Players: Pat, Josh, Jamie, Cy

We tried out Mountain Witch, GM-less. We rotated GMing around the table a few scenes at a time, and did a Chapter refresh after each GM rotation. I'm skipping over a lot of mountain climbing and bandit killing here in the summary.

As always, we were a group of Ronin, hired by the empire for a large bounty to climb Mt Fuji and kill the Evil Mountain Witch.

The game ended up centering around Yoshi Tomo's mysterious son, Ichiban, and Mitsuhide's equally mysterious love Satori. Ichiban had been touched by the spirit world in some way, and his father hoped to free him from that curse and protect him. Honored Sensei Kaede Tsuro took the boy under his wing during the trip, teaching him to still his mind. During their trek up the mountain, the ronin came upon a home with an old man tending a small garden, and his beautiful daughter playing the biwa. Mitsuhide recognized her as his love, the girl he'd taken up the sword and been driving to become a samurai for. But her stories of how she'd come to be way up here on the mountain weren't very clear. Mitsuhide had Keisuke prepare an alchemical potion to get her to spill the truth. She seemed to think she was living in a village near where Mitsuhide grew up, a village that had been wiped out by plague and burned to the ground years before.

After turning to the spirits to guide them up the mountain, the group came finally upon the Witch's fortress, a huge ice castle in deep drifts of snow. The entrance was guarded by two ogres, wearing the flayed faces of Satori and her father. Tomo recognized them as death Oni, the evil mirror of a living soul split asunder by death. Satori's love twisted into a strange hunger, they tore into Mitsuhide, nearly killing him before Tomo intervened, threatening to kill the other Satori if they fought on. The Oni considered this, and promised to let the group past if Tomo would bring the Oni Satori's Biwa. Tomo returned to the hut, asked the Biwa of Satori, and brought it back.

But Tsuro used this distraction to lead Ichiban away from Tomo into the fortress itself, setting off pursuit from Tomo. Tsuro kept ahead long enough to present the child to the Mountain Witch! As payment, the witch put Tsuro's face onto an Oni, allowing Tsuro eternal life and granting the Witch a loyal servant in his death Oni. Tomo and Ichiban struggled against the witch, but without others to help, they quickly succumbed, and Ichiban was crowned as the Witch's prince.

Meanwhile, at the gates, Keisuke and Mitushide continued their battle against the ogres. But they were not strong enough. With Mitushide close to death, Satori appeared walking up the path. Her Death Oni turned towards her as Mitsuhide begged her to return to safety. He chased the ogre, but was not fast enough. He was forced to watch as the Oni consumed his love, destroying itself in the process as they were churned into a roiling puddle of blood.


All in all, I had a good time. I think it might have worked better with a single GM and three PCs, but I'm not sure if the Dark Fates would have driven things enough then. I might have made conflicts a little too challenging, but I wanted to push people to value Trust as the main way to get things done. I wish we'd been able to get Pat's story more integrated into the game. I'd definitely give it a few more tries.

So why *was* Satori on the mountain, anyway? Was the man really her father?

And whose grave was it? Really her mother?

Satori (and her mother and father) were dead. But their spirits were trapped here by the Mountain Witch, so he could use their death Oni as servants. In my mind, when people normally die, they just move on. But if the yin and yang get split, they can be kept in this world. The yin parts were kept in the circle by the mountain witch, to keep living their lives. While he used the Yang parts as Oni in his hordes. But the Yang parts hunger for freedom, trying to consume the Yin so they can move on after death. Tsuro had specifically bargained with the witch to be split like this and keep his death oni from coming after him, so he could "live" on forever (in exchange for Ichiban.)

The mother had died somehow (leaving the circle, suicide, something I hadn't plan that far ahead) freeing the Oni from the gates as well (the second torii arch you found at the gate.)

In an important way, Mitsuhide freed Satori from her eternal bondage to the mountain witch. I was planning to push more towards that as a decision for him, or a bargain from the witch. Trying to have him decide if he would rather live on with (a shadow of) her forever if it meant she should be dead, and the Mountain Witch would be able to use the Oni for dark deeds.