/l5r/ - Legend of the Five Rings General

Spooky Tranquil Shinomen Mori Edition.
>Topic: How spiritual do your games get?
Do you ever involve shenanigans from Sakkaku or ghosts from Gaki-do? If so are they an important feature of your campaigns.
What are your thoughts on the alternate setting of Togashi's Empire? Do you want a Night Parade of 100 Demons coming into your town and shining their butthole eyes at drunken samurai?

How are your games going and if you're not in one now, what type of game have you always wanted to play in or run with the system/setting?

The Trove (in case you don't have the books)
mediafire.com/folder/vx477quhxz4vt/Regend5Ling#btf4cvsidtj6ff

Have you made any new homebrew content? Tell us about it. Here are some from previous threads:
1d4chan.org/wiki/Veeky Forums_Custom_L5R_Minor_Clans

Previous thread

Other urls found in this thread:

discord.gg/yYXEw
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Togashi's Empire is easily my favorite alt-history setting from IH2. I think the Cat Empress plot is one of the coolest tidbits from that section.

I haven't used tricksters or ghosts yet, but I love animal spirits from Chikushudo having fun pretending to be humans in general. You can have a lot of fun with animal archetypes that way.

I'm focusing in on Yumeji as a big element in the campaign I'm running now. Party had their first weird foray into Yume-do last night,. They had a strange conversation with a Blue Lantern spirit that wanted to know why they prevented its assassination attempt on their Aunt, and then they talked to a bird spirit who had choice words for the Kuni shugenja and her make-up choices. They're starting to figure out why people seem to be either insomniacs or narcoleptic.

>I haven't used tricksters or ghosts yet, but I love animal spirits from Chikushudo having fun pretending to be humans in general. You can have a lot of fun with animal archetypes that way.

I've had a very uptight kitsune appear in several points of my games as both a magical fox and Totally A Real Samurai Guys. It is fun

>Togashi's Empire

If you're running more of a wuxia style type of campaign, it's perfect. Otherwise, It's OK.

i got my spine ripped out by a ghost, then i was revived by the tenth kami, and now i'm the envoy of meido and i have to go around telling ghosts to go back to meido

also i'm now effectively immortal but if i die it'll take like a hundred years for me to come back. i also can't reincarnate normally, and if i kill an innocent with my ghost slaying powers i die and they take my place :<

feels bad man

I'm the guy who was advertising a game in the last thread, and boy oh boy do I have some neat players and characters. Which one do you want to hear about first?

>Yojimbo with the scariest voice
>One Eyed Beauty
>Magistrate with a Tsundere Waifu
>The Unluckiest Yogo

The legend of Ikoma Hotsuma continues.

Please tell me you have room for one more player

What. What fucking acid is your GM on?

I want to hear about the married magistrate.

He's not married. She's a former fiancee of his and is now a Sworn Enemy because the guy set up her father for seppuku on orders from the Scorpion Clan.

we were at shiro ichiro in the shrine to the tenth kami and i was fighting some guy who was possessed by a maho-tsukai. we were trying to save the person who was possessed so i had him in a chokehold but then the ghost of the badger clan founder (i can't remember his name) was like 'okay so i should definitely kill him right' and i was like 'noooo' and jumped in the way when he reached in to pull out some organs, so he got my spine and i was dead but then we ended up saving him.

in the meantime the ghost was like 'noooooo what have you done' and then vanished, then ryoshun-kami showed up all 'sup' and the rest of the party was like 'what' and he was all 'yeah i'm the tenth kami check this out' and he revived me, and later on i found out all that envoy of meido junk and now i'm kinda like 'aaaaaaa'

also the spine that was ripped out of me was still there and i didn't want to grab it. i hope nobody else did :< well except for the eta that are supposed to clean that shit up

...

I heard Tsundere waifu?

Mercenary duellists who sometimes go in disguise in order to make another clan look strong incoming

Maybe, I'll post a discord link in a bit.

Well, first off he's not actually married, because he FUCKED IT ALL UP. Dude's really smitten with his betrothed, even though it's a political marriage, and she's pretty into him as well. Daidoji chick, so she's not TOTALLY uptight about the honor shit usually.

The problem is that Mr. Magistrate decides to inform on her father's less than stellar business dealing and may or may not have exaggerated about just how deeply involved her dad was. Waifu's dad commits seppuku and the waifu is understandably pissed as fuck at Mr. Magistrate, breaks off the engagement, and swears to gut him with a spear if she ever sees him again.

So his true love is also his sworn enemy. And she probably still loves him a bit too.

"I don't WANT to kill you in honorable combat or anything... baka."

Otherwise, the character is a pretty standard Soshi Magistrate.

Dammit, I didn't know you were also a ninja!

Who's going to suspect the detective of being the killer? Nobody, that's who.

why do those dragons have landing strips?

Everyone knows that Togashi was secretly an aircraft carrier.

Kantai Collection. It's Soryuu and Hiryuu.

Anyway, here's the discord link: discord.gg/yYXEw

I'm considering another player, but for a text based game four is a little tricky to manage.

Who do you guys want to hear about next?

>One Eyed Beauty
>The Yogo Who Likes Bonsai
>Mr. Scary Voice, Yojimbo For Above Yogo

Their names translate to dragons

Because Moto Naleesh is the darling of the court, and some clans found this funny.

They seem mad, bro.

The USS Iowa getting a shipgrill made a lot of non-japanese players butthurt as hell for some reason.

>Battleship
>Long flight deck

>The Yogo Who Likes Bonsai
Go on...

Uh...what game and why?

shipsluts and because reasons

Kantai collection, a game about fantasy ww2 naval shit.

As for why... waifus make mad dolla.

Now to be fair to the Yogo as a family, not ALL of them end up getting cursed mechanically speaking. They're sort of like the fat kids in gym class, nobody wants to get teamed up with them. They seem to attract bad luck, and as part of the character creation process, I had everyone roll on the heritage tables.

Only the Yogo ends up with a dishonorable ancestor, who currently is in a tree somewhere screaming for mercy.

Incidentally, the bonsai tree the Yogo takes around with him to keep him occupied when he isn't in court doing court things is from a cutting of that tree. His mask is also cut from a tree trunk, and you can see the rings and the like. It may or may not also be from said tree.

His wife also hates his guts incidentally, probably because she was married to a fucking Yogo.

Kantai Collection. It's about WWII ships fighting things as cute grills. Very popular and has a fuckton of doujins, fanart, and waifus and until recently only had Axis ships in it. Then Iowa dropped, and people went fucking INSANE.

Kantai Collection, a browser game where RNG is God, and there is no canon

Just forget the official stuff and check out the doujins and fanworks

So, what clan is best for someone who has no idea how to play or handle the setting? I take it they can't just play a peasant or something and ignore all that honour stuff.

Crab. Crab kill things on the fucking wall.

>Coming from DnD
Crab - disregard honour, acquire kills.

>I want to learn but don't know everything
Dragon - there'll be some standards apply to you, but occasional mistakes or oddities can be ignored based on your character's background (i.e. Kitsuki investigators use evidence, not testimony)

>A

>I don't want to be constrained by honour, but want to come to understand it
Scorpion - everyone expects you to be a dickass, and provided you don't betray everyone and play ball in court, you should do okay.

>I wanna be a barbarian
Unicorn

>I wanna play my dickass CE rogue in L5R
Seppuku family bushi

>Then Iowa dropped, and people went fucking INSANE.

You got any more butthurt to share? I know it isn't on thread topic but I really want to see. I can post samurai to help balance it out

...

Sadly not. You can search for it though, shouldn't be hard to find.

So it looks like I'm down to the last two.

>One Eyed Beauty
>Mr. Scary Voice

Are there any rules for heimin characters beyond monks, or (kami forbid!) eta?

The existence of the eta is probably the single greatest justification for the Kolat. The complicity of the Celestial Order in the consignment of eta to their role in society is morally abominable. The Kolat have fucked up in Rokugani history, but so have everyone else, their goals seem ultimately moral.

Scary voice please.

Morality is kinda irrelevant when there are literal descendants of the gods walking among people. This is not an intangible class division, many of the samurai class are literally better than the peasants. Not necessarily smarter, and certainly prone to hubris, but entitled to their positions.

Granted, the upheavals in Heaven since the Mantis was raised to Great Clan put a lot of doubt on "unflinchingly follow the Celestial Order OR ELSE"

Our Friendly Neighborhood Yojimbo is a pretty young guy - he's just out of training really, and he's basically the second most unlucky person in the group judging by backstory.

His brother showed shugenja abilities, and then accidentally had a fire kami nearly kill him, a Pheonix nearby, and burn down a fuckload of grain (and probably a few peasants). Mr. Scary Voice ended up getting his scary voice due to pretty horrible smoke inhalation but hey, at least he wasn't dead!

He's also got a few friends he met during the Topaz, and an ancient blood feud that might spark up again due to his ancestor purposefully dying in a duel to shame a Crane duelist.

On top of having pissed off a crane duelist, he's also got someone else gunning for him, but he's in the dark about it... at least for now.

He's specialized in polearms for that delicious initiative boost which combined with the Bayushi school really makes them good at kicking ass fast.

So that leaves miss one-eye

It's important to remember that mortals are the ones charged with changing destiny. If things are going to change, it will be them to do it, though at great sacrifice. Overthrowing the entire celestial order would probably end up killing most of the best and brightest of the peasants, and leave the least suited to try and run things afterwards. The Yobanjin would have a field day.

The existence of the samurai doesn't bother me nearly as much, because having an upper class composed of people who are objectively better isn't that bad. It'd make things pretty stable actually.

But the eta exist. A group of people consigned to being subhuman without any chance of moving up in the chain of being, at the mercy of any heimin or samurai who cared to be cruel to them without any recourse in the law, either of the land or in heaven. The eta perform functions that are necessary to society, like managing human waste and corpses, services without which disease would run rampant, and while everyone else enjoys the consequences of their actions they spit on them for being impure. It's no wonder some of them turn to blood magic, the Celestial Order is nothing but a punishment for them.

>A group of people consigned to being subhuman without any chance of moving up in the chain of being
If they follow their destiny correctly, they'll be reincarnated to a higher position.

If they're good eta they might become samurai in their next life. Or heimin.

Yep. Her player is sad because apparently, she's the least interesting by description.

To put short, she's... interesting.

She's probably the second youngest member of the party and the last of our 'Let's hit things HARD' people involved in bringing law and order back to the poppy fields. One Eye lost her eye doing something incredibly stupid, and as such uses her mask to help cover it up. She's got a Shosoru blade, a free rank in stealth due to a good heritage roll, and the Dangerous Beauty advantage.

The really interesting combo comes from her other three disadvantages, Insensitive and Touched by the Void. Basically, she'll become dazed if she ever tries to help someone out, as she needs to spend a void point to do it. Ouch. Then there's the fact that despite basically running the fuck away from her crab mom trying to set her up with some nice Hiruma boy she's got the disadvantage 'Fascination: Marriage.'

I have to say, we've got an awful lot of love related problems in this party. Maybe they'll need the opium to chill out.

Whoops, Touched by the Void. Not touch of the void.

Don't worry, GM-sama. Your void can touch me all day.

The soul of an eta may move up in the Celestial Order after their death, but the soul is only one part of what a person is. What is mourned when a person dies in a world with reincarnation? All of the other parts that made a person who they were. The mind and personality of an eta live in misery for all of their existence.

L-lewd

Void is the lewdest element after Air, which acting and seduction runs on.

Air also includes Strength, thus making it the Element of High Impact Sexual Violence.

Wait, no, that's Water. Goddammit I haven't played this in ages. BRB sudokuing.

It is okay user. We forgive your shame with your death

(while laughing quietly at it in private quarters)

water has the spell that lets you change into animals

i'll let you figure out what you could do with something like that ;)

That also raises some legit questions. Is fucking a sapient but non-human species bestiality? What if it is a horse but that horse has the brain of a samurai? Are we cutting Supergirl and Comet's gordian knot?

Is that why Unicorn Shugenja specialize in water?

> What if it is a horse but that horse has the brain of a samurai?
Then the horse commits seppuku for failing its rider.

intercourse for any reason other than procreation is dishonorable and so any thoughts to the contrary should not be entertained

It's not honorable, but it is glorious ;)

Our game is heavily influenced by Usagi Yojimbo, so while various yokai appear in the game they aren't central focuses and are always very dangerous.

Any action taken for selfish purposes is dishonorable. Clearly though if you can find an altruistic reason, or even a beneficial one, it can be excused.

If you go by the premise that it's for the other person's pleasure, that makes it altruistic, right?

PUT UP THAT DISCORD

They're full.

Yeah, I'm just starved for l5r

Who isn't?

It's a constant struggle. So much flaking and unreliability makes finding stuff that lasts very challenging.

...

I run a game so I'm good. I'd actually invite people in here if I could manage one more player and I thought you'd not flake out. Mostly the former but a bit of the latter. If someone drops maybe I'll recruit new blood from in here

Ikko-ikki campaign when
Let's attain the pure land and fuck some samurai shit up

You can't be the player you want to be without having someone else run the game. I've been the person running the game before. It is not what I wish to do now.

Loan Sword Ashigaru when?

And that is why you probably won't find a game.

A player starting a game doesn't work. Going "Hey guys, let's start an L5R game, nose goes not GM." is not how you get to play L5R.

Are there any monk rebellions in canon, incidentally? Just "fuck your sinful shit, we're taking over"?

Rolled 16 (1d60)

Ikoma!
...Ugh. Lion most boring clan.

Not really.
There's the Heresy of the Five Rings, which was almost there when the Five Ringers started getting violent and pushy, but then they were declared a heresy and shamed to death.

I like Lion. You just need to decide if you're going to subvert stereotype or buy in so hard you become a living contrast with other characters.

Huh. How did you get there, Spider image? That was meant to be something else

A likely story.

I assure you, I don't know what you mean.

>Are there any rules for heimin characters beyond monks, or (kami forbid!) eta?
Start with rings at 1, get 8xp for experience. It's in the Void chapter.

OTOH, it's possible/hinted at that should the kolat ever truly succeed, they'll bring about the end of everything.

That means FUUUUUUUUUUUCK THE SPIDERRRRRRRRRR

Sweet Jesus that's harsh. The Monkey Clan founder was a heimin, wasn't he? Their bushi school is downright cheesy nowadays, he came a long way with his starting rings of 1 and 8 experience points.

At least they're not 1E ninja. Jesus fuck, ninja.

>The Monkey Clan founder was a heimin, wasn't he?

He clearly just gathered lots of battlefield exp

Or his samurai sooooouuuuulllll gave him the ability to use ronin rules even though he was a dirty peasant.

If the excuse made is that people lower in the Celestial Order can mistakenly have souls of a higher rank, doesn't that make the treatment of eta even worse?

No, because it's self correcting.
If they were born an eta but were actually supposed to be somewhere higher, then it's either because fate needs it to be that way (Most likely so they don't get noticed by anyone /anything) or because it's some kind of residual kharmic balance that's not harsh enough to be worth getting the paperwork approved by Emma-O.

So if an eta moves up in the world, they were never really an eta at all? In that case, in a sort of timeless zen sense, samurai can choose to live in an era where there are no true Eta whenever they want. Fortune favors the mortals, I guess.

>So if an eta moves up in the world, they were never really an eta at all?
Yes. This is the basic justification for any social mobility, since the system, at the basic level, allows for none at all. Of course, there is mobility here and there, so the best way to combine "No social mobility ever" and "But really, there is some" is to say that you're just correcting mistakes or recognizing something that has always been true.
When an emperor makes a new minor clan, that clan's founder has retroactively always been a member of that clan since the day they were born. It just hasn't been recognized until now.
Sometimes it's just an easy excuse to promote people, other times it's actually true.

Spent some time working on my own set of mass battle rules, as promised a couple threads back. It's not ready to show off yet, but I thought I'd solicit feedback on a feature I was thinking of.

I'm making battle into a mixed trait skill. In the pre-battle preparation stage, which represents the relative positioning and planning of the armies, I'm using intelligence as the trait. For sudden maneuvers and changes of plan, I'm using perception. For non-tactical rallying and rousing speeches, it'll be awareness.

Any thoughts on this? I feel pretty solid on the first two, but I'm considering whether "will" might not be better for the "HOLD THE LINE!" style morale rolls. Whatever decision happens, it ends with one of the Elemental Rings being left out, either Earth or Air respectively.

The most elegant way to handle the individual unit combats would be with some sort of roll and keep based system, but that'd make the theorycrafting harder, so I think I'm going to stick with a contested 3d6 plus modifiers bell curve for fighting soldiers. There will be no base strengths, only advantages. Most of the strategic parts will be mitigating advantages or giving them temporarily. For example, cavalry gain an advantage on open ground, which can be mitigated by the successful general in a battle turn if that's what he uses his success for.

>How are your games going

My current party (an Utaku Mounted Infantry dude, a Soshi (Emerald) Magistrate / party leader, a Fudoist nun, and my Miya Akodo Bushi) is investigating a Spider Clan infiltration/subversion that is centered around arming rebellious lords with blackpowder weapons. The adventure is quite literally a blast because the Utaku guy and the Fudoist chick both have a tendency of blowing shit up and they untied their extraordinary... hmmm... 'aptitude' to maximize the amount of explosions in each session.

In the last session, my character rallied a bunch of lesser lords to defeat one of the bigger villains in a pretty darn epic Mass Battle. Even though he was the army general, my character personally took the enemy banner and killed the enemy general (he was a no-name miniboss, but it was still cool) in a duel. Shit was cash, especially when the nun got the 'A Clear Shot' battle event with a disposable rocket launcher - oh man, that poor enemy officer couldn't see it coming!

By the way, we are running a homebrew setting with a continent-spamming Rokugan and ten Great Clans led by the ten Kami, as well as a super-powered Emerald Empire led by the eleventh Kami, the Sun Empress Tsudao. It is... kinda like a long story.

...