Daidoji Yomito

The below is a writeup for an villainous NPC that I created for Legend of the Five Rings, a Crane samurai-ko who used the law of Kiri-sute Gonen to basically indulge her sociopathy; it was intended as a criticism of the law, which wasn't particularly detailed in the L5R corebooks. In the Wikipedia article I'm linking, it's pretty clear that striking down a commoner had a bunch of repercussions and, if abused, could easily lead to the forced seppuku of the samurai in question, but that's not information that I had at the time that I wrote the below. 

So, then: Write the truth, or the legend? 

Daidoji Yomito

Yomito is an excellent samurai-ko. She's honorable, brave, fights well and comports herself in court, as befits a member of the Crane clan. She can be charming, subtle, belligerent or demure as the situation dictates. She's been marked as somebody that the Crane clan may call upon in the future to uphold the honor of the clan, a potential clan champion - she's even gone on a warrior's journey across Rokugan in order to develop her skills.

 

She's a sociopath. And a murderer. And she gets away with it because of Rokugan's social structure.

 

Yomito realized at an early age that the peasantry were not like her; she was samurai, and they were the peasantry, and the samurai ruled over the peasantry. When she split the head of a peasant child at the age of ten - not for any particular reason - the consequences were hushed up by her doting father. A little water cleansed the bokken, she was lightly scolded and that was all. Why should anything further befall her? Obviously she was provoked, and by a peasant.

 

After her gempekku, she lured an ox-driver into the woods and stabbed him in the stomach, then watched him die. When she was betrothed, she decapitated a peasant farmer - the father of two - and claimed that he'd stumbled into her. When her betrothed died from a snakebite near his bed (how sad for her!), she vented her fury on a pair of nightsoil collectors whose odor offended her. Nobody said anything. They were just peasants. When she slew a husband and wife whose porcelain tea sets were the pride of the Daidoji, on the pretext that they had been rude to her, it was agreed that it would be a good idea for her to go on a warrior's journey somewhere else. (And vent her fury on peasants who weren't nearly as valuable to the Crane.)

 

Yomito knows that the peasantry are considered a resource to the lords of the lands that she travels through, so her murders follow a nomadic pattern. Her typical operandum is to move into an area, engage in a few first-blood duels - just to establish her bonafides as a duellist - and then to settle in as just another ronin passing through the area. Then, drunk peasants start getting remarkbly clumsy around her. Who would doubt the word of a Crane duellist on a warrior's quest? Yomito is very good at professing innocence, and her high Honor and Status give her a lot of protection. Stoked on her seeming invincibility, she'll plan a spree murder, execute it, then move on before anybody can find her. 

 

Despite her intelligence, she's fully capable of making stupid mistakes that can incriminate her. If she kills a peasant on impulse, she'll use her katana, despite the fact that it identifies the murderer as a samurai, and a trained one at that. Even if she uses methods that don't identify her as a samurai, there are other clues - the force put into the blow of a wooden club, or the use of a piece of Crane-woven sash as a garrotte. She's already been identified as a sociopathic murderer by at least two Imperial magistrates, but one is dead (in a duel) and the other was recalled on an unrelated political matter and hasn't been able to find her again. 

 

How long she can continue her murders is up to the players.