Player Characters

Tetsuo Akane

Tetsuo Akane was born in 1219 A.D. to Mitsuo and Mami Akane in the village of Morinomura, the youngest child and only boy out of four sisters. An accomplished swordsman as a young man, Mitsuo embraced the path of the samurai in feudal Japan during the Kamakura shogunate. In 1221 A.D., former emperor Go-Toba chose to stage a rebellion to reclaim the throne and overthrow the shogunate which Mitsuo and his older brother Masaru, also a samurai of renown, supported. When Go-Toba’s rebellion failed, he was exiled to the Oki Islands to live out the remainder of his years.

The Oki Islands functioned as a traditional place of exile for nobles who came into conflict with the imperial court. The islands’ temperate climate and plentiful resources allowed exiled nobles to reside with a comfortable lifestyle during their banishment. Both Mitsuo and Masaru were assigned at various times over the next ten years as honor guards to the former emperor as he lived in peace writing poetry and embracing sword making. Leading up to the uprising, Go-Toba invited some of the best swordsmiths in the land to the imperial palace to craft swords with him. Using the talents learned from these smiths, Go-Toba continued to craft weapons in peace on the Oki Islands, creating Swiftsteel and Razorsword. Staying true to the code of the samurai and accepting their positions with dignity, Mitsuo and Masaru were a small group of samurai tasked with protecting the former emperor during his exile. Impressed with their exceptional duty that many samurai would consider beneath their station, Go-Toba bequeathed Swiftsteel to Mitsuo and Razorsword to Masura as parting gifts for their obligations of protections afforded to the former emperor.

Returning to their homes in the village of Morinomura in western Kyushu, Mitsuo and Masaru lived a simple life as representatives of the shogunate while raising their families. While Masura’s wife never bore him a son, Mitsuo elected for Tetsuo to take the path of the samurai ensuring a formal education as well as training in martial arts, horseback riding, archery and sword use. However, life changed in 1232 A.D., when the village awoke to an unnatural darkness that covered the land. With a bright flash, the darkness lifted, and the villagers found themselves in a different environment, no longer in Japan. It wasn’t until later after the village suffered many casualties from starvation, plague and monsters did the small population come to understand they had been transported to the Tortured Lands, a barren area in the northernmost Moonsea region in north Faerûn. Even when scouts did not return, the villagers continued to eek out a meager life attempting to maintain normalcy. Tetsuo grew in stature and embraced the samurai lifestyle becoming a powerful warrior in his own right. When Mitsuo died during a hill giant raid, Masaru continued Tetsuo’s training bequeathing Swiftsteel to his nephew. More and more casualties occurred until heroes from Hillsfar were able to make peace with the village and help its inhabitants emigrate to other areas of the Sword Coast, where the common language of Japanese was supplanted by the languages of Faerûn races. With his family members and others perishing from village raiders or strange unexplainable diseases, Tetsuo, Masaru, Mami, and Tetsuo’s remaining sisters, Kaori and Hiromi, were the last of the residents of Morinomura to relocate to a settlement outside of Hillsfar. Having sustained wounds weeks earlier, Masaru did not survive the move and bequeathed Razorsword to Tetsuo as the older warrior had no offspring to hand the weapon down to. Promising his family an answer to why Morinomura had been transported to Faerûn, Tetsuo left his loved ones in the care of a local dignitary and traveled to Baldur’s Gate to find answers and a possibility of a way to return to Japan. While traveling from Baldur’s Gate to Waterdeep via ship, Tetsuo and several other adventurers were magically transported to a Japan not completely different from his own