Okay, so this is a couple of sessions of recap, so it’s likely to be dodgy, although not as dodgy as my most recent sake purchases. I’ll say this for the cheaper stuff like Black and Gold and the carton sakes: they’ve never gone to shit in the bottle like the two more expensive ones I bought.
Aaaaanyway, talking of going to shit, Plum Tree Village has probably sunk a few Yelp ratings after the following (none of this is strictly in order, but I’ll cover the important revelations and progress):
Rin, having been informed by Moko of Iwa’s affinity with the “River Babies” went to look for them. With her eyes, not with meditation sessions, which got results. The River Babies were annoying little tricksters that enjoy luring travellers off paths and into water where they can trip and splash them to their weird little yokai heart’s content. And they tried all that with Rin. But while it put the willies up Moko, Rin has a good way with the spirits and she was able to talk her way into receiving the scroll entrusted to them by Iwa. She read the crumbly old scroll and discovered a fragment of the story about the building of the Shrine. Result!
While everyone suspects Otomi of some sort of supernatural shenanigans, neither the carrot (courtly chat) nor the stick (Sugi’s visible willingness to split her head) got a scroll out of her. No, no, she claimed; while she liked Iwa and they often had nice chats, the girl had not given her any kind of old scroll to hang onto.
If Otomi could help, she languidly assures you she would. *Breathy sigh*
Koji had more luck when he encountered the extremely shy washerwoman, offering to clean his clothes. He was able to charm his way closer and closer to the screen behind which she knelt and when she took his clothes (again nearly toppling over with the weight of them) he seized the wrists of the overburdened servant. She was, it turned out, a frog wife, a Yokai frog that took the form of a human to try to win a human husband. The frog dating scene must be rough, what with glamourous pig actresses monopolizing the most eligible frog bachelors. Anyway, the frog wife handed over the scroll in exchange for her freedom. Result!
The Yokai they haven’t got to grips with is the Kasa-Obake, which Takuya encountered while meditating in the shrine. So I guess I can’t make too much fun of how much meditating was going on. Anyway, he was alerted to the presence of the Umbrella-like spirit as it hopped its way around the shrine after hours. He sat, listening to its path (a circle around the honden, clockwise) for a while before the shrine was patrolled by two of the Crane ashigaru who were doing the rounds. He heard the guards conversing, classic guard shit like “What was that?” “Nothing, it must be the wind.” Then a wet smacking sound, a cry of alarm and the sound of a body hitting the stone path, another wet slap and then another body hitting the deck.
Honestly kinda mad I didn’t make this.
Takuya opened his eyes which is when the now alert Kasa-Obake saw him see it and responded the way it usually does and smacked Takuya in the face with a long ropy tongue. Takuya was dazed and the Yokai disappeared.
At some point the decision was made to move the statue of Koshin back to the meditation garden. So they did. He is underneath the Plum Tree where he had been just fine for a few centuries.
Iwa, also in the meditation garden, is in increasingly bad health, but she doesn’t have too many people that care, so she is wasting away muttering the shoshi ni kie between bouts of exhausted sleep.
Away from the shrine, down the road all of two minutes, the village’s Otter guards were wandering around in a mild panic – they had been searching for their fellows who were nowhere to be found.
Entirely coincidentally, Koji had been so wound up to breaking point by the difficulties of dealing with the yokai that he REALLY needed to blow off some steam by gambling. He found himself looking for off duty Otter guards to gamble with in the barracks. But they were gone, not just not there, but several of them had packed all their belongings and left. Koji may, possibly, have had a tantrum in the barracks, taking out his accumulated strife on the possessions of peasants – let’s face it – who had the audacity to not be there to gamble with him. He smashed and raged, but no-one was there to see it. When he was in his rage refractory period however, his detective instincts kicked in and he could tell that not only had several bunks been cleared out, but that they were the bunks of the more senior guards.
So the entire group found themselves on the road, tracking these missing guards south, before realising that they had probably gone to the estate of the local lord, Umezawa Saburo. At this point they turned back, as it was also getting dark.
They arrived back in town to the shouts of calamity and the sound of combat. A group of bandits swarmed the Ryokan and several of their victims lay on the ground as they rushed past. The sound of fighting came from the entrance of the Ryokan, but between there and the party of magistrates was another group of bandits.
Combat was joined. Initially, things didn’t go well as the yari wielding bandits held Koji at bay and arrows came a little too close to Yoshihiro for his comfort. Rin failed to get a defensive air invocation off to the kami.
But the tide turned, with Takuya’s Pelting Hail style presumably burning through his arrow supply as fast as it went through the morale of the bandits. Several of them broke and ran, even before Sugi waded in for some Tetsubo Justice.
Yoshihiro had been injured and wasn’t able to summon fire to assist him but his Void-fireball worked well for keeping incapacitated guys incapacitated and they slew the bandits who did not flee, with the exception of two that were pounded unconscious.
The fight in the Ryokan had evidently turned too, with a blood splattered Eiji appearing at the door shortly after a dying bandit was hurled out of it.
The bandits had mostly been armed with shitty bows and yaris, but one of the unconscious opponents had slashed at Sugi with a wakizashi. They slapped their captors back to sensibility and got craven peasant drivel from the bandit, but steely – if pointless – defiance from the ronin. The ronin didn’t fear death (Koji figured out) as long as it came from the edge of a blade rather than the end of a rope. It was revealed that Umezawa Shota had set up this raiding party.
Things don’t look good for the Shota, but things also suddenly don’t look great for the Crane either because Lady Sachuko has appeared at the door to the Ryokan in the throes of an absolutely epic meltdown.
I was a bit slapdash about the Criticals but there’s kind of an art to them too from the player side.
Critically hitting an Incapacitated foe renders them unconscious. Minions who are knocked Unconscious by Criticals are just kind of assumed dead. NPCs who have plot armour aren’t. Criticalling an Unconscious foe adds 10 to the severity of the (unresisted) Crit.
Also, you CAN make Razor Edged weapons more deadly. It’s a Basic Opportunity spend to add +1 Deadliness. Should be on the “Basic” cards. I thought that seemed weird.
You can get Criticals a few of different ways:
– PCs may have a fancy technique that scores a Critical if it is successful. Must be nice! I suspect we’ll all know when someone has that because I wouldn’t shut up about it if I had it.
– You can hit the target with a Strike action AND spend two Opportunities. This means you may prioritize keeping dice with Opportunities over dice with extra successes (i.e. extra Damage). Importantly, since Opportunities are resolved before Damage is applied, this means that the Crit effect occurs before the Damage/Endurance count is figured out, meaning you COULD Critical someone twice in one action. Why is this important?*
– You can hit the target and do so much Damage that they can’t buy it all off and they suffer a Critical and are then Incapacitated.
*This is important, because even a 0-2 Severity hit that lands damages armour (dropping resistance by 1) and if the Weapon they are being hit with is Razor Edged (like a Katana, Wakizashi) they’ll get Bleeding as a condition which means they take Strife on their Fitness check to resist the Crit as Damage as well… meaning the early Opportunity Critical paves the way nicely for the actual Strike Damage by stripping away everything that resists damage! Not too shabby, is the ol’ 1-2.