/l5rg/ Legend of the Five Rings General

Those are for Con games

I guess that makes sense.

>What Minor Clan is the best Minor Clan?
Boar
>Why is it Monkey?
This calls for a duel.
>Do you allow custom minor clans?
Never had to deal with one yet, but I'd allow it provided I read the fluff beforehand and any mechanics that the player might want to use.

Not but I've been hearing horror stories from my friends about how it's turned out for them. Stuff like it's basically turned into softcore ERP, there are no consequences for doing shit, ridiculous tone policing even when people are going out of their way to be polite, and other stuff.

...

I jumped ship before FRO8 truly got underway; thought it was going to be more pbp, and didn't consider that a game about gossipy courtiers who talk behind each others' backs would attract people who gossip and talk behind each others' backs OOC.

Try these:
>Murder! (Players try to solve a murder, Cluedo-style)
>Winter Court! (Courtiers go through a contest of skill.)
>The Magnificent Samurai (If there's not enough samurai, you call it that. Survive several waves of bandits, with foreplanning and oratory skills!)
>Sanjuro (With wits and cunning, you help a woman escape a large mansion, filled with guards.)

>The Magnificent Samurai (If there's not enough samurai, you call it that. Survive several waves of bandits, with foreplanning and oratory skills!)

Oh boy we did this once and it was glorious! The village was kinda out of the Empire's official border, so both the villagers and the bandits only had very rudimentary ideas about what samurai could do - they essentially assumed that samurai are just better-trained mundane warriors.

We abolished this silly misconception during the first wave, when our band of four (magistrate, bushi, courtier, artisan) killed one-fourth of the bandits (~200 dudes) without breaking a sweat (or taking a single Wound for that matter). After that, our main concerns were:
>Calming down the terrified villagers who were convinced that we were slaughter spirits who wanted to turn their lands into our blood-soaked ceremonial grounds
>Managing the disposal of dead bodies
>Tricking/forcing the now obviously reluctant bandits to attack the village despite their non-existing odds
>Introduce the ways of the Empire to the backward village

It was fun, even with the expected story themes turned inside-out.

I always thought the Dragonfly and the pre-Mantis Moshi were the most interesting minor clans.

What is the Realm of Animals like?

It's Rokugan without any hint of civilisation, and a whole bunch of animal spirits that look like animals.

But are the animals intelligent?
I'd like to make a character who ended up wandering into that Realm and managed to get back to home eventually after meeting some of the spirits.

Yes and no. They're animalistic nature given form, and the realm will exert a measure of influence on foreigners that remain there for any length of time. All realms do. In this case, it will cause you to behave more and more like an animal, until you simply remain there.

HM maybe I should think of a different realm for my character to wander into.

bump

That's only if you integrate yourself. Just wandering through won't affect you (much), especially if you are actively trying to leave once you realize something is wrong. If you happen to find the untamed wilderness fascinating or beautiful, then you will get affected by it.

And even if you do willingly stay in Chikushudo, its Jealousy (Which is extremely weak compared to most realms) wears off in a week or two.
Basically
If you end up there and then leave, nothing happens
If you end up there and willingly hang around (It is a very nice, naturally beautiful place, but there's no magical compulsion) for weeks or months, you will very slowly start to change into a generic animal spirit, removing yourself from the normal kharmic cycle. This change will be reversed within days if you leave the realm (or are dragged out) before it is completed, although there will be permanent, mild remnants of the change, such as new birthmarks, or thicker facial hair.

Then what would be the worst realm to wander into; ignoring Jigoku and the realm of Slaughter.

Sakkaku's inhabitants are all either huge jerks or grumpy orochi. You're in for a bad time Jealousy or no.

I imagine the realm with the Gaki would be worse.

It should be noted that all involuntary Controls can be resisted exactly like the Taint, because that's all that the Taint really is.

Going down the line

Chikushudo is safe enough as long as you don't willingly stick around.

Gaki-do won't exert any control as long as you don't interfere with its role. Interfere and it will drop the Control hammer, making you roll an ever increasing Willpower roll to resist every single minute. Luckily, the type of gaki you get turned into will quickly finish punishment and get reincarnated. That's still functional death for you. Also, the denizens of the realm are dangerous and disgusting.

Jigoku's Control, also known as the Taint, will fully corrupt you within seconds, jade or no. If you could somehow survive that, you'd find that the realm itself isn't actually that dangerous. It's formless and bland. Good luck actually doing that though.

Meido does not exert control on visitors, because anyone interfering with Emma-O's work gets ejected by him directly. It's boring, but you could hang around if you really wanted to. Nothing there but waiting souls and the big man himself though (And his little helpers in later eras).

Maigo-no-Musha has no functional control for outsiders, and is the waiting room's waiting room. Possibly even more boring than Meido.

Sakkaku's control starts up within the day and tries to make you more like the things that live there. Self-restraint and acting "appropriate" start to be less and less important as you get more and more influence in you. This doesn't last long once you leave the realm, although there can be permanent remnants.

Tengoku's Control is absolute and unresistable, but not exerted unless you cause trouble. If it wants you to do something while you are there, you do it. End of story.

Toshigoku is extremely dangerous, with a Control that starts to affect you within the hour. It can be resisted, but not for long. Goes away if you leave before getting fully corrupted.

>cont

Yomi exerts influence to stop guests from being disruptive, but that's it. Toe the line and it leaves you alone. Its denizens don't want you sticking around for too long, because you're supposed to be trying to get here through a mortal life, but they're honored ancestors, so they'll just ask you to leave politely and firmly when your visiting time is up.

Yume-do is visited every single night by every sentient mortal and immortal from all realms. Everything from the lowliest maggot gaki to the Celestial Dragon dreams, and they all dream here. If you get here through means other than sleeping, you can voluntarily take its Control and become a Yumeji for ever increasing power over your own dreams, and eventually even other people's dreams. Do this and you start to lose connection to your old realm, which manifests as sleeping way too much. Do this way too long and you lose connection to your old realm entirely and fade away as lord of your own disconnected dream realm. At this point, you could start to poke into other people's dreams, but why bother?

And then there's the mortal realm itself. Anything that ends up here becomes mortal, then dies and goes to Meido, where they get shuffled along to wherever they go.

This stuff is strictly out of character knowledge. The Rokugani themselves know about all the realms, but don't have many details about the ones that aren't directly related to reincarnation.

bump

Have any of your characters had to commit seppuku?

Remember, it's not shameful to say they did. To die in the name of one's lord is the highest honor a samurai can attain.

Are the other nation's aware of these alternate realms?
Like I'm pretty sure there's a version of Egypt, India, and the Middle East somewhere around Rokugan.

Once.
But this act was more of a protest against an admittedly retarded Clan Champion and a way for my character to leave the group as I could no longer play.

Possibly, but what happens to dead gaijin is a complete mystery to Rokugan and has never been explained. The not!romans have a god of war that suspiciously resembles Akodo, but there's really not a lot of information on non-Rokugani religions.

Theology is weird; it's shown that the Gods of the Ivinda are real, but how they fit in Rokugani cosmology is also strange. Not to mention all the eerie similarities between Yodotai theology and that of Rokugan.

From everything that's said and read, it's implied that the one true creation of the world really was the Nothing making things, Amaterasu and Onnotangu making the world and all it's inhabitants, and making the ten Kami.

The Yodotai describe their gods "falling from the heavens" but unlike Rokugan thinks that they simply died on impact. Their spirits and the descriptions of said gods also sound remarkably similar to the elemental kami and the God kami, respectively.

Shinsei is also implied to have went to the Ivory Kingdoms and helped to establish their own philosophies under a different identity.

My very first character had to commit seppuku because her Shadowland Taint went though the roof. She got the Paneki treatment: her second chickened out and the Taint resurrected her as an intelligent undead (to be exact, her mutation was the "you can't die lol" one).

That sucks.

That sucks even harder than the first one, because to be denied seppuku (and to have your second chicken out) is like, some kind of mega sin. At least you tried to commit it before you became a Lost.

...well, I mean, you're a Lost now, but you tried. Your second's a little bitch, by the way, considering the deep personal importance that being a second implies.

That seems to be several handle sizes too many.

Actually, given the relative size of Kanpeki and his massive meaty hands, it's not that far off from the handle size of a nodachi used by a normal man.

It's definitely not the most ridiculous nodachi in fantasy.

Looks like a Nagamaki to me.

It's a nagamaki. Basically take a naginata, but equalize the blade and handle lengths. Also, it's misclassified by the game as a polearm even though all evidence suggests that you wield it like a katana with way more leverage.

It's definitely like at the exact 50/50 mark between a sword and a polearm.

Huh, looked like a nodachi to me.

Thanks for the correct, user.

Is this control function where the Touch of the Spirit Realms advantage comes from?

>Your second's a little bitch

She was hunted down, killed, then reanimated as a zombie so that she could share my character's fate to some extent.

The funny thing is that the whole story was set up by a Daigotsu dude who wanted to marry my character but was friendzoned early on. He thought that turning his waifu into a Lost might improve his chances (it did btw) and sent some kansen at her second to fuck up the seppuku ceremony.

Yes, but surviving manuals and supposedly authentic martial arts all treat it like a sword in terms of basic movements and stances and whatnot.

No, but another player's character had to.
We were playing the 1e Topaz Championship adventure, and his Lion was utter garbage at literally everything.

Shamefur Dispray.

>Daigotsu character killing your character to fuck her

I can't say I'm surprised by this, considering that Shadowlands characters, even at low levels of Taint, tend to be insane by the standards of any... well, sane person.

He didn't think through not being able to have kids with you, did he? Or is there some maho ritual I'm not aware of that can knock up a zombie?

Kinda. Touch of the Spirit Realm generally means that there's a bit of that realm stuck in your soul somehow. Maybe you were there for a while before reincarnating and it stuck, maybe your mom passed by a little hole in reality when she was pregnant, maybe it's just a fluke. The advantage could also represent being descended from a slumming Fortune in some cases. Emma-O is known to take a vacation from sorting souls to go start a mortal family every few centuries, and Touch of the Spirit Realms: Meido would be a good way to represent being related to that.

It is the Hantei ancestral sword, a no-dachi (pic related).

I didn't know if you fucked up badly at the Topaz Championship, you had to kill yourself to preserve your clan's honor. I thought that was just a joke between me and some friends from my first game.

The more you know.

If you fuck up really badly at any formal event, you might have to seppuku to cleanse the shame. But being that shit at your own gempukku either means you really are some kind of super failure or your standards are way too high even for a samurai from a family with high standards.

The Daigotsu dude was an intelligent undead too. Turned out that undead-on-undead relationships tend to have quite a leeway in certain aspects like procreation and producing heirs.

A zombie wanted to bone your character, so he fucked up your seppuku so you'd also become a zombie, so that a zombie could bone a zombie.

I fucking love this game.

I used it to represent my character's inhuman ancestry; his grandfather escaped from Gaki-do before the War of Spirits.
All his decedents will bear the sin of Gaki-do for eternity.

I feel like this is the least shit and argumentative general on Veeky Forums.

Thanks for being cozy, L5R.

Just wait till our >>female bushi faggot shows up, the "Can samurai be gay?" retards, and retard clan partisans (current flavor is "Crab suck at everything forever") show up. Then the thread will degenerate into shitflinging and general retardation.

It has the blessing of being a smaller game, so it doesn't get the virulent shitposting that D&D or 40k get.

Did anything happen during the reign of Hantei XXXIV?

>A zombie wanted to bone your character, so he fucked up your seppuku

He also sent my character (and the party she was part of) to the Second Festering Pit that directly resulted in her receiving shitton of Taint. But I guess him overreacting like this was understandable, because his rival was a Hida, so the stakes were actually pretty darn fucking high.

But the answers are right there in the books. To all of those questions. (Samurai-ko exist, no one cares if you keep it secret, and worst clan is Shadowlands).

Well, he lost a lot of political support when he tried to force everyone to be more pious and ascetic, and then he retired after a bunch of monks convinced him that you can't force everyone to seek enlightenment that hard.
Also, the most important development in the arts the Crab ever saw was invented in the Draw-Lot Plays.

My 1st game took place in a setting of Rokugan where the Iweko line has continued to the fourth, Daigotsu's deal with Iweko I didn't make the Taint voluntary (because the evil realm of evil will disobey things that tell it to stop being as evil), and the Spider Clan are under constant watch by the Kuni and Kitsuki for the first sign of them being shits.

I mean, hey, GM is free to make their own Rokugan as they want, and I wasn't complaining.

Two daughters. Eight sons.

Of the daughters:
One fucked her brother while he was pretending to be a unicorn.
The other founded the worst (real) clan to ever exist.

what the fuck, Ameterasu?

>What Minor Clan is the best Minor Clan?

Sparrow
It's really too bad they'll never have good mechanics.

>invented in the Draw-Lot Plays

I regret not making a Crab.

Incest isn't that uncommon in real life mythology, so hey.

Hantei also wanted to bone Doji, so.

The Challenge / Focus / Strike files from Kaze No Shiro.

>One fucked her brother while he was pretending to be a unicorn.
Nah.

>In 153 the Kami Shinjo was lured to the Oasis of Spirits from where she returned pregnant. She spoke little of it, but she had five shapeshifting children, who used to feel most comfortable in the figure of their father, a shimmering white steed with fiery halo, a Ki-rin.

>i'm gonna eat this fucking kids.
>why is fu leng so creepy.
>doji stop pouring us tea this is the fifth cup.
>i have to pee. will that flood the world?
>why doesn't my wife put out anymore.
>bayushi what the fuck are you doing.
>hida stop stepping on akodo's feet.

Okay so the kid in red and black is obviously Bayushi, but why is he summoning some sort of demon?

And... who is Hida fighting?
Ryoshun?

That's probably Akodo, considering they were the most martial of the kami.

l5r.com/2012/12/12/10k-card-the-celestial-court/

Lord Moon and Lady Sun sit in the Celestial Court over seeing their young children. Lord Moon’s blade rests behind him, he is stern and cold. Lady Sun gazes out on her children, reserved but interacting with Doji. Behind them you can see scenes of the world of what has been and will be.

Doji and Bayushi. We initially thought to pair Bayushi with his twin Shiba but the two have so little in common that it is easily shown visually. So we had Doji and Bayushi participating in their parents’ court as their descendants would for generations to come. Doji serves her mother tea learning the ways of etiquette while Bayushi notices and curiously reaches out at a strange shadowy flicker that his father lets go unspoken.

Hantei and Akodo. The two argue angrily as children do over their toys much like they will fight over the Empire in the last duel of the Kami in years to come.

Hida and Ryoshun wrestle for fun. Both bigger and rougher than their other brothers we imagined a wrestling contest not mean spirited but of pure brotherly competitiveness in a sumai style.

Shiba and Togashi. The spiritual children, the two brothers meditate and contemplate the universe at their fingers. We chose to obscure Togashi’s face as this has been the general nature of him.

Fu Leng and Shinjo. Perhaps my favorite in the illustration. Fu Leng appears as his sister Shinjo always remembers him, conjuring little creatures for her amusement. We see a Fu Leng before he was twisted into a monster, back when he lived to make his sister clap with glee. The brother and sister play and draw together forming memories strong enough that Shinjo would one day venture deep into the Shadowlands to try and reason with her little brother who had gone mad.

What would have happened if Fu Leng never became the evil monster of the Empire?

He would still be even more dickish than Bayushi. Fu Leng had a habit of being a little shit even before he fell.

If he'd stayed around with Shinjo, things might have actually been happy for them both.

Even the other Kami, who didn't remember their fallen brother, were surprised by how evil and twisted he'd become and mourned him appropriately.

In an addition to what I said in he'd probably still be a dick.

He was so much of a dick he trolled the Lying Darkness.

... How does this happen? What edition? What insight rank?

I'm not sure about Uikku guys...

Where is the new Uikku? Without his prophecies we are blind to the future...

I blame Togashi, the biggest dick of all the Kami. Fu Leng had a good hiding place from his hungry hungry daddy and Togashi led Shinjo to it and Lord Moon followed them.

It would have been baller as hell if Hantei and Fu Leng tag teamed Lord Moon and became Bros of the Throne. Fu Leng would have been the Magic-vs-Magic and Hantei the Steel-vs-Steel. But no, Togashi had to ruin it all.

Celestial Order. It had to happen.

The Order isn't fair, but if you break it, bad shit happens.

>our band of four (magistrate, bushi, courtier, artisan) killed one-fourth of the bandits (~200 dudes) without breaking a sweat (or taking a single Wound for that matter)

You have a shit GM.

If they had a Mirumoto, it'd make sense.

Otherwise I'm not seeing how they pulled it off, or if it's just an exaggeration.

>>hida stop stepping on akodo's feet.
Akodo is to the right of Hantei. They're arguing next to a ball. That leaves Hida's wrestling partner to be Ryoshun.

Wasn't there a couple new prophets?
I think you had a Dragon and a Fox prophet.
Not that it matters prophecy has to be like the worst power.

bump

Hmm... Not that guy or the other one, but that's a little disappointing, especially since they always had a hard ban on anything ERP-like. And I'm saying that as someone whose character last game knocked up another PC, without having things get lewd. I'm not sure what you mean about 'tone policing' though, since they always had a lot of focus on the high level of etiquette and such that's required when samurai interact though.

But I haven't played the newest game yet either so don't know what things are like this time, first hand (I was in 3, 5, and 7... or something like that). Still thinking that maybe I should resurrect my cold hearted ninja who karate chops people in the neck though.

I just checked, and it's a plot thing.
In addition to him being a total fuckup, that is.

Not so much a plot thing as a Matsu thing.

...

Homebrew combat system + IR3 Mirumoto Bushi who could make 14 attacks per turn. But the kill count was somewhat evenly distributed because fantasy samurai versus mundane bandits is obviously a very poor match-up for the latter.

Wow. So not even mook rules; your group just went full on wuxia ham.

It is actually a combination of the two: non-samurai combatants have considerably worse fighting stats, while samurai (all of them, not only the bushi) has access to some pretty darn bonkers techniques. Obviously, samurai-on-samurai fights tend to be far less glorious and more like an elaborate, tense match of technique and tactics.

What's the worst thing you've ever come across in a group?
Either like the worst character or worst plot.

I am a complete newbie to the game who is preparing their first character, a hotblooded and overconfident Kakita Bushi who is less than enthusiastically welcome in Crane Lands due to his propensity to shag around, and all together un-crane like cocky (ok, cocky IS cranelike) and gar (this isn't) attitude. The "Unexpectedly Bro Duelist" is what I was going for. Peasants love him due to his easy going and forgiving nature, which also earns him no favors among his clan.

How'd I do, stat wise?

Traits are:

Daredevil (Mental) : Cost -3 : pg 147
Hero of the People (Social) : Cost -2 : pg 150
Dangerous Beauty (Physical) : Cost -3 : pg 147
---
Black Sheep (Social) : Bonus 3 : pg 156
Lechery (Social) : Bonus 2 : pg 160
Brash (Mental) : Bonus 3 : pg 157
Overconfident (Mental) : Bonus 3 : pg 161

Expand on how you play a "living campaign".