Kisada's Wake

[zfaulkes]

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Year: 1998
Location: Midwest Express Center, Milwaukee
Story: Kisada’s Wake
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Hida Kisada, Crab Clan Champion, was one of those cards that made Legend of the Five Rings cool when its first set, Imperial Edition, released in 1995. Great art, great flavour text, highest force in the game (higher than dragons!), and a great role in the story: making a power play for the Emerald Throne of Rokugan.

At GenCon 1996, Crab won the L5R World Championship, and the story outcome was that Hida Kisada stormed into the imperial palace… and had the emperor’s sword thrust through his gut by Fu Leng. Kisada survived, but was so wounded he was never the same.

At GenCon 1997, L5R made its mark at GenCon with the Day of Thunder, the end of the game’s first story arc. That incredible high was always going to be a tough act to follow – you can’t kill ultimate evil every year.

When The Hidden Emperor, L5R’s second story arc started, there was definitely a sense of changing of the guard. The game had been bought by Wizards of the Coast, though it was still run by Five Rings Publishing Group (FRPG). The new base, Jade Edition, had really shaken up the clans, and new characters were coming to the fore.

The Crab Clan had a new champion, and was about to say goodbye to its old one.

The last expansion to come out, right before GenCon, was titled, “Kisada’s Funeral.” It was an important new card in tournament play, and I’m a loyal Crab player. When I found out that I could go to GenCon, I posted a message to the l5rinfo mailing list that I would hold a wake for Hida Kisada.

On Thursday, the first day of GenCon, someone came up to me and said, “Ree (Soesbee, then L5R storyteller) tells me you’re going to have a wake for Kisada.” I replied that yes, I wanted to do it, but I hadn’t yet made any definitive plans. I resolved to do that tomorrow.

On Friday, I got up early, and made up a quick half-page little flyer announcing the wake and telling people where my room was. I took it to Kinko’s and spent two bucks photocopying it. Before the first round of the world championship tournament (“Test of the Jade Champion”), I started handing them out. I figured that I’d get a few die-hards after the tourney, we’d go to my room at Marquette University (I figured it’d hold a dozen or so people), get some munchies, relax, and shoot the breeze about L5R.

I think I realized the enormity of what I had done when FRPG staffer, Mindy Sherwood-Lewis, got up on a chair and announced the wake to all the L5R players in the qualifier. It became rapidly apparent that the idea of holding a memorial for Kisada was a tremendously popular idea, and there was no way that I was going to fit everyone who was interested in attending the wake into my room at Marquette.

I had created a monster.

Sometime before the last round of the tournament, I announced to people, “Don’t go to my room! I’m working on something else!” I would try to scout out some other locale for the wake. John Wick (original L5R storyteller, then working more on Legend of the Burning Sands and 7th Sea), bless ‘em, came up with the brilliant idea of holding the wake in the Hilton, where he’d given RPG seminars earlier that day, and would be staging the L5R LARP session the next night. We scouted it out. By the time we got back from locating the room, it was obvious that the Kisada mourners were dead-tired, and the wake wouldn’t be a success if we did it then and there.

Enough people had come and talked to me about it, and been enthused by the idea, that I figured it was better to wait and do it right.

On Saturday, I went down to Kinko’s again and copied up another handout, this one telling people the wake had been postponed and would be held after the LARP, which I thought would be about 10. Late in the afternoon, I had a good thought to get everyone at the wake to sign my “Test of the Jade Champion” T-shirt. I got an indelible marker from another fan without too much asking around.

The wake almost got screwed over again when the room Wick and I had scouted was being prepped for something totally unrelated to GenCon, and we couldn’t use it. So I stuck up more signs, and used one of several little small conference rooms in the same area that the LARP was being held in. People began coming in, and I started getting them to sign the shirt.

The LARP ended shortly after midnight (earlier than some dire warnings I’d heard). The assembled people gathered and heard from three people who had killed Kisada.

Ree Soesbee got up first. As the current storyline director, she was the one who finally decided to do in the Great Bear. Ree described how she first saw Kisada in one of her booster packs. She looked at the cards and thought, “Wow, he’s pretty amazing. I wonder if he’ll join Crane...” The second time Ree saw Kisada was when he was coming over the hill, leading a huge Crab army in an attack on her last Crane province. (Cries of “Not in the face!” were heard from the audience.)

Ree also informed us that Kisada was known as “The Great Bear” not only because he was the biggest man in Rokugan, but because he was the hairiest man in Rokugan (at which point I lifted up my T-shirt to show my own rather hirsute chest).

I then drafted the person who played Kisada in the LARP (Warren Banks) to “lay in state” on the table at the front of the room while John Wick spoke about Kisada.

Wick said, “You know, this isn’t the first time Kisada’s died.” He originally was to have died in the Anvil of Despair expansion set, which was to have chronicled his encounter with Fu Leng at GenCon 1996. But sometime after Wick wrote that up, he got an angry phone call from Ryan Dancey (then head of FRPG): “What’s this sh*t about Kisada dying?!”

Wick went on to describe what happened when he went back to re-write the confrontation between Fu Leng and Kisada. Fu Leng took the Hantei sword and shoved it through Kisada’s guts, and suddenly Wick was surprised to find himself typing what Kisada said next:

“Is that all you f*ckin’ got?”

And that’s what Kisada (and the Crab) are all about: standing on the great walls of Kaiu, day after day, and saying to the Shadowlands (and anyone else trying to tear them down): “Is that all you got?”

After Wick was done, I let our “body” get back up and take a seat, and it was my turn. What follows is close to what I said:

“I asked John what the colour of mourning in Rokugan was, and was told it was white, so I’m going to put on the Test of the Jade Champion shirt, even though there’s now a lot of black on it.

“Long ago, a Crab lord -- perhaps even the very first Hida himself -- married and was about to start a family. He asked a monk -- maybe it was even Shinsei -- to bless his family. Shinsei thought, and said to Hida:

“‘Father dies, son dies, grandson dies.’

“A Dragon or Phoenix might have simply contemplated the words. A Crane or Scorpion would have thanked Shinsei eloquently. A Lion or Unicorn might have raised an eyebrow.

“But the Crab got up and said aloud what all of the others only thought. ‘Why have you wished death upon my family?’ he said.

“Shinsei looked up at Hida. ‘It is a great tragedy when a parent outlives a child. This is the way of things: for a family to disappear in this order, generation after generation.’

“Shinsei’s blessing to Hida reminds us that death is the way of things. But when a life is over, any man should be measured not only by his greatest highs, but also by his deepest lows.

“Hida Kisada stood on the walls and defended the Empire from the worst things you can imagine for decades.

“He sold his own son, Sukune, to those same forces.

“Great highs. Terrible lows. But no half measures. No compromise.

“Hida Kisada was a great man. An unforgettable man.

“Finally, I’ll let you all in on a little secret. I am not a playtester, but I can tell you that the original title of Kisada’s Funeral was Words Without Deeds. How do I know this? Kisada’s Funeral is my card. Now I know that some of you hate this card... [interrupted by applause from crowd] but I guess some of you don’t. In any case, I am very proud of that card. I hope that you agree that he got a memorable send off.”

I then invited everyone downstairs to the bar and said, “Live every day as though it were your last... because one day you will be right.” Several folks went down to the bar and were very loud and drank much beer until it closed. A good time was had by all.

On Sunday, John Zinser (head of AEG) told me, “Kisada’s wake was the event of the con.” He said about three new people who never would have tried L5R otherwise, stopped by the AEG booth after they’d heard we’d had a wake for one of the L5R characters.

Likewise, Ree stopped me the next morning and said, “Kisada came alive last night. We had a real, emotional wake... for a character who only existed on cardboard.” When she later announced the final four players in the Test of the Jade Champion (speaking in character as Doji Shizue), she said that Yakamo’s tetsubo had been brought directly from Kisada’s funeral pyre to the contest.

A couple of years later, John Wick wrote in a Gaming Outpost column, “Last year’s Gen-Con saw a wake for another L5R character: the Great Bear, Hida Kisada. I didn’t kill him - that was Ree’s job - but I was there. It was moving. Hard to breathe. We said a lot of pretty words - pretty to a Crab’s ears, anyway - and said our goodbyes to one of the biggest L5R characters in the history of the game.”

On Thursday night, before the wake, John Wick had said to me, “You know what gives you perspective, Zen? When you learn that one Magic expansion sold more cards than all the cards in your game put together.” After the wake, I always wanted to say to him, "Hey, John, do you think you’ll ever see over eighty people showing up after midnight to celebrate the memory of one of the Weatherlight crew?

"That gives you some perspective, too."