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Heroes of Rokugan I

Heroes of Rokugan II

L5R Homebrew

Alex Jacobs’ second module, this one written in combination with his then-fiancé Terri, was by far my favorite of his submissions, especially since it featured one of only two of the campaign’s return appearances by Seppun Munemori, the infamously inept daimyo of the Seppun. (Alex’s personal creation, the delightfully awful Seppun Takashi, also showed up.) Even better, the module was a courtly competition/intrigue scenario that featured “love sucks” as its underlying theme – clearly, Alex had been paying attention!

This module featured an extremely detailed series of courtship competitions as the PCs and NPCs contest with each other for the right to marry one of Munemori’s daughters. Alex and Terri put a lot of work into writing up all the new NPCs, including the various daughters, and making the different court-competitions interesting and diverse. I especially appreciated their inclusion of a Sadane contest since this gave me the chance to firmly remind everyone in the campaign that Sadane is not Rokugani “your mama” (I honestly don’t know where that myth got started, but it proved extraordinarily difficult to clear out once it took root).

Metaplot-wise, this module was pretty “normal” compared to the big plot events that had been happening in the previous few mods. In part this was simply the nature of the specific scenario, but I liked putting it into the schedule at this point for a couple of reasons. One was story pacing – it was important to balance the big, epic scenarios with smaller-scale stuff in order to give the players “breathers” during the lead-up to the final conflict. The other was that I wanted to remind everyone that most of the Empire was still experiencing a fairly conventional existence at this point, and ordinary court intrigue and samurai drama was still going on even as the armies clashed and NPCs died.

Rob Hobart

Heroes of Rokugan I

Heroes of Rokugan II

L5R Homebrew