Youkai Kabuki Monogatari

[Clay]

The following post was originally posted by Dreamstryder, but due to the spam flood somehow become permanently marked as having unread messages and indicated 6 replies that no longer existed. I have repasted the contents below:

This is a plan for running games of intrigue and the supernatural in old Japan. I wonder if I'm missing anything besides sample characters...?

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STORY STRUCTURES (from samurai sagas and ghost stories, often from kabuki)
The "character" mentioned needn't be the main character or player's, just the main instigator, but, if not the PC, the interaction between this character and that of the player must be the heart and focus of the story, bringing it toward its unique conclusion. Keep in mind active character roles needn't be limited to (A) living (B) humans. The story can vary by changing the nature of the characters.

Obsession:
See revenge, but the obsession could also be the thirst for power or wealth. It could also be something potentially destructive that is normally considered good or innocuous. A warning in the beginning by an acquaintance, say a partner or wandering monk, serves as foreshadow. The character may be snapped out of obsession by the sacrifice (or threat of loss) of someone close. Perhaps this someone pays the price in the character's stead, or the character is swallowed up by consequences, but warns away or saves all others from being dragged down with him/her (this lucid compassion is a farewell of a character who is for most of the tale thought to be selfish or mad). Perhaps, tragically, the obsession brings all involved to pay the final price, but the turnabout is more dramatic, especially if it makes the audience care about the obsessed.

Ex: A freed courtesan who can't return home tries to find the person who bought her freedom; he is of high political rank, hence the secrecy, but in seeking him she is involved with a political group who, unbeknownst to her, is working to destroy him. She may appear before him at last just in time to sacrifice herself to save him.

Obsession (Revenge):
This is an obsession plot, but so common that I mention it in more detail by itself. After taking revenge, usually the revenger is revenged in turn, captured by the law, or commits suicide. Another take is that the revenger gives up on revenge; the path to forgiveness, peace of mind, or wisdom that revenge will only make things worse can be a more open-ended road.

Ex: human swordsman seeking to be more powerful than the god who wronged him, animal's ghost takes revenge upon human...usually the less powerful seeks revenge upon the more powerful; the wronged seek revenge only because they feel they have no power/law in their favor.

This example can also involve a Secret Plot structure, as in the story of the Chuushingura (47 Ronin).

Righteous Secret Plot:
The characters are members of a group who gather in secret to plan the accomplishment of a specific goal as an end-result. This cause is colored as worthy, and carrying it out is self-sacrificial for the greater good.

If the goal is the military conquest of a castle, perhaps the mission is suicide but so distracts or cripples the enemy as to allow the commanding force survival or even victory.

If the goal is political takeover of the city, perhaps a publicly ill-favored task deemed necessary is committed by a force who volunteers to take both public blame and punishment for the entire affair so that the rest of the team can rule without public stigma.

The goal could involve bunking a rule or two to accomplish under a rule as monolithic and restrictive as Tokugawa Japan, and none of the members expect to escape punishment for these means after their goal is completed, often dutifully surrendering themselves as the final step. In Tokugawa Japan, if they did manage to escape the law's reach, their families would have been punished in their stead.

Examples of this last kind: The 47 Ronin. The story of a Sakura village group of peasants, suffering under the harsh laws of its local ruler, decide to appeal to the next highest in the chain of command. This means that the lower ruler must fix the problem to save face before the higher, but the peasants expect the lower ruler to punish the peasant ringleader as revenge for the embarrassment (not as punishment for a crime).

Mystery:
This can be the other side of a Revenge or Snowball Rolls plot. Symptoms always proceed to draw the audience in, then a preliminary problem/cause is suggested by someone or hypothesized by the detective. Character relationships are further developed during investigation, which may also feature further symptoms, new or already discovered. Something should conflict wildly with the preliminary hypothesis, and here the situation may calm for an interlude, supposedly solved, or the situation may without pause worsen, perhaps claiming more victims or putting blocks of physical or legal nature between the detective and the furthering of investigation. Someone from the beginning has a story to tell (evidence and/or testimony, and not always given willingly) that explains the current symptoms, and now it is up to the detective to apply it to pull the case to a close. In the case of a haunting, the story is usually tragic.

How to write mystery: Write the full story, then hide parts of it, figuring out what parts lead to the next, and marking these spots with clues you make up. Decide which clues can be found when. Keep in mind clues could be interpreted as something other than what they are (they may even be seen not as clues at all); in this case, another clue may point to its true nature.

Ex: Someone alive who is wronged but unable to see revenge or escape their lot always prays at a shrine. Each night a spirit in the image of the enshrined does something about it. At first, leave out all but the signs left by the spirit. During investigation, one may learn than the lord taxes this village too harshly. This was so harsh that so-and-so's wife went to the city brothel to avoid family starvation. Upon meeting so-and-so, note that he isn't particularly vengeful, just remorseful. Perhaps there're signs at the temple in the morning (or an encounter in the night).

The Snowball Rolls:
Someone had an ambition or an accident, and there was a mess. Now they're trying to hide it, and more messes are made trying to hide all the messes made previous, all going back to that first mess.

This could also be a plot of how a group of soldiers keep fighting a hopeless battle because so many of their companions died that they can't bring themselves to stop now, and more will be lost that way. Perhaps they're now ghosts, still fighting illusions of their foes.

Forbidden Love:
Romeo and Juliet is a well-known European story of this structure, which is fairly universal. Two who love one another cannot wed because of some law. Perhaps they are from rival or warring clans, Perhaps one is engaged to another, perhaps one is a ghost, the other a living human, perhaps the cultures are distrustful of each other (for example, a fox transformed and a human). Usually someone pulls the two apart and the other must find or follow them toward the climax.

Death: Sometimes the lovers elope and jump into the sea together to be together in death, sometimes they seek reincarnation into lives wherein they can be together. Sometimes one does not know the other is a ghost or other being (usually there is foreshadowing that something is abnormal) and bad things happen to one or the other: 1) the unknowing one is eaten by the beastly other (usually a Revenge story, actually) or is taken away by the ghostly lover come dawn (both now dead). 2) A suspicious third party slays the secret lover, revealing its true form to the other lover.

Differences Overcome: Sometimes they successfully change what they are (a ghost into a human). Sometimes the outsider gains the trust of the other's family by saving another member or by some other big favor.

Unrequited Love: Perhaps a tragic outcome is the preface, and the lovers are reborn, but one somehow remembers while the other does not (or one is still a ghost). The one who remembers must usually move on or get the other to love them anew (probably as a whole different person). In such cases, the two or one may have changed genders since.

TYING MULTIPLE STRUCTURES TOGETHER
Secret plot + Mystery + Snowball + Revenge
The player controls the daughter in these events; each new paragraph develops from her decisions in the previous paragraphs.

A samurai is implicated in a plot against his lord and forced into seppuku to save his household punishment. The daughter of this defamed samurai now heads the household. Knowing this was against his character and that he had been going to secret meetings, even knowing one or two of the members, she seeks out the true events.

Discovering that her father was last seen alive with the head of the plot, she desires to confront him. Perhaps the head is too high up the status ladder for her to venture a straightforward vendetta without further harming her household (and winding up dead); furthermore, he is currently gone on political duty, so she bides time and collects evidence and allies, with the caution that she can't risk her family being implicated a 2nd time in the plot.

Upon confronting the head, he tells the daughter that the plot was actually to depose a minister, and her father decided in a quick spot to become a scapegoat to save the team; the head hands the daughter a letter written by her father that explains as much. Will she believe it? If she does, does the head actually reveal that the plot was not a complete success, encouraging the daughter to take up her father's place? Why was her father involved in the first place?

I didn't even get into where each of these scenes could be set. The daughter could have been at home or in a battle when she got the news. Maybe she journeyed to other castles or to the plot's former meeting place near a Buddhist Temple to find information and allies. Where did she confront the plot's head, anyway? It was probably hidden away, but was it in another lord's castle or upon a boat out on the water?

THE SUPERNATURAL
The supernatural should be rare enough to be special, but I like at least a whiff in each tale. Supernatural isn't there just for showy subject matter; it is a disfunction given physical form to:
A. show there is consequence even where the formally recognized laws of our world don't cover or even run counter.
B. accentuate the character of a place or the feelings in one's heart (see using traits).

Ex: The dead may walk in flesh and blood because they were granted temporary return to the living world to finish an honorable task. A transformed mononoke of a woods that was cleared by a neighboring lord to build or mine now serves that same lord, yet his clan is split over retreating to another mononoke clan's mountain and joining them, allying with that clan to oppose the expanding lord, and joining the seemingly all-swallowing human society in disguise. Two characters have dreams of their past lives who were at different sides of the same event.

CHARACTER TRAITS
Pay attention to culture-caused OVA traits: Love can also be Forbidden Love, or an unpleasant arranged marriage. Ronin, who may be viewed with suspicion, certainly warrant some Weakness. Simply being of samurai status or of a lowly profession can also affect Influence or a corresponding Weakness.

USING TRAITS TO DECIDE STORY
As GM, look at your players' character Weaknesses (seems to me more weaknesses are story-related than are Attributes). Devise a situation that would pick on as many of them at once as you can. Come up with the abstract conflict first, THEN an actual circumstance that would cause it (first what you want, then how you get it).

It is easy to create drama thru conflict of interests. A classic is duty versus personal happiness versus virtue. Let player interests inform the concrete events of these circumstances (one likes making monologues, one likes sword fights, one's intrigued by mysteries, etc). Realize that the scenario should not make any decisions for the player characters; consequently, the future is not a fixed story-line.

Challenge both them and their characters, so don't make things easy, and you needn't know or devise how they'll solve all the problems you throw at them; that's their job. In return, allow them experimentation and creativity in solutions.

8 CHARACTER ARCHETYPES
Common character identities as help on where to start or fine-tune:
A pair of comedic peasants or an old husband and wife couple
A Prince/Princess*
A yamabushi
A Buddhist monk/nun**
A Shinto priest or priestess/miko
A ronin
A samurai
A shinobi (aka ninja)***

*Daughter or son of a lord, not necessarily the Emperor/Mikado's, basically a specially positioned samurai
**Buddhism is often misunderstood to concern escape from the world, but in reality, being human means desiring, so Buddhism is about being wise in choosing and pursuing one's desires. Many samurai retired to become monks, and would don a Buddhist name. Women would become nuns often to escape from a world where they were legally bound to their fathers, brothers, or husbands.
***Often depicted as assassins, books and museum sources I've found say ninjas actually preferred not to take lives, were vegetarian, and (in Iga at least) doubled as medicine makers and gunpowder mixers. Often shinobi are portrayed as self-destructive, altering their bodies or leaving behind an arm if it will help them fulfill their missions or protect their own.

8 SETTINGS
This stuff can happen anywhere, but here are some ideas:
A forested mountain
A seedy part of town
A castle
The sight of a past battlefield
A ship on the waves*
A (Buddhist) temple (recognizable by the 5-storied pagodas with the 9-ball spire on top)**
A (Shinto) shrine (recognizable by the torii that serve as gates)**
A (Buddhist) graveyard (Shintoism doesn't do graves)

*Traditionally the Japanese hardly ventured out of sight of shore if they could help it. During the Tokugawa period, the shogunate even mandated that ships not be built to sail well too far out in order to regulate contact with other countries.)

**Either building might have stone shishi on either side of the entrance as guards against evil. Temple and shrine culture historically blended together and might be in the same building; the two practices were only separated after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, when "Shinto" was given its official name.

[Dreamstryder]

Thanks, Clay.

A lot of these stories are just developments of certain Weaknesses (Obsession, Wanted, Secret, Servitude, Love Interest) played against each other. A theme common to all of these narratives is a choice among duty, personal happiness, and justice; one will be sacrificed for another (real character-building moments).

So if a character has multiple weaknesses, put them in a situation where the pursuit of it (or pursuit to rid themselves of it) sets them up to feel the burn of another Weakness (or the pursuit is just dangerous to their existence). This shouldn't be a frustration exercise for the player; their struggles should have some effect, and the outcome not forgone.

So what about attributes? One could link an Ability to a Weakness to set up a story, like "the implanted wings granting me Flight also suck my energy, giving me Languorous" or "my Beauty is the reason I'm Wanted...Am I Snow White?" One problem is that players may not want their Abilities and Weaknesses linked in strange and exciting ways they didn't intend (really, linking their traits is their job and everyone will have offered them ideas before the game), so instead make NPC plans or relationship maps that engage their pre-established character story or attributes.