/L5RG/ - Legend Of The Five Rings General

mediafire.com/folder/xpa768hxwcezl/RPG#2nbbe1kyny4qo (L5A)
mediafire.com/folder/c7tfqff9sqp71/L5R

Minor Clan Edition.

Which Minor Clan is the greatest, and why is it the Sparrow?

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l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Sparrow_Clan
l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Night_of_the_Spider
kazenoshiro.com/rpg/unofficial-content/l5r-rpg-adventures/
kazenoshiro.com/challenge-focus-strike/
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>Which Minor Clan is the greatest, and why is it the Sparrow?
Their mechanics make anons cry.

Why is that?

IT LIVES

...

If you can create custom spells through spellcraft, could you cipher them into scrolls and hand them to other shugenja of the same school ? Or do the have to go through the spell research again themselves ?

Once a spell is made, it's made.
Officially, all of your research material belongs to your school, including the spell itself (Traditionally, three copies of it are given to the head of your school, and then one of those copies is returned to you) because you had to use school resources to make it (And had to get special permission to do so, since a spell with a bad starting premise could be very dangerous, or blasphemous, or both).
The honorable thing to do is give it to your sensei's boss and let him figure out how to disseminate it, but anyone in your school would be able to cast it if they got their hands on a scroll.

Technically, if someone really wanted to replicate the same effects, they could importune the kami and ask. So long as (theoretically) they could cast that spell from a scroll, it's doable.

>and why is it the Sparrow?

Ah yes, the supposedly humble Mary Sue's clan of choice.

>supposedly humble
Mate. You better be humble when your techniques are Jack and Shit, and Jack was killed for being gaijin scum.

I'm a bit toasty and thus can't tell if that was really good or trying too hard.

Goddammit, user.

Probably trying to hard, but the product is acceptable.

That Rank 5 technique synergizes pretty well with the Kakita Bushi Rank 5, for all those Rank 10 Sparrow/Kakitas running around.

The Hare mechanics look pretty good to me.

Shame Hare clan is dead in my game.

Monster. Why?

I assume because he's a spider sucking faggot

Because it's a very real possibility that can occur in 1E adventure.

So let me get this straight; Unicorn's Yomanri archery is superior to typical Rokugani instinctive fire, right? Is that represented in any tangible mechanical way or is it just a flavor thing?

It's different. A master archer doesn't stop being a master archer just because they use a different technique. They do make pretty good sniper assassins, though.

I think it's "for each round you spend aiming you get a free raise". You also have to be stationary and your defense drops to TN5 or something like that

+1k1 attack or +1k0 damage per simple action taken, all lost if you're interrupted, and doesn't work with centre stance.

>why is it the Sparrow?

The Sparrow used to be interesting, now they are just an edgy gone native Spider Clan splinter group nowadays.

The bat clan I always enjoy due to their interesting gimmick of being spiritualist telephones via Bat-a-mail.

During the last Wintercourt a Unicorn archer destroyed the competition in the archery contest. Its pretty solid.

While the Tsuruchi method is easier in combat due to the quickfire mentality a good Unicorn with time to set up and aim will fuck anyone over.

Yomanri Archer is a rank 4 tech, and WC limits you to IR3, so that was probably just good rolls rather than actual school techs winning out.

When did this happen? They seemed ok in secrets of the Empire

Spider infiltrated them during I think the race for the throne or shortly after. The point was to slowly subvert the minor clan into a base for mass infiltration of Spider spies and assassins. The plan went to shit when a number of the infiltrators went native and came to cherish the simple, kind, lifestyle of the sparrow and exposed the whole charade while killing the worst of the infiltrators. The empress and the sparrow allowed them to become true sparrows in recognition of their actions. But by that time the majority of the clan's leadership were Spider's of some kind and no one REALLY knows for sure just how many Sparrows are legit original sparrows and not turn coat Spiders since the clan doesn't track blood lines as strictly as other clans.

It was one of those "oh, that happened" things where it was just kind of in the background. Current Sparrows deeply hate the Spider though for fucking with them.

Same user , just looked it up, it was infiltrated during the lead up to the destroyer war, then the Great Clan Spider cut all ties to the infiltrators and then the infiltrators went native until a mantis figured it out.

l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Sparrow_Clan

Yeaaah... I think I'll ignore that for my Rokugan. It seems a bit heil hydra.

Well, the end result actually wasn't that Hydra as the remaining Infiltrators are pretty much just Sparrows right now. They have no alternative motives and the Sparrow are saved thanks to mantis wining the tournament associated with them.

The Sparrow in pic related was a child of the current Sparrow which are basically the same as they always were. They just have a huge hate boner for the official Spider clan as seen, no doubt encouraged by the Spider renegades who are now all Suzume who view the official Spider as treacherous douchbags, since they KNOW how evil they can be.

The only time Spider clan EVER works is in a Heil Hydra style.

Spider should have been what the kolat are, a massive and secret organization of conspirators working from the shadows to turn the empire away from the heavens and dismantle the honor system.

The kolat are so poorly written once you get to their actual motives, which are forgotten every time they do shit. Spider would have fit that role so much better in the long run.

Even the name of Spider emphasizes this, with the webs they would weave throughout the empire. The night of Assasins would have been perfect with them in that position and characters like Susumu would have been even more at place.

Can't tell if you're saying the night of assassins should be Spider or Kolat.

l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Night_of_the_Spider

It was Spider, fwiw.

Tomoe better still be alive, asshole.

Oh I know it was Spider that pulled the night of assasins, I just think that it would have been even more fitting in a Kolat Spider way, since it was intended to kill important people and have Spider infiltrator's rise into the now empty positions. It is the perfect example of how that concept could work.

The problem is that, since Kolat exists, AEG wouldn't even think of make TWO conspiracy groups and as a result the Spider infiltration of the empire was clunky as fuck.

>and why is it the Sparrow?
I mostly like the Sparrow because they're simple, heart-on-sleeve country Samurai. They're kind of like the Monkey, in a sense, but without the amazing founder or crazy good techniques. They're just trying to survive, do the Emperor proud and pass on their traditions via storytelling.

As for optimizing the school mechanically, it's hard but can be done. That's not to say other schools don't do it better, but working with what you have there's still some decent builds.
If you're going for a bushi, then the go-to build is as an Archer. Your rank 1's primary weakness, reduced initiative, will mean you'll need to be protected in order to avoid spending void to avoid wound penalties, but reflex stacking covers both of those pretty well. Your rank 2 also helps cover for your rank 1 weakness, the rank 3 is kinda whatever for pure combat. It does add theoretical versatility, though.
Rank 4 is a rank 4. Rank 5, if you stack the center stance, rank 1 and spend void, gives you +3k2(+10) on attacks.

Now making a courtier is a very different path - without different/multiple schools, you should ideally go Suzume storyteller at 2 and minor clan diplomat at 4. Your rank 2 and 3 are both void reliant, so you can spend a little more on void and build as a duelist. Your rank 5 doesn't work in Iaijutsu duels, but then again between your rank 5 and 1 (and since you're a courtier mostly, you should have a yojimbo), you can kinda eke some combat skills. Since you'll be wearing your katana anyway, you might as well learn kenjutsu as well.

...

Have you ever killed a character with no-save poison, /l5rg/?

So which clan would Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden belong to?

Ninja don't exist, so he would not exist.

We all known ninjas are just a myth and peasant superstition.

No, but I was DM when one of my players did it.
It's not as OP as you might think, especially considering the hoops you have to go through to kill someone with it.

Statistical question: Roughly what ratio/percentage of samurai take the different school advantage? For some clans, especially minor clans with only Shugenja schools, I imagine the percentage is much higher than normal, but I'm curious what people think.

I'm also working on a campaign who has a major figure who has the different school advantage, so I'm curious.

Thing is he spends more time killing demons and maho users then as as an assassin. It is just he has skills in acrobatics and shit

Kuni-trained Hiruma Witch Hunter?

I think Tomoe survives regardless and becomes Kitsu anyway. Canonically, at least.

In the original bad ending for the Hare adventure the entire family asked one of their ronin vassals to serve as second in their collective suicide, then he takes the PCs out of the sieged castle and asks them to serve as his second.

I think he would have to be a Hiruma trained Kuni Witch Hunter, since they don't allow non-Kuni to join.
His traditional Kuni facepaint must be relatively small and covered by his scarf or something.

Is there any downside to taking the Topaz Champion rank?

For a first time 4e l5r gm(played before so I'm familar with the rules) which is the better box set? Second City or City of Lies? Anything to watch out for with either of them?

The requirement of being the actual Topaz Champion is pretty harsh to meet, and you can't really plan to meet it.
You get one shot, and if you don't ultimately win, you will never get the opportunity again.

Other than that, no.

City of Lies is 1E, so mind that. Not that it has much in the way of mechanics, the only NPCs statted are those who the PCs are reasonably expected to see in a fight.

Yeah I saw that while glancing at it, I just heard it was a good sort of campaign framework- which I think will be what I need most to get the PCs working together and giving decent location info.

Are you talking about 1E City of Lies?

(checked)
Not him, but I thought 1E was the only city of lies there was?

Pretty sure it is.

Five Rings like the book by that samurai who defeated Saskai who may or may not have existed?
Sasaki that is not M whatever his name is

Random, but wat?

Famous samurai book
I'm given to understand the moral is
>be a sneaky fucker do whatever it takes to win

... Yeah, I get that's where the "five rings" thing originates, but what the shit are you talking about?

Clearly, in English. Please.

Sasaki is a samurai that may or may not have existed but allegedly was hot shit and Musashi killed him with a whittled oar

So I know very little about L5R but I do know it shares mechanics with 7th Sea
So my question is how difficult is it to combine the two could I take a noble from Montaigne and an Eisen mercenary and drop them in Rokugan

They don't share many mechanics. You'd have to build everything from scratch.
There's also cultural problems, in that Rokugan is a very xenophobic place and the last time not!europeans came around, the results were bad enough that they closed the border on pain of death. The only people who get away with it make friends while outside of Rokugan and then pretend that they've always been samurai while otherwise keeping their heads down.

You could, but it would require a lot of handwaving cause the Rokugani fucking hate foreigners. Especially European-type ones.

7th Sea and L5R both use pools of d10s where a certain number is rolled and a certain number is kept.

That's where the similarities in mechanics end.

A foreigner in Rokugan absolutely NEEDS to have friends in high places if they don't want to get forcibly escorted to the nearest border or killed outright.
The Moto had the entire rest of the Unicorn Clan backing them.
The Unicorn Clan itself would have been destroyed or driven back out if they hadn't gained the support of the Crane by proving their heritage.
Yoritomo Singh had express permission from two different emperors and the champion of the Mantis Clan, and had to repeatedly prove himself willing and capable of learning Rokugani ways before being officially recognized.
The gaijin sailors that joined the Tortoise clan were as secret as possible and had express permission from an Emperor.
That one gaijin woman who runs a geisha house on behalf of the Scorpion has at least one (Probably more) major daimyo backing her.

I know Rokugan is isolationist to the the point of absurdity in the games fiction but I was thinking of a game set during a period where foreign trade opens up. The current Emperor decides to open the borders and the game would be a mix of court drama between the different factions and nations trying to open up relations at a summit and the behind the scenes fights to stop a group trying to sabotage the summit by assassinating the foreign diplomats

I was thinking of a San Juan Bautista campaign, where gaijin traders share shipbuilding technology with Rokugan to patch up relations and a year or so later the Emerald Empire builds its first ocean-worthy galleon and sends an roving embassy to explore the world. Getting gaijin paintings of the party is a must.

...

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Are there firearm rules in L5R or just a picture of a gun with the words DISHONARABRU GAIJIN written under it in big block letters

>Are there firearm rules in L5R
There are for sure, but I'm drawing a blank as to where to find them for 4e. Maybe try the first Imperial Histories book?

There are two separate rule sections for firearms.
One is for the guns used by the dishonorabru gaijin, in Imperial Histories 1, and the other is for the guns that Rokugan would theoretically create if they decided to make their own from scratch, using only the basic concepts from foreign weapons, in Imperial Histories 2.

I assume the books take every opportunity to say how horrible guns are and how no honorable samurai who be caught dead using them going so far as to reiterate that point ever five sentences

Yes for the first, no for the second. The IH2 campaign is Iron Rokugan, where firearms and other technology has been incorporated into Rokugani society.

Incorporated is the most important word for Iron Rokugan, because it directly contrasts with "westernization" that happened to real Japan.
Rokugan with guns is still Rokugan. Swords are culturally more important, ashigaru aren't given the good stuff, gaijin are restricted to one port city, and any attempt at foreign influence is met with harsh and unyielding resistance.
They bought a dozen arquebus, reverse engineered them, and then designed their own weapons.

You seem a bit like you're fishing for an argument, friend.

It's more that I dislike the absence of guns in material depicting samurai when guns where actually regularly used because samurai aren't idiots

D&D gets a pass because guns usually haven't been invented yet and it's clusterfuck of nonsense anyway but in L5R the people of Rokugan have first hand knowledge of how effective guns are when properly fielded and they should know useful they would be in fighting THE ARMY OF DEMONS that they live next to

I understand the image of the honorable swordsman charging into battle but when you have a society that is right next door to Hell and has to regularly fight off demon invasion the fact that they don't adopt guns in anything but an alternate hypothetical future timeline is something that takes me right out of the setting

I mean the Crab seem like they should be lining up to get huge fuckoff cannons to fire at giant Oni

But then again there's always homebrew

To be fair the Rokugani didn't just arbitrarily decide that guns were DISHONORABU for no reason. They banned them after getting super pissed at the gaijin after the gaijin nearly fucked their shit with them and an Empress got her head blown off by a cannon.

Honestly I think the gaijin origins of guns have more to do with it than the power of the gun.

They didn't just up and decide that guns were bad because lolfuckguns.
Gunpowder is literally blasphemous. There's a lot of evidence that it actually fucks with the elemental kami, and nobody wants to do that when doing something like that can cause multi-year crop failures and other horrible curses.

The Crab aren't very interested in losing the blessings of their ancestors and all of their magical protections for the sake of a projectile that's slightly better than whatever the Kaiu have whipped up.

Sorry, this is bullshit.

It's open to interpretation on whether Rokugan-approved fireworks and explosives are legit different to gunpowder, or just "different" (ie; name only) for sliding them under Rokugani law.

And it's not up to interpretation that a cannon took the empress' head clean off despite the entire range of magical protections the heavens and the Seppun Hidden Guard could bring to bear.
It's also not up to interpretation on whether the Emperor can declare something blasphemous and have it actually become blasphemous.
Before White Stag, someone using a firearm was just a guy using a firearm. After White Stag, someone using a firearm will cause them to be thrown into Gaki-do or toshigoku because Emma-O and the rest of the heavens listened when the emperor said fuck that shit.

It can actually be both, thanks to metaphysics.
The chemical composition might be exactly the same, but the fact that it's not foreign made and not used for military purposes can actually have an impact due to pulvera (sp?) being explicitly blasphemous by name and firework powder not being blasphemous, also explicitly and by name.

The emperor has the same kinds of powers that the Pope has, except that it's objectively true and tangible. When they say something is bad, it actually becomes bad and the spirits consider it bad going forward.

The difference between "Rokugan says ..." and "It actually happens like ..." is a pretty important distinction imo, and removing it sucks a lot out of the setting. Maybe not so appreciated in RYW.

Rokugan says is the more important part for figuring out how people will act.
If people honestly believe that it's really different, and really bad for you spiritually, then they're going to treat it as such. It doesn't even matter at that point whether it really is that bad (The only functional difference is how much paperwork Emma-O has to deal with later). Anyone caught using it will be treated as if they had used maho and probably executed for violating a serious imperial law and/or for their gross breach of religious morality. At the very least, their ancestors will turn away from them. Spirituality and magic is very real and has a very strong effect on everyone in the setting.

Of course, ancestors are notoriously blind to whatever their descendants are doing, or even whether their descendants are where they think they should be (See also: Many Yasuki ancestors coming back from Oblivion's Gate and being really fucking pissed that their family jumped Clans over 800 years prior).
But usually, when they notice something, it's because it's gone public in the mortal world.
Unfortunately, firearms are loud and obvious when used. Stick to bombs like the totally -nonexistent-I-swear ninja do and you'll have a much better time of it.

>ancestors are notoriously blind to whatever their descendants are doing, or even whether their descendants are where they think they should be
Maybe most of them are only obligated to look after the first few generations after their death or for as long as people are actively praying to them specifically? Unless you're Mirumoto or Otaku, if you died over two hundred years ago most of your descendants aren't going to remember you specifically. Maybe once you've stopped being relevant and are lumped into the generic ancestors category you get to go on break and just play pachinko in Yomi for the rest of your time. Then, it'd make sense why so many have no clue what the fuck is going on. They're letting the newbies take care of things.

I don't think you've been following, which is really an accomplishment.

You know that different realms operate at different time scales, right? That you can accidentally walk through a portal and spend seconds/months/years in another realm, then find your way back seconds/months/years ahead/behind when you left.

>You know that different realms operate at different time scales, right?
Where is this stated? There was that one guy who founded the Tanuki Clan who lost a year, but it was never directly stated that he was in a spirit realm during that lost time, and I don't recall this being in any of the descriptions for the spirit realms. Especially not one of the ones that is actively connected to ningen-do.

>I don't think you've been following, which is really an accomplishment.
I don't see why you'd think that, considering that what people in the setting say is true and believe to be true is more important than what is actually true, especially when some of those people are actually spirits that have objective power over your afterlife and the wellbeing of everything around you.

It's described that way in reference to travelling through Dragon lands, Kitsune Mori, and other places connected to different realms and accidentally passing through, though you would have to seriously dig through books to find an outright statement.

I'd sooner start trying to refind the reasons behind the three offers and two refusals in the ritual of gift giving, as that was actually useful.

That sounds more like Chikushudo or Sakkaku being dicks than a general statement on spirit realm speeds.

During the Destroyer War and the Oblivion's Gate thing, travel between Ningen-do, Yomi, and Tengoku all seemed to be pretty much 1:1. An entire unit of Scorpion troops committed sepukku at one end of the Oblivion Gate battlefield and marched right out of the gate on the far side within just a few moments to catch the enemy in a pincer attack. Although in that particular case, someone higher up in the celestial bureaucracy might have told Emma-O to expedite their afterlife processing and shove them back out the nearest hole.

Refusing twice proves that the person giving the gift is sincere in offering it and that they really do want you to have it.

Do any of the books have a collection of plot hooks, adventure seeds etc? I think the core had some, but am wondering if there were more elsewhere.

And as a development of that, it also proves that the person receiving the gift is taking the time to properly consider it.
It'd be rude to just take a gift and toss it on the pile, after all.

I think the Game Master's guide from 1e had more than a few.

>That sounds more like Chikushudo or Sakkaku being dicks
Not when it involves the Elemental & Celestial Dragons, and realms other than Chikushudo or Sakkaku.
> than a general statement on spirit realm speeds.
I wouldn't take it as a direct statement of ratio per realm; they're more ineffable than that.

Everyone who has heard of the ritual knows that. This particular description went into detail on each offer & refusal.

Try here: kazenoshiro.com/rpg/unofficial-content/l5r-rpg-adventures/
The site also has a number of official fictions which you may be able to draw inspiration from. In addition, if you're looking for more of a one-shot kind of game, check out the challenge-focus-strike series:
kazenoshiro.com/challenge-focus-strike/

Japan was using firearms in the Warring States period. That's long before Westernization hit.