Samurai

In the samurai campaign, obviously enough, the characters are samurai or ronin, and here you have the same sort of division as you had in the pirates/outlaws campaign.

If the characters are samurai, their usual adventures are likely to be missions for their lord. An ongoing campaign might deal with the lord's campaign to become ruler of all the land (while the PCs maneuver for power beneath him, possibly with the intention of removing and replacing him later on); the campaign might instead deal with expeditions into unknown lands (such as the usual player-character setting, which creates, just like in the Amazons description above, the opportunity for a "clash of cultures" mini-series).

If the characters are ronin, their usual adventures could be mercenary actions as they play a part in warfare in their land; or the campaign could be an exercise in outlawry, as with the pirates and outlaws description above. These ronin character could be noble samurai driven into a lawless and lordless state, or could be honorless bad-guy ronin with no interests beyond survival, wealth, and killing people.

Either way, if you intend to run a samurai campaign, you ought to buy the Oriental Adventures game supplement, an extensive AD&D® game treatment of the world of oriental role-playing. You won't have to adapt everything in it to your AD&D 2nd Edition campaign, but you'll find useful material there anyway.

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