L5R General

Akodo best husbando family.

So what is best waifu family?

Hida, of course
Either perfect housewaifu that you protect, or muscular bushi waifu that protects you

This is canon.

A scorpion bride will only ever marry once, and is extremely loyal as long as that loyalty is repaid. If you don't fuck around on her, she'll be a top tier waifu. Go for Bayushi for maximum chances of dangerous beauty.

Doji are generally charming, elegant, cultured waifus, but they have the disadvantage of giving you bunch of Crane in-laws.

Crab and Mantis women will usually marry you because they want to, not because they have to, so that's a plus. Hida are big muscle-waifus who want lots of kids and somebody to drink with, and Kaiu will mke toys for your kids by hand, so t hey're both top tier options in their clan.

Moshi are matriarchal, so you're more likely to get a dominant or at the very least equal partner there, and they're super pious to boot, if that's your thing.

>Crab and Mantis women will usually marry you because they want to
More often, but still not usually. Even the Dragon don't claim that.

If you like loud, honourable to a fault, sleeps early, and spends most of his time with his unit, then yes.

And any good GM worth his Salt is gonna be sending various inquisitors after him. Good drama point if the team has to decide between helping the inquisitors, or covering up his crimes.

On the other hand, actually playing one of those inquisitorial groups would probably make for a very interesting game.

I don't disagree.

>Genzoman ZR samurai waifus
I know I shouldn't want this.

Most Hida girls are soft and squishy, and strive for perfection in being housewaifus and probably only know the basics of fighting if they live in a dangerous part of Crabland.

She's trying to give her a cupping-delicious-boob-orgasm, inb4 she's stealing her soul.

You have a fetish. It's understandable.
Now keep it to your damn self and off the gaming table like a polite, reasonably adjusted human being.

Man, I just want to play a simple character concept and you people are telling me it's either nigh-impossible or a fetish. So much for "Rokugan my way." Thanks a lot AEG.

It's like I said. It just doesn't have to be perfect. With good coverup and basic disposal methods I can get away with it until divinations get involved. Then it's just going down in a blaze of glory.

Getting away with it forever was never the goal, just getting away with it for as many people as possible. I imagine slowly destroying small villages without giving them the chance to send for help would be the best idea.

Both are possibilities. Playing this as a character I probably wouldn't be doing it very often. Once a week to once a month. Doing it less often stands more of a chance of being beneath notice; it isn't Maho itself, just a Maho-like act, so it may throw some people off the trail. "Who is practicing Maho here?" "No one."

Really, I don't think it's impossible to get away with if you do it infrequently. Teams already leave a trail of bodies, who cares if one ends up in the woods with chunks ripped off of it that may as well have been a wolf? There's just not as much thrill without the danger, though.

But what are the disposal methods? What is the cover up? Doing this in a Rokugani society is damned hard.

First off you would target people that either would be expected to go missing or would be thought to be missing somewhere else. A hunter, for example; they would go and search the woods, so you could safely hide any traces with some lye/pearlash and water in the cemetery. A beggar might not even get a search party.

They key is misdirection, not concealment. If someone divines where his remains are, "He's in the cemetery." It should keep them misled long enough for the alkali to dissolve whatever is left into nothingness. With nothing to make anyone think it's Maho, there won't even be an inquisition until after ten or fifteen victims.

how did that end up in my wuxia folder

Where would you get the chemicals and why would you tell people you need them? A samurai who gets those things though their normal channels of procurement is going to raise some serious eyebrows just out of the oddity of it.

Second, while you could kill a hunter in the woods, what are you going to do with him, eat him there raw? You cant go back to wherever you are living, and going in to town isn't going to be any kind of good idea.

Side note to that, to memory cremation is the norm for rokugani citizens, though I cant remember the source, so cemeteries aren't really that much of a thing.

Also, if said diviner looks in the location the body is buried, and communes with the spirits, they'll quite blatantly tell him that some dude was doing weird shit over there with a dead body, and they'll be able to instantly say that it wasnt Maho, because they would know if any Kansen were involved.

As for a beggar, you are now operating in the middle of a town or city big enough to have beggars, are you going to eat him raw in an alley? How do you get him somewhere suitable without being seen, because while you are right that a missing beggar wont be investigated any time soon, a shadowy figure in the distance stealing a body, more of a concern to be looked in to.

Disclaimer: This post and the posts preceding it are entirely theoretical in nature, a musing on serial murder in historical times. This is poor advice for the modern day and should not be interpreted as advising anyone to do so.

Pearlash is commonly used in baking. It has similar properties to baking soda in the leavening of bread, but it is also heavily alkali and can speed decomposition. It's also very space efficient, for a leavening agent; you need very little added to dough to create a nice and fluffy biscuit. It was done by soldiers on the march who were issued flour rations quite often, and should still work with rice flour, so there's plenty of excuse to have it.

I don't know if they'd have it in Rokugani society, but they likely have a similar alternative.

A hunter in the woods could be expected to be out there for several days. It's enough time to eat, cook, and disguise the rest as rations in that order. At this point, why not go all the way and eat some raw. If we don't have enough time to finish it off, it's not hard to mask it as a wolf or bear attack and no one's going to commune with the spirits on why a hunter got himself dunked on by a wolf.

Cremation, huh? It makes sense. In that case, there's any number of places that it could be hidden.

Again, misdirection as much as possible. A missing peasant isn't going to get a Shugenja on the job, they have better things to do than track down a beggar who got drunk and wandered off or a hunter who got himself lost. If the spirits do get involved, something has already gone wrong, but a particularly uncooperative or tricky spirit just might save you if you give them the ammunition to do it.

Killing a beggar might be complicated, but they do sleep outside quite often. It would be no major trick to get him in the middle of the night. Failing that, you could pay him a little money to 'deliver a message' to a hut at the edge of town to minimize witnesses. And a beggar's only one possibility.

I'm looking for rules for stipends. I could have sworn they were Emerald Empire but I can't find them. Anyone else know?

So how are new cities built in Rokugan? Is it conducted by imperial construction workers, the great clan who owns the city, or both?

If a minor clan gains permission to build a city/vilalge, do they need to build it themselves or do they work alongside great clans in exchange for some kind of favour/boons?

I think they're in Imperial Archives.
They're not listed as a "mechanic", but there's some description that have hard numbers and details.

Well, I'm sure you need to send your plan to a specific part of the Imperial Bureaucracy, and then, assuming they approve of it (Greasing the wheels and not building it on a potentially hostile border helps), get to work. An entire new town probably has investors from all of the nearby clans, and further away clans could be persuaded to send supplies and workers in exchange for owned interests in the town (Guaranteed plots of land, seats in the new local court, whatever). The Kaiu in particular will sell their considerable skills in exchange for shipments and support for the Crab.

I know a lot about the setting, but the exact chemicals and byproducts used in making bread is beyond me, so lets just say that that they do have it or an alternative. It doesn't answer the question of how you get it, cooking is a low skill, samurai don't cook, and when out campaigning, they still have people for that. I'm not saying you cant get a hold of it by just robbing the kitchens or something, but it is yet another ring to jump though where things can fall apart.

As for wandering off in to the woods for ages to do your business, unless you are some random ronin, its going to raise some questions, and as for bringing some back as rations, that will get you caught. Samurai do not eat meat, they do not touch meat, meat is a dead and unclean thing only fit to be touched by eta. Admittedly some some samurai aren't quite as hardcore on this, but outside the unicorn its rare as all hell, and even with the unicorn they have been getting rarer and rarer as they continue to fully re-adapt to rokugani customs.

The problem with the whole 'misdirection' thing, its a super short term plan, if you're in one place, then the occasional disappearance is going to add up before long and people will investigate, maybe not shugenja, maybe not even samurai at all, but investigation will happen, even just for the hunter who gets lost, or the random beggars who go missing. And if you're not mobile, you fall in to the trap of non home ground, you might try to kill a beggar only to have a street urchin you didn't know about see you, or take a route that is unexpectedly busy.

And all of this, all of it, is completely not a big deal compared to the big one.

Why are the other players not catching on, because they're either not playing their characters properly for the setting, or they're evil, in which case you have back up and this all gets easier for you.

thx brew.

Cooking isn't a Low skill, it's a craft skill. Not particularly special for a samurai, but not dishonorable. A samurai chef cooks for other, higher ranking samurai, and might make a name for himself doing that. They'll never be as illustrious as a famous duelist or great warrior, but everyone likes good food, and having a great and trustworthy chef on staff is a positive for any lord or daimyo.

Derp, I just remembered it not being high or bugi skill, the very existence of merchant skills slipped my mind. My bad.

It doesn't help that the foremost Merchant skill is Commerce, so people end up treating all Merchant skills as if they were Low.

I honestly cant remember a time in which a player has used a merchant skill at all in any game I've been in or ran.

Just remember that one of the premier honorable skills, weaponsmithing, is a Craft skill.

Is cooking actually Low? I was under the impression that cuisine was at least not dishonorable. I don't know where I'd source that, but real-life cooks from the time period L5R is based on were reasonably well respected, to a similar degree as tailors. That said, I'll concede that it is a potential point where an investigator could reach me.

We discussed in the last thread that Unicorn is probably the best way to go about it. It would be fairly unorthodox for a samurai to go on his own hunting trip, but I think it would do no more than raise eyebrows. Especially if one or two of your subjects have recently met a grisly end to wolves, and you feel obligated to put an end to it. Hunting is a High skill too, if I recall.

You are right that misdirection is a short term plan and that eventually suspicion builds up. If you space out the deaths you cause to once every few months, almost no suspicion is raised at all. So I suppose it depends on if I have to eat meat fresh, or if I can preserve some and eat it slowly over time to satisfy the "daily cannibalism" requirement. A human body could easily produce enough meat to last two months of casual eating, and it looks no different from venison when properly cut.

Staying mobile is another way to go about it, but that also carries risk. If I move around to unfamiliar places, it might be difficult to track down and kill someone safely, and I might run out of meat.

Other players catching on... yeah. I'd need a pretty good table to get away with it while hanging out with a bunch of other samurai, but my friend does run games and would be willing to do solo games now and then.

o fug i'm slow
ye i guess it isn't Low

One thing about Rokugani chefs is that they're usually also good with medicine. They know how to cure what ails you using herbal remedies. And while nobody would ever say it out loud, they're also first and last defense against poison.

Cities are rarely built, they grow out of towns more often.

Jade Magistrate: You monster! How many lives have you consumed?
Cannibal Samurai: How many breads have you eaten?
Jade Magistrate: What the fuck is bread?

>Cannibal Samurai: How much rice have you eaten?
ftfy

fortunes & winds pg. 73

Jade Magistrate: ...are you hitting on me?

>Cannibal Samurai gains a rank in taint
>I renounce my humanity!

>Cannibal samurai

Well, it is not like people can't get away with worse in Rokugan. You can summon an oni, give it your name, and be celebrated as a hero. Or attack the Empire at the head of a massive army of monsters and daemons, destroy everything in your path, and become the Fortune of Persistence. Or be literally the Lord of Evil Hell and have your very own Great Clan filled with hookers and blackjack.

Because in Rokugan, you can go and fuck consequences.

Only if you're a named NPC, user.

>You can summon an oni, give it your name, and be celebrated as a hero.

Who is this?

Don't worry about it, user. Everyone knows lots of the metaplot can be pretty 90's X-treme, but only beeposters make a huge fuss about it.

Isawa "Everything That Is Wrong With The Phoenix Clan" Tadaka aka "Even Two Dumb Women Realized I Was Full Of Shit, But I Couldn't" Guy.

This is bullshit and you know it.

>This is bullshit and you know it.

Yeah I do, Bee-kun. The difference is I understand that the metaplot has never been good and I mostly ignore it because it's not relevant to me, as I don't run games that involve the canon metaplot.

In summary: stop beeposting.

>He doesn't know who the Dragon Clan Champion is

>bee bee bee
You're never going to force this meme, user.

TOGASHI MITSU

He might bee able to.

Honey, stop.

Don't bee like that.

It stings me when you do that.

>Genzoman Edition

Is it bad that I've been tempted to run a lewd L5R game because of Genzoman's art? How would that even work though, Rokugan seems like the worst place to have lewd adventures in.

Run it KLK style. The spider do another rain of blood except it taints all the cloth and silk in the land. Only a small amount of tattered garb remains.

That sort of thing is going on all the time. Nobody talks about it, and so long as attempts are made at keeping up pretenses, nobody much cares. This is a setting where a thin paper screen in a room is considered absolute privacy, and honor dictates it be treated as such.

Rokugan's tragic view of romance actually makes it quite interesting. Romance distracts one from your duty, but people still fall victim to it all the time. The human heart is at war with the mind.

It's why pillow books are so popular, even when (or rather, especially because) they're many times thinly-veiled actual accounts.

I wonder if there's a shunga scene going on, though probably with the Shadowlands and the Taint around stuff like Dream of the Fisherman's Wife would be in really poor taste.

True.

"Romance" might be a bit of a strong term given what I've seen in most lewd games. Unless said players have a fetish for hand-holding and missionary with the lights off for the sole purpose of producing children. That would actually be really nice, since I enjoy those things myself. Might get boring if it's the -only- stuff happening though.

>a dangerous part of Crabland
Dohoho, user. That's like saying a safe part of the wall.

>Side note to that, to memory cremation is the norm for rokugani citizens, though I cant remember the source, so cemeteries aren't really that much of a thing.
It's a shadowlands / original bloodspeaker war thing. Burying / cemeteries means allowing it to be raised as undead. Cremation does not.

>A missing peasant isn't going to get a Shugenja on the job
Peasants are superstitious AF, and will stick together, or talk to monks about their problems, which can get monks looking into it more easily. Monks are potentially shugenja, too, or have kiho / elemental awareness that would make things difficult.

>another peasant goes missing
>local authorities ask nearest samurai to investigate
> which is the PCs
>if they're even moderately honorable, compassion requires they do so

After this happens twice, I think they'll start to get suspicious of the PC with no honor.

So far, I'm surprised neither of our two bushi this session have destroyed anything yet. Worst they've done is steal a drink from someone in a sake den.

Pre-Coup Hida Kisada comes at you ready to kick your shit, but your last PC comes up to be your yojimbo and try to save your life.

How fucked are you?

So the first session of 'Breaking Bushi' is starting to wrap up. The three PC's have made contact with the local ronin hired to protect the poppy farmers on the edges of the territory from bandit attacks, along with a traveling minor clan samurai.

In total, including the courtier and the missing magistrate's yoroki about to join them next session, there's going to be seven of them against a group of bandits.

Ghost ships have been found along the river as well. Truly, this is interesting times.

You know, there's so many ronin bushi, and ronin shugenja, by why no ronin courtiers? Surely there's villages around that need representation and legal protection from overexploitation?

>letting a ronin speak in court

user... please.

Actually I think I've seen a ronin courtier in official fluff but I can't remember where

Probably because
A) getting chosen as the representative for a village in court would be hard.
B)Getting said ronin into court is hard as balls.
C)From a ronin's point of view it's simply better to learn to fight or magic than learn court.

There's the gambling school which is technically a courtier, and there is one ronin courtier, but they're very, very rare.

Samurai can do whatever they like to heimin. If that heimin is in some way under the care of a courtier who can socially stay that samurai's hand, then he becomes pretty handy to have around. Sort of like a peasant's "Get my lawyer on the phone"

my yoritomo bushi beat the ghost of kaimetsu-uo in a duel

i probably have a decent chance

Yojimbo here, some highlights from the first session include:
>"Wait, is that the Duck Clan mon?"
>"Opium, but more importantly HARVEST?!"
>One-eye takes the wrong drink
>"My lord SUPER trusts me, you guys"
>"Huh - I didn't realize my character was like that."

Explanations if requested later.

Considering /way/ out of context, yes explanations. Seems a cool start of a minor storytime (maybe)

There are ronin courtier techniques, but ...

That's what courtiers (the rank of court samurai who do jack all but gossip, share info, and represent people who aren't native to court) are for.

Rezan, for instance.

Wasn't Rezan an eloquent bushi, though?

>Samurai can do whatever they like to heimin
It's going to be serious 'why are you breaking my money producing property' time when it becomes known. Your clan will support you, but not for long if it keeps happening.

Courtiers, in general, provide two key roles.
1: They shmooze in social courts.
2: They run the government in boring paperwork centered courts.

Ronin have no clout to schmooze with and no ruling government bureaucracy to speak of, which makes dedicated courtier training both unlikely and fairly useless.

You forgot #3 - Win allies and make people more interested in your group's point of view.

That is an area a Ronin can very much act in. Heck, it's the signature ability of the ronin courtier school to make people think that something was their own idea, not that it came from the ronin they were talking with.

He was a skilled duellist and terrible poet, but I haven't found anything to say he was definitely a bushi outside the ccg.

Sounds like a shoo-in in a place like Ryoko Owari.

...

>>I want to play a vilely evil character with a monstrous habit.
>>Accommodate me or you are hurting my fee fees.

Eat shit

Going full "Rokugan your way" for a second, which minior clans would make the best great clans? Which would be associated with which Kami?

Hare got a lot of cool shit going on already, and if you unite the areas they hold they get a shitload of space under their power.

Hare would be an OK great clan, same with Fox.

Monkey probably, but that's because they're the one minor clan that isn't super Niche. If they were still a thing, the boar would be awesome.

Does heavy armor penalize attacks in 4e?

I assume so because it's an agility skill roll, correct?