have a weird but very prominent sense of humor (as well as posing a potentially-dangerous obstacle to the PCs). However, right around the time I was finishing up this mod, my work on 4th Edition resulted in my learning that at some point during the Diamond era of the CCG, Rich Wulf had decreed that orochi were deadly-serious creatures who were stuck being the “straight men of Sakkaku,” an idea that made little to no sense to me but that was officially canon. This was a big problem for me since I had put a lot of time and work into the scenes with Icewave and didn’t really have the time to rewrite that whole section of the module before the premier. Accordingly, I ended up employing a sort of "cheat" by declaring that Icewave was a rare example of an orochi who actually had a sense of humor.