Thank you for the review, and a lot of meat here for me to consider!
With respect to aimlessness, I think I have to bite that bullet. I hope players will consider success for themselves, and I expect some will try to save everybody, enrich themselves, gain power in the village, or simply take the blows as they come. (The ronin act as a foil to the party, whatever they choose, because they are also “adventurers” of a sort.)
That being said, I think you’re right I need to have some more detailed wants & needs, maybe even possible moves. A ton of the interactivity here relies on GMs playing the villagers “to the hilt,” following their desires. If Ojin didn’t get anybody to the bozu dolls on the first day, I’d have him asking refugees to do it on the second, and have the refugees asking him why nobody has helped him yet. It ought to come across that Ojin would be upset with someone sheltering in the shrine, too… You’ve given me much to think about for after-judging revisions. In an earlier version of the module, I had much more written for the characters, but I couldn’t fit it with the schedule of events added later.
All your advice for layout seems dead on to me, and I thank you for it. The weight of the Jost calendar headings was me trying to lend them a kind of movie quality, but they’re out of whack with the weight of… all the other Jost in the PDF. I don’t know I have the heart to get rid of my brackets, though (and I’d have to—I find em-dashes too useful to get rid of them, either!).
Thank you for the thoughtful review. The time you take does not go unappreciated. <3