Rob Hobart

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Much like Writ of Justice, this module was written to introduce an NPC – in this case Kaiu Sumata, the “Crab treasure hunter.” By this time I had conceived the notion that the Big Bad NPC would be selected by the acquisition of the long-lost Bloodsword Ambition, so I needed an archaeologist/treasure-hunter NPC who could eventually lead the PCs on the mission to find the sword. Much as with Akodo Torokai, I wanted to bring in the NPC earlier to establish a sympathetic recurring relationship between him and the PCs, and I came up with this module as Sumata’s introduction. I depicted him as the Rokugani equivalent of the modern “nerd cliché” – fat, socially anxious, hopeless with women – but since he was a Kaiu, I also gave him a more heroic and capable side that would emerge in later modules. Interestingly, some players eventually developed significant interest in Sumata – one player of a female PC wanted to arrange a marriage with him (didn’t go through, though) and another player wrote an epic fiction that depicted him eventually attaining the position of Oracle of Earth.

I came up with the idea of making the module into a follow-up to events in Otosan Uchi and East Hub Village during the twelfth century, events depicted in then-recent fictions in the CCG storyline. I particularly liked the idea of bringing back the East Wind ronin band and showing how they, like everyone else, had become corrupted by life in 1500 Rokugan. Ultimately, though, the East Wind were a side-story to the main task (finding an ancient helm lost during the fall of Otosan Uchi in the mid-twelfth century), connected to it only through the fact that the insane current bearer of the helm was a former member of the band. This tangential connection made the module rather vexing to some parties, who got bogged down investigating the East Wind itself and couldn’t find the clues leading to the helm.

Since the module featured the East Wind it was set, by default, in the Eastern Hub Village around Otosan Uchi, and I threw in a corrupt/incompetent local magistrate in order to leave the PCs without any support from higher authority with their quest. This inadvertently created a continuity-error with the earlier module Write of Justice – it had also been set in East Hub Village (and had a different local magistrate NPC), but when I was writing this module I mistakenly remembered it as taking place in North Hub Village instead. Later, when I realize the error, I went back and revised Write of Justice to actually be set in North Hub Village.

The other sub-plot in this module was the presence of the “Spider’s Fangs,” a secret group of Shosuro Shinobi answering directly to Shosuro Hido (“the Spider”) and thus independent of the Scorpion Clan’s normal chain of command. This allowed me to depict conflicts with “ninja” without creating an inherent conflict of interest for Scorpion PCs, as well as dropping hints to those same Scorpion that something might be amiss within their own clan (since they could potentially recognize the Fangs’ fighting style as that of the Shosuro Shinobi). However, in retrospect the module made it too hard for the PCs to realize that the Fangs were surveilling them – as a result, the climactic confrontation with them seemed too much “out of left field” to most PCs.

The module featured a two-stage climax – first the PCs fight the Tainted Crab berserker who is wearing the helm, then they fight the Fangs (who want to retrieve the helm for the Spider). This was interesting from a dramatic standpoint, but resulted in the module being somewhat more dangerous than I initially expected, with some PC casualties in smaller 4-player/5-player tables. (I later put a warning on the website, recommending 6-player tables only.) However, the most memorable aspect of the combat was in the first stage where I built in the possibility for the Tainted berserker to literally rip off an opponent’s arm if he inflicted enough damage with one hit. Like the earlier “infected wound” idea, this was a deliberate attempt to introduce long-term consequences for combat – and in the process, create new storylines and role-playing challenges for the PCs. Although I didn’t think about it when I wrote the idea, this particular long-term injury was specifically devastating to Mirumoto and Tsuruchi characters (both of whose fighting abilities were specifically dependent on having two working arms. Once this became apparent, I didn’t have a problem with it, since it would force those players to assess their characters as something more than combat stats. (Amusingly but also insultingly, some players accused me of inserting this element into the module specifically to “punish” Mirumoto players for their over-powered School. On the other hand, a cool outcome from this was a Mirumoto player who spent a year of effort and wrote a lengthy fiction to justify re-creating his non-functional Technique by way of Ise Zumi martial arts, substituting unarmed maneuvers with his legs for the defensive moves he could no longer perform with his missing arm.)