It's a quite dark night in a land to the far east the assassin Victor L'Houette has been called into service by the samurai lord Shigun. After declining any details on the target short of what is important to the mission he is told that his target is the prominent shogun lord in the are, Mogun.
He leaves the local tavern where the contract was accepted and moved quickly to the home of Mogun. After quickly dispatching the guards in the front towers using simple stealth he moves to the next are. While quietly trying to move around the corner he killed a guard standing close to a spirit enchanted gong that activated by sucking the life source from the dying guard. This grabbed Victor and dragged him to the guard tower at the opposite corner.
This left him in a compromising position but he quickly escaped using shadow magic. He then teleported behind the guard and killed him in such a way as to make it seem like he was fine to the onlooking guards on the ground.He then created a shadow form of himself to distract the guards which lured two of them into the training grounds.
This distraction allowed him to dispatch the guard manning the alarm with a quick thrown dagger to the neck. Victor then moved to the training ground which consisted of rows of sparring dummies.
As he moved up to assassinate the two remaining guards the magic gong released it's remaining magic to activate one of the training dummies which took a swipe at victor and missed. Victor reacted quickly and cleverly to this wooden construct by releasing a flask of alchemist's fire onto the dummy while also killing one of the guards.
The dummy followed this up with a massive uppercut which sent Victor sprawling. Victor then used his shadow noose to kill the remaining guard by dragging him through the fire. He then followed up by throwing a flask of alchemist's frost onto the dummy which caused a reaction as the dummy went from extreme heat to extreme cold and result in the dummy splintering.
He then moved to the remaining area which revealed a dueling area in the shape of a yin-yang symbol.
Mogun came out of his house in full battle regalia and called out the assassin even dissipating the shadow Victor. When Victor revealed himself Mogun called off the bowmen in the guard towers and he laid down a challenge, a duel to the death. Victor agreed and they each took up a position on the symbol which was activated when Mogun released some of his blood onto the symbol.
This symbol forced the challengers to only use sword skills and after a hard fought back and forth fight, in which every splash of blood that landed on the symbol caused it to flare, it all came down to one last sword stroke. And the Shogun fell. With a flourish Victor plunged a wrist-blade into the kneeling Shogun and before the guards could shoot him he had disappeared in a cloak of shadows. With the alarm raised Victor implemented his "get out of there plan" and instead of facing the now roused force of Mogun's samurai he decided to run into the house.
As he ran threw he caught a glimpse of the now widowed wife of Mogun and his child and crashed threw a window in the back of the house. Upon returning to the tavern he received his reward sat down for a drink while a shadow grew darker across the land.
This was originally just going to be fun little game for Dave to play but after coming up with the setting I liked it so much that I wanted to make this game a tie-in to a campaign that I was running at the end of the summer. I then decided to do a few games like this to create a setting for the players including area's, characters and lore.
I wanted to do something classic and oriental for this game because whenever I think of an assassin in black I think ninja and so the target would be a shogun lord. I made up the map in about an hour while Dave was eating his dinner. I had come up with the dueling yin yang symbol which was going to set up a duel between Victor and Mogun's #1 samurai and have Mogun be a simple kill at the end of a map crawl in the house but after cutting the house map due to time constraints I decided that Mogun should be the duelist and so I moved the dueling circle from the training grounds to just in front of the house.
I had made the map L-shaped in order to make it look interesting. Unfortunately this led to a situation where Dave could move through the inside corner in a few squares and completely avoid the training ground which would suck. I had draw the large gong as just map filler but I quickly used it as a clever defense mechanism in order to force him to play this part.
I did have the living dummy set up as I knew that he couldn't help but see the rows of dummies as an area for luring guards in for an easy kill buy confusing them in the dark. So I left the living-dummy there as a trap and he fell for it.
It was a super enjoyable game to DM and I hope all of the single player games I do over the summer will be this fun.
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