The Way of the Minor Clans
Way of the Minor clans is the ninth clan book, for Legend of the Five Rings. It details 12 Minor clans, 3 of them defunct, their place in Rokugan, their schools, their outlook, plus the usual bits and pieces.
Great! you say, 12 new clans! Opportunities more than doubled for GM and player alike! Ahh, but wait…
Rules Critique
Minor clans have one less glory than Major clans. Some minor clans, like the Wasp and the Mantis have no Family Name, and thus gets no family bonus. No minor clan have more than one family. Minor clans pay 2 extra points to join a Major clan school. Why would they want to join a Major clan school? Because A) Minor clans only have one school. No Fox Bushi, no Mantis Shugenja. B) Because Minor clan schools only goes to 3. rank, except Mantis Bushi School which goes to rank 4.
So, if you are a player who would love to play a Minor clan samurai, so much so that you would buy this book, think twice. Many of your cool ideas will be unfeasible (Wasp shugenja, Centipede Bushi-of-the-Sun). Some of your ideas may work out fine (a Fox shugenja can hold his own, as long as the campaign stays below rank 4), other will leave you handicapped, like the Wasp Bushi (no trait bonus for family, the same as 8 character points less than everybody else. That hurts when you only got 25 points).
The same problem goes for the GM who hopes to find a treasure trove of NPC’s in the Way of the Minor Clans. Their are just not that many combinations to play with. Once you have used a Wasp NPC, you will be hard put to come up with one with different stats, unless he is incompetent, which Wasps most certainly are not. (Of course some of the Minor Clans are quite few and isolated. The Badger, for example, have almost no interests beyond their distant mountain region, and so are little use for a campaign along the coast, or near the shadowlands. If you can use half of these clans you will be lucky.)
Also the ceiling on ranks in the Minor schools seems silly to me. Sure, there are only 50 Wasps or Centipede in total, so maybe there are no high ranking senseis right now. But then again why not? The Centipede could be a spiritual superpower what with their meditation at Yama sano Amaterasu, if the GM decides. There is just something hopelessly AD&D about this rule.
In short, this book makes it quite cleat that it is hard to be of the Minor clans. AEG has made it policy to penalize the Minor clans for this reason. This makes sense in the context of the game, but isn’t it hard to be a Ronin too? True Ronins do not get a family bonus, Ronins have no schools (in the basic game) so they are compensated for this by tons of extra character points. Minor Clans gets no such compensation. And any Ronin mongrel can become a Shugenja, but a Mantis can not. Why, oh why?
For the Seeker of Lore
But maybe you do not care for such mundane matters as rules balance. Maybe you are a connoisseur of the Fantasy Geography of Rokugan.
Welcome to the Way of the Minor Clans! Here you will find information on Rokugan shipbuilding and sailing (and why Rokugans ships are so miserable it defies imagination). Here you will find knowledge of the fall of the Snake clan, lured into depravity by their study of the Maho. You will learn why such a mighty clan as the Mantis, have no family name. You will marvel at the folly of two, TWO! clans who have opened trading across the sea with Gaijin, in direct violation of imperial decree. One of these is with the Ivory Kingdoms, who may be the lost Tiger tribe. Do the they not realize the danger? Learn of the birth of the Wasp, an event of our own era. Witness the spiritual purity of the Sparrow Bushi, who live in poverty, but are true to their ideals. And wonder why the Hare clan was framed… (well, it’s a Kolat thing, so you will have to buy some other book to find out).
Summary
Minor clans are not as useful as they could easily have been. But the book is a fine read.
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