Rob Hobart

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The campaign’s first two-round module, and an ambitiously complex one, this mod had several apects: it was a very strong beat on the meta-theme of moral/social corruption, it was another stage in the Scorpion internal conflict introduced in City of Lies, it was the conclusion of the Akodo Torokai mini-arc, and it was the full introduction of the infamous and super-capable ronin assassin Kagekaze (he had gotten a very brief preview appearance in Unexpected Find).

As always, I enjoyed creating investigative/mystery stories (multiple ones in this case, as the PCs pursue different investigations in Round One and Round Two). It was also fun to create a huge cast of Scorpion NPCs, many of them with serious personal flaws. However, the best part of my work on this module was creating and exploring the world of Toshi Aitate, the Vegas of Rokugan. Toshi Aitate was originally described in 1st Edition’s “Way of the Scorpion” (one of the best of the “Way of” books) and I loved the concept – it seemed a very Scorpion thing to basically invent Vegas (complete with everyone wearing masks so “what happens in Toshi Aitate stays in Toshi Aitate”) and I was more than a little disappointed when the city, like a number of other cool things in 1st edition, inexplicably vanished from later L5R materials. (As with many other such things, I was later able to restore Toshi Aitate to its former glory in both 3rd Edition’s “Masters of Court” and the 4th Edition “Atlas of Rokugan,” in the process drawing on some of my ideas in this module.) For the module, in keeping with HoR2’s themes of social/moral decay and the pain of modernization, I decided to take the whole “Vegas of Rokugan” idea and crank it up to eleven, with rival yakuza gangs, a main street “strip” lined with garishly-lit gambling dens and geisha houses, and even a highly addictive foreign drug, “Crimson Flower,” that was basically an allegory for cocaine in our own modern world. (Since the drug was brought in by the Thrane, it would recur as a plot-thread in the later Shipping Lanes modules.)

The concept of the assassin Kagekaze had been brainstormed by my wife and I when she conceived the module which would eventually be released as Broken Words. We wanted the PCs in that module to be deeply alarmed at the prospect of facing the hired assassin, which meant we had to “set up” the existence of such a lethal, super-capable assassin in an earlier module. I hit on the idea of combining that introduction with the end of the Torokai arc, making the assassin the agent of Torokai’s death. The specific nature of Kagekaze’s personality drew inspiration from a number of sources, including Ogami Itto (from “Lone Wolf and Cub”) and a one-shot assassin character who shows up in episode two of the anime “Samurai Champloo.” The concept was of an intelligent and brilliantly skilled man who in another era would probably have founded a School or even a Minor Clan, but in the corrupt and socially decaying era of Rokugan 1500 was reduced to being a killer-for-hire with a cynical, almost nihilistic world-view. Kagekaze clings to his own personal “assassin’s code” to try to give his life structure and meaning, but that code is not a true substitute for Bushido, and it cannot ultimately sustain him.

Since the whole point of the Kagekaze/Torokai story was to confront the PCs with an unavoidable defeat that would leave them shamed and burning for vengeance (a classic samurai storytelling theme that I drove home repeatedly throughout HoR2), I needed Kagekaze to be powerful enough that sane PCs would not dare to fight him. I deliberately made him ridiculously high-Rank and gave him a “broken” Advanced School of his own devising (which also reinforced the idea that in a more honorable age he would have created something great), and then made sure the PCs would realize how strong he was before they jumped into a fight with him. This produced the desired result – many PCs became obsessed with growing strong enough to take on Kagekaze (either as a group on in a duel). I later played on this by posting on the campaign YahooGroup a list of “the five deadliest swordsmen in Rokugan” which included Kagekaze along with the three potential Big Bads. It’s worth noting, though, that at this time I did not have any specific plans for Kagekaze beyond his planned return appearance in Broken Words… the final conclusion to his storyline did not come to me until I was into the campaign’s final year.