Mask of the Oni - Part One A 'fishy' experience

 Nice merge of a Japanese picture with Cuthulu stuff from ParadiseLost.Etsy.com for the, erm, originals

  

Our valiant party after the abject failure of the Wedding at Kyotei Castle are now moving into the Mask of the Oni. Prior to the game we carried out some setup. Masako received an insulting letter from her brother basically congratulating her on picking the losing side every single time and then utterly failing to assist it.  We then re-covered what the party had discovered mainly as Natsuki wasn’t involved at the time and was not aware of the stakes. Extra personal incentive was provided with Masako being requested to 'deal with' the Kitsuki with extreme prejudice (almost as  a punishment for working against the Lion Clan), Sakura was informed she had had an ancestor who had died at Hiruma castle which left Natsuki being requested to retrieve the stolen maps.

Pre-work done the groups first task was to get into the Shadowlands and to be frank. Talking socially is not one of their strong points. Natsuki doesn't literally - though he has a repertoire of sign signals to make his opinions known and the other two are not particularly keen. This resulted in some great dice rolling. The first was to persuade the Crab leader that the Maho-sorceress could actually sneak past the vigilant Crab and the group did decide to go for the eminently sensible 'she was on a boat' approach but failed horribly. I can only think they were either accidentally insulting or perhaps too supercilious as it took a courteous attempt by Masako to actually get past this point. Then they had to persuade him to allow them to follow. This went badly as well and eventually Natsuki succeeded by drawing various diagrams in overcoming Crab opposition and actually getting an escort.

Phew. The group managed to obtain supplies for six days and even 'borrowed' some Ashigaru armour (the Crab would not waste better armour but equally did not want their scouts moving with unarmoured people in the Shadowlands) and finally moved on from the nasty 'talking politely' to entering the Shadowlands.

Bar the standard issues with even moving out there their first major challenge occurred at the end of day one when they discovered that the river had mysteriously turned itself into a huge dark oily lake and going around it would take around two weeks. The group rather efficiently decided to make some rafts out of dead wood which was done via passing a labour task. They built three rafts and then decided who would go on which raft. Each party member went on a separate raft with three crab with Sakura and two each with Natsuki and Masako. They then went over the lake with Natsuki's 6th sense twinkling like a fire alarm. Half way over and the rafts were attacked by an undead sea monster. This had a nasty (strong) attack with its mouth or it could do six much lesser attacks with its tendrils. Any critical hit against it would sever a tentacle which would the  animate and become another attacker. The group could use their accompanying Crabs to either move the rafts or to assist them in their own attacks.

 Not quite as big as this though

This combat was fascinating. The creatures attacks were focused initially on famed pincushion Masako but due to the Ashigaru armour were not that dangerous. Meanwhile Natsuki cast Biting Steel on both Masako (for the rest of the scene) then Sakura (for 2 turns) Katana vastly increasing their damage. Masako and Sakura meanwhile laid into the creature quite effectively.

By round three and the creature had been beaten - at which point its remaining tendrils all become animated and started attacking on their own and here is where the fight started to amuse me get really interesting. Natsuki decided to cast Tempest of Air which is an area effect spell. He hoped to use opportunity to remove the other two rafts from the attack (I decided that 'target' could be a raft). The attack was strong but literally no opportunity was gained so everyone received two damage (including all the tendrils). Since everyone was standing on their rafts and fighting I decided each would have to make a TN2 fitness check to stay on their raft.

Masako failed but only by one so I declared she had fallen in but retained hold of the raft. Sakura failed with no successes at all (just opportunity) so this was 'fell in with the raft overturning' All the Crabs in those two rafts also failed so 'everyone' was in the water. The next turn Masako needed a fitness two to climb back in (successfully), Sakura had to decide whether she was A - fighting whilst swimming making the attack TN3 and attacks on her TN1, B - defending herself whilst trying to climb onto Masako's raft (TN4 for the climb on with any attacks on her still TN2) or just climbing on the raft without fighting (TN3, attacks on her TN1). She decided on the last and succeeded in getting out of the water. For the Crab Scouts I rolled a d6 for each with a 5 or 6 indicating they drowned primarily due to the weight of their armour. Two Crabs were therefore killed. Finally Natsuki cast another area effect fire spell which zapped all the remaining tendrils..

So our soggy group got over the lake where I then provided the excellent news that 2/3rd of their rations were now corrupted due to contact with the lake water and both Masako/Sakura (plus the Crabs who had gone in) were now all afflicted. Nothing major as yet but it makes their composure levels suddenly very important.

Lovely. Natsuki and the two Crabs with her were unaffected.

We stopped here for the week so the group could dry itself out.

 Nice picture. Not certain where the building came from

GM Notes

This scenario is a fun one but is not as defined as some of the others especially in its more generic encounters which can be practically described as 'the same as the other scenarios except replace level 1 bandit with level 1 skeleton/other'. It needed some work to pad out into something more Shadowlandsy so that was done with the help of the Shadowlands book mainly as I did not want 'travelling in the Shadowlands' to be practically identical with 'travelling in Rokugan' with the odd fitness check for 'sharp rocks'. Saying that the encounter was set with the expectation that the escort could assist and if they had not managed to get an escort then a different (simpler) narrative would have had to occur.
 

The group did well though and though Natsuki's Tempest of Air created a lot of trouble it might have gone smoothly and his invocations are definitely improving the combat potential of the group. If a couple of them can get to level three before the Castle then that will make things much easier.

I am going to add an action shot showing the enormous (ahem) effort I put into making things real for the group. Then I realised I don't. Plus Dave Robothom of the FB group will no doubt put up more pictures of his work to utterly shame mine.

i.e here is something similar to the painting of one of David's two inch high figures (or what he will probably produce. and then add realistic background scenery hand carved from Japanese wood types)

whereas here is the action shot of my group fighting the sea monster

For those who may be confused that is a sea monster, a 'raft', an overturned raft and a sinking raft along with several detached tendrils. Not that I need to explain as the picture obviously makes perfect sense.