Saviors of Kamigawa Vignettes

For the last collection of short stories, just as before, we have a mini site, but it seems the content on those is steadily decreasing. No links to articles at all this time around, not even a FAQ! Just the stories! Luckily it’s the stories that I’m actually interested in. So let's just dive right in.

War’s Wage, by Jeff Grubb

A mad warrior arrives at a village babbling about Kataki, War’s Wage following him. The villagers are unsure what to do with him, as aiding him might anger Kataki, but sending the poor sod on his way might also be seen as aiding him. The narrator, who was the one to first spot the warrior, kills him in an attempt to appease Kataki. But then Kataki manifests and kills the villagers, saying that killing the man had denied him his vengeance, and that there has been a long line of these murders since the original person who offended him was slain before he could claim his vengeance. The narrator runs, having become the last person in a long line to earn Kataki’s anger.

Not much to say about this one. It’s cool, the twist works (though you’ve probably figured it out by the time the narrator kills the old warrior), and it conjures up a good atmosphere, really selling the uncertainty among the villagers and just how screwed up Kamigawa has become, with each action or inaction possibly insulting some murderous kami.

The Face Behind the Mask, Rei Nakazawa

A samurai, a minamo scholar, an orochi, a yamabushi and a nezumi ninja are trapped in a fortress near Eiganjo, shortly after O-Kagachi’s siege at the end of Heretic. They are the last five survivors there, and there is a horde of kami at the gates. Oh, and one of them is secretly Sakashima, the Imposter. Sakashima is such a good cosplayer that he managed to trick kitsune and soratami, and even the kami are scared of him. The samurai, who was charged by Konda to bring him in, comes up with a plan to save everyone. After the kami are defeated he tells Sakashima that he figured out which of the four others he was a while back (I won’t spoil more than that!), but that in their situation it didn’t matter. Instead of bringing him in he gifts Sakashima what he came to the fortress for: a census scroll that finally allows him to discovers his first name.

This is my favorite of all the Kamigawa vignettes. It’s got a good mystery, for once I couldn’t predict the twist until the very end,  and the set-up where you get a part of the story from the perspective of the five survivors alternated by the inner thoughts of Sakashima works really well. Oh, and the hint that allowed the samurai to figure out who the imposter was is not only right there in the text for you to discover, it also makes use of the continuity of the other vignettes! How great is that?

But most of all, I just love Sakashima as a character. His superpower of not just shapeshifting but personality-shifting is… really exciting? Experiencing the world through another person’s eyes must be a true revelation, and the fact that it is not possible in real life does feel very… limiting at times. So I fully understand Sakashima’s joy at being able to do so. Also, I just really like characters who just get to enjoy their superpowers. He’s not cursed by his power, nor corrupted by it, nor does he feel some compulsion to do good or evil. He’s just happy and grateful that he can do these awesome things. How refreshing!

Continuitywise, this story happens after the fall of Eiganjo, so I’ll put it between Heretics and Guardians on the timeline. It also reveals Marrow-Gnawer started a purge of… either the Okiba-Gang in specific or ninja in general, the wording is not quite clear. Just a minor little continuity note.

The Meeting, Alex Smith

The five kirin meet up inside a painting every 1000 years. This time they discuss whether or not they will join the Kami War. The black one wants to kill all the mortals, even though the other four stand up for them. At the end a Minamo student who was watching the painting and dreamed of the meeting wakes up to find the black kirin has infected her with a disease.

This one is a bit meh. The kirin just sit around and have a not-particularly-interesting chat, and then all go their own way, none of them having changed their mind. It would’ve been more interesting if the Infernal Kirin had actually convinced the others, thus explaining the flavor text of Bounteous Kirin. But nah. This story doesn’t accomplish much other than showing us the personality of the kirin, and giving us yet another story of kami being horrible, which is a subject that is running very thin at this point. Two trivia/continuity points though:

• The Skyfire Kirin tells a story of a scout who found the kirin in the form of a sword, and tricked his warlord into dying in battle against an ogre, after which he himself became warlord. This scout was Godo’s great-grandfather. Lovely bit of world-building that.
• The Cloudhoof Kirin lived in the dreams of mortals for the last thousand years, including Meloku, Ishi-Ishi, and Snow Fur, who doesn’t have a card but does show up in a bunch of flavor texts.

Iizuka the Ruthless, by Gwendolyn Kestrel

A big battle between nezumi and samurai is on its way. Ronin Iizuka the Ruthless and his band plan to make use of this distraction by robbing the treasure of Forked Tongue, a nezumi shaman who has pledged most of her guards to the ratfolk’s army. When they arrive though, they discover Forked Tongue had no intention of fulfilling that pledge and thus they are faced with overwhelming numbers of rats. The nezumi commander grabs his son… but Iizuka stabs through him, killing son and rat.

I can't find any bigger art for Iizuka... 

Also kinda meh. Another horrible person being horrible. The most interesting thing here is the use of Forked Tongue, the treasure obsessed shaman who didn't get a card, but we did already meet in the Horobi story among the Champion’s vignettes.

The nezumi are amassing against “the great General Takeshi”. Is that someone mixing up General Takeno and Daimyo Takeshi Konda? Or perhaps this story takes place way in the past, when Konda was just another warlord. We know Forked Tongue is still alive during the Kami War due to the Horobi story (she escapes here, so this story could come first), and while I doubt most nezumi live that long, a shaman might… Meh. It’s probably just a name mix up, but it gave me some speculation to entertain me with this otherwise not very interesting story.

The Last Visitor, Jay M. Salazar

Six years after The Dragon Shield, the Battle of Silk is nearing its end. There’s less than 50 monks around now, but they carry Jugan’s strength in them (as the dragon distributed its +1/+1 counters among them when it died). Kazuki is still ringing the sacred bell, even though it has made him deaf and overwrought with muscle. Then Ayumi, the Last Visitor arrives, brought by the bell. The other kami leave… and then Ayumi slaughters all the monks instead of aiding them.

Hrm. That’s a bit of an anticlimax. 8 months after The Dragon Shield WotC releases its follow up story, and it’s just another “kami are bastards” story like we’ve been getting all that time. It’s perfectly fine, in fact it’s a lot better than the story it’s a sequel to, selling the horror after the six years of war very well, but like I said with the Iizuka story, I’m just kinda done with this. I would’ve been much more into this story if we had gotten it as part of the Betrayers vignettes, when it hadn’t gotten old yet.

Final Thoughts

So we’re ending on a bit of a downer, with three stories that I didn’t really like. But the thing is, it’s not like these stories are much worse than the ones we’ve been seeing so far. They’re just… the same. Which is the problem. The Champions vignettes drew us in with their world-building, the Betrayers ones build on that with character pieces, and now we get more of that. But by the 20^th iteration I’m just a bit bored with it. These stories should’ve gone somewhere else.

The one thing that sets these stories apart a little is an increased use of continuity, from the hint in The Face Behind the Mask, the nezumi shaman in Iizuko the Ruthless and the entire sequel story in The Last Visitor, these stories do reward having read all the vignettes that came before. This I can only applaud of course. But these are just references, not enough to carry the entire story. It did give me one idea how the Saviors vignettes could’ve differentiated themselves from what came before though: really lean in to that continuity. Give us that sequel to Mountain Secret, where we discover who was spreading lies about Kumano. Tell us why the Yamazaki’s are no longer on speaking terms. Give me that third Azami story I’ve been asking for all this time! That way this final batch of vignettes would feel much more like a closure of the story than just more of the same.

Another idea came to me after having something of a revelation while reading The Last Visitor: none of these stories actually involve any saviors. Stuff just stays as bad as it was, or gets even worse, which is totally at odds with the name of the set these stories are supposed to be promoting. So not only does everything get a bit same-y, the depressing war stories also get a bit too depressing after a while. No wonder my favorite here involves Sakashima just enjoying himself and getting a happy ending, and my favorite last time was Kentaro and his crew being upstanding guys doing good things. It would’ve been a breath of fresh air if at least some of these stories involved people actually achieving something to make the world better. If we had gotten the Ayumi story with Betrayers, Saviors could’ve given us a story about *tabs over to Scryfall* eh… Sasaya? Reki? I dunno, just anyone salvaging what is left of the monastery and starting anew, that would be both much more in-theme and pleasant to read.

All in all the vignettes go out on a low ebb, but on the whole I enjoyed them a lot and can only applaud Wizards promoting their sets this way. From now on we’ll see them put short stories online every once in a while, but unfortunately we’re still a long way off from this blog covering regular Uncharted Realms stories. I'll have a bit more to say about all the vignettes together when I do the whole block wrap-up, but first... check back next Wednesday for the coverage of the Saviors novel!