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The GM's Survival Guide is basically worth every penny that you're going to pay for it, but it's awfully difficult to review without exhaustively detailing the contents - which is pointless, since there's far too much information inside for me to do anything but gape.
There's rules for cinematic and realistic versions of the L5R game. There's a complete summary of all of the advantages and skills within the main game and all of the Clan books up to that date - although they're skeletally detailed, they're a tremendous resource for using advantages and disadvantages from books that you don't have. There's details on duelling etiquette. On what you can eat in Rokugan. On the kind of animals that you might find yourself fighting. Rules for running a Rank 0 Samurai campaign. Suggestions for playing non-samurai games, like a magistrate and an imperial scribe, or a pair of peasant soldiers, or a customs official. Use of the CCG in the role-playing game, as well as details on how to translate characters in the card game to the RPG. Enough adventure hooks to sink a boat. A list of random happenings that you can find. Expanded combat rules, including hit locations and raising to hit specific areas. Alternate uses for spending Void.
And that's not everything that's in the book. It is, however, enough to force me to point out that this book is chock full of useful information that any L5R GM - experienced or new - is going to find remarkably helpful. If you've got the 2nd edition, I understand that there may be some bleedover between that edition and this one, but it's still useful - unless they reprinted the whole thing, there may still be enough information to merit purchase.You can open the book up to any page and find something useful.
However, that leaves me in a rather awkward situation. There's not enough continuous material to justify my usual approach - going through the book stage by stage and analyzing each chapter - which means that I'm not able to write a decent review. I can say that it's a great book, and worth every penny, but I can't really say too much more beyond it.
So, here's with some nitpicks:
Nitpick #1
The Rokugani prohibition against touching dead flesh; as one of the chapter describes, if a samurai touches dead flesh, then he loses - and I'm not sure if I'm reading this right or not - all of his hard-earned Honor on the spot, even if nobody is watching. This prohibition is apparently historically accurate.
On the other hand, it reminds me of when I was in Boy Scouts - one of the other campers had picked up on the "the American flag must never touch the ground, and if it does, then it has to be burned" rule and was eternally watching like a hawk for any violation of the rules. Every time the American flag brushed against the ground, he'd demand that it be burned. Ultimately, somebody shut him up by suggesting that he could buy the new flag after we burned the old.
In any case, the can't-touch-dead-flesh prohibition seems like it could really screw up any novice GM who's not sure of how to treat the prohibition - especially since most samurai are in the business of making dead flesh. We're informed that being covered in blood isn't bad, since war is an inherently glorious activity, and we're informed that you can regain lost honor by performing a ritual, but it baffled me beforehand - say that you're climbing over a pile of corpses to get to a general; have you touched dead flesh? Or are you excused because it's in battle? A friend of mine explained to me that the prohibition only applied to handling dead flesh, as opposed to simply brushing your hands or body against it in passing; I can live with that ruling.
Nitpick #2:
There's a discussion of exactly how much a koku is worth, which basically says that it's worth about as much as the harvest - in other words, if the harvest is good, a koku is valuable, and if not, then it devalues. My only problem - and this perhaps stems from not having read the L5R rulebook closely enough - is that I don't know exactly how much a koku is worth. Having a relative value is fine, but it's difficult to figure out what a koku is worth in relation to anything - the book provides no guide. Neither does the Merchant's Guide to Rokugan, although that book has its own objectives in mind. So while we do get clarification of how the koku works within the system, I still don't know what I can get for one. I'm going to go with the guess that a standard koku is worth about a thousand bucks, in medeival terms - enough to buy a cow, or ten chickens - and that the value fluctuates depending on how the rice harvests are doing.
I believe that my next review for the L5R line will be a touch more complete.
-Darren MacLennan
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