Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa

Writer - Scott McGough
Cover Art - John Bolton
First Printing - September 2004

SUMMARY
We start with a prologue in which lady Pearl-Ear, a kitsune living at the royal court of Eiganjo delivers the daughter of daimyo Konda. When she goes to tell him, she finds him with general Takeno, headmaster Hisoka, soratami ambassador Meloku and a mysterious floating rock depicting a dragon curled in on itself, that he claims is a way to "secure the future".

We then skip to twenty years later, to a Kamigawa that has been ravaged by attacks from the spirit world. We follow the ochimusha Toshi, the titular outlaw, who uses kanji magic (as in, he draws kanji symbols to summon magical effects). He stumbles upon a bunch of soratami trying to make a deal with Marrow-Gnawer's gang of nezumi. He manages to escape, but the soratami follow him to his home to kill him. He escapes again, but sees the kanji for moon, iceberg, unstoppable and disaster or cataclysm appearing in some shadows and fallen bamboo. Wanting answers, he heads into the Sokenzan mountains to find Hidetsugu, an ogre shaman with whom he has made a blood pact called the Hyozan Reckoners. (Hyozan means iceberg. If you face one of them, you're also in trouble with those you can't see, get it?)

Hidetsugu already has visitors: the brothers Yamazaki (who work for Godo, bandit warlord) and Ben-Ben, representing the akki. Although the sokenzan bandits and the akki are usually fighting over territory, they have now teamed up and want Hidetsugu's blessing for a military campaign. He gives it to them. When they have left he tells Toshi that a water kami attacked him looking for Toshi. He makes his apprentice Kobo a member of the Hyozan and formulates a plan: Toshi and Kobo will head into Jukai forest to find allies among the budoka living there, while he himself will gather yamabushi kami-killers, so they can all move against the soratami and blue mana kami's that seem to be against them for some mysterious reason.

Kobo and Toshi almost immediately run into Ben-Ben and the Yamazaki's again, who have summoned their god, the Myojin of Infinite Rage. He gives their army another blessing (which will later be revealed as growing the hordes of akki endlessly through magic), but also summons three kami to attack Kobo and Toshi (mentioning Toshi's "kami handlers", which confuses the outlaw) for disturbing the ritual. The two fight their way out and continue on their way.

Meanwhile, princes Michiko wants to do something to end the kami war. Her friend Choryu convinces her that the answer might lie in the libraries of the wizarding school Minamo. Their mounted archery teacher Sharp-Ear (brother of Pearl-Ear) wants to stop this, but when he confronts Choryu the student of magic locks him in a block of unmoving water. By the time he escapes, Michiko, Choryu and their friend Riko have already left. Sharp-Ear follows them and by using magical trickery leads the three to his kitsune village, where lady Pearl-Ear, who raised Michiko after her mother's death, is staying. This turns out to be a less than safe place though, as the akki army is converging on it. The kitsune hold a divination ritual which shows them a writing mass of snakes, which they interpret as Michiko having to go deeper into the Jukai to find the orochi.

An army from Eiganjo, headed by captain Nagao, arrives, looking for the missing princess. They agree to help the village against the akki (as this falls under their orders of protecting Michiko), but things don't go well. Although Sharp-Ear manages to shoot one of the Yamazaki through the neck, Nagao is seemingly killed and the endless hordes of akki overwhelm the protectors. The villagers flee into the forest, and Sharp-Ear and Pearl-Ear decide to take Michiko and her friends to the orochi. While on the way there they run into Toshi and Kobo. The two groups start bickering, and are then ambushed and drugged by the orochi. Turns out it wasn't a great idea to follow a vision send by the kami during a kami war.

Toshi is the first to wake up, thanks to his burning Hyozan tattoo. This indicates that one of the brotherhood has been slain and that the others need to take vengeance. And indeed, he finds Kobo strung up between two trees and mysteriously drowned. This makes water mage Choryu a suspect, as he was the one person to avoid getting captured. Seeing that the orochi and their god, the Myojin of Life's Web, are planning to kill Michiko (they think this will end the kami war), Toshi kidnaps her and flees to a defensible position in a cave.

In short succession, Konda has a vision of where his daughter is and sends three mounted divisions after her, Michiko's friends also escape and follow Toshi's trail, and the Orochi themselves follow close behind. In an aside we also learn that it was headmaster Hisoka's idea to have Choryu lure Michiko to Minamo, and that his soratami overlords did not like this.

In the cave, with everyone converging on them, Toshi and Michiko are visited by "the smiling Kami of the Crescent Moon", who tells them to call him Mochi. He says that he send the kanji that made Toshi go to Hidetsugu, just because he likes to be helpful. He shows Toshi and Michiko what happened on the day of her birth from the perspective of the spirit world. How Konda used the sympathetic magics of her birth to tear a hole in the barrier between worlds and steal something from (the as yet unnamed) O-Kagachi, the greatest of all kami. After hearing this Toshi offers his services to Michiko, knowing she's going to need all the help she can get, and it can never hurt to have a princess indebted to you. At which point the ginormous O-Kagachi partially manifests in the material world for the first time and eats Konda's three divisions in one bite.

Despite Toshi saying he doesn't trust him, Mochi's keeps offering to help him and Michiko. The small kami summons the Myojin of Night's Reach, who is the ultimate source of Toshi's black magic. Toshi decides to become her acolyte in exchange for more power, specifically the power of "silence". He uses Michiko's tears to power up his kanji, fights his way through the orochi that have by now arrived, and then uses his new power to stop the chanting of the worshipers of Life's Web, which was what kept her in the material world.

With the orochi chased off, Toshi just has to deal with Michiko's friends. Toshi reveals he is now working for Michiko, but still sticks a kanji on Choryu's forehead that sends him straight to Hidetsugu. Before the others can retaliate, he uses his new powers to fade away from sight and lies down to just enjoy the silence.

TRIVIA

• The spirit world is called the kakuriyo, the material world the utsushiyo.
• After his crime, Konda has crazy eyes, which are constantly swiveling in their sockets, and are occasionally described as even wandering out of them! He also has bouts of super strength and precognition, and stops aging.
• Michiko's mother was lady Yoshino, Konda's favorite concubine.
• Eiganjo, the castle, was build by a young Konda. He then drove bandits out of the Araba, the parts of Towabara directly surrounding the castle, and united various warlords. His nation became the greatest power in Kamigawa during his reign.

• The two soratami that chase Toshi in the beginning are Eitoku, a bushi, and Chiyo, a shinobi. Chiyo is also the right hand of Uyo, a high ranking soratami seer.
• There is a cameo by Kiku, who is working for crime-lord Boss Uramon. These two characters will be more important in the next books.
• Godo has been fighting a guerrilla war against Konda for 10 years. Konda hasn't dealt with him yet due to both the rough terrain of the mountains and the drain the kami war puts on his resources.
• Hidetsugu worships the All-Consuming Oni of Chaos.
• Kobo used to be a jukai bushi. Wanted to becomes a yamabushi kami-slayer, but the yamabushi masters thought teaching a forest monk was below them. Now he's been Hidetsugu's apprentice for 5 years.
• Pearl-Ear and Sharp-Ear have 6 brothers and 9 sisters. The Ear-related monikers are assumed names, though we never learn their real ones.
• Konda's explanation for the war is that the spirit world is reacting against a new kami representing Eiganjo brought into being by his conquests, and that Terashi, the kami of the sun, and the Myojin of Cleansing Fire are still on their side. An image the Myojin was crying in the prologue though, so I doubt it.

• Ichikawa is the spirit of "the great river".
• Kitsune live in the north-western part of the Jukai. Orochi in the uncharted eastern parts. The Kamataki falls are north of the kitsune lands in the Jukai, Sokenzan is south of them.
• Kitsune are "long lived", so WotC, remember that if you ever make a D&D module for Kamigawa. Use the elves as a template for them!
• As we saw in their short story, the Yamazaki's are called Seitaro & Shujiro. They share the position of second in command for Godo.
• When kidnapping Michiko, Toshi summons a giant moth to ride. He found the beast long ago, shot down and entangled in branches after a battle, and made a deal with it (giant moths are "semi-intelligent"!), freeing it in exchange for a ride every once in a while.
• Hisoka once rode a chariot into the sky, but was not invited into the Moonfolk capitol.
• When Mochi demonstrates his power, he shows Toshi all of Kamigawa, revealing that it is a globe with multiple continents. With these "based on culture X" planes I always wonder whether they are just very tiny or if there is more out there. Good to know that in this case it is the latter. Though now I'm wondering if those other continent are also all home to Japanese inspired cultures or if they are as varied as our Earth is? Are the other continents also based on real world locations? What would a European or African inspired culture look like on a world in which Shinto(ish) gods are real?
• While describing Night's Reach Mochi mentions that Boss Uramon has a shrine to the Myojin in her basement. In the next book this will become relevant, as Toshi goes to check it out to utilize it for himself.

CONTINUITY

• As I mentioned last time, the vignette of the Brother's Yamazaki does match up well with what we see here, although we have to get through two more novels before we get there.
• Lady Pearl-Ear was mentioned in the Eight-and-a-Half-Tales story we also covered last week.
• In a court meeting in the first Michiko chapter people bring testimony saying the kami war has gone further than just the Araba, suggesting this is a very recent development. We'll learn from other sources that there have been attacks on other places for at least a few years. (Remember The Battle of Silk lasting 6 years?) There must have been some kind of escalation though, as it is said Hisoka got Choryu to bring Michiko to Minamo because he was panicking now the war has spread beyond the Araba.
• Other things that will get contradicted elsewhere in continuity are the claim that Michiko's mother was killed in the first year of the war;
• ...and that Kiku kills with magic flowers, rather than by making people's shadows turn against them as is shown on the cards. But we'll talk more about that in the Saviors review, in which Kiku has a bigger role.