Rob Hobart

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Our largest and most important Interactive up to this time. Since I was depicting the actual Winter Courts in modules, I set this one during the Cherry Blossom Festival (early spring, immediately after the winter), an event prominent enough that it still made sense for a great many notable samurai to gather for negotiations.

Of all our Interactives, this one was the most significant and influential in shaping the campaign’s storyline. (The two later Interactives, at GenCon 2009 and WiR 2010, were more dramatic in their content but had less total impact on the campaign’s metaplot, an unavoidable reality of the campaign moving into the climactic arcs of its final year.) Everyone knew that all-out war was on the way after the results of Shiro Usagi, and every clan had goals to pursue as part of the lead-in to that war. Some of these were strategy proposals and agreements, such as where and how troops would be committed, who would be attacked by whom, and so forth. Other negotiations involved the commitments of clans that were still technically neutral, such as the Mantis. A very prominent topic, of course, was the Crane-Dragon-Unicorn side’s final full-court push to try to split the Phoenix away from the Lion and Crab, an effort which once again came up short.

Probably the most notorious event that occurred here was one entirely player-created: the slaughter of Unicorn horses that resulted in war between the Unicorn and the Phoenix. The Scorpion had orders to try to promote conflict between the other clans (part of the Three Old Men’s plot to throw the Empire into war and thereby create an opportunity to seize power), and their player-leaders decided the best way to do this was to have an NPC Shosuro Actor (in the long-term guise of a Phoenix) murder the Unicorn horses, an act absolutely certain to trigger war. In fact, the Scorpion overreached a bit by having the actor’s persona be “a Lion trained by the Phoenix” hoping thereby to get the Unicorn to also attack the Lion. Since Temujin and Gintaku had zero interest in fighting each other directly while the other five3 clans were still at full strength, there was no way this was going to happen, but a Unicorn conflict with the Phoenix became definite after they delivered a rather disassatisfying apology to the Unicorn players. This was all a very unexpected outcome for me, but I was happy to run with it, especially since it let me depict a conflict which (up to that time) had never happened in L5R canon.

For this event I played Mirumoto Daikabe, the boisterous new leader of the Mirumoto family, and I had great fun strutting around and booming out my proud declamations. A very funny moment happened when I learned the Crane were all hidden away in a back room and went over to beat on the door, shouting “Come out, Cranes!” Whereupon the door opened and about thirty Crane PCs emerged, rather likea massive swarm of clowns erupting out of a tiny car. (Turned out there were other rooms beyond the first one, so the entire Crane contingent had been able to fit inside.)

The diplomatic and meta-plot outcomes from this event were extensive and complex, so much so that I ended up writing an extremely long campaign fiction – by far the longest single fiction in the campaign -- to depict the results.