L5R GEN

Alright guys, let's talk anything L5R.

I'm about to start putting together my own campaign, first time GM here, and any advice on story building and GMing would be appreciated!

I've been a player in a lot of different games over the years, DnD, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulu, and L5R. I've never been able to GM before now. What have your experiences been like?

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I posted in the last one and got no reply, so here's one bump.

About those covers.

Why it that so katanas are always depicted extremely truthfully, never venturing into shitty "fantasy aesthetics" teritorry while swords of every single other culture than japanese are usually turned into overdone, oversized, cartoonish caricatures?
How does japan have such immunity?

>Why it that so katanas are always depicted extremely truthfully[?]
1. the image of the katana has entered pop culture in a recognisable form.
2. they aren't.

Katanas get shitty fantasy makeovers plenty. Usually, it's in the form of retarded length or thickness.
The thing is that even the plainest katana has some level of aesthetics to it (At the very least, it's got a wave pattern along the length from how it was made and an interesting cross-stitch pattern on its hilt), while the most baseline version of most other swords simply don't, so they tend to be exaggerated more. Yeah, the fanciest examples of pretty much any sword can be cool and pretty, but katanas are one of the few that looks fancy even when it's really not.

Man I've really wanted to play in an L5R game for a long time, I even know about the first 3 things I"d play given the chance, but I'm pretty sure at this point I will never get the chance to play at all.

-Don't be a dick about etiquette. Figure out how much people want to bother with it, and use that as a baseline. It's fine to just use western standards of etiquette as a sort of translation.

-Decide how honorable your samurai are. L5R goes back and forth between adherence to bushido being the norm and it being an ideal that most people far really short of. Decide which one you want in advance, make sure everyone is on the same page.

-Keep things small scale. Books talk about imperial court and massive wars. Ignore that shit. Do politics within a province, fight feuds between family lines instead of between clans.

-When in doubt, do a story about magistrates. Solve crimes, but include things like resolving hauntings and breaking curses. Magistrates are still influential, so it's easy to mingle them with courtly and military aspects.

And I don't suppose I could ask here where to locate the PDFs for the recent editions of the game...

...could I?

>-Decide how honorable your samurai are. L5R goes back and forth between adherence to bushido being the norm and it being an ideal that most people far really short of.
Not really. There's a 1-10 scale and honour adjustments that provides a clear picture, with 4-5 being the average when taking all clans into account.

>HONOR RANKS 4-5: WHAT IS EXPECTED
>Characters of Honor Ranks 4 and 5 are the standard against which most others are measured. Such samurai make an effort every day to adhere to the tenets of Bushido and to bring honor and glory to their families and clans. Still, they are human and fl awed individuals. As such they fall short of their potential on occasion, but not so much that they spiral downward into shame and disappointment.

You could certainly find it in the tg archives.

I see a bunch... but well, one thing I would like to look for is the supposed "Rokugan Atlas"

I want to run Legend of the Burning Sands, but I'm not entirely sure what to do.

What can I do that isn't the Not-Roman-Mongols invading, or "A Rokugani Scorpion in Cairo" ?

hm... from what I have observed...

I think I could be a half-way decent Crab player...
...a Samurai (well, kinda), trained in various arts who finds the most enjoyment fighting in the shadowlands, however outside of it, is very VERY bummed out.

Finding enjoyment in fighting the shadowlands is going to weird out most other Crabs, and blatantly appall most other Rokugani if they find out.

hey, if Crab's job is defending the whole dang empire from the Shadowlands, might as well find some kind of enjoyment out of it.

It's sorta like finding joy in combating pedophiles and serial killers.

I download all of mine from One Drive.

Me and my friends have 3 campaigns going right now. They all take turns running their own campaigns and one is in the burning sandds. What we did is we're like a scouting party and we're on Horseback.

user was referring to whether Honor 1-3 or 6-9 should be more prevalent next to the average.

look for DA Archive

maybe someone can help me, what does jade do? does it actually deal damage to tainted things? does it just render oni vulnerable?

Crab: 1-3
Crane: 6-9
Dragon: 4-5
Lion:6-9
Mantis: 1-3
Phoenix: 6-9
Scorpion: 1-3
Unicorn: 4-5

Spider: 0-0

Jade damages tainted creatures, and oni are tainted. Therefore, they lose some of their damage reduction/take more damage.

Losing their reduction is functionally the same as taking more damage.
It burns the skin of anyone who has at least one full rank of taint (Including oni), which is unbearably painful and really obvious to observers, but not actually mechanically damaging.

>Spider
I'll keep that in mind if I ever decide to run a game in the Iweko or Onyx eras.

I would actually argue that the Spider range from 0-1, since the Susuma exist and some of the spider monks avoid the Taint.

hey i had a question about the shame swords.

so do you need a disgraced soul or a holy soul to make one? I'm making a game with the plot focusing around them and i want to get the lore right.

l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Shamesword