If there's one thing that Legend of the Five Rings does right, it's moral dilemmas.
I'll admit right up front that what I know about Oriental culture can comfortably fit into a backpack; I know the basics, but most of what I know comes from L5R and secondary sources. I can tell you that the writers on L5R have been carefully detailing the way that Rokugani culture works, which is apparently a blend of Japanese and Chinese cultures - rules-based, shame-based, honor-based. And it's the difference between our culture and theirs that provides the moral conflict.
A man has a woman killed as revenge against some petty slight - but as a samurai, he's well within his rights to do so. A samurai kills a lowborn peasant for using his discarded arow quiver as a feed bag - again, within his rights, but we'd consider it cold-blooded murder. A sixteen-year old girl kills herself for failing to pass her rites of passage - but in Rokugan, for the Matsu clan, that's expected of her. (Well, plus she fully expects to be reincarnated.)
Void in the Heavens is about the same kind of moral conflict. I'm not sure, however, if it's going to have the same impact on the PCs that you'll run it through just because of the particular nature of the moral conflict.
What's it's basically about is this: The Oracle of Fire - a human who shares part of the soul of the Dragon of Fire, and whose mastery over fire magic is indisputable - retires to a cave near a Scorpion castle in order to prepare to pass his soul along to the next Oracle of Fire. A Scorpion woman happens onto him, and discovers that he intends to give the Oracle-hood to a lowly peasant girl. (An eta, actually, but Sengoku says that referring to somebody as an eta is akin to calling somebody the N-word - at least, if you're in Japan. I figure that I'll call her a lowly peasant girl.)
Using the same quick thinking that gets the Scorpion clan tossed out of Rokugan's swinging front door, rowdy-drunk style, on an almost annual basis, she attempts to seduce him, planning to take his power and become the next Oracle of Fire. Since the Oracles aren't familiar with human emotions, he falls for it, only to realize that he's been suckered by a Scorpion. Going mad with grief, he descends on the nearby Scorpion lands and proceeds to kick the hell out of it.
That's where the PCs come in. The first scene involves a combat with a pair of creatures created from pure fire, who originate from a rather unusual source; it's not nearly as much a straight beat-'em-up as you'd think. (Thank Christ; combat in L5R is lethal.)
After getting the Scorpion's story on why the Oracle of Fire is so honked off, the characters ascend a mountain that's been severely warped by the Oracle's rage, get the incoherent story from a grief-stricken and insane Oracle, and are then sent to fetch the peasant girl.
Here's the central crux of the adventure:
The decision is whether to support the Oracle's decision to give the Oracleship to the eta girl, which should be morally shocking to somebody raised in a Rokugani culture, or whether to go with the Scorpions, who are convinced that the Oracle is insane - but the Scorpions aren't trustworthy, and everybody knows it.
As the book describes, the samurai that the characters play are supposed to be absolutely horrified that the Oracle of Fire is going to hand over the reins of being an Oracle to a peasant girl - a peasant girl from a family that hauls around dead bodies, making her practically an untouchable. But, the average gaming group lives in a society where discrimination based on family origin, race, sexuality, so on and so forth is considered a mortal sin, usually practiced by drunken inbred cannibal morons.
What I'm getting at, essentially, is that if the players are going to correctly role-play their experience, they're going to have to act as social bigots, which a lot of people are going to be uncomfortable with. The only justification for disliking peasants is because they handle dead flesh, so making a logical case for not letting the peasant girl have the Oracle-ship is going to be difficult. In order to provide a good moral dilemma, both branches have to be equally difficult. In this scenario, one side is going to be obvious unless the characters really want to curry the favor of the Scorpions.
There is a sidebar describing how the GM should play this up, but I imagine that most players are going to regard the justification in the same way as they'd react to Satan himself tempting the players to eat the forbidden ice cream - they know what's right even if somebody's trying to talk them out of it. Unless they're really good role-players, you may have trouble establishing two viable choices.
What you could do, come to think of it, is turn the girl from a lowly peasant to an older thief, one who can't necessarily be trusted. It'll give the characters a better reason to potentially mistrust the Oracle's decision, his insanity and her social status aside, and I imagine that the players will be much happier with it.
Anyways, the adventure moves from the central choice of the adventure to a final confrontation between the Scorpions and the Oracle of Fire; the player characters will be involved no matter what, and anybody starving for some samurai hoo-hah will be amply satisfied by the subsequent fight. The aftermath will leave the GM with a good number of decent story hooks that relate to the original objective. I'm really not sure about how the shift of Oracles affects the metaplot of L5R, for that matter - I'm not nearly a good enough scholar to tell you.
Is the scenario worth buying? I would say yes, absolutely. It's not a bad scenario by any stretch of the imagination, and it's got some really neat encounters within it, but the central hook is going to take a lot of good role-playing in order for the scenario to come off. But all it'll take is a little fine-tuning for the scenario to sing.
-Darren MacLennan
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