The Kami Must Be Crazy

[CodeRed]

So I'm part of a regular group that's been playing back since the 3.0-3.5 transition in 2002. We take turns cycling through players as to who gets to DM for each campaign and it's going to be my turn coming up in about 2-3 months. I need to start working on a new campaign and of the three options I presented to the group, they decided the one they want to do the most is a Magic the Gathering Kamigawa plane influenced game set in Rokugan from Oriental Adventures.

If you don't know the Kamigawa setting from Magic the Gathering, it was basically a Japanese Mythology setting where the Spirit World was at war with the Mortal World. In their story, the Emperor of the mortal world stole the divine heart of the chief Kami, O-Kagatachi, in order to make himself immortal. This led to a twenty year war with the spirits which is where the first card set and novelization picks up, twenty years in. So I want to do something similar, Spirit vs. Mortal world but I am tripping on some details and wanted to get peoples' thoughts.

1. Why are the two worlds at war? I don't want to completely recycle the MTG reason as several of these players read the novels/played MTG back when that set came out.

2. Should I begin the campaign in media res like the MTG setting or would it be more interesting from the players' perspectives to have to adjust to a war that is just beginning?

3. Do I need a main villain? I'm currently leaning towards a yes with a mortal doing something that pisses of the Spirit World that will end with their death as they are way out of their depth with what they meddled with. Once they are out of the way, that doesn't necessarily solve things for the players and the world, etc.

Would love to get some people's thoughts and comments as I have found these boards to be really useful at generating interesting ideas.

[CantigThimble]

Some ideas for #1: A Hisoka-like character has figured out a way to imprison and bind the kami to his service. You could have him be developing ways to use these bound kami to improve human life. This also lets you include the classic oriental theme of progress vs tradition.

Alternatively the Kami are growing greedy. Traditionally they receive their rites each season to allow the harvest to progress. If they feel the humans have been lax, they may delay the rains or the snow until reparations are made. However for the last few years the delay has been growing until increasingly extravagant offerings are made. As things have been going famine will begin within the year. Some people have started rebelling and defacing shrines and it just gets out of hand from there.

[CodeRed]

Some ideas for #1: A Hisoka-like character has figured out a way to imprison and bind the kami to his service. You could have him be developing ways to use these bound kami to improve human life. This also lets you include the classic oriental theme of progress vs tradition.

I was thinking about something like this. Some human bloodmage (which are kill on sight in Rokugan) is binding kami to his service. I'm thinking a possible Orpheus motivation, his lover died or was killed and so he wants to weaken the veil between worlds so he can enter the Underworld and save her.

So he would be doing anything and everything he could to stoke the war more as every time the kami manifest in a physical form, it would tear the veil just a bit more. Even if the players uncover this lord's plans and put a stop to them, it may be too late to end the war immediately or the possibility of other evil spirit entities finally using this as an excuse to try to claim the mortal realm for themselves.

[CantigThimble]

My only issue there is how did it turn into a war? Did the kami just start attacking everyone in response to his bindings? Wouldn't the humans be hunting him just as much as the Kami?

[Vemynal]

1. I never actually read the books so I hope I'm not copying them. You said the King stole a beings heart. I still like the idea but lets twist it a little bit. Make the ruler someone long lived like an Elf (arrogant) or a Dwarf (greedy); they do indeed have a powerful kingdom they rule. Lets pulls a Wormtongue and have a shadowy adviser manipulating events. Powerful Enchanter wizard maybe? (If Enchanter wizard doesn't fit with your idea of dwarfs this could be a gnome?). As for what offended the spirits - we can pull a little from Legend of Korra and say that long ago the mortal and spirit worlds were a single world and that some large event split their worlds into different parts (ooo this would be perfect use for the different planes). Maybe the Enchanter Wizard has convinced the King to invade the spirit world for his own greed (or pride) and lay claim to its lands. Thus breaking an ancient treaty with the spirits that has placed the mortal world and spirit world at war.

2. Set it back a certain # of years and if players are older than that they remember a time prior. If you say a 50 year war and an elf is 200 years old but a human is 25 they remember time before the war differently.

3. I feel like you could actually use the mana wheel a bit for spirits / villains. Red spirits = Dragons, goblinoids, kobalds, fire elementals (etc).
Black = demons, devils, undead
White = Solars, unicorns, etc
Green = Fey, monstrosities (if green appropriate), wild beasts, earth elementals.
Blue = probably the hardest to find from the MM. Anything aquatic or air based that doesn't fit elsewhere (including water/air elementals)

Beings of each color could potentially be in a loosely associated faction together; i.e. do the Fey a solid and word of mouth passes around to make it so earth elementals don't straight up murderhobo the party if they come across each other. Or if you do something to royally piss off a solar, any unicorns you meet want you dead.

I'd say make the mortal race ruler dude & Enchanter the penultimate "villain" of the campaign but maybe keep his involvement / what he did unknown to the party for awhile. Pull a Revan from KOTOR with it. You can also always JRPG style it to where when the Heroes stop him some ultra powerful spirit he was containing (for his own power) gets released and starts to wreck everything and its up to the players to save the day. Oooooooo Maybe you could use the Tarrasque here?


Also, if I remember in kamagawa the mortals seemed to be losing the war pretty badly. I'd say keep that angle. Keeps the pressure on the party and the stakes high.

[Regitnui]

Kamigawa! The mortals didn't win, the daughter of the bad guy returned That Which Was Stolen to O-Kagachi, the spirits calming after that.

I don't see the MM working well here, since the Kamigawa block took the Shinto animist theory and ran with it; the spirits of forging turned on blacksmiths, the spirits of weapons turned on their wielders, and whatever other concept you can imagine joined the battle. The spirits were... Formless would be putting it kindly. Even the ones that resembled an identifiable item were weird as all the Hells. Hana Kami (flower god) were illustrated as human faced flowers with a pained expression vomiting streams of petals.

As for the reason; try the binding.of spirits in gems. This doesn't work on essential or self-aware spirits like the fey or elementals, but it siphons off tiny portions of their power that can be used to make mortal lives better, or 'burned off' as spell fuel. The kami feel threatened by mortals essentially taming their power and refusing to tribute when the gems can do exactly what the mortals need.

[Naanomi]

A good adventure arc could be finding out why they spirits are attacking... Mortals have no idea the normally capricious-yet-cooperative Kami 'suddenly' turned on them...

Maybe the answer is something obscure; like many 'spirits' Shinto Kami operate on the own set of rules hard to understand. Maybe ancient cave-dwelling mortals made a deal: 600,000 years where Kami serve men, then 600,000 where men serve Kami... And the Kami are enraged they aren't holding up their end of the bargain?

Maybe Kami are starving because humans are doing the old rites incorrectly; and are desperate and confused as why humans so long ignored their (bizarre or too cryptic) warnings. This isn't a war, it's a harvest of soul energy to feed a starving spirit world

The great Kami of death once collected a soul, as is his duty. The soul pleaded to return to life, to say goodbye to his lover. Death agreed, but warned for every day he was removed from his place in the land of the dead, one mortal would die in his place. The man agreed, but found his beloved in the arms of another that same night. Bitter, he practiced dark magic to prolong his life... And Death waited. The great Kami of death can wait no longer, the soul is due... With the interest that was promised those many centuries ago

[CodeRed]

Kamigawa! The mortals didn't win, the daughter of the bad guy returned That Which Was Stolen to O-Kagachi, the spirits calming after that.

Way more complicated than that. The daughter of the Emperor basically realized that the divine heart was basically her "twin", it having been stolen on the same day that she was born. So she and the heart fused to become a human/spirit hybrid that struck down both the Emperor and O-Kagatachi and forced a peace between the two worlds by being a being of who was both.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to keep working on the exact reason why but I definitely think I'm going to have to cold open with the spirits just going crazy. The vast majority of them are neutral, neither good or evil so if pushed they would respond exactly like a human would by lashing out at whatever they perceive as a threat. Not completely sold on what exactly the "threat" is to the Spirit World is that would cause normally complacent spirits to go crazy.

I'm thinking for now I'm going to stick with my original thought. Some lordling begins experimenting with binding spirits to this world and siphoning off their powers. He builds a secret society that then comes to believe that the spirits ought to serve man. The lesser spirits, not fully able to manifest in the world or put thoughts together in a way that humans understand begin lashing out randomly which is where the campaign starts. From there, there's plenty of places to go for the player's decisions to shape the game. Do they decide to try to find out how to appease the spirits, do they decide to escalate the war, etc.? In a high-intrigue and caste based society, there's plenty of people who would use all this upheaval and chaos as a way to gain political advantage so all the different players (both mortal and spirit) would be doing different things behind the scenes.

So there's politics there both on the human and spirit side. Different factions on both sides will try to play the situation the way they want which leaves the party plenty of places to shape the campaign through their actions. The idea of the "veil" weakening and stronger spirits being able to cross over also lets me organically increase the difficulty of the creatures the party faces as they level up and explains why a giant Demon doesn't just cross over and start eating everyone.