Legend of the Five Rings /L5R/

Also as I clicked the send button I realized I was thinking totally in the perspective of Empress as in the Empress Iweko I, as opposed to the wife of an Emperor.

Either way, the point about the scale of things still stands, also >you can't use this secret for leverage because busting it will result in the Empress Guard breaking into your house and giving you the worse end of a katana.

>If the Empress is just a trophy wife, then it can work.

That's a good point. It a much different story if the Empress is on the throne, or just married to the Emperor who's on the throne. She has a lot less leeway if she is not herself the divinely appointed ruler of Rokugan.

Yeah, it seemed pretty high up there for what I was thinking for him. The player said he liked the idea of the princess or something similar, but he's new to l5r so he might not get the scale. Maybe if he started with higher status, but otherwise no.

Good point. I was actually thinking Iweko style empress who is the person in charge, but how would things change if it was just a consort empress?

New question for l5r, what does your character think of the Mantis clan?

Shitty fucking upstart pirates who are only a great clan on the backs of the actual seven thunders.

PS: fuck Togashi

The Mantis Clan was a mistake.

What are the flaws of the L5R system? And what does it do well?

So who do you need to get permission from if you want to open a dojo? Particularity if your mission statement is to accept samurai of any background as students, even ronin? Not even for a School where you teach Techniques, just a basic dojo for kenjutsu or a specifc kind of weapon skill or whatever?

If you're not teaching school techniques, probably no one. It's just a gentry.

I supose that you should ask permission to your own daymio.

Depends on your rank and clan. The unicorn are a lot more chill and willing to help peasants, while the mantis get along with theirs and give no fucks what others say when on their islands.

You might want to explain to him the scale difference, really. A lot of other RPGs deal with multiple realms from the get-go on the same scale that L5R deals with multiple TOWNS, so he might not be grasping that in L5R the imperial court is on the scale those games would treat divinity and cosmic realms.

Newfag at L5R here, only did a quick intro scenario.

Does choosing the Ronin option is viable, or does the system of muh honor forbids it / renders too much of a headache to have fun with it ?

If I have a chance to play a Mifune styled character, I'm gonna take it.

Ronin are viable, sorta. A carefully built ronin has the potential to be about as good as an upper-mid tier great clan bushi, but they suffer lots of disadvantages from social standing alone, not to mention their individual school techniques can be shaky.

What's important to understand is that Ronin are still Samurai, still nobility. They just don't have a lord at that moment. But because of their lack of a lord, they have no authority over anyone. No one has their backs.

You get kind of fucked in the ass for the most part, mechanically. The "generic ronin school" in the Secrets of the Empire book does a lot to alleviate the issue but by no means "fixes" it.

Being a Ronin is viable, but difficult. Everyone looks down on you, and you could be killed for so much as looking at another Samurai funny because you have nobody to protect you.

It's true that official ronin techniques are generally crappy, but it's worth mentioning that there are ways to be a ronin socially without having to subject your self to their mechanics.

For one thing, a samurai who is newly cast out started in a clan and will still have whatever Techniques they learned before being made ronin. You'll have to start taking actual ronin techniques as you advance, but it's still a better starting point than most.

There are also actual schools that ronin might have. Mantis Brawler is explicitly one because of the way it's taught master to apprentice instead of in a dojo, and you could rule that other schools are similar in your game.

Dude, just two words: warrior's pilgrimage. It is like having all the advantages of being a ronin, but none of its disadvantages.

Make a normal clan samurai and send him to a musha shugyo. That way, you can get the best of both worlds.

He should do something smaller, but just a fun by having the PC sleeping with the Scorpion Daimyo. Then, for added kicks, the Daimyo's sister is the wife. Really twist the knife on what Scorpion Duty means.

Atlas will be available in pdf next month

fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/8/17/plan-your-journey/

muh dick

They're producing new stuff already?

The Atlas of Rokugan was the last thing AEG ever printed for the game. It's had an extremely limited paper run.

Still no match for the Monkey Clan.

Depends where you want to put it. If you're putting it in an established town, you'll definitely need permission from the local daimyo and at least one or two higher daimyo. It would also help if you could get some support from an Otomo or Miya.
Building one out in the middle of nowhere is easier, but it's also more dangerous, since a clan could come along to claim it by force for their own exclusive use and there's not much you could do about that.

>fuck the literal best Kami
Why?

It's nice to see that they're still selling 4th. At the very least, they haven't decided to burn it all to the ground and start the RPG line over from scratch. Gives me hope for whatever they're doing for 5th edition.

Reposting some classics.

Maybe if you took
That dick out of your ass, Mantis
You’d be important

Scorpion knives slick
With the blood of weaker men
As if that were new

The quiet sounds of
Unsullied waterfalls are
The best sounds for sleep

Against all of the
World’s threats and many dangers
Stand brothers in arms

Trust, respect, and guile
Are lost on the armies of Crab
But then they knew that

The arrows of skilled
Men fall quieter than boasts
From the loud and weak

Troubled brows rest well
On breasts of dearly missed
Wives and admirers

The wisest men know not
To anger the Lions, for it
Is too easy for them

Blood at the corners
Of the mouth before battle can
Unnerve the foe well

Trust not Ronin men
For they sell their honor like
Whores, Steel lieu of flesh

See beneath the dark
But do not look long, the dark
Stares back at you soon

Yellow light spills on
Scenes of carnage, a bright sun
Over dark deeds by men

Unicorn clan have
Little to speak of, really, since
Their symbol is dead

The Phoenix are well named
For they are at their very best
When they are on fire

The poisoned blade is
Effective, but sullied by
The will to use it

The wisest souls are
The ones who wait for the best
Chance to mock Dragons

Why wouldn't you want to fuck the best Kami?

This. A regular weapon dojo for any samurai wouldn't be a common thing though as your target audience is either Clan Samurai who already received their training and are looking for a way to pass the time or brush up on the go, and courtly types whose education doesn't feature bugei skills and are looking to learn some basics for sport or when they might eventually need it. Smelly ronin without a master on the other hand will likely flock to such a dojo as that'd probably be one of the easiest ways to learn essential survival skills without joining a ronin organisation. Both crowds don't really seem to mix, as Clan Samurai probably don't want to train together with wavemen. Founding the dojo itself is probably just a matter of getting permission from the local governor to use that plot of land for that purpose.

There's an unaffiliated dojo in the back of the Book of Fire. Its history is a little extreme, thanks to having scrolls written by a master and being literally in the middle of nowhere, but it could give you some ideas.

Yeah, in City of Lies a Kitsuki bushi opens a dojo right in Scorpion-controlled Ryoko Owari. The issue is less about opening the dojo and more about the Kitsuki being willing to train heimin as well as samurai. And she did develop two Techniques for her school, but doesn't let any bushi already in a school learn those until they fully master their original school.

It's implied that there have been a lot of custom Techniques, but the vast majority of them don't survive their creator's death or the deaths of their immediate students. I imagine that most of them are on the same level of ronin Techniques and aren't as good as the more normalized School Techniques anyway.

MUH MAN

Read Ooku when you get a chance.

They could try to kill the ronin, but that's still murder if there are witnesses. Dueling is legally easier to handle (though asking your lord for lethal permission may take time); the fallout from killing an unknown ronin in a non-lethal duel would be less than 'accidentally' killing someone whose family politically matters/cares.

So long as there's a L5R thread up, does anyone have a decent map of Rokugan that shows clear borders of clan territories? I know the borders are somewhat fuzzy at times, but I can't find anything that really represents what I'm after.

There aren't really clear borders in most areas. Cartography is an art, not a science, and the between spaces are often completely devoid of human habitation. The best you're going to get for a border is wherever the respective patrols decide to stop and turn back.

Clans use border stones. There's even a card that mentions how no one will swear an oath by the border stones, as they change too often.

Provinces outside clan lands usually have more rustic villages, inns along imperial roads, etc.

Exactly. The borders aren't clear. Where one side considers them to be today is not where they will be in two months or where the other side considers them to be. One clan might think that their territory butts right up against the other clan's along a stream, while that other clan might think that there's a patch of unclaimed territory on the far side of the stream.
Meanwhile, the peasant village that actually sits there pays taxes to whoever shows up to take them and couldn't tell you who actually owned the area because nobody knows.

Holy shit, miracles DO happen.

Just before the tax collector come to a certain village on the border, the peasants push the border stones across said village, so they could avoid paying the collector sent by the clan.

>The borders aren't clear.
That's blatantly not true, though.

The borders are very clear when you walk past a border stone. (vs "whenever the patrols decide to stop/turn back") The issue for cartography is that they move whenever two clans have a minor skirmish along their borders. read: war, but no one says that, because it would get imperials involved, and then no one gets to play with the ball.

No, the cartography thing is that measuring distance is something most cartographers won't bother to do. "Eh, that looks like 10 miles or so" is about as far as they'll go. Actual surveying is not a thing in Rokugan. Also, not every area has border stones. It's all well and good that you carved your clan's symbol onto a rock in the middle of nowhere, but someone going between places might literally never even see that one rock in this area, and it might be obsolete anyway from a "border skirmish" shift or Imperial edict.
The only places you're going to get hard borders is highly populated areas and places where a major conflict was just recently ended.

And even highly populated areas are questionable sometimes. The City of the Rich Frog is an entire city, and until very recently in the timeline, either the Lion or the Unicorn could have laid claim to it, and both of them had sent troops around it at different times with no issue whatsoever.

The cartography problem is multiplied when the official Imperial maps are wrong (Which is all the time). An Imperial cartographer goes out and takes a looksie, files his report, it sits in a drawer in a bureaucrat's office for 10 years while other cartographers file their reports and the bureaucrat putzes around, it finally gets approved, the map gets updated, and now the official map that overrules every other map in the empire is only ten years out of date instead of twenty. Meanwhile, the functional border that everyone is actually using in their day-to-day lives is somewhere else entirely.
It's a huge mess that rarely ever gets sorted out, and never actually stays sorted out for more than a few years.

Absolutely nothing in Rokugan works as it ideally should.
Honor can't be lived up to, maps and borders are suggestions at best, the economy is fucked beyond repair, the heavens are practically blind except when it would be better for them to be so, and the kharmic wheel has been fucked so hard that an entire extra afterlife had to be made just to bleed off the imbalance from people dying without the chance to reach their correct fate.

The legal system is subjectively based on feelings and lies, the feudal system inherently creates conflicts of loyalty, and the culture of nobility is extremely high pressure and actively stifles most attempts to blow off steam.

>Absolutely nothing in Rokugan works as it ideally should.
The weird thing is there are just as many people who over-emphasize this as there are people who forget about it or don't seem to comprehend it at all.

>No, the cartography thing is that measuring distance is something most cartographers won't bother to do.
That's a separate problem, and relates less to how cartographers don't measure, and more an Aasimov's Foundation (IIRC) problem where historians became people who wrote about other historians' works.

>The legal system is subjectively based on feelings and lies

If you're some bitch-ass Crane, maybe.

>Not Gleen allow

I'd settle for three map with clear, non-indexed names of locations, each for a different era (Before the Maw, Pre-Scorpion Coup, "Modern"). Anyone got the Atlas and knows if it has this sort of thing?

...

I wonder how much a night with a mantis costs? You know they're willing if you've got the coin.

Blame the Scorpion, not the Crane.

A Crane and a Scorpion might have developed the justice system, but the the Scorpion guy intentionally created a bunch of loopholes in order to abuse things.

Lorefag help needed

Got a game coming up that is mostly mantis and dragon clan players. I'm trying to bridge the gap between them, and need help coming up with the proper lore reason for a PC Yoritomo to be accepted into the Mirumoto Bushi dojo for training.

I get I can just use the different school and or hostage advantages but need a lore reason to justify it and don't know enough about Mantis/Dragon relations.

>implying it wasn't actually the Crane the whole time

By my understanding, that's usually not how that happens; you need to suitably impress someone important (usually a family daimyo or clan champion) with an unusual skill set, and they invite you to found a dojo. Anyway, you might want to take a look at the Hundred Stances Dojo from Book of Fire, as there are some similar elements.

Dojos of most clans are often open to bushi from other clans.

It's the secret details of techniques (which I usually hand waive as the years of physical & mental conditioning involved, not the method of employing the technique that can be learnt by observation - think Shigurui for examples) that they don't often share without a serious show of obligation - marriage, vows of loyalty, peace hostages, etc.

>need a lore reason to justify it and don't know enough about Mantis/Dragon relations
You really don't need anything more than hostage/different school to establish what the current clan relations are. Either/both clans feel they need something to ensure the other maintains good behaviour after establishing some kind of agreement.

What do they want to protect? Trade? Treaty? Marriage? Other?

Could be right after the Mantis' ascension to Great Clan, and they are desperately looking for allies in the clan game. Dragon agree, and some cultural exchange of pupils happens to learn the other clan's schools.

Read up on Saibankan, the former Scorpion who became the Fortune of Magistrates and Justice.

>Still implying it wasn't actually the Crane
Doji Hatsuo.

Think of it this way. Saibankan and Hatsuo worked together to create the new justice system. Saibankan was raised to divinity as the Fortune of Magistrates and JUSTICE, Hatsuo didn't.

Guess which one was probably actually interested in justice and law, and guess which one created a bunch of exploitable loopholes in order to abuse things.

Considering being raised to fortune status happens on the whim of the emperor, I don't think the truth of who was dedicated to JUSTICE! matters here at all.

And considering Saibankan's whole bio paints him as someone dedicated to justice with the reputation of being the fairest and wisest judge in the land, both honest and dedicated to the law, and is just assuming he did wrong because HURR DURR SCORPION, I'm going to go ahead and believe he was elevated for an actually good reason and this whole business of him making intentional loopholes and exploits is a load of bullshit.

I'd still like some official announcement that they're looking at the RPG.
I know the odds of hearing anything until a few moths after the LCG launches are zero, but still. I don't want to get my hopes up.

Haiku do not work
like this you baka user
Separate each line

They're the ones who announced they're not announcing anything until after the LCG launches, user.

Not to mention that the Crane has a history of being hacks.

As well as carefully tailoring every rule or tradition they're charged to create for the empire to benefit themselves.

Sounds like a great reason to turn Curse of the Golden Flower into a campaign

I was asked about running a Romance of the Three Kingdoms style game, and L5R seems like a good fit.

I know there's rules for mass combat, but is there a ruleset for governing a fiefdom? Any edition, I can port it over.

The Way of the Daimyo, in the back of Emerald Empire. It's not good. The versions in older editions might be better, I haven't read them.

I'd just grab a copy of Green Ronin's Song of Ice and Fire RPG and port their system.

Trying to build a Ronin duelist, what advantages should I pick up?

>and L5R seems like a good fit.
It's not.

The player who asked is weebish, and the fantasy Japan trappings don't bother us. We've got lots of clans, an Emperor, and plenty of history in which to find (or create) a period of instability. I like the mass combat rules in 1e seem very fitting, and the lethality doesn't pose an issue. Anything I'm missing?

Thanks. Looking at ASOIAF, it's a totally different system from Roll and Keep. Is that just your preferred domain management system?

>The player who asked is weebish, and the fantasy Japan trappings don't bother us. We've got lots of clans, an Emperor, and plenty of history in which to find (or create) a period of instability. I like the mass combat rules in 1e seem very fitting, and the lethality doesn't pose an issue. Anything I'm missing?
So wait, are you looking for a Rot3K style game or just "Not-Asians fighting wars in Not-Asia?"

>Thanks. Looking at ASOIAF, it's a totally different system from Roll and Keep. Is that just your preferred domain management system?
Not him, but SIFRP actually has a lot of similarities to R&K, as it's a d6 based roll and keep type system, converting the fluff would probably be more difficult than the mechanics. That said, it's well known as one of the better domain management systems in pretty much any RPG that deals with such.

I guess I should clarify that the intention is for a more grounded Three Kingdoms idea. Not full Dynasty Warriors, but a general feel of trying to recapture an age of respect and honour in a time when those are in short supply, and temporal warlords rule through force instead of the will of heaven.

I just flipped into the Quick-Start ASOIAF rules. Time to go to the PDF thread and unearth the real books to give it a proper look.

Yeah, it's the only decentish public one that I know. My club used to use it before we switched over to our own rules, and it worked decently.

You'll probably want to hunt down Imperial Histories 2 and check out the Shattered Empire alternate timeline, might fit what you're looking for time period-wise.

Thanks.

Thousand Years of Darkness?

That's Imperial Histories you're looking at, you want Imperial Histories 2.

There are two IH books.

...

...

That might work too if you are into edgy stuff.

I hear samurai are into 3 feet of edgy stuff.

I mean, over-the-samurai kind of edgy. Like "evil rules the land and there is no hope only desperation and pain and blood and killing and stuff" kind of edgy.

>L5R in 2016

How does the Wick Dick taste?