Legend of the Five Rings General

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>>51114238
The treasure trove:
>http://www.mediafire.com/folder/c7tfqff9sqp71/L5R

>>51112862
>What the hell is sturdy clothing and can anyone post up an image?
You know that short tunic that you always see Studio Ghibli samurai wearing? Like that, but with pants. Short, light, plain, not going to get snagged on anything, and somewhat resistant to wear and tear. Perfect for people who have to trudge through the wilderness.

>>51113194

Bad math on your part.

An Earth 3 Forest killer has 18 wounds while healthy (Earth 3 x 5 + 3 Stamina). 19 damage and you are Nicked for a +3 TN penalty. all other wound ranks are 9 wounds.

An IR 1 Air 3 Void 3 Iaijutsu 3 Kakita bushi is going to beat you silly.

7k4+3 (36.7 ave) versus your 3k3+2 (18.5 ave) (untrained); Kakita knows 5 pieces of info on you and gets a +1k1 to Focus.
9k6+3 (50.4 ave) versus your 3k3+2 (18.5 ave) (untrained); Kakita wins and gets 6 Free raises.
8k5+3 (43.7 ave) versus your 25 Armor TN (Reflex 3 for the benefit of the doubt), calls 3 Raises for extra damage and assigns all 6 free raises to extra damage; hits with +9k0 to damage.
14k2 -> 10k4 (38.9 ave) damage puts you into Hurt for a +10 TN penalty.

>>51115550
If you, as a bushi, don't have Iaijutsu 3 for the Mastery Ability, then you should switch for something non-bushi because you are playing the game wrong. Excusable only if you needed that 5 xp for Jiujutsu 5 or Heavy Weapons 5.

>>51115550
And then the Forest Killer spends a Void to reduce damage by 10, which is only fair as the Kakita has blown through all his Void, going down to about 29 damage. Which will put him at Grazed for +5 TN Penalty, or +2 if he took Strength of the Earth. Which in his example he did.

>>51115751
But Kenjutsu 5 has the same abilty but better as it applies to all Swords, so Iaijutsu 3 is far from "doing it wrong" if you intend to play a guy who'll just tank the first strike and power through to win Duels to the Death.

>>51116002
But you don't necessary want Kenjutsu 5 (that's 15 xp), while Iaijutsu 3 is something that is well within the realm of possibility even for a starting character.

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>>51115046
>You know that short tunic that you always see Studio Ghibli samurai wearing?
Pic related?

>>51115865
No void spent there.

7k4+3 (3k3 Awareness, +3k0 Iaijutsu and +1k1+3 Center Stance)
9k6+3 (3k3 Void, +3k0 Iaijutsu, +1k1+3 Center Stance, +1k1 win Assess by 10, +1k1 Kakita Bushi IR 1)
8k5+3 (3k3 Reflexes, +3k0 Iaijutsu, +1k1+3 Center Stance, +1k1 Kakita Bushi IR 1)

Spending Void on the Focus Roll would push it up to 10k7+3 (57 ave) for 7 Free Raises followed by spending a point to boost Katana damage by +1k1 would put damage output at 16k3 -> 10k6 for 49.9 damage average.

>>51116285
You don't get Center Stance bonus in the first round (Assessment) because CS bonus goes for the following round only.

Alright, I'm a lurker and new player to the setting (havent been able to find any games, if anyone knows a good direction to look I'd be grateful.)

I've been batting around the idea of working on a home brew clan and looking for some input on the concept.

My latest iteration is a minor Clan offshoot of the Dragon devoted to honoring the will of their founder (insert worldview/goal of founder and their epic tale here) which translates into a philosophical or spiritual predisposition even in their martial Bushi, almost always through a lens of reverence for the dead.

There's some basic fluff, now for the mechanical goal: I'll speak plainly here, I personally don't like mechanics that (I feel) overly restrict what a player can do with their general class. For example I don't like that if you want a really good duelist then you go Kakita, period. (yes I know there's a mathematical discussion about that right now but the fact its a stretch to accomplish makes me feel this example is valid) If a players a Bushi and wants a sick duelist and dumps the exp into it then I think that should work. Now the player is going to have to deal with the consequences of that focus but I dont like feeling like its locked away from them. (I do have no issue with them needing to put in some extra work exp wise than the Kakita to reach the same heights though, just not enough that its no longer even something you'd consider).

Obviously I don't want players running around being fantastic at everything, so the bonuses need to be limited to the particular thing you want to focus in, yet letting you decide just what that is. This makes me feel some of the ranks should target a players chosen skill and give 'x' effect.

I'll admit though mechanics are my weakest subject. Thoughts?

Also I'll likely post some Clan fluff and Lore later.

>>51116718
>>new player
>>Homebrew clan

Don't.

As a general aside...what is with /tg/'s boner for Minor Clans?

>>51116891
They're easy ways to create custom factions that don't really step on anything else in the setting's toes. Monk Temples would be too, but they've got a much more rigid theme in the Brotherhood itself, and ronin otokodate don't really have the oomph of an entire clan.

>>51116891
You can't really home brew a Great Clan without dramatically changing the setting, but Minor Clans come and go without changing much. They're also a nice size of fluff/crunch parcel. You could also do a new monk temple, for example, but there isn't much there to do.

>>51116891

On the second part, it gives me a way to present other players with new tools to play the game and create stories (in this case the idea is to give some thought to how we as the living translate and act on what we see as the wills of those who came before us, and just how personal and flawed, or not, that can be) they haven't before.

Also see >>51117008


As for the first part; I'm aware my status as an inexperienced player (something I hope to fix) turns this into a generally bad idea. Hence why I'm looking to the more experienced L5R community.

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>>51114427

What ever happened to Marta Mora?

>>51116675
I've seen it interpreted both ways (an AEG FAQ was the first time I saw Assessment getting the CS bonus), but it doesn't really change much only 2 pieces of info instead of 5.

>>51117407
That is literally what the Kitsu Sodan Senzo, Moto Death Priests, and Bat Clan are all about. Read the setting.

>>51117823

In the sense they each have death as a thematic element? Other than that all three are pretty damn different. The Kitsu Sodan Senzo are all about actually communing with the deceased and even summoning them, which you could say is a way of directly keeping them alive, or known. The Moto Death Priests are mechanically all about wielding death and fluff wise about literally following minor death gods. The bat Clan I admit I know the smallest about, as I haven't dropped money on Secrets of The Empire, though what I've been able to dredge up shows them mechanically to be a summoner class and fluff wise to focus more on Kami and Spirits.

What I'm after isn't any of these, as that would be redundant. I'm after fluff wise trying to tackle the issue of whether the living are even capable of representing the wills of the dead, or if there's inevitable co-opting, and all that jazz. Seeing as the vast majority of Rokugan doesn't have the Sondan Senzo's ability to just ring them up (a rather difficult procedure regardless if I'm remembering it right.)

Mechanically I'm also not after any of those three, but in allowing players to achieve a single chosen specialization of their choice to work towards without being locked out by faction-specific mechanics, though the cost is that it'll take a little more work.

I understand that something like this isn't necessary, for christ's sake if someone wants their drama of figuring out what their deceased dad truly wanted and what that means for them on a tough-as-nails tank they can do it using a Crab Bushi, but like most Minor Clans I'm trying to develop something that provides its own hooks on such a thing.

Clearly I think the lesson here is I just need to present a third or fourth draft if I want advice so there's an actual clear focus for discussion.

>>51110534
Togashi's sight of different futures worked better the less he personally get involved in any particular event. Everything he did was geared towards giving the second day of thunder the best chance of success vs Fu Leng possible (because that's when he dies / his sight stops), but he had to work from the angle of seeing oncoming futures that don't work, then meddling in ways that created holes in his predictions, hoping none of those holes would break the rest of working future(s) he saw.

>>51116891

Because the setting keeps getting rid of minor clans. The setting seems more interesting with a few big factions and then a lot of smaller ones in between.

>>51117573
Nothing?

>>51116891
Special snowflake.

>>51118453
>>Translate and act on what we see as the wills of those who came before us...

Asking the ancestors what the want is pretty sure fire way of accomplishing that. Which is one of the primary functions of the Sodan Senzo and was how the Bat got their Minor Clan (Naseru was sad his sister was dead and found out this creepy Mantis guy could retrieve spirits from Meido and got him to retrieve Tsudao who reassured him that he wasn't a total one-eyed douche-nozzle).

>>51120184

>Special snowflake
>Clans that don't have much influence on anything

>>51121024
Did you see the pre-edited Butterfly School? Shit was 1e Kakita Artisan levels of broken.

>>51121067
How so?

>>51121194
It gave +1 Void, something only Monk or Monk-like schools do. I believe the family bonus was Awareness which is very synergistic with their R3 technique of breaking the game.

The Rank 3 Technique was ridiculous. For a trivial roll you could lock out most characters from the raise system, forever, as it lacked a duration. Awareness/Iaijutsu (Assessment) vs Void x5 with raises adding to the the number extra raises inflicted means with a TN of 25 you are locking Void 3 characters completely out of raising. Incidentally using the tech triggers off entering Center Stance so it even gets to flip the bird at initiative. In doing so it outright neuters anyone it faces. Shit is well beyond the ken of Great Clan Techs, much less a Minor Clan.

>>51121516
Wow that's horribly written.

>>51121623
To be fair, I the author's didn't actually understand what they had created, rather than setting out to deliberately create some kind of god-clan.

>>51120714

Definitely not denying thats a way to go about it, but my point is that kind of tale (where you have the luxury of ringing up grandpa to actually ask him just what in the hell he wanted to do with the family farm) is precisely what I'm trying to not get at since, as you point out, is what the sodan already do. Tales like their's are the fantastical adventures of Major clans, and the Bat clans quest is of similar scope and singular in its happening, though it is a minor clan.

I guess what I'm is what happens to everyone else, the people who cant just hook into resurrecting those whom are gone, and even more, what happens when the person whose gone was so present, so larger than life, that they inspired you so deeply you devoted yourself to bringing their vision to life. Then what happens to that after time. Definitely something I want to work on, and I'll do a better job of actually presenting it clearly.

>>51121024
You get to be a "proper" samurai without the stigma of being a ronin, with super special secret techniques, and still get to be outside of the established setting and be unique.

People seem to miss that the theme of the game is that samurai are rather confined, and that freedom is represented by the shit life of a ronin.

So how large a role does war play in your games? Do you ever run mass battles? How did it go?

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So what are your PCs' favored hobbies /tg/? I GM but between my players we have a pillowbook author, an artist, and a shugenja who slums it on the streets as a fortune teller to let off steam and acquire rumors

>>51123433
Poetry. Just constant haiku at every opportunity.

>>51123445
I started doing this in a different game, because another PC got cursed to speak only in rhymes. My PC found that impossibly funny and spent the rest of the session either mimicking their rhyme speak or speaking in other forms of poetry. I did combat haiku for a while there.

Its actually pretty challenging. I may just suck at literature though

>>51123433
I play a humble roning, so he practices the suitably humble art of wood carving.

>>51121067

1) That was a homebrew minor clan in the works.

2) No homebrew or setting minor clan will ever approach the special snowflake status of the major clans. See: Spider Clan

One of the constant issues with the roll and keep system has been that most weapons are objectively useless aside from flavor. Why would you ever use a weapon that is identical to another in every single way except that it deals less damage? At least with knives and shit, you get the argument that they are small and easily hidden, but with polearms it's hard to argue for using anything but a bisento. Not to mention that even with mastery abilities added to incentivize taking skills, those are completely unevenly distributed. Just look at kenjutsu and polearms, for example. Kenjutsu gets a flat +1k0 to sword damage. Polearms gets the exact same bonus, but only against significantly larger or mounted opponents. One would think that a situational bonus should give larger benefits than one that applies all the time, but apparently not.

You spend so much time making all these diverse techniques, kiho, spells, schools, kata and whatnot, only to make the weapons bland as fuck, aside from the bows for some reason. It feels like they wanted a simplified system, but instead of going the route of games like Qin or Exalted, where damage is universal and what separates weapons are tags, they went the other way and made weapons identical save for damage. But while tags are generally more subjective in power, damage is objectively better or worse.

So my group generally uses some house ruled weapon tags and maneuvers to diversify them and give them more of a purpose. Spears, chain weapons and polearms generally have the Keep At Bay maneuver that imposes attack penalties on opponents with shorter weapons. Weapons that break get the Twist maneuver that lets you break them off inside an opponent's body. Spears get the Defensive tag, adding Armor against charging opponents while in either defensive stance. Knives are faster than larger weapons. A bisento, ono or similar top heavy weapon gets the Unwieldy tag that makes them more powerful, but also reduces armor TN after a swing.

>>51124079
To be fair, with the whole "winner gets to decide the storyline" aspect of the TCG, a lot of the fluff is essentially glorified fanfiction. I tend to pretend a lot of stuff didn't happen, or at least happened in a way that made a lot more sense.

>>51124178
>a lot of the fluff is essentially glorified fanfiction
On a certain scale, that's definitely true. When AEG allowed the community to design a card by committee, and the community's collective voting pattern spat out a Mantis Clan Kenku Ninja Pirate, that was shitty fanfic. When the Mad Ronin had a tournament to be brought back to sanity and the nezumi won? Shitty fanfic. But the large scale stuff? That was L5R being deformed by the need to keep shovelling tournaments and story prizes out there. The fans' portion of blame for that amounts to existing and paying money for cardboard rectangles.

>>51124930
Either way, it boils down to a lot of the fluff being retarded. Rokugan is definitely one of those settings where I feel the GM absolutely has to exercise some recidivist tendencies in order to not have it all be completely illogical and stupid.

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>>51114238
Maybe. Depends if I'm playing a dumb character or not.

Also, for /tg/: Have you ever made a glorious save against impossible odds?

Additional Information:
>Be Scorpion, Shosuro Family
>Be part of party because kicked out from home and in the area at the time (Black Sheep, Cast Out)
>Not many chances to be a courtier, because we accidentally stumbled into a War campaign
>Bayushi vs Shosuro in a battle for supremacy
>Shosuro (most of the higher-ups) have been consumed by the Nothing
>Other clans backing this fight on both sides
>On the side of Bayushi because Emperor, Loyalty, and Team.
>Also only competent team diplomat.

>Fast forward to the session
>Part of the army as military advisor, about to defend Kyuden Bayushi
>Six bottles of sake down due to trying to calm some people through Dutch Comfort (fail)
>Emperor makes a speech about taking the enemy down
>Break into laughter due to fighting the enemy while one such "enemy" (he met with us already) in the ranks
>Emperor is not amused
>Use Etiquette to feign behaviour due to alcohol (damn well smell like it): 10k5 = 44
>Emperor's Etiquette: 10k10 = 43
>Get off scot-free (sure honour took a hit by -6 (probably via GM Fiat), but at least it's not Sudoku-worthy)
>Have friend drag me off of the crowd
>Half the party is OOCly laughing their arses off, while the other half was just shaking their heads, wondering why the Scorpion made a fool of themselves in front of THE EMPEROR
>I remind everyone that I have the "Rumourmonger" disadvantage:

Roll a Willpower check of a TN of (Individual with the highest Glory Rank, x5). If you fail, you are compelled to creat a rumour about them.

>If I stayed there a little longer, I would've had to roll Willpower on a Honour 6, Glory 4, Status 10 Emperor.
>I'd probably fail, and create a horrible rumour that could spell my execution/seppuku.

>mfw I revealed this to the party
>mfw that worked

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>>51123433
Rumourmongering, Go, writing stories, drinking tea, drinking alcohol, lechery, infiltration, be an asshole in court.

Such is the life of a courtier.

>>51125319
>Rokugan is definitely one of those settings where I feel the GM absolutely has to exercise some recidivist tendencies in order to not have it all be completely illogical and stupid.
Revisionist? True. You really have to Rokugan Your Way to avoid whichever stuff personally offends you - but exactly what that is varies per person.

>>51125507
>Emperor is not amused
>Use Etiquette to feign behaviour due to alcohol (damn well smell like it): 10k5 = 44
>Emperor's Etiquette: 10k10 = 43
If you don't call for raises, the result is only the most basic success. I wouldn't expect anything lethal, but "Scot free" is stretching it when you laugh at the head honcho.

>>51124178
>>51124930
>>51125319
As someone who plays the CCG, which is what got me into the game, I take offense to that

One of the big draws to me was when my friend told me that winning tournaments influenced the storyline. I was like holy shit really? That's pretty fuckin cool

You're not wrong that it messes up the canon but in reality, who exactly goes exactly per-canon in every L5R game they play? The beauty of RPG's is that if you don't like something, don't use it. The endless notching in this General about card players ruining the game is on my opinion kinda like beating a dead horse. Yes we get it, a couple retards who put in some stupid shit can cause some breakdowns in the story. Luckily you can ignore it if you want

>>51126762
>who exactly goes exactly per-canon in every L5R game they play?
When wrestling a herd of monkeys into a playgroup online, you better believe I prefer keeping canon straight.

>>51126778
You're not wrong
But you also have to consider L5R was invented before the Internet

>>51126762

To be honest, many players are not exactly fans of the pre-tournaments canon either.

I, for one, don't mind stuff like the Spider Clan at all because I think the story has been shit since its inception, so nothing can surprise me.

>>51122456

>super special secret techniques

Except if its properly balanced (which it should be, we all know there are exceptions) it really is just a way to help you mechanically focus a character with tools you don't otherwise have.

>outside of the established setting

Except your not? Your Samurai, you are expected to behave like one and be held accountable to all the same expectations, failures thereof, and intrigue. Except you dont have the weight of a major clan backing you up, so plenty of other samurai will (very politely) look down on you. Not to mention the book litterally instruct how to and encourage you make your own minor clans, so if anything they are confirmed established in the setting, if not canon lore. Don't get me wrong anon, I'm not saying people don't use these things to live their special snowflake dreams, but you're painting with an awful broad brush.

Hello there fellow samurais !

For my next game I want to do an actual scene of Tea Ceremony with lots of plot, diplomacy, politics and discussion. That means making tea the way it's done and serving it the right way while being in roleplay all the way.

but I do have a problem : I don't know how it is 'properly done' : how do you make the tea ? For how long ? How do you serve it ? How do you drink it ?

>>51123433
Fucking.

When you're a Crab bushi with the lecherous disadvantage, you have to blow off steam somehow.

>>51125604
When you're a courtier none of those are hobbies, they are most serious duties.

>>51128005
Nah, I think being an asshole might just be recreational.

>>51114238
Ok /tg/uys,

I got a lore question...Did Osano Wo ever fight a epic monster? Any giant serpent, multi-headed dragon or a kraken?

>>51127821
A noble pursuit. Make sure any bastard ronin you father will know that they have the blood of Hida in their veins and should come to try their luck in Crab provinces. Maybe a 20 goblin winter will be declared and they can die nobly in the Shadowlands trying to join the clan that they by all rights should have been in from birth.

>>51128228
Well, he did apparantly debate Togashi, and those debates were "legendary" so he did fight one epic Dragon.
But yeah, he might have fought something epic when he waged war on the trolls?

>>51128766
It happened after he had ascended to Fortunehood, but he had an incident where he actually returned to Ningen-do to take the field alongside a bunch of Crab fighting, I think, the Lion. And then either Bishamon or some other fortune partial to the Lion took the field on their side, and the fighting was so titanic that all the mortal soldiers just left the field in awe and horror, conflict forgotten.

>>51126762
>>51126778

But the game itself does give alternate canons with Imperial Histories.

Personally I never do anything without assuming the Toturi lineage never died out - otherwise its just madness.

>>51129219

Well, in my games I assume Amaterasu was actually a good and responsible mother and as such she sucker punched Onnotangu when he tried to eat their children - otherwise it is just ridiculous.

>>51129219
I always assume they just dig up a Hantei heir from the otomo/seppun or the like, after the day of thunder, as is procedure. Or Togashi has one hidden somewhere. Or produce one that's been hidden/married off into Doji/Akodo/Hida/you get the point. Each to his own!

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>>51130021
>Each to his own!
>Not fighting to the death in honorable duels over who is more right on a matter purely of opinion

Do you even Crane?

>>51130800
But anon, Crane are always right

Though, that makes me wonder, can someone develop a bad reputation from being too trigger happy with challenging people into duels?

>>51130896
Yes. You'll get some grudging respect for your abilities if you consistently win, but people will think you're a belligerent asshole if you act like every hour is duel o'clock.

>>51131212
>but people will think you're a belligerent asshole if you act like every hour is duel o'clock.
How about a young Kakita out to try and desperately prove themselves so they can make it into the Kenshinzen? Losing sight of the greater nature of the family and their duties for their obsessive focus on being not just the best duelist but being KNOWN as the best duelist?

Because that's an idea I wanted to play sometime. Flawed gloryhound Kakita going about his dreams all the wrong way.

>>51131697
That sounds pretty good to me. Extra points if he's on a musha shugyo while rampaging around Rokugan challenging everything ever. He'd either learn some humility over time or die.

>>51129219
>>51130021

So what are some other recommended lore fixes by /tg/ apart from apparently avoiding Iweko stuff?

>>51131748
>"You looked at me weird!"

>"I wasn't even looking at you!"

>"So you call me a liar then?"


This would be real easy to get into constant duels with honestly.

>>51131879
Weeeell. Everyone has their own personal thing they think is a step too far, but avoiding everything ever with the spider is at the minimum a good step. Another would be to consider that yeah, the events that happen in the 12th century are maybe good plot hooks, but whatever you do, don't have half a dozen of the most destructive wars ever take place in almost nonstop order in a few decades. Spread that shit out over the century.
Me, I would just say start around where the timeline of first edition begins, before the scorpion clan coup, and work your way out after that to figure out what elements if any from later things that happen you want to incorporate in one shape or another.

>>51131958
spread that shit out over the centuries, rather. Many centuries.

>>51124079

Speaking of minor clans, how do you guys handle having minor clan characters who want to be full courtiers? Are the only options to have them go find a major clan to sponsor them? Any info on what major clans do this the most?

>>51123602
Cranes are asshole elitists.

t. Lion

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>>51131958
I use the Spider but I ran a two year game that saw the PCs involved at the end of the Destroyer War and the game set a century later has them altered from where they were going in the lore.

I decided to run with impossibly zealous Imperial loyalist angles with them that got ignored in the actual game, make more than ONLY the Susumu remain untainted, and generally bastardized them into something different based on how the PCs radically altered the setting there

We have fun, at least.

>>51131879
Kill everything past the Four Winds Period. Some of the old guard will say go even farther and kill everything after the Second Day of Thunder, but really outside of Shizue stupidity the Hidden Emperor was not THAT bad, especially when compared to Megatron...err Iuchiban's return and everything to do with Iweko dynasty.

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>>51132024
>The Kenshinzen notices you and approaches the fence

>>51132053
Take your iaijutsu elsewhere you silver haired, grease-stained fop.

>>51131958

I like how in Imperial Histories, the Champions of the Sapphire Throne historical setting outlines how it would be like with Toturi Emperors instead of Iweko.

And its basically "all good in the 'hood".

When doing games, if people really want the later stuff, I always set it after the current timeline but before an assumed destination of Champions of the Sapphire Throne.

>>51130896
>Crane are always right
Only Hoturi would be so full of himself to believe that.

>>51132164
More accurate to say when the Crane are wrong they have the Kakita to fix that, barring the opposition having a surprisingly gifted duelist. Contrary to popular belief the Kakita are not undefeatable and if you're from another clan you know that going in and plan to bring the right backup.

>>51132024

It's okay, you are absolutely correct.

t. Yasuki

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>>51132053
>>51123602

>>51128168
When offending someone can result in a duel, blood feuds, etc, I'd say being an asshole is a professional skill.

>>51130021
>I always assume they just dig up a Hantei heir from the otomo/seppun or the like
Shame to undermine the dedicated preparation of the Scorpion Clan Coup.

>>51132539
Well, they are no longer Hantei after the ritual of abdication, and then is reversed when the ritual is reversed. I mean, they've been doing this for a millenia, there would be a crazy amount of Hantei descendants in the imperial families. The amount of people who would have to be quietly killed in the imperial families is simply staggering, not something you can get away with quietly. And ofcourse Shoju was influenced by Ambition and working against the clock with the prophecy. I don't think it would discount the dedicated preparations at all.

>>51126762
There's a certain point in the timeline where you really, really can't avoid the stupid shit without massively rewriting the entire timeline. It's not a case of just leaving out a small group or single events, the entire setting is heavily affected.

>>51132016
The Minor Clan Diplomat alt path puts the weight of the Minor Clan Alliance behind you, and putting that on top of an mc that already has a courtier school is fairly reasonable. If you need to seek great clan patronage on top of that, the Mantis are typically willing to help out.

>>51132926
Be careful when asking the Mantis for help. They've grown accustomed to eating minor clans and aren't afraid to abuse every advantage they can get to that end.

>>51132966
>They've grown accustomed to eating minor clans and aren't afraid to abuse every advantage they can get to that end.

Well, when the alternative is to let them fall to the Spider ...

>>51128536
Sometimes when you're a youngun, you make bad choices. One of those is falling in love with, and impregnating, a Togashi monk at the Topaz Championship.

It's like with the Olympics - you get all those talented people together who live strict, regimented lives, give them an opportunity to perform at their best and have some privacy after, you're gonna see a lot of sparks fly.

Also maybe a Hida-Goju was made.

Now the recreational activity of geisha diving is calmed down since he's married.

>>51132926

Where's the minor clan Diplomat alt path?

I was thinking the Mantis are probably most likely to take on minor clan students.

But I don't know of many minor clans that have a courtier school, if any, unless I'm missing things. The only one I can think of is the Bee Clan, which is a highly obscure one.

>>51132016
>>51132926

It is rather a limited set of options for the poor minor clan courtier.

What I've done is homebrewed up a minor clan, the Ant Clan, whose only real main purpose is to provide a dojo for minor clan samurai to learn how to not be total shitheads in court. I have it as an option for players to take with the assumption that the Ant are happy to take any minor clan samurai.

>>51133163
Isn't Suzume like all diplomat all the time. Of course it was eaten by the spider.

Also, I thought Dragonfly was diplomatic s gate keepers to true dragon lands?

>>51133163
There's a reason why courtier schools are rare in minor clans, and it's simply that such small clans really don't have any political power they can bring to bear, and are usually small enough that they'd be easily overrun by bandits if they didn't focus on being able to fight. Minor clan Shugenja get a pass because it's such a special ability that wasting it would be stupid, but there's just really not a lot of room for courtiers when you barely have the opportunity to enter court and live isolated from any major military.

>>51133210

The Suzume is a bushi clan that can storytell.

The Dragonfly is a shugenja clan that can foresee the future to bullshit their way through court.

>>51133210
Suzume are bushi with a secondary focus on being friendly and outgoing, and Tonbo are shugenja, although they do have a strong social focus with their technique.

>>51133270
>>51133274

How accurate is Divination in Rokugan usually? I've considered playing a Tonbo before the future telling angle for court sounds like a lot of fun.

>>51133418
It kinda depends on how you're divining. Divining the future using kawaru sticks or astrology is vague, but fairly reliable if you're good at it. Single sentences that can tell you whether to be on the lookout for trouble or special symbolic things. A shugenja using mid to high level Water magic can get somewhat more clear visions that are accurate but vague, that will come to pass unless the shugenja himself does something to change it.
Then there's a special ability that some people are born with where they see the future, and that's as good as the GM makes it. Togashi has the ultimate version of it.

>>51133270
There's also the Kasuga school.

>>51134786
Yeah, although they're a special case because they have direct Imperial protection and don't need many bushi. More than a few times, the Emperor declares himself to be the Tortoise Clan Champion with the head of the Kasuga family appointed to the position of Acting Champion while he's busy doing Emperor stuff (Which is to say, Acting Champion from the moment the Emperor declares himself to be the champion because he's never not doing Emperor stuff).

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>>51126758
As I said,
>(probably via GM Fiat)

And then this same Scorp gets to: live another 10 years, have a few kids with a wife who he has a respectable relationship with, and is training the bastard children of his friendly rival in the ways of the Scorpion the best ways that he can, only just to spite him.

And then he gets another letter from the Emperor about another duty he and his party have to perform.

>>51135192
Frankly, you're lucky that the nearest Seppun didn't behead you, drunk or not. They can basically do that and get away with it if someone isn't being respectful of the Emperor. With a less forgiving GM, the only way you'd get away with "only" -6 honor would be if the Emperor actually was amused. For a lot of characters, that'd be a death sentence for their career at the very least. Assigned to a far away, unimportant backwater for the next [Years until retirement +10] years.

Speaking of minor clans, here's something I've cooked up recently.

The Shrike Clan

Mozu Family:

+1 Intelligence

Mozu Bushi:

+1 Agility

Starting Honour: 4.5

School Skills: Spears (Yari), Kenjutsu, Medicine (Acupuncture), Meditation, Etiquette, Defense, any Lore

Starting Kit: Light Armour, Sturdy Clothing, Daisho, Spear, Medicine Kit, Travelling Pack, 3 Koku

Rank 1: Way of the Shrike

Shrike samurai take up the spear in defense of their charges, bending their intellect towards protecting those they serve and neutralizing all threats. While wielding a spear, add +1k0 to damage rolls, and add your Intelligence to your ATN. Also, the yari is a samurai weapon for you.

Rank 2: Insert the Thorn

Samurai of the Shrike Clan practice acupuncture both on and off the battlefield; one who inserts a needle to heal may also insert a spear to harm. You may add your ranks in Medicine (Acupuncture) to the total of spear attack rolls. You also gain a free raise on any use of the Medicine skill, and Medicine Kits have 15 uses for you instead of 10.

Rank 3: Beak and Barb

The weapon of a Mozu Bushi strikes like a darting beak and pierces like a cruel thorn. You may make attacks with samurai weapons as a simple action.

Rank 4: Prey, Transfixed

A Shrike samurai knows how pierce an opponent through, inflicting great wounds and hampering movement. As a complex action you may spend a void point to make a spear attack against a single target. Add +2k0 to your damage roll, and make a contested roll of your Fire vs. the target's Earth. If they fail, they must call two raises to no effect on their next trait or skill roll.

Rank 5: The Shrike’s Warning

Those impaled by the Shrike serve as a gruesome warning against further assault. After you reduce an enemy to the Down wound rank or you use your Rank 4 Technique, all opponents who can see you must roll to resist a Fear 2 effect.

>Cont.

>>51135355
Lore:

The Shrike are descended from Shiba Mozu, a bushi who once served as yoriki for a prominent Emerald Magistrate. While investigating a plot against the throne, the Magistrate was attacked in the night by assassins wielding poisoned daggers; roused by his superior’s cries, Mozu rushed to the magistrate’s defense, killing three of the assassins and causing the others to flee—but not before the Magistrate was successfully poisoned. Thinking quickly, the yoriki was able to stop the spread of the poison by using acupuncture to insert his hair pins into the Magistrate’s arm where he had been cut, in order to halt the flow of blood until a shugenja could arrive. Though his actions caused the Magistrate to ultimately lose his arm, his life was saved, and he went on to foil the plot he had been investigating. In reward for his service, Shiba Mozu was allowed to found his own minor clan, the Shrike.

The Shrike are a clan of contemplative samurai who devote their time to serving as yojimbo for those who uphold the law, and to refining the practice of acupuncture, the better to preserve the lives of their charges.


The Shrike is a really interesting animal, and I thought it would make a great thematic hook for a clan, and both spears and acupuncture are underused in L5r. It seemed like a match made in heaven, so here we are.

>>51135355
I'd say that the Rank 2 is a bit much, but it only works for spears, which are underpowered, so it's probably fine. I'd probably add that you only get the free raise if you are using the Wound Treatment or Acupuncture emphases. Knowing how to utilize pressure points and needles doesn't help you whip up a herbal remedy or identify a disease.

>>51135457
Acupuncture isn't even a real emphasis, and to be honest it's mostly there for fluff; it's very briefly mentioned in, I think, Book of Fire as a kind of medicine Phoenix sometimes practice, and that's about it. I think what it would actually be good for IS dealing with disease, since that's the kind of thing unblocking the chi in the body is supposed to help with. Certainly, inserting needles won't actually seal your wound up, though one might argue good chi-flow might speed your natural healing a little.

I miss the days of all the Minor clans having only three rank schools. It made sense since they only had very limited resources and many are relatively young.

>>51135393
>>51135355

Forget a fetish for minor clans, what's with /tg/'s fetish for homebrewing spear based minor clans?

>>51135771
>Relatively young

Era agnosticism, man. Run with only three techniques existing if you want, but that's no reason not to have them available for groups who desire them. It's always easier for a gm to restrict already-written content than to invent something new off the cuff.

>>51135882
/tg/ loves to try and take the shittiest option and make it good. L5R 4e shits all over non-katana weapons and spears are shat on particularly hard.

>>51135894
Nah, Minor Clans should be way weaker than Great Clans. Otherwise they wouldn't be Minor Clans.

>>51135942
You mean besides their lack of numbers or lands and being small enough to never be able to challenge the big boys for enough turf to grow to become big themselves? I'm fine with their schools not being vastly worse but that's just my table. You can nerf them at yours because as >>51135894 said it is easier to nerf than to invent new and improved content

>>51135915
Funny thing; L5R was originally never intended to do weapon stats. That was something management insisted go in, along with HP. So Wick went all passive aggressive, and included a HP system where getting hit once would wreck you.

Later editions should have swapped out weapon damage for martial art damage, leaving weapons to be a free raise towards one maneuver.

>>51125604
what was that personality again?

i need a playset for my boobie scorpion and i missed her

>>51136901
If true I see why he did that in 7th Sea 2e. Which is fine enough for the genre I guess but I prefer weapon lists.

I do however enjoy 7th sea 2e and am in a game of it that has been running since the book went out.

>>51140875
oh, kameyoi. sorry i remembered google button

Rokugan is missing something that just about every asian culture has: situations where the social rules don't apply. And not in the "the rules don't cover this" way, but a "The rules say that the rules don't apply" way.
It might be because American and Canadian society is aggressively informal, and we view societies that have constant social rules as, well, those rules always applying.
So, what situations where the rules don't apply would you put in your game? Most of them are fairly specific, so don't get too crazy.

>>51131879
Personally, I tend to start after the Second Day of Thunder. You have the Mantis in their current form for the people who want it (without a lot of the later stupidity and writing team fiats), no Spider, and the slate has largely been wiped clean with no impending threats, but tons of plot hooks with the Scorpion and Mantis positions being awkward, and a new Imperial family on the throne for the first time.

But I also feel that you still kind of have to rearrange some past events. The Scorpion Coup I actually like, because it feels like an inevitability when you have an officially sanctioned Clan of self-professed villains. I don't necessarily mind the Clan War, except that the Crab allying with the Shadowlands felt really out of nowhere, so I tend to revise it so that it was simply an unprecedented spread of Taint in the upper echelon of the Crab instead of fucking oni and bakemono in Crab ranks. Still makes the Kuni look kind of useless, but at least it's not a full-blown 180 in terms of values.

I'm trying to think of a story justification for an old-ass Lion Elite Spearman to learn from the Boar bushi. Purely as a brainstorming exercise. Could someone help me with this?

>>51143497
Rokugan has the problem of being a really strange interpretation of feudal Japanese culture. And yes, I know Rokugan isn't Japan, but anyone claiming it's not trying to emulate fantasy Japan to some degree is deluded. A lot of it has gotten better. Indirect speech is a staple of Japan, with kisama, omae and temee at one point being polite terms to refer to someone that eventually were considered too direct to be polite due to escalating politeness cold wars. But a lot of it is just completely failing to understand how the feudal Japanese system was built, and implementing Chinese policies instead. Except that Imperial China was built on a whole different system and had whole other notions of propriety, and you can't just mash a square peg in a round hole and have it make sense.

Of particular note is the strange approach to ronin. These super rigid restrictions on samurai (and by extension, the boom period of wandering ronin outside the social structure) only came about as a result of the Tokugawa shogunate restricting samurai in order to prevent more civil war. In Rokugan you have a powerful emperor on the throne, except that inter-Clan fighting is still permitted for some reason. So you basically have Sengoku era with Edo era politics and a powerful emperor, which didn't exist in either period!

And I won't even go into how fucked martial arts schools are.

>>51144854
Considering how early the Boar were wiped out, no. But I tend to be more fluid with allowing people to take schools outside of their Clans. After all, the Boar can't be the only Clan to use spears regularly, and the Mantis Brawler school specifically states that due to ronin leaving Clans and whatnot, techniques tend to find their way to those outside of the Clans.

>>51145005
>In Rokugan you have a powerful emperor on the throne
You don't, though. The emperor of Rokugan has to maintain the illusion that the clans could not ever rise up against him, and to that end there is an entire great clan dedicated to keeping the emperor's favour and the other clans' ire, plus an imperial family working around the clock to ensure the clans stay focused on serving the emperor and fighting each other.

We're shown this with Toturi Naseru, before he decides he can become anything, and wants to become a bomb. Or Hantei 38th and Shoju. Or Iweko and how the Spider forced her hand with accepting them. Or Yoritomo whoever and his knife hiding emperor threatening tricks. Etc.

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>>51143497

Rokugani people break their carefully set-up rules like others change their underwear, and the extension of the rule breaking is usually used as a measurement of character (bigger the breaking, stronger the character) rather than something necessarily damning. Hell, if you break a rule REALLY hard then chances are high that you become a Fortune!

So I guess there is no need to have concrete exceptions because literally anything can be an exception, and it is up to the rule-breaking person in question to make the best out of it.

>>51145005
>and by extension, the boom period of wandering ronin outside the social structure
There's a genuinely small number of ronin within Rokugan, too. No one likes them. They're barely a step up from bandits in the eyes of clan samurai, and their treatment leaves ronin with few choices than to become bandits, monks, or dead.

>The number of ronin in the Emerald Empire at any one time is relatively low, perhaps a few thousand at most. There are eras during which that number increases dramatically – for example, after the Scorpion Clan Coup in the early twelfth century, when both the Scorpion Clan and the Akodo family of the Lion Clan are disbanded. But these are exceptional times, and for the most part ronin are rare.

>>51145634
>Hell, if you break a rule REALLY hard then chances are high that you become a Fortune!
You have to unbreak it just as hard for that to happen, AND it has to happen when the empire is facing destruction. Later on, when things are more stable, while everyone looks back at what shits your clan was (you especially) and considers giving you even more shit and less trade than they did before you decided the empire is fucked and you must find a way to take over (whew), you need an emperor who is savvy enough to nip any thought of that in the bud, calling for the seppuku of your successor.

>>51145608
Compared to the eras of Japanese politics Rokugan is based on, the emperor has a shitload of power. We're talking about eras where daimyo would basically tell the emperor to go fuck himself, directly contradict his orders with no repercussions, and then proceed to throw him out into the streets.

Ronin as they are presented in Rokugan only came about once the shogunate decided to place severe restrictions on samurai to keep them from rising up. Before Tokugawa, it was perfectly possible for peasants to become daimyo (something that happened several times), samurai to become peasants or merchants, and for samurai to marry peasants. The strict lines between social castes was enforced as a way to keep track of the warrior class, and resulted in what Rokugan is based on.

Except that doesn't make sense without the preceeding events, namely a full-scale civil war where pretty much every single clan decides Imperial law no longer applies and they all are free to rule as they see fit. Hence, it would make sense if the omnipresent social order was implemented with the reign of Toturi 1 or maybe the Steel Chrysanthemum, but since it has been more or less in existence from day one, with a few years of exceptions for several centuries it doesn't really fit and makes Rokugani politics make no sense. Which is kind of a bad thing in a game largely about political maneuvering.

>>51145682
None of these really change what happened, right? The story remains: cause an absolutely apocalyptic fuck up -> become a Fortune.

And Kisada is not even the only example. We also have Shiba Tsukune, Moto Chagatai, or Toku.

>>51145839
>Compared to the eras of Japanese politics Rokugan is based on
I prefer 'inspired by', because it's more accurate. Saves the hassle of trying to figure out why it's not closer to being Japan, too.

>>51145646
The point is that for ronin numbers to be low, the social restrictions on samurai have to be looser. Ronin numbers surged the more strict the rules were, because surprise surprise, that made it easier to end up lordless or cast out. With Rokugan having the Edo period strict rules on samurai switching masters and the absolute social distinctions between samurai and commoners, it makes no sense that Clans would have a large amount of independence since they presumably would want to augment their forces rather than let their vassals loose, while the emperor would want to maintain a centralized power structure.

Rokugan tries to combine several separate eras of Japanese history that happened as a result of one another, and turn it into a mish-mash. It would be sort of like having the Roman Empire and renaissance Italy happening at the same time.

>>51143497
Actually, it has exactly that situation, it's just rare and everyone avoids bringing it down on themselves extremely thoroughly. When the Emperor declares you to be ex-living and expects it to get done immediately, people start dying at astounding rates with no social niceties whatsoever. The People's Legion had all of their wells poisoned by combined forces from the Scorpion, Phoenix, and Crane. Their commanders, even those who were technically samurai, had their throats slit in the dead of night. No quarter was given, and no challenges or parleys were accepted from them, and nobody was spared. Within months, every single one was dead or on the run and many of the areas they had claimed were depopulated entirely.

To a lesser extent, people stop raising eyebrows at atrocities that happen when a war becomes a grueling slugfest. Leave the Brotherhood alone and you can basically do whatever and the only repercussion is that you'll get a reputation for being ruthless. Wars against Gaijin and the shadowlands can reach that point immediately if the Rokugani involved want to jump straight to poison and assassinations.

>>51146517
>It would be sort of like having the Roman Empire and renaissance Italy happening at the same time.

Heh. The Yodotai Empire is pretty much this.

>>51145839
Real Japan didn't have literal gods handing down their strict social structure and an ever increasing legion of ancestors subconsciously beating it into the heads of everyone they're allowed to haunt. There's a lot of supernatural support for Rokugan's structure. It's why nothing really changes over the course of centuries. The old bastards who want things to stay the same still have influence even after they die, and it's practically a religious mandate to not change too much.

>>51146721
The thing is that society wouldn't look that way if there was a divinely enforced social structure, because a strong central government would make it impossible.

You have taken the clan politics of the Sengoku era (characterized by non-existent central government) and Edo era governance (characterized by an extremely powerful centralised government) and somehow tried to have it make sense. One excludes the other by necessity.

>>51147060
In real Japan. Rokugan had it artificially imposed early on and continues to impose it through strict traditionalism, religion, and active spiritual activity.

>>51147060

This is the biggest flaw of the setting.

The "Great Clans are autonomous, powerful, bickering warlords always vying for power and land and position" vs "The Emperor is Supreme in every way and everyone agrees this is true" just does not make sense.

The way I play it off is having the Emperor be supremely unconcerned with Clan politics so long as they pledge 100% support to the Emperor and anything he decrees, and instead focus on maintaining Rokugan against exterior threats.

>>51147144
You're missing the point. The Kami enforce social position and the Celestial Order, but they don't mind control people (as proven by Scorpions lopping the head off a Hantei and taking the throne). Rokugan makes no sense because it tells us the emperor is powerful enough he can just exile entire great clans, but at the same time is so weak he can't prevent great clans from doing what they want.

And don't get me started on the Kolat.

>>51147196
>The way I play it off is having the Emperor be supremely unconcerned with Clan politics so long as they pledge 100% support to the Emperor and anything he decrees, and instead focus on maintaining Rokugan against exterior threats.
Explicitly how it was set up. Hantei and his son basically made it so the clans are free to do whatever as long as it doesn't threaten imperial power and doesn't threaten national security. The Unicorn and the Lion are completely free to waste all their time and energy fighting each other and trading border territory, right up until the Emperor decides they've gone too far. Then they stop because continuing brings down the Imperial Legions and a bunch of economic sanctions that legitimately hurt.

>>51147261
He can prevent them from doing what they want. Most of the time, he doesn't, because that's the precedent set by Hantei Genji, the Shining Prince.
And the Kolat don't actually do anything aside from cover their own asses and vaguely exist. In the entire timespan they've existed, none of their goals have been reached (And those that did were reached by unrelated third parties) and the only major act they ever did was hand out Crystal against the Darkness, and that got them destroyed.

>>51147277
>>51147315
Except that still doesn't explain a lot of stuff. for example, why Great Clans would voluntarily exile their own samurai and turn them ronin without an imperial decree when it would make far more sense for them to not piss their subordinates off and create bandit armies with a grudge. And if it is some sort of divine/imperial mandate, why they would be so few in number when the rules of conduct are so strict.

Also, everything about the Scorpion ever, including that time they fucking murdered the emperor and tried to take over.

>>51145054
Brawler spreads so easily because it's taught in an apprenticeship system. I suspect dojo-system schools don't translate out of their clans as well as it does.

There are other apprenticeship style schools that probably could spread easily among Ronin, though-- both of the Kuni schools, at the very least, and possibly others.

>>51147441
I just tend to assume there would be similar/inspired unaffiliated schools somewhere in Rokugan. Mainly because it just feels weird to go "you want to use spears, you have to pick this one Minor Clan that probably no longer exists". If Mirumoto could invent dual wielding, surely some other samurai in the twelve fucking cneturies of Rokugani culture probably would have thought to invent similar techniques.

>>51147426
> for example, why Great Clans would voluntarily exile their own samurai and turn them ronin without an imperial decree when it would make far more sense for them to not piss their subordinates off and create bandit armies with a grudge.
Because that's the way their honor dictates they handle the situation. I know the running theme is that everything gets dropped when there are actual stakes, but you don't just make ronin on a whim. Most Ronin "deserve it", either directly or through the reflected shame of someone near them. Agents who are cut loose to be deniable assets explicitly exist in the setting, they just don't get any direct story time.

>>51147441
The Kuni schools (Especially witchhunter) are guarded much more fiercely than Mantis Brawler. Someone sharing their secrets is someone who gets killed, maybe not even by the Crab. Giving away school secrets is bad enough that most clans would treat you like a deserter, but worse, and kill you themselves. Maybe not the Phoenix, because they go full retard with sparing people and the Isawa probably want to steal those secrets themselves.

>>51147513
The ronin sections say most of them are either illegitimate children or people who lost their lord. Both of which are examples actual Japanese clans generally overlooked when the Shogun didn't force them to enforce the rules to limit their military power and social mobility.

>>51147505
There are tons of lesser schools and unaffiliated dojo all across the country. In some interpretations, most Ji-samurai end up attending one and not having any Techniques Some of them might even have a Technique or two, but those tend to be short lived without a lot of scholastic resources going into them. The original inventor and their immediate students are often the only ones to get the full Technique.

>>51147581
Illegitimate children are a serious problem for most samurai who married for politics or economics, and more important, they're a problem for the lord who benefits from said politics or economics. The parents rarely have a say in what happens, and the lord has every reason to not legitimize the problem.
Samurai who lost their lord are in a similar boat. Another lord taking them on also picks up their baggage and now has however many extra expensive semi-nobles to feed and equip. Not doing so can make sense if there's no one around capable of taking that extra burden. A lot of ronin of that type also lost their lord because he was perceived as being a dishonorable shit, and others wouldn't want to associate themselves with that image.

>>51147581
Plenty of illegitimate children and lord-losers get folded into their clan with no problem. Most ronin being that doesn't mean that most of those people end up ronin. Bastards only need one little white lie to stay in, and lord-losers just need to find another lord in the same clan.

>>51127679
Like looking for directions about Tea Ceremony there...

>>51149050
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_tea_ceremony

>>51127679
>>51149050
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL9BiNuImws

Plus see the sidebar for more videos.

>>51149070
>>51149072
Thanks a lot

Got a Yoritomo bushi and I got enough points for one more ring bump, should I put in reflexes or perception?

So far I have Earth: 3, Water: 2, Fire: 2, Air: 2 and Void: 2.

If I bump up perception, water will turn to 3

>>51149572
Reflexes.

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>>51149572

This sucks because you would need both. Reflexes is generally a better pick, but Perception 2 is a really uncomfortable thing (and Water 3 is pretty good to have).

So I'm thinking about running some L5R in the future. What edition should I use?

>>51150577
4th edition.

>>51150252
Reflexes will help you avoid dying long enough to save for perception. Water 3 is definitely good, but I would say it's non-essential.

>>51150577
4th is the way to go, but definitely supplement it with sourcebooks (fluff info) and adventure modules from 1E if you can get your hands on them.

>>51147060
>clan politics of the Sengoku era
They're not really this, are they? Those Clans were more like Rokugani Families, with unstable alliances that amounted to clans. Rokugan is a different beast with the appearance of similarity.

>>51147426
>why Great Clans would voluntarily exile their own samurai and turn them ronin without an imperial decree when it would make far more sense for them to not piss their subordinates off and create bandit armies with a grudge
Commonly, they *don't* create armies with grudges. For most of Rokugani history, there aren't enough ronin across the entire empire for this. It's only in times of extreme circumstance that changes and ronin flood the land.

>>51149572
Ditch Awareness, go with both.

On the topic of Ronin and the circumstances surrounding them.
First, Wick just hates reasonable settings (he deliberately wrote the rokugani economy to be broken and non-functional, for "story reasons")
So, let's try and reconcile things.
...
...
I don't think I can. Not unless the Emperor sets social strictness standards and the clans listen on that without also losing their ability to fight each other. Selective looseness of control, basically. Not a good precedent to set.
But there is a way to keep lots of ronin around: Ronin families that are forced to not swear fealty to anybody. Then, the clans just quietly make their incompentents and fools (and politically inconvenient) ronin, so that there never was that person in their family. Their actions are not their fault.

>>51145608
>Or Yoritomo whoever and his knife hiding emperor threatening tricks. Etc.

Actually that was the founder of the first Family the Mantis gained, Gusai, about 700 years before Yoritomo was even born. The Gusai couldn't hold in their treasonous impulses and lost the name three generations later.

>>51152134
You're assuming that the clans aren't on board with their own culture and wouldn't want to do what is seen as the right thing to do. Honor is actually considered important by a lot of samurai in every clan. If you do something bad enough that they want to punish you, but not bad enough to get you actually killed, forcing Ronin is a good option. It's like banishing someone. It is also used to create deniable assets by removing someone from your clan while still relying on their loyalty. Which is itself relying on the new Ronin having the honor and integrity to keep serving even though they've been publicly shamed, since they really could just fuck off to be a mercenary or bandit once they're released. Ronin are almost never created by direct imperial decree.

>>51147426
>And if it is some sort of divine/imperial mandate, why they would be so few in number when the rules of conduct are so strict.
The letter of the rules of conduct are strict. Rokugan is a society that finds ways around the letter of the rules of conduct. Half the rpg involves there being a problem you can't resolve without great difficulty, breaking the rules, or finding creative ways to bend the rules.

Then there's the setting fact that ronin in Rokugan are playing on hard mode. If they're not being urged out of town, there's a good chance sooner or later someone will look to start a lethal duel or skirmish with an opponent no one cares about. Ronin who go ronin to be ninja in service to their lord frequently kill themselves afterwards.

Then there's the number of ways to become ronin temporarily, see how shitty it is, survive as long as you can, and come home with a greater appreciation of how well off you are / maybe a new path to polish in your spare time.

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>>51152295
>The letter of the rules of conduct are strict.

The letter of the rules actually go quite easy on the people. Bushido in particular puts great emphasis on the "take no shit, give no fuck" mentality - in fact, the most basic Virtue (Honor) is all about that with the second most important virtue (Courage) only reinforcing it. Courtesy might be the only Virtue you can't base a solid Zeroth Law Rebellion on. By the letter of the rule, of course.

>>51149959
>>51150630
>>51152033
I could give up a point in athletics which would help me keep Water at 3 and reflexes at 3 but at the cost of 2 in athletics...is this a fair or reasonable trade?

>>51153752
Athletics 3 can be regained with one session's XP (two if your GM is stingy), and a Yoritomo's first technique has similar benefits to Athletics rank 3 mastery anyway. Getting a stat to 3 would take at least 4 sessions worth of XP.
Drop the athletics and pick it back up later if you think you need it.

>>51153879
Thanks for the help everybody! Currently I have Earth: 3, Water: 3, Air: 2 (Reflexes 3), Fire: 2 (Agility) and Void: 2.

Should I give up one point in Athletics, leaving it at 1 and use the point to emphasize Void Recovery for meditation? Or wait once I get more XP in the future?

>>51151716
Rokugan is like if the UK were composed of eight different Scotlands, each united under its own Robert the Bruce.

>>51154180
Wait for XP. Your skills are already kinda low and meditation won't be reliable until you get Void 3 anyway.

>>51154214
That may be some kind of revelation or remark on L5R for you. The average person isn't going to do more than say, "Great. And?"

>>51154409
It's a more apt analogy than sengoku Japan, is the point. The scale and structure of what L5r calls a single 'clan' is equivalent to a whole country in actual terms. It can be very misleading.

>>51154473
>It's a more apt analogy than sengoku Japan, is the point
That's ok. Rokugan is not Sengoku Japan.

> The scale and structure of what L5r calls a single 'clan' is equivalent to a whole country in actual terms
Also ok. Rokugan is, pre Clan War, 2 million people. After, it struggles to maintain that population in the face of apocalyptic events.

Are the things like Benten's Curse or Ebisu's Blessing real or just a fancy way of naming advantages/disadvantages?

Like is Benten really going to look down from her lofty pedestal and say "fuck you random samurai" and curse them?

>>51155335

Wouldn't you just fuck with random people if you were a Fortune?

>>51155335
Either.

Also

>Gods
>Not being petty assholes

Are you really that new?

>>51155335
>Like is Benten really going to look down from her lofty pedestal and say "fuck you random samurai" and curse them?
Yes. The gods can be capricious and random at times.

>>51155335
Often, yes. If they're marked as Spiritual, it's either a curse or some kind of defect inherent to your soul. Actually figuring out the difference is unlikely though.
Benten might curse you for something as petty as not paying attention to that cute peasant girl who was kinda into you when you were 14 because she was really trying to set up one of those tragic inter-caste romance stories. Probably not, but she might.

>>51155373
Well they're not based off of Greek gods so I figured L5R would be spared that sort of thing.

>>51155555
Actually, they're pretty heavily based on greek gods. Onnotangu is basically similar to Cronus, although he had different motivations. Amaterasu even fed him a rock to trick him into thinking he ate the last kid, although she did get him blackout drunk first, and then their last kid went off to git gud before coming back and saving his siblings. Hantei is basically earthbound Zeus with less overt powers and significantly less raping.

>>51155629
Only slightly different motivations. No prophecy, but he did figure that the kids of two really powerful beings could probably overpower those beings, and that Amaterasu would love them more than him because he was a little date rapey.

Also I wonder why there haven't been more half-fortune kids running around.

>>51155866
Half-fortunes honestly don't have much going for them. Emma-O, one of the objectively most powerful Fortunes, goes mortal and has kids when he needs a vacation from sorting the souls of the dead and, at best, those kids have Touch of the Spirit Realm: Meido and maaaaybe Inner Gift and they live and die as mortals whose father disappeared when they were young.
Fortune favors the mortal man, and that extends all the way down to what mortal kids inherit from their parents.

Even the direct Kami bloodlines lost most of their overt powers. Hantei's grandkids and great grandkids barely had longer lifespans than normal humans.

>>51155941
I'm not wanting like, super powerful god kids running around... I'd just like a little bit more spiritual/magical weirdness to happen every now and again.

Like how the Bat Clan founder is related to actual Bat-Spirits, and occasionally a Kitsune will pop up in the Scorpion/Mantis clans. I believe there have been a few half-naga people running around at some point. I think things like that are neat.

I'd like to make a character like that one day. And it doesn't matter if all they get is some sucky power because of it.

>>51155780
He also had the Lying Darkness whispering in his ear, ever since he hid it from Amaterasu and allowed it to remain unnamed.

>>51155941
That's more the effect of Ningen-do being an extremely jealous realm whose Control is mortality than a true loss of power through lengthy bloodlines. I'd bet when you meet some of those emperors after death, they're pretty badass.

>>51156096
... So do it? It's not the focus of the official fictions, but these people exist.

>>51154180
>Thanks for the help everybody! Currently I have Earth: 3, Water: 3, Air: 2 (Reflexes 3), Fire: 2 (Agility) and Void: 2.
I forgot to put that I have 3 for Agility.

Is this a good start?

>>51156260
You didn't take emphases, right? And you bought a few skills at 1?

>>51156196
The only DM in the area who runs L5R games prefers more.... Mundane stories/characters.

>>51156343
>You didn't take emphases, right?
Katana which I have ranked at 3

>And you bought a few skills at 1?
I have 19 in total. Other than Athletics at 2, they're all 1's

>>51156513
Do you have a kama or other small weapon to free action draw at the start of combat?

>>51156513
...How? By my count, you've spent well over 60 XP so far.

>>51156601
I have a Kama and emphasis on it cause of my school. I believe Way of the Mantis lets me draw it for free

>>51156697
GM gave us 80 exp to start with

>>51145005
>anyone claiming it's not trying to emulate fantasy Japan to some degree is deluded.
Emulate is an odd term for a setting that purposefully takes it's understanding of the Orient from western stereotype and Japanese hyperbole like the hagakure.

>>51156706
No, being a small weapon lets you draw it for free.

>>51145005
>>51145608
>>51145839
I love talking about how broken of a setting Rokugan is on 4chan.
Other places tell me to stop whining, stop adding things to the setting, stop changing details, it's a fantasy, accept the fact that it doesn't make sense and don't do anything to make it make sense.
Which is the same bullshit that Wick gave for his lack of research (first thing to axed? Uikku's prophecies. I will not have Wick railroading my fucking campaigns from the sourcebook)

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>>51157655

>>51155866

Well, the Celestial Dragon's daughter died at her gempukku, so I guess we might have a problem with abnormally short life expectancy here.

Do you often play against stereotypes? A nice guy Scorpion, pretty and polite Crab, crude Crane or blood-crazed Phoenix?

>>51165123
>blood crazed phoenix
>against type

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>>51165285
Blood for the blood mages.
Skulls for the ancestral burial crypts of our people.

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So I just started playing this, and I really wish the naginata wasn't kind of shit.

>>51166505
What are you talking about? It does the same damage as a katana and is a samurai weapon, so almost anyone can SAA with one. As far as non-kayana weapons go in l5r, it definitely places near the top.

>>51166657
Doesn't let you do the katana void trick and polearm mastery bonuses are inferior to swords and heavy weapons though.

>>51166681
FRO had some pretty good home brew masteries for pole arms that you could swap in.

arms

Rank 3: The total of all damage rolls made with a polearm is increased by +1k0.
Rank 5: A character wielding a polearm adds his Polearms Skill Rank to his Armor TN during Skirmishes.
Rank 7: All polearms may be readied as a Free Action instead of a Simple Action.

They had some good stuff for spears, too.

>>51166657
>It does the same damage as a katana
That's the thing, essentially. Next to the Katana, it's pretty much entirely redundant. Almost every bushi will have some Kenjutsu more or less by default, so there's little reason to split up your points and invest into polearms as well when you can get the exact same performance by going all-in on the Katana. And as >>51166681 already mentioned, you get better masteries and the katana's special out of it as well.

But mostly it's my inner autist being annoyed that a fairly long polearm with great leverage is supposed to deal the same damage as a sword that's half the size.

>>51166903
These Mastery abilities are pretty bad desu. Rank 3 is 'meh', Rank 5 is decent, and Rank 7 is shit.

Also
>FRO
What is this? Google doesn't give me anything.

>>51166940
To be honest, the main issue with L5R is how fucked the weapons are. Well, that and the fact the developers themselves acknowledged how fucked up SAA was, and yet they still made some schools get them later in 4th edition, not to mention the schools who get shit versions of them for no apparent reasons. I would even argue keeping them at all was a mistake with how overpowering they tend to be, since the difference between a good SAA and a bad one (or the Fortunes forbid, not having one at all) is the difference between being a solid fighter and being fucking useless, regardless of what other techniques you might have.

>>51126948
>1995
>before the Internet

Are you fucking stupid, anon?

>>51168901
How about if SAA was replaced with two free raises to the Extra Attack maneuver? Or only one SAA could be done forcing the other simple action you have to be a move action or something else?

>>51168901
Yeah, even from a newcomer's perspective SAAs looks like a huge boost in power. As in, that allows you to actually do stuff in combat, as opposed to just full-attacking all day every day.

>>51167062

Five Rings Online.

>>51155555
Truthfully l5r is about based on historical asia and their myths as dnd is based on historical europe. That is, not very, and mostly viewed through a really fucked up lense of hollywood history. There's a reason why Japanese people find l5r kinda funny/offenive

Can I ask what everyone's issue with deadly weapons are? I think it fits that if a weapon can maim you, it makes one consider combat as a last resort and makes it that much more dramatic when the swords are drawn.

I know using magic in duels that aren't taryu-jiai is generally considered cheating, but let's say I'm a Void Mystic who casts Moment of Clarity, giving myself the iaijutsu skill. Technically speaking, I'm not even calling on the kami, but rather drawing upon the Void, much like spending a Void Point. Is that still cheating?

>>51170028
The problem is that these "deadly" weapons are inconsistent like all hell. Sometimes you kill a dude with a single strike, and other times, you can barely deal enough wounds to get them out of Healthy. Some weapons (the Xk3 ones) allow greater reliability, but it only means that all the others are rendered largely useless (with Xk1 weapons being trash-tier). It just spoils the fun.

>>51170834
No one cares about what you technically did or did not do. Spells generally produce an effect that makes them difficult to hide - glowing shugenja eyes, whispering winds, fires flaring, earth rumbling, etc - maho gets to look like cartoonish daemons and radiation being thrown about.

Then there's the whole praying thing - which you likely are doing. So you agree to a duel, then immediately beforehand you start praying, glowing, and other unusual effects take place. After which you say you're ready. Who thinks you're not fuckin' cheating? I have a bridge to sell them.

>>51170882
With our group, we just houseruled damage dice to never explode. Still reasonably deadly (seems like it'd take about 3-5 good hits to take a guy out, less to put them into a state where they might want to flee or surrender), and there's no longer the issue of somebody just up and disintegrating from a single particularly lucky hit. It arguably takes out some of the "spice", since you can always tell whether or not a particular weapon will be able to kill you in the next hit, but overall it seems worth the trade-off.

>>51167062
Yeah, Rank 7 should have the 9s and 10s explode that Kenjutsu and Heavy Weapons gets. Though personally if I were to start brewing, I'd put that as a universal Mastery Bonus for all Weapon Macro Skills at Rank 10 as a capstone like in 3e.

>>51169266
I guess, but I just think it's a mistake in general. The gap between having it and not having it in combat is huge, and to be honest it's a really boring technique because it's just +1 attack with very little flavor. If you absolutely have to have some way of giving people more attacks without a bunch of raises, just make a toned down version that's a universal mastery 7 weapon ability. Your suggestion with free raises towards extra attacks might work. That way, anyone who actually invests in a weapon skill can get it, and schools don't become as useless because they don't get rank 3 SAA. I just feel that school techniques should be unique buffs that represent how that school fights rather than having a mandatory rank 3 technique that's just a generic as fuck buff you need to keep up. And yes, I said rank 3, because if you get it at rank 4, your bushi school a shit.

>>51170028
I don't think anybody has a problem with deadly weapons. As a matter of fact, it's fairly simple to build characters that probably make the game less deadly than intended. Usually people complain about the fact that most weapons are useless. For example, yari being completely pointless, and nage-yari being even more so since it's just an objectively worse yari. Look at the polearms section. Even if polearms were good weapons (protip: they're not), there is literally no reason for you to ever use a nagamaki, because the bisento is objectively superior. A case could be made for the naginata since it has the samurai keyword and therefore interacts with some schools, but as someone already said, the katana deals the same damage, has an added ability on top of it, comes for free with most bushi schools, and uses kenjutsu, which is a better skill both because almost everyone starts with it and it has better mastery abilities.

Aside from some very specific builds involving grapple/entangle shenanigans or heavy weapons, there's no reason to go for any other melee weapon than a katana.

>>51171092
It makes raising for damage pretty fucking useless unless you also houseruled in raising for kept dice.

>>51171032
Void Mystics don't actually pray or anything, though. There are no void kami, you commune directly with the Void, and the school specifically mentions it gets to cast spells covertly without incantations, prayers or scrolls.

For all intents and purposes, the dude meditates for a while and swings really good. Which could be said for Striking as Void or spending Void Points.

>>51171127
Self-correction: Taking a no-dachi if you can use all your school techniques with it might be worth it. Forgot it's a sword rather than a heavy weapon. Which is kind of bullshit, since it's just another reason to not take a tetsubo, but I digress.

>>51171186
That cuts praying, but doesn't address the rest of it.

>>51171092
We overhauled the whole combat system with Action Points, elimination of the Damage roll, shitton of buffer wounds, and crazy glorious options from maneuvers/techniques/katas/whatever.

My last combat-oriented character was a lightning-fast rape machine in skirmishes and she specced for fuckin' war fans - a character no way you can make in the current system. my other character was a Mirumoto Bushi who could make 14 attacks per turn at IR 3 - nuff' said.

>>51171127
>there is literally no reason for you to ever use a nagamaki, because the bisento is objectively superior

Bad example. You might want to use the nagamaki because it is one-handed.

>>51171308
>Bad example. You might want to use the nagamaki because it is one-handed.

Which coincidentally make so little goddamn sense that I'm still convinced that's an outright typo. "Hey, this weapon is basically a katana with a much longer handle for better leverage. Somehow that means it should be used one-handed."

>>51171290
The rules specifically mention it is possible to cas spells covertly by mumbling quietly, indicating that unless you're throwing fireballs, spells are not immediately obvious. Add to this that Void Mystics are explicitly allowed to break the rules and cast spells silently, and it should be largely impossible to detect even if it was considered cheating, which I'm not sure it is, since drawing on the void is mandatory in iaijutsu to begin with, plus the fact that it's just an improved version of the universal "spend void points to get skill ranks" stuff everyone gets. Not to mention that it would be pretty shameful for a bushi to refuse an iaijutsu duel if he cannot prove there was any sort of foul play at work.

>>51171308
So you are not playing L5R in any recognizable form...

>>51171308
I guess. Though handedness in a setting with no shields and largely non-existent dual wielding is kind of a moot point, especially since as far as I know there's no school that uses polearms in addition to abilities that doesn't make dual-wielding suck balls. Also, masakari get better mastery abilities anyway.

>>51171408
Well, it is not recognizable in a way that samurai are far above the common folk and not just glorified ashigaru. Fights tend to be about style, tactics, and technique as participants employ their own distinctive arsenal of special rules to defeat their opponents, rather than throwing dice against the wall and hoping for the best. many of these special rules are intentionally OP so that characters can get their own side-quests to acquire them or defeat an opponent who has such an "ultimate technique".

So I found this on reddit (i know, I know, bad fa/tg/uy), but it seems sorta relevant
https://www.reddit.com/r/rokugan/comments/5ng7h4/traditional_breaks_from_tradition/
What does TG think of the Nightingale brotherhood?

>>51171259
I'm a Hida Bushi. I took tetsubo as my default because it's a beautiful weapon.

>>51171405
>The rules specifically mention it is possible to cas spells covertly by mumbling quietly, indicating that unless you're throwing fireballs, spells are not immediately obvious
That hides the caster of the spell, but does not hide the spell.

The Soshi school exists to hide spells.

>>51171749
Fairly interesting, but a whole brotherhood that basically focuses on non-commercial pimping seems to mildly whiff of magical realm. Besides, the whole topic of romantic love vs. political marriages is one of the fairly significant sources of internal conflict in the setting, both on and individual as well as a societal level Introducing a simple way out that basically allows people to just go cheat whenever with minimal risk would undermine that.

Besides, isn't the whole thematic issue he mentions of a place where the rules don't apply already covered by the Geisha? If I remember correctly, the very point of them is that a samurai can just set aside the usual pretenses and just be a regular person spending some fun and relaxing time with a nice lady (or lad, depending on your interpretation), who may or may not be down to clown afterwards.

>>51171749
Wasn't this shit copypasta'd into a general a few threads back?

>>51171749
Didn't they post it here before going to leddit?

>>51168713
Why is it that the Asahina get some of the nicest looking art?

>>51173539
The reward of actual pacifism.

>>51173658
And also of being genetically hella pretty.

>>51169348
That's basically the reason why getting Defense isn't entirely a waste. Someone who uses the defensive stances has time to do other things while also making themselves more difficult to hit. With stance dancing, you can even have the advantages of a turn defending and activating kata AND a turn of attack(s).

>>51171749
>>51172304
It's literally already covered by Geisha and she-monks (Nuns in some sources) of Benten, the fortune of love.

>>51173810
Aren't Monks supposed to be old retired samurai unless you are in Dragon lands and then everyone are Monks?

>>51174816
Retired samurai and anyone else who gets their head shaved.

>>51174816
Nah, the vast majority of monks are ex-peasants, many of whom were orphans left at monasteries as infants. Going from samurai to monk is a bit of a heavy transition, since you have to be humble and do grunt work (Monastery maintenance and charity tend to be manual labor and interacting with heimin and hinin), on top of giving up your worldly possessions and identity, and getting into deep theology.
A peasant is already used to doing grunt work and doesn't have many possessions or an important identity to begin with, and they're usually very actively pious even as peasants.

>>51174950
Some monks are also criminals who decided that retiring is a better alternative to getting hunted down by magistrates. It even tends to work out for them if they can maintain a proper monk life.

>>51174950
That's also why it makes perfect sense for monk characters to only have Monk abilities. Retired samurai monks still have their old techniques and possibly spells if they were a shugenja. But most monks never had any other Techniques, kata, ect aside from what they learn in the Brotherhood.

Also balance reasons, but hey.

>>51175001
There's an official story about a criminal who retired into the order of osano-wo to avoid a death sentence. 10 years of induction, after which a magistrate eventually found some kind of trail leading to the order. Of course, the monks of osano-wo deny any outside arbitration, so he also spent ten years joining the order - after which he found the monk that had been the criminal, realised there was no punishment harsher than joining the order, and the story ends.

>>51175076
Retired monks also seek to unlearn what they have learnt. Back in 2e there was a whole mechanical process to it, whereby you could eventually (after years) replace your non-monk techniques with monk techniques.

>>51175135
I could see that for bushi or courtiers, but the Shugenja gift is seen as a divine gift and "wasting it" is often seen as vaguely blasphemous. Although I could see a shuggie monk stop using their spells for anything but communion and unusual meditation techniques.

>>51175135
Actually it was first in the 1e Way of Shinsei book. Which incidentally has the best rules for Enlightenment ever.

>>51175188
It probably depends on the monk order in question and the time period.
Like during war between clans I can imagine healing spells being used by monks to save lives.
Or like in Crab lands all monk-shugenja know offensive/warding spells to help combat the Taint.

>>51175188
Ties to the world bind, and few bind as strongly as gifts. A monk's path lies beyond that, when they are ready.

>>51175302
Dohoho.

>>51175578
Most monk-shuggies in Crab lands would be Kuni and Kuni-trained who couldn't even fathom not having Jade Strike on tap at all times. It's such an important part of them that it even affects what color their eyes glow when they use magic.

>>51175824
Alright maybe that was a bad example....

>>51175824
>Kuni and Kuni-trained
Just Kuni. They're remarkably paranoid.

>>51177960
Paranoid or suitably cautious?

>>51180981
Not him, but let's be honest, there's not much difference when you're part of the Crab. For good reason, given everything.

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Dumb lore idea:
>Kanpeki rules over Rokugan with his Army of Darkness
>As he starts getting comfortable, he gets a knock on the door.
>Only except it's not a knock, or on the door. It's a large boulder through the gate.
>Motherfuckin' Yodotai, motherfucker.
>Romans with the power of CONQVEST vs Evil Samurai with the power of Hell

What happens then? Also, can/will Rokugan be regular Rokugan again after such a war?

Are omiyage a thing in Rokugan? Like, would it be rude of a samurai to show up to another's estate without some kind of gift from his home province? Or returning home without a gift from the province he visited?

>>51182170
Can someone explain to me why 4chan has a deep love for Rome and wants it to kill every single other culture out there?

I don't get this meme.

>>51182317
Rome is cool. They conquered like half the known world. Samurai are cool and everyone on 4chan is a weeb to some extent. Samurai fighting Romans is therefore double-cool. That's about it.

>>51182341
Don't these Romans have weird cheating anti-magic? And literal gods on their side?

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>>51182317
It's more to the fact that AEG had been teasing this shit for a while now, that the Yodotai attacking Rokugan is imminent. And with the negative ending of Satan Hard II: Satan Harder, it gives me personally a welcome change.

Besides, Spider is NOT a clan.

>>51182385
Yes.
>And literal gods on their side?
Literal gods who bear descriptions that suspiciously sound exactly like the Kami.

>>51182398
Oh fuck the Spider, they can fuck off and die (even if my character's wife is a Spider monk).

Having not-Rome about is just weird to me since they apparently have some gimmicky shit. Plus you know it'll make the weebs mad if Rokugan loses, and the AVE IMPERATOR fags mad if not-Rome loses.

It'll just be a shit show where no one is satisfied and shitposting reigns supreme.

>>51182398
>>51182454
I still like the idea that the Spider grew out of, or replaced, the Scorpion after the creation of the second festering pit.

>>51182398
The only problem I see is that Rokugan is getting implausibly fucked in such a short period of time. The Scorpion Coup, Clan War, War of Spirits, and the Invasion of the Celestial Heavens happened within a century, in addition to smaller conflicts like the Dragon-Phoenix war and the second and third Yasuki Wars. By all logic, it should take generations to rebuild after all that in a feudal society, and even then I question why society didn't collapse in its entirety.

It's kind of the same problem Cygnar has in WarmaHordes, where statistics presented by PP had their war casualties listed higher than the population of the entire country. There's only so much war you can have without a time skip without it becoming completely ludicrous. At least 40k has the excuse of having millions of worlds to draw resources from.

>>51182537
>why society didn't collapse in its entirety

It did, that's why all those fuck-ups happened. But there is this weird tradition in Rokugan that one should sweep anything bad under the rug and do their best to pretend that everything is fine. Ignorance is a bliss and all that.

>>51183387
No, I'm talking about sent back to the stone age here. With how massive the casualties and damage to infrastructure was, not to mention less than decades between huge conflicts that tore the country (and in some cases, the spiritual realms) to shit, Rokugan shouldn't even be a cohesive nation. The Destroyer War alone had fucking toxic rain and plague zombies and shit on top of the whole divine aspect.

It makes no sense that you would have such a large series of cataclysmic wars within such a short time span and still be able to function like you always did. The Second Festering Pit alone is fucking retarded in that it wasn't just game over right then and there given what happened when Fu Leng fell into the Nezumi empire.

Hantei Genji: Great Emperor or Greatest Emperor?

>>51183453
Well, I think there isn't much to destroy in Rokugan in the first place. Like, you demolish a few peasants huts and so what? They can rebuild them in a week or so.

>>51183671
A pretty shit emperor, but his son and grandson were much worse, so I guess it is an A for effort.

>>51183996
>Like, you demolish a few peasants huts and so what?
Try farms and rice stores.

>>51183996
Castles, farms, cities, roads. Not to mention the whole "diseased rains poisoning wells and fields" thing, a goddamn pit to hell in the middle of the Empire, or any of the other stuff.

You're vastly underestimating what sort of infrastructure is necessary to have a functioning country, and how destabilizing it is when a significant portion of the population die to war, famine and disease.

>>51182516
You can get bareback fucked by a million AIDS and herpes infected dicks

>>51184720
>Try farms and rice stores.

So the peasants are gonna be hungry for a year or two. In the whole history of the Emerald Empire there was literally one case when they made a big deal about it.

>>51184900
>Castles, farms, cities, roads.

Well, I guess the peasant huts can wait until the castle is patched up. Farms are the problem of the peasantry. Cities are just clusters of peasant huts. Roads are shit anyway, so no bother.


I think you guys underestimate the sheer amount of shit the average Rokugani samurai gives to mundane problems. Those things are heimin-tier, so let the heimin deal with them and go have a border skirmish with our neighbors instead!

>>51185116
If the peasants are dead or dying, there's nobody to grow rice. Without rice, the samurai can't function, and samurai consume more than the average peasant. Despite having super fertile lands, the Lion armies still require outisde imports to feed them.

>>51185264

And instead of trying to improve farming techniques or - gods forbid - reduce their armies and revamp their tactics so that they can go on with less food, they just gloss over the whole problem and let the heimin (merchants) deal with it.

>>51180981

Suitably cautious honestly if you compare them to, say, the Isawa.

>>51187016
There's a midpoint between ''there's maho under every rock and on top of most of them'' and ''Black Scroll? Don't mind if I do!'', and that midpoint is the kuroiban.

>>51183671
´Hard to say, everything we know about genji is so far in the past it's all been edited by the history cops to make the Hantei look good. He seemed like a nice fella, based on that setting in the imperial histories book.

So, in terms of story, how do I go about becoming a Kenshinzen ingame? What kind of reputation should one try to get to get their attention?

>>51188629

You can be a nobody, the only requirement is to challenge and defeat a member of the cadre. Since they most likely can't turn down challenges, no matter the person of the challenger, as it would look really-really bad, you only need to step up to one and be done with it.

Can I ask what the point of getting Skill ranks is if they're not added to your dice pool besides getting the Mastery effects?

I asked, and apparently even if I have Heavy Weapons 5, my tetsubo won't be any more or less accurate or damaging besides my Strength trait and the default roll and keep of the weapon.

Just seems like a waste of XP and that I should focus on raising my traits.

>>51188954

Huh? Skill Ranks are always added to the dice pool if the roll uses that Skill.

>>51188954
Skills do in fact add to skill rolls. Attacking with a tetsubo, for example, is a roll of Heavy Weapons + Agility, keeping Agility. Also, you can only roll max 10 dice; for every 2 beyond that you would roll, you instead keep an extra one.

>>51188954
>>51189546
Thinking about it further, you're probably getting confused about how damage works; that IS independent of your skill, and is instead rolling Strength + weapon DR, keeping weapon DR. Pumping your weapons skills will make you more accurate, but won't make you intrinsically hit harder. Of course, the more accurate you are, the more you can afford to raise for extra damage, so it kind of comes out in the wash anyway.

>>51188954

Dude what the hell are you smoking.

>>51189784
Clarified butter man.

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>>51185116

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>>51190868

>>51191004
>Small Farm – “Capture their stores to feed our troops and burn the farms, but leave the Asahina’s peasants alone. Let their masters choose which dogs will be fed and which will starve.” – Hida Kagore

>>51188954
>Example
>Tetsubo 5 + Agility 3 = 8k3 Attack roll
>Strength 5 + Weapon DR (Tetsubo is 3k3) = 8k3 Damage roll
This is how it works.

>>51177960
Nah, any Hiruma, Yasuki, or Toritaka (Even before joining the Crab) with the gift would be trained by Kuni, and the Jade mentality is drilled into them relentlessly.

>>51191170
>>51189546
>>51189545
>>51189590

Alright, thanks for the clarification, I was just confused is all.

>>51188135
It should be noted that the Kuroiban get along much better with the Kuni than they do with the Isawa. The Witch Hunters are more aware of the Kuroiban and its activities than most Scorpions are, and regularly work together with them.

>>51191606
I imagine the Isawa be extremely patronizing to work with.

>>51192152
>I know you're part of a tradition that's been directly fighting this shit for literally a thousand years or more, and/or from a tradition that works directly with said tradition because you know it's a good idea, but let me just say that my tradition knows more about it than you.
I'll prove it by opening this black scroll here and selling my soul to three different Oni, gimme a sec

>>51192439
I'm sure channeling the powers of The Lying Darkness is completely harmless as well.

>>51191606
>>51192152
>>51192439
Why are you talking about the Isawa, when the relevant Phoenix are the Asako Inquisitors, who work just fine with the other two?

>>51191530
Any non-Kuni would be adopted by the Kuni, thus being Kuni.

>>51192605
Because the Isawa can't stop butting into other people's problems.

>>51192659
The Asako Iniquisitors are their own order, but the Isawa are often in the office of Jade Champion-- pretty much any time it isn't a Kuni, in fact.

>>51192627
No? They train their clan's shugenja and whatever other shugenja they end up with through student exchanges or other deals. They don't adopt every shugenja that comes their way, just like Bushi schools don't adopt every bushi they train, and courtier schools don't adopt every courtier they train.

>>51192627
Nah. They're given higher priority for potentially marrying into the Kuni family when they're adults, to keep the shuggie blood strong. But that's also true of non-shugenja-family shuggies in every clan.

>>51192605
And the Asako are weak politically and magically, due to their monk-ish nature and the fact that the Isawa hate them.

>>51192704
>>51192704
I didn't say every shugenja that comes their way, and I was referring to in clan. Kuni do single mentor student training, and foreign clans aren't welcome in such by default.

>>51192686
Great for official investigations. Secret investigative schools don't give quite so many Fuchs.

>>51193330
It's also great for getting in the way of those secretive investigations, which can be an issue.

>>51193311
Then why did you say "any"? They don't adopt in-clan non-Kuni shugenja, and they don't banish their own non-shugenja family members.
And foreign students happen all the time. The Falcon explicitly sent their shugenja to the Kuni by tradition, and other minor clans without shugenja schools of their own send them to whoever they can set up an agreement with at the time. Also any nearby ronin shugenja who don't already have training, although they don't actually join the school, just pick up the basic skills of talking to the kami, and are so rare as to be nearly meaningless.

>>51193420
Also the Isawa. Literally every shugenja school has nearly constant student exchanges with the Isawa. If you got 1000 Isawa together in a room, you'd find at least one representative of every Shugenja school in Rokugan.

>>51193420
>Then why did you say "any"?
I didn't account for stupidity on the internet.

>>51193535
>any shugenja trained by them is adopted by them
>no
>well I didn't say every

You do know what any actually means when you use it in that context, right?

>>51193535
Don't make definitive statements for things that are objectively not definitive. We'll assume you're one of those people who are really wrong about how things work in the setting.

>>51175824
>Most monk-shuggies in Crab lands would be Kuni and Kuni-trained
>>51177960
>Just Kuni
>>51191530
>Nah, any Hiruma, Yasuki, or Toritaka (Even before joining the Crab) with the gift would be trained by Kuni
>>51192627
>Any non-Kuni would be adopted by the Kuni

>>51193594
I know the context of the conversation, which you seem to have forgotten.

>>51193633
I also know the lore, which you seem to have forgotten.

>[The Kuni] had no physical school, instead teaching their students directly and only one or two at a time. Their students were very often close relatives. They went to great lengths to understand the creatures of the Shadowlands, including capturing live specimens to study and dissecting dead ones. The tragedy of their scholarly pursuits was that members of the Kuni family were the most susceptible of all Rokugani to succumb to the Taint.

>Each Kuni had a part of the family library in their care, the system had its advantages and disadvantages. Exchanging knowledge between two shugenja could be difficult and few shugenja had an all-encompassing mastery of the school. It was, however, difficult to destroy any significant portion of Kuni learnings. They held annual meetings in Kyuden Hida every winter behind closed doors to discuss their findings over the past year.

These aren't the guys who open their libraries to or share knowledge with other clans, beyond the simple and uncontroversial stuff like Jade Strike. The other clans aren't willing to publicly acknowledge 99% of Kuni research even exists - it's worse than dead baby jokes in polite conversation. Do the math on whether they're going to send valuable shugenja (shugenja are rare AF outside the Isawa!) to the Kuni.

>>51194794
Where else are the Crab going to send their shugenja? Are you seriously trying to imply that Hida (Not that there are many Hida shugenja), Hiruma, Kaiu, and Yasuki shugenja DON'T go to the Kuni, or that the Toritaka don't send their relatively large number of shugenja to the nearest shugenja school that also happens to be on good terms with them?

Saying that they don't share their secret knowledge with out-of-clan students is one thing (And certainly true). Saying that they don't accept out of clan students is objectively false. At least one Grand Master of Earth was a Kuni trained Isawa, student exchanges are relatively common, and there are multiple instances of them training literally anyone who asks for it Jade Strike.
The Kuni School is not that decentralized. Students are assigned by daimyo and higher ranking members of the school. Any adult Kuni is eligible to become a sensei for at least one student, but they don't just grab the nearest family member and call it a day. They're organized and politics can influence them just as much as anyone else.

We're about to die, someone make a new one.

>>51194912
>Are you seriously trying to imply that Hida (Not that there are many Hida shugenja), Hiruma, Kaiu, and Yasuki shugenja DON'T go to the Kuni
Try a little harder, mate. I'm saying they get the Kuni name. They're not Hida / Hiruma / Kaiu / Yasuki / Toritaka any more. They're Kuni shugenja.

>At least one Grand Master of Earth was a Kuni trained Isawa
Prove that means they were shown the inner workings of the Kuni shugenja schools, rather than studying their ways of commanding the kami.

>student exchanges are relatively common
Prove it, and establish that means the exchanged student was truly trained as a Kuni - shadowlands lore and the whole shebang.

>there are multiple instances of them training literally anyone who asks for it Jade Strike
I mentioned that. More than that, it's the ciphers that make casting foreign spells difficult, so sharing a spell without a cipher is a simple matter. Still unusual in contrast with how shugenja families normally behave, but not difficult.

>>51195623
>I'm saying they get the Kuni name. They're not Hida / Hiruma / Kaiu / Yasuki / Toritaka any more. They're Kuni shugenja.
And that's wrong. You don't leave your family to join another family's school. That's literally not how it works.

>Prove that means they were shown the inner workings of the Kuni shugenja schools, rather than studying their ways of commanding the kami.
Studying their ways of commanding the kami means that they are mechanically a Kuni Shugenja with the technique Gaze Into Shadow, an affinity for Earth and deficiency for Air, 3 Earth spells, 2 Fire spells, and one Water spell. And the name Isawa.

>Prove it, and establish that means the exchanged student was truly trained as a Kuni - shadowlands lore and the whole shebang.
Prove that they don't. You're claiming that they literally only train people who take their name. Find even one example of that happening.

>>51195623
The Witch Hunters explicitly only take born Kuni as students. In direct contrast to their normal school, which takes Crab Shugenja of all stripes in the same manner as every other shugenja school. They don't adopt every shugenja they train.

>>51194912
Also;

>Every Kuni had to take at least one apprentice during his life, and no Kuni was allowed to adopt more than one.

I presume that means more than one at a time, but it's still not favourable for exchange students.

>>51195764
>Find even one example of that happening.
Find me one example of a Crab shugenja with the Hida, Hiruma, Kaiu, Yasuki, or Toritaka name.

>>51195838
>Crab
Kuni, because wording matters.

>>51195848
http://l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Crab_Clan_Members
Here's a start.

>>51195838
Hida Kozan
Hida Rohiteki
Hida Ruri
Toritaka Hiruko
Toritaka Ikanko
Toritaka Mai

>>51195899
Scratch Ruri, she was a Soshi originally.

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>people are continuing to argue with this retarded faggot
This thread can't die soon enough...

New thread >>51195982

>Toritaka Exorcist alternate path for Kuni Shugenja
>Literally named after the family that developed the alternate path for the shugenja school
>"Many Kuni visit Toritaka lands regularly to equip themselves with exorcism wards"

Sure does sound like those guys abandon their original family when they go to shuggie school, huh?