Rob Hobart

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The authors of Nemesis of Justice wanted to do a follow-up module that would resolve the campaign's shourido sub-plot and give the PCs a chance to directly confront the fallen monk Hoshi Haitoku and the malignant yokai Hiruma Kyujitsu. For my part, I wanted to find some way of expanding the “Tour of the Spirit Realms” sub-plot to the ultimate location: Jigoku itself. They agreed to write a two-round module in which the second round took the PCs into the Realm of Evil, and the result was Truth and Falsehood. If I’m not mistaken, they also inserted one of their own PCs, Kasuga Kouji, who had a rocky past and could potentially be further dishonored or even killed as a result of events in this module.

Like Nemesis, this module incorporated minor bits and pieces from earlier in the campaign that had drawn the authors’ attention. For example, one earlier module had included a brief scene that depicted the Tiger Clan daimyo as a pleasant family-man with several daughters, so in this mod they brought him back and introduced one of his (now teenage) daughters as a plot-significant NPC. They also made use of the idea of Otosan Uchi serving as the primary Thrane port in Rokugan (first introduced all the way back in Devoured by the Sea), including a scene where the PCs could get into a drinking contest with a Thrane tourist (potentially winning a silver knife that could prove useful in Round Two).

The centerpiece of Round Two, of course, is the PCs’ trip into Jigoku – which resulted, the moment they passed through the portal, in the complete destruction of any jade items they had. (Some players lost unique items which they had acquired laboriously via fictions and favors.) I was perfectly okay with this because the primary focus of the campaign was on human evil and thus the loss of all the PCs’ jade items would not be the devastating blow here that it would have been in HoR1.

Canonical L5R has taken a number of different approaches to what Jigoku looks like, ranging from standard demonic landscapes (the Shadowlands on steroids) to outright alien environments such as complete darkness without identifiable form. In order to keep the module manageable, we stuck with a more “normal” depiction that was basically a bleak, lifeless, evil counterpart to the earlier depictions of places like Sakkaku and Chikushudo. We had a lot of fun developing ideas for different encounters in Jigoku; my personal favorite was the “gambling oni” who tries to trick the PCs into giving him their names. Another fun bit was the world-weary “beat cop oni” who shows up to collect the yokai at the end of the module but is willing to let the PCs go.

Ironically, the one fault I eventually identified with this two-round module was playing time… written as a two-round module, it tended to run short, with some tables finishing both rounds in a little over five hours. In retrospect, the first Round in particular needed some more side-elements and NPCs to round it out into a sufficiently long adventure. On other occasions I probably would have noticed the issue before the premier, but my insanely tight schedule during this time-period left me barely enough time and energy to finish the edits on the existing material.