Rob Hobart

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This module was submitted by a player who had ambitions to create a “Spirit Realms” series of mods, similar to the “Bushido” series but with each module showcasing a different realm. Although he was never able to follow through with more modules, I liked the idea enough that over the next three years I released mods that visited every Realm except Gaki-do.

I added a lot of material to this module’s initial, rather incomplete draft. Pretty much all the atmospheric “dreams intruding on reality” stuff was mine, and drew from a number of different influences, notably including the Miyazaki film “Spirited Away.” I even worked in a subtle Rokugan 2000 reference in the vision of a modern “salaryman” checking his wristwatch. I expanded the initial quest (to retrieve the monk) to make it into a depiction of the classic Japanese folktale of the “mischevious drunken monk” – something very widespread in Japanese culture but largely missing from canonical L5R. I really enjoyed writing that part since it presented a completely new situation to the PCs, with an unusual challenge (convincing a stubborn drunk to do what they wanted).

I also wrote pretty much the entirety of the actual Yume-do sequences, creating the various encounters with the sleeping daimyo’s tormented past. These were a lot of fun both to write and to role-play, especially the dream of the daimyo’s daughter (who suddenly turns nightmarish and screeches at the PCs if they ask the wrong questions – a very iconic Japanese horror image). The concluding antagonist, a Baku-no-Oni, had been written up in 3rd Edition’s “Creatures of Rokugan” but I modified it significantly for this module, as I did with most creatures – I was not a fan of the 3rd Edition approach to creature stat-blocs.

[Digression: Insight Ranks and Modules]

I chose to make Essence of Yume-do a Low-Rank module partly because I knew we’d lose some characters at Grave of Heroes, but more importantly as part of an effort to divide the campaign into two separate storylines… one for “primary” characters who would ascend to higher Insight Rank and participate in all the biggest challenges and events of the campaign, and one for “secondary” characters who would be lower Rank and would see the story from a different perspective. I had wanted to do this in the final year of HoR1 but the compressed schedule and the need to make sure all the PCs could play through the entire remaining storyline made it impossible (and forced me to undertake the massive extra effort of creating “all-Ranks” modules). For HoR2, I was determined to start using this storytelling device from a much earlier point in the campaign and maintain it to the end.

However, I soon discovered that many players were employing various shenanigans – hoarding XP, spending them in such a way as to carefully avoid raising their Insight Rank, or even deliberately playing modules out of sequence – in order to run only a single character and pile all the campaign’s XP onto that character. Although in some cases these players wound up getting punished for their choices without any intervention from me (I remember a couple of different instances of Rank Two characters getting killed while holding 30 or 40 unspent XP), I nonetheless soon came to realize that I needed to make the division between the two paths more specific and “hard-coded” in order for my storyline idea to work. This would lead to my introducing Low-Rank modules that were specifically paired with higher Rank scenarios, requiring different characters in each one. [End Digression]