/l5rg/ - /l5r/ - Legend of Five Rings General

A fantasy setting that uses Japan (and chunks of the rest of Asia) as its crib sheet/framework instead of Europe. 4E Core and Emerald Empire are all you NEED, but you'd be well served read Great Clans as well. There's a LOT of setting information out there.The Spider Clan are controversial at best, so be careful with them (or just truncate them entirely; it's not particularly difficult).

Hurls internally

What does L5R do well, mechanically?

Lethal, high-impact combat.

Mechanically, it captures the feel of the setting quite well. Fights are dangerous things and the way stats and skills are handled reflect the semi-magical nature of humans in the setting.
The balance isn't perfect, but it is better than you'd expect from something with this many unique class-like character progression schemes. Spellcasters aren't extremely overpowered and can't directly replace other characters, and there are fluffy ways for a GM to reign them in without being too meta if they do break things over their magically charged knees.

Caveat on balance: It's decent enough within one social group. Great Clan schools are all mostly okay, but they collectively shit on Minor Clan schools, which themselves collectively shit on Ronin, who shit on anything that isn't a samurai or monk.

What do you mean by "high-impact"?

>stats and skills are handled reflect the semi-magical nature of humans in the setting
Can you elaborate on this?

If the guy you're fighting gets one solid hit in you FALL DOWN, or at least are so seriously injured that beating him becomes increasingly difficult.

This is dubbed the "Death Spiral" effect by fans.

>>What do you mean by "high-impact"?
you heard me.

Every stat is connected to a "ring", which is an elemental concept. Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. There's one physical and one mental stat within each of the elemental rings, and increasing both is required to increase the Ring itself. Your Earth Ring affects how much damage you can take, your Water Ring affects how fast you move, and all of them are affected by and affect magic.
There's also the fifth Ring, Void, which is entirely standalone. It gives you Void Points, which are like fate points or destiny points or what have you. Only humans have this strong connection to the Void.
Skills are more related to how the culture actually handles education, with specific groupings that are universal within the culture, but not outside of it. Rokugani swordsmanship uses a different skill with different mastery effects than any given gaijin swordsmanship skill.
A core part of normal characters are Techniques, which are semi-supernatural, well, techniques. Special, secret ways to fight, or argue, or cast magic that ONLY students of your School know. The strong cultural focus on ongoing education is linked to character progression. You get better because you went back to your sensei and learned more, not because you magically got the next ability out of the aether. Your School is a combination preschool, grade school, middle school, high school, college, and grad school, and is at least as important as family and feudal ties.

>preschool
Minor quibble. A child's parents are supposed to take them for the first seven years.

The parents are primary caregivers for sure, but they do prep them for their school, and often the little kids will play with slightly older children who are already in School.
On average, a kid bound for a bushi school is going to have a more rough and tumble early childhood.

>What do you mean by "high-impact"?

He means it's deadly combat fairly easy to die in 1 or 2 shots as a starting character and it leads to a fairly grueling death spiral.

It's not ridiculous D&D HP.

Its do DND as Dwarf Fortress is to base builders.

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Crane be limp-wristed as fuck. Didn't anyone teach this bitch how to hold a sword?

>tfw you'll never be an all Kitsuki-family party and play Law and Order: Rokugan edition.

Crane got cut. I doubt they teach them how to hold a sword when you've lost.

He needed to go smelt more metal to get swole.

Also stop bleaching his eyebrows I guess.

Goddamn it, now I can't stop looking at it. I'm going to have to check all my Crane art. Thanks, user

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Has anyone ever ran the 'tournament of Minor Clans" before, and if so, any house rules or changes I should do? Or any tips and suggestions otherwise, like for prizes or whatever.

>What do you mean by "high-impact"?
You can die in a single attack, it'll average around 2-3 though.

Not even joking.

Not all Crane bleach. Some are naturally white-haired. It's considered a sign of power in shugenja.

Also, it's likely that some pluck their eyebrows entirely and paint on a replacement.

Why does HOR3 use 4e rules but set itself in 1137 and have Toturi on the Throne?

Because the time period for each edition of the RPG is only the default, not the sum total of what that edition can accomplish.
4e itself has two entire sourcebooks for playing in other eras (Including some theoretical and what-if scenarios).
Also, I'm pretty sure HOR is one of those alternate timelines.

Because they play with an alternate history that kicks off before the lore went to shit. IIRC AEG made that a cannon alt history setting in Imperial Archives?

Imperial Histories.

Would you recommend the post-Hidden Emperor setting? I want to run a few games and these seem to be the only 4e premades around.

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If you bleach you think you'd remember to do your eyebrows too.

I've done it, but I ignore the dumbest stuff and don't play it up. And rewrite other things I hate. Basically you can seriously run a game set in any era, or in one of those nice still in between times, but as a GM you have to know what dumb is to be found and how you personally want to deal with it.

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why does the horse wear a mask?

horse dick

No one cared who she was until she put on the mask.

Why does anyone care who the horse is?

What's going on?

Because it passed Scorpion horse gempukku

Yeah you gotta remember the age of the person writing it. Kids were watching the animu while he was probably being a weeb for Shogun and Rising Sun and shit.

I fucking loved Shogun, even though it is about as historically accurate as L5R is, but if that was what Wick was reading he had a very weird interpretation of their ultra selfish/pragmatic honor in that book.

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That doesn't look like a normal oni. I like the idea that the Scorpion's pit vomits up more Indian themed monsters due to that being where Kali died. I'm going to include that in my game now since it is set a century after the Destroyer War and ignores most of the canon since to try and do an AU thing specifically for my group

The one from the other angle is great too

I love Ki no Oni's design. Something about how strange and different it is compared to other oni

I always liked the Oni no Tsukakoro.
It's just a rolling bonecage (covered in spikes) that ricochets off people until it can tangle someone's limbs in itself. Then it manifests tentacles, holds them down, and digests them on the spot.

Ah, good ol'Oni no Tsukakoro. Brings back fond memories of "Mirror, Mirror".

Man, I wish I had "Bearers of Jade" and "Way of the Shadowlands". Those old First Edition books were so strange and weird and awesome.

>Brings back fond memories of "Mirror, Mirror".

youtube.com/watch?v=1AfNOKQdY-U ?

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Not as immediately delightful, sadly

There's no shame in delayed delightfulness.

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There is any School focused in the Firearms of Iron Rokugan? Oficial or Houseruled?

Read the clan specific firearms.

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It really triggers me when I see Crane without dyed hair. Hayaku died for your sins. Show some respect.

It isn't compulsory or anything.

app.roll20.net/join/1485553/toeMpg

Okay fagmos. Starting at the Topaz Championship. If someone wins they will be more powerful than everyone else. If your character dies you rejoin the party with reduced XP. Schedule pending.

Oh, and no ninja.

Schedule is really important, especially relative to the time zone too.

Made a thread in the roll20 for scheduling.

>Dyed hair
>Not natural white/silver

Not all Cranes are from that one family.

Text or voice?

IC will be text. Optional VoiP for OOC/coordination. Probably be using a discord server.

I've found a lot of people you recruit online aren't comfortable with voice. Maybe use a second text based service just for the OOC channel or something?

Discord does voice and text. It will be used for OOC.

Which makes it really annoying for those that prefer voice. So much typing.

I don't like talk unless it is for /v/ games. I stutter and talk over myself when I get excited so kind of ruin dramatas for important IC scenes. Coordination OOC would probably fly with me, but some people are even more reclusive.

>I stutter and talk over myself when I get excited
Yeah, I fell you man, so do I. Ironically for L5R, I have the opposite accent/speech impediment common to asians, my Rs come out as Ls.

I still prefer voice, because I just don't care, and writing so much is a pain in the dick. Reading too, if you've been away for a minute and need to catch up or something.

So if L5R is so deadly, how long does a typical campaign even last? Do you just endlessly cycle through characters?

You just don't get into a lot of fights, and you're a lot more careful when you do.

There's no such thing as a dungeon crawl in L5R. There's no endless featureless rooms of monsters for you to slaughter for loot.

It's only deadly if you lose.

Really, in most skirmishes, one of your dudes will finish off their enemy first, then help others mop up. If the opposite happens, well, either you manage to run away (shamefur dispray) or TPK.

Duels are rarely to the death, but you shouldn't be throwing duels around like candy.

oops wrong vader.

So is there no monster fighting whatsoever in L5R, mostly courtly intrigue and mano e mano duels? Because if a skilled human can kill you in one hit how on earth do you defeat a monster?

Oh no, there are monsters. The shadowlands and spirit realms are there for a reason. It's just that monster in L5R deserve respect / fear and disgust.

Monsters are incredibly rare and they are very dangerous. You generally don't fight anything of that caliber until you've got a significant amount of XP under your belt and you're more resilient.

In a generic campaign, the majority of fights you're gonna get into are with people less skilled than you are. Peasant infantry, criminals, maybe some zombies or other lesser shadowlands creature like goblins.

You don't usually get one-shot by people. You CAN, but only if they are incredibly lucky. On average you last for 2-4 hits, but the first hit is the most important, because wound penalties are a bitch.

This one-hit-kill thing is only true at low levels and under specific circumstances. An unoptimized guy attacking with a subpar weapon will need as many as 6-7 hits (or even more) to kill a prepared PC.

That's when you send in the Witch Hunters, Vindicators, or Inquisitors.

But seriously though, in groups or when everybody's at round IR3 is when you start tangling with the nasties in my experience.

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That first line sounds very 40k. I know what you mean, but still.

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So does anyone else have trouble remembering to use glory rules? Honor I award/take at the end of a session, barring some egregious sin or major act, letting me look back over events without having to stall the game by checking evry few minutes, but I for some reason am garbage at doing the same for honor. Should I just print off the table and tape it to my forehead or something, am I a retard?

There really shouldn't be rules for glory. Just try to remember what the party has done and have people recognize them every now and then.

Hey, what's the latest info we have from FFG?

The latest news is that we'll get news at Gencon.