What settings based on real-world cultures are actually well researched...

What settings based on real-world cultures are actually well researched, and not suffering issues like "Samurai in china"?

Legend of the Five Rings

Gor.

>Legend of the Five Rings
You're kidding right?

Because "not well researched" is one of the biggest complaints about L5R that the writers only address by saying "Rokugan is not Japan."

>Rokugan is not Japan

Hence why it's different to Japan.

Unless your argument is literally "Rokugan has to work the same as Japan" then you don't really have anywhere to go with this.

My biggest beef with it is that China and Korea don't exist and aren't separate entities. Unless they changed it, last I checked, Rokugan is pan-Asia, China and Korea included, which is a shame because both are a big part of Japanese history.

Sengoku. Just ignore the later ninja book that said "fuck the historical accuracy and authenticity we established with the core book, ninjers vs sammyrai is kewl!"

Legend of the Five Rings is a cool game, but is kind of the opposite of "actually well researched" and fully embraces stupid Western stereotypes of samurai (but does awesome things with it).

Most of those stereotypes originate in Japan itself. The difference of course is that modern Japanese culture has nuanced, unstereotypical depictions of samurai too, which don't reach the West.

A lot do, especially pre/during WWII where what were during their time extremist writings dismissed as the inane rambling of a senile madman (Hagakure) suddenly became "totally accurate manuals of rules everyone followed." Nitobe Bushido is arguably Western because it was written specifically for Western audiences by a Japanese man with a Western education using Western traditions painted over with "Japaneseness" as propaganda showing Westerners that Japan totally had a warrior tradition comparable to the West.

But there's still a lot of stuff that comes completely out of left field that confuse even the Japanese, like the whole gun thing, largely propagated and arguably started by Noel Perrin's completely misguided treatise trying to draw a parallel between what he thought (read: intentionally misinterpreted/misrepresented to suit his argument) happened in regards to feudal Japan and guns and the Cold War world and nuclear disarmament.

Anyway. L5R takes these things and makes a cool fantasy world around it, in the early days of the franchise it was totally unintentional and the lead writer(s) were just half remembering parts of some movies they saw once with the blanks filled in by the aforementioned stereotypes, but they quickly came to embrace it, ran with it, dropped any pretense they were even going to try to make anything historically authentic anymore, and made a pretty amazing and unique game. This still doesn't make it "actually well researched" by any means. Still a great game and a hell of a lot better than some shit I've seen that actually tries to be "historically accurate" though.

...why base a fake culture entirely on a real culture?

Because you get the best of both worlds of familiarity and authorial freedom.

This.
At the end of the day, not a lot of people care about mushroom men or the bats that won the south.

>mfw this user is actually serious

Oh boy... L5R is not only very poorly researched, but unlike what says it doesn't even fill up the (vast amount of) blanks with stereotypes, just makes up shit on the run. Like how there is a Greek(!!!) creation myth in the universe or how the L5R kind of Bushido goes completely topsy-turvy when it comes to classic samurai archetypes.

There is a reason why the writers eventually gave up on the setting and started pushing the "Rokugan Your Way!" stuff.

Don't forget "ronin have no place in samurai stories."

what

This is a thing that one of the main writers of the first edition of L5R actually believes.

I get it if you're playing a historical or pseudohistorical game, but if it's fantasy and maintains internal consistency when mixing cultures, who cares? Do people bust nuts when there are "vikings" or "desert dwellers" or "feudal kingdoms" that aren't an exact copy of a real culture?

The community is DrowTales kinds of retarded.

this

Hârnmaster

>tfw you care about the mushroom men or the bats that won the south.