I have another RPG plot problem I'm stuck on. Only have a brief moment to type this up, so I'll keep it simple.

A character is going to wind up in front of Emma-o for judgment, but at the end of that will be restored to life, rather than being reincarnated. Said character has a history of pretty awful deeds: repeated betrayals, blasphemy, etc. More recently he's been improving himself, learning to be honorable, doing things to cleanse his karma, but Redemption Is Hard and I don't want Emma-o to just pat him on the head and say "keep on working to be good, son." He's repeatedly ducked the consequences of his deeds, and he knows it and knows that isn't right; this is the chance for some kind of consequence to come down on him.

What form should that consequence take?

It can't involve him staying dead or losing his memories. Most other things are fair game. And for anyone who remembers things I've said about my campaign in the past, yeah, this is the Scorpion sleeper agent who betrayed the people he'd infiltrated and then betrayed the Scorpion and is now a ronin with an erased Name, etc etc epic ridiculousness. :-P

Give him a Curse from Emma-O.Like the Cannot Lie disadvantage. That will teach him to stay honnest.

And it's a really fantastic tool for roleplay.

If the Lords of Death are cool in your setting, then I would have them deal with the character rather than Emma-O. The Lords of Death would go full REEEEEE on the character, declare that his mere presence defiles Meido, and kick him out for good. So he is back to life, but unless he pulls something big, his soul will go straight to Jigoku next time.

And the worst thing? Jigoku knows this, and it likes where this is going.

Well, depending on how brutal you want to be?

You could always have Emma-O give him the Momoku disadvantage.

"Your crimes are such that the universe itself requires compensation. You are alone, in a way few living things will ever be. The next time we meet, I will not be so forgiving."

Beyond the above mentioned ones instead of an actual curse instead take a note from mythology and give him a quest. It can seem simple or pointless save for the fact that their past actions have made it impossible.

Like forgiveness from someone that they have wronged terribly...and I aint talking the cheap samurai kind of forgiveness I'm talking the real deep spiritual kind thats never given easy (if at all). The kind of thing Epics (and tragedy) are made of.

Typing on my phone; please forgive my brevity.

Can't Lie -- I thought about it, but that would mean honesty is no longer a choice. And choices are harder. :-)

No Lords of Death here.

Momoku isn't permitted in my game because it's too heinous. And this guy is Chosen by the Oracle of Void, so the Void Dragon would disagree with Emma-o pretty hard.

Quest for forgiveness is what he's been doing for the last fifty sessions. :-) We're nearly at the end of the campaign; not a lot of time left for long-term plot additions. And he's already anticipating vengeance from someone he massively wronged a couple decades down the road, when their reincarnation has grown up.

Have someone he cares about die in his stead.

If he is so big into the Void Dragon then you can have it show up and take his side. Emma-O is not happy, but at least he gets a non-embarrassing way to get rid of this annoying soul for good: he allows the character to go back, but in return, he demands that the Void Dragon shall... well, "void" him upon his (next) death. This must be a cool compromise all things considered, except for the poor character whose after-death expectation is now utter and irreversible oblivion (that in turn might be worse than a one-way trip to Jigoku, depending on his actual beliefs). So if the character wants salvation then he must do it quickly, because once the end kicks in, it is gonna be the end.

That would mean whacking a PC. :-P

(Edit: that was in reply to Kakita-san)

Eternal oblivion would make my players hate me, and not in a good way. That's more tragic than we want to go.

But I should add that plot stuff means something like Maigo no Musha is about to be created, for not just returned spirits but some people whose souls the PCs think were destroyed forever. So something linked with setting that up could be fitting.

5 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

Eternal oblivion would make my players hate me, and not in a good way. That's more tragic than we want to go.

You can always leave a door open, but still have the blade hanging, so to speak. Depending on the plot, you can have the Void Dragon show its hand to the character, and demand something Void Dragon-y in return of a more lax "voiding". This can include Maigo no Musha shenanigans where things can go for the better.

You can always take a few pages for the brief (though awrsome) series brimstone.

Emma-O ia not happy and condemn him to a state of limbo. He will wake up every day at the exact same state he was at the moment of his death, wearing the same clothes and equipment (so he cannot acquire further possessions) and probably now has a permanent wound. In addition, people tend to forget him and cannot acquire further Glory or status.

He also has a magical tatoo with the names of all those who wronged Emma-O. (Khadi sorcerers, powerful maho-tsukai who escaped death, mass murderers), etc. He doesn't necessary have a compulsion to hunt them down, but prophecies speak of him as a undead-hunter, attracting all sort of problems, from magistrates wanting to use his talent to powerful monsters wanting to off him before he off them

Instead of Momoku, why not just reduce his Void to 1, but restore it gradually as he becomes a good boy.

Like I said, we're near the end of the campaign. There isn't a lot of space left for long-term plots to pay off.

It sounds to me like he's more Gaki-do material than Jigoku. So maybe Emma-o decides to give him a taste of the afterlife he's currently headed toward: eternal hunger.

I hate to say this...but were I in your shoes? He'd stay dead and go to whatever judgment awaited him, OR he would be slammed with Momoku BECAUSE of his ties to the Void Dragon.

Lack of time for additional plot points that no matter what, he's coming back from the dead on the cheap-if he's been ducking consequences so much that this close to the wire he's not actually on the up and up?

Anything I can think of that doesn't feel like a total cop-out appears to be off-limits for your group.

How badly did he betray the Scorpion? He might not get the chance for Jigoku...

Now that I'm not typing on my phone . . .

SirEuain -- oh, we already ran the plot where that issue got dealt with. The NPC was fully expecting to end in the Traitors' Grove. Instead his Name got erased by a very cranky Nezumi. :-)

Gunichi -- what I'm trying to say is, he is on the up-and-up: he's spent the last 49 sessions working toward becoming a better man, with great success. I'm trying to find a middle ground between "you still suck and deserve to have the hammer come down on you permanently" and "your redemption is now complete and all of that bad karma has been earned off" -- I think he's made great progress toward the latter and will continue to do so as long as he's given the opportunity, but hasn't finished clearing that debt yet. So I don't see Emma-o doing anything that would stop his progress in its tracks (quite apart from OOC considerations that would make yanking this NPC from the game a bad move). I do, however, see Emma-o doing something that will sting, without requiring another 49 session of play to work out. (We've got maybe 15 or so left.)

The question I'm stuck on is, what's the most thematically appropriate punishment for him to suffer? I think it should probably involve the creation of Maigo no Musha, because it is thematically about second chances and people who have somehow wound up out of the places they should be finding their way back. Those are very appropriate to the character, and the creation of that realm is a thing that needs to happen anyway (since we've had our equivalent of the spirits coming back through Oblivion's Gate). But how do I turn that into a punishment? My current thought is that he will be asked -- sans explanation -- whether he would give up his own chance of rebirth to help others return to where they belong; what that actually means is that after he dies, he'll be the guardian of that realm instead of being reborn. But I feel like there's got to be a better way to approach that.

. . . how did Maigo no Musha get created, anyway? The wiki only tells me when and why it happened, not the specifics of how, and the book that might have more details is currently inaccessible to me.

Cursed by the realm : Meido.

2 hours ago, Kinzen said:

But how do I turn that into a punishment?

I'm fairly sure that babysitting all those failures should be a big enough punishment all by itself. Especially since the character would be constantly on the pedestal by the other souls because of his life.

I think the real question here is why Emma-O would trust the character with this.

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. . . how did Maigo no Musha get created, anyway?

The "second chance souls" essentially decided to create their own afterlife with hookers and blackjack, and nobody really bothered to stop them. So they just converged in one place somewhere in the spirit cosmos, said "this is our realm now", and *pop* Maigo no Musha came to existence.

Emma-O could require him to retire and join the brotherhood as a way of cleansing his soul and seek enlightenment. IIRC Emma-O was a monk at some point and could not fulfill enlightenment.

Maybe Emma-O wants ur PC to fulfill that which he could not!

10 hours ago, okuma said:

Cursed by the realm : Meido.

The label is ideal. The mechanics, not so much. "You are now condemned to zone out slightly whenever you're not concentrating on something" lacks bite.

If I could think of a mechanical penalty that seems suitable, I'd happily stick that name on it. Or "Cursed by Emma-o."

(Edit: and yeah, I know the why for Maigo no Musha. It's the metaphysics of how that seems to be unclear.)

8 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

The "second chance souls" essentially decided to create their own afterlife with hookers and blackjack, and nobody really bothered to stop them. So they just converged in one place somewhere in the spirit cosmos, said "this is our realm now", and *pop* Maigo no Musha came to existence.

So, no particular details for how they did that; they just decided to, and it happened. Got it. I think I'll want it to require something more specific than that; I'll ponder what that should be.

Edit: Actually, there's an idea -- whatever the "something more specific" is, if it's something taken from the NPC, then I get my justification for the new realm and my punishment in one fell swoop. It will still require PC action to actually bring the realm into existence, but if I can think of the appropriate thing to take from him, I've got my setup in place. Not sure what it should be, though . . . not his soul en toto, certainly.

It was created because of the imbalance of the war of spirits :

http://l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Maigo_no_Musha

11 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

Actually, there's an idea -- whatever the "something more specific" is, if it's something taken from the NPC, then I get my justification for the new realm and my punishment in one fell swoop. It will still require PC action to actually bring the realm into existence, but if I can think of the appropriate thing to take from him, I've got my setup in place. Not sure what it should be, though . . . not his soul en toto, certainly.

Maybe it could be his kharma for this life? Both his bad kharma and good kharma would be taken away from him, so he is back at square one kharma-wise, like his current life never happened. This kind of "dumping the kharma" deal might even satisfy Emma-O, because he can now just push the restart button with the character when he dies for good.

It also sounds like a cool idea for a future story: the character reincarnates into the exact same station, but his "kharmic echo" remains in Maigo no Musha and starts haunting the reincarnation. The next party then runs into the kid and they have to get rid of the weird ghost stalking him.

Is he alone in this judgment? Was there an opponent of sufficient worth and inclination to also reincarnate?

Not being reincarnated is already a punishment. Death is not bad. There is no better way to force you to face consequences of your action than to make you live with them. Emma O flat out forcing that person to live in the shadow of their sins until old age is something that greatly emphasizes the philosophy about death and rebirth.