The Inside Scoop on Gaming

When it is, I celebrate. But by the same token, if it sucks, you're gonna hear about it. Unfortunately, Way of the Crab for the Legend of the Five Rings RPG is in the latter camp. Impressively, it manages to contain almost everything I dislike in an RPG book, while simultaneously ignoring everything I love about Legends of the Five Rings.

While everything I discuss below is a genuine problem with Way of the Crab, it also is a problem with a lot of books put out by a lot of companies. And yes, I know it might be a bit unfair to use this book to rant about some of my dissatisfactions with the gaming industry in general, but I think these are valid gripes, and the fact that my criticisms of Way of the Crab fit many other books just as well doesn't make it any less guilty.

So what, specifically, bothered me enough to justify writing this long review of a fairly minor book I didn't much care for? I'll try to explain:

Bad Fiction. This is a big problem in the RPG industry right now. I would like to blame White Wolf for this, but the truth is it's been around far longer. It's only been the last few years though, that virtually EVERY new release opens with a five-to-ten page salvo of amateur fiction.

I guess the theory is that introductory fiction helps draw the reader into the fantasy world, but I can't help but feel that it has simply become a way for writers to get into print a lot of fairly lackluster prose that wouldn't be published otherwise. The result is that reader gets frustrated with the cliches and melodrama and the book (which should really be about the game, anyway) starts with a strike against it right at the beginning.

This is not to say that there aren't game designers who can also do good fiction -- Robin Laws leaps to mind as someone who has proven himself, as do pretty much all the guys down at Pagan Publishing -- but the rest should really spend more time developing their skills before inflicting upon us yet another fantasy tale of a child swordsman-in-training coming of age facing some horrific demon-thing.

Bad Art, and Plenty of It. Leaving aside the cover, the art in the Legends of the Five Rings rulebook was pretty good. Way of the Crab is nowhere near that standard. What makes it doubly irritating is that there is so damn much of it. A dozen artists are credited, each with several pieces. As a result, there is a minimum of a quarter-page picture every second page, plus numerous half-page, full-page and even double-page drawings. The majority have little or nothing to do with the text. These gratuitous doodles are not what I paid $20 Canadian ($14.95 US) for.

Another thing that disappointed me here was the lack of any meaningful stylistic direction to the art. The anime-inspired Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles have (appropriately enough) anime-inspired illustrations. The grubby, gallows-humour Warhammer Fantasy RPG has always featured grubby-looking, gallows-humour art (by many different artists, I might add). Legend of the Five Rings has many possible directions that could be taken to help give it a medieval-Japan feel: they could try imitating the sketchy, fluid look of the Lone Wolf and Cub comics or other "historical" manga, or the otherworldly look of traditional Japanese art, for example. A few pieces do go in the latter direction, but a few pieces do not a consistent look make.

Borders: I was going to put this under Bad Art, above, but this is such a particularly obnoxious trend, I'm putting it all by itself. Way of the Crab is, like many RPG books, marred by big, blocky borders around the text on every page, filling all the margins. In Way of the Crab, these margins take up almost a third of the page width, and over a third of the page area as a whole if you count the top and bottom.

What a cynical practice. All this does is reduce the amount of text on each page. And while many pages have sidebars in the margins, many others do not, and those that do rarely run down more than half the length of the page. Compare the sidebars here to the dense, information-packed ones GURPS uses -- and when GURPS books don't have anything relevant to put in the sidebars, we get full-page text instead, not just empty space.

Sneakiness: One reason I have this book is that I wanted to find out a bit more about the intriguing-sounding Kolat mentioned in the Legend of the Five Rings rulebook, which promises more information in Way of the Crab. Well, I'm happy to report I am curious no longer. According to Way of the Crab, the Kolat are (drum roll, please): an "enigmatic order" and ... um, well, that's about it. Yes, thanks to Way of the Crab, I have no further interest in trying to find more information about the Kolat. After all: "fool me once ..."

And I do hope the AEG people will understand if I don't rush out to buy the Shadowlands sourcebook just so I can find out what the heck the "shadowlands taint" they keep talking about is. (Please don't tell me there wasn't room to reprint it: any book that has nothing better to do with its last four pages than reproduce the character sheet from the Legend of the Five Rings rulebook twice is not a book with space problems.)

I know AEG wants to do what it can to sell as many copies as possible of each new book, but instead of using these kinds of sneaky tactics, how about releasing quality product? Is that really such a naive idea?

Lack of Content: This is what it all comes down to. All the other things I mention above are really part of this one. The real problem with Way of the Crab, and so many similar products (I'm looking at you, Mr. White Wolf angst-ridden-supernatural-creature subgroup-book and Mr. TSR Complete class/race/other-meaningless-straightjacket Book) is that it is so fundamentally empty. The book is roughly 10 pages of interesting material padded with another 110 pages of filler: filler art, filler fiction, filler borders, filler history (any chapter on history that has long sections of dialogue is going on waaay too long), filler pregenerated characters (does anyone ever use these?), etc.

Not to mention the pages devoted to the Legends of the Five Rings CCG, the double-page chapter headings (!), and the maps of the Crab castles (which could conceivably be useful if they came with keys and room descriptions).

What's missing are any of the things that I (and I'm sure many others) loved about the original Legend of the Five Rings rulebook. That book presents a magical, exotic culture, bound by social class, rigid codes of behavior and heroic ideals. Way of the Crab instead presents a bunch of generic fantasy RPG cliches in samurai clothing. Where the Legend of the Five Rings main rulebook drew from the history, culture, society and religion of Japan and other Asian lands, Way of the Crab draws from AD&D.

I really wanted to see how the Crab clan lived. How do Crab samurai interact with their daimyo? How do they interact with the peasants? What is it like in their swordsmanship schools? What happens when the uncouth Crab travel to other lands? Do any Crab samurai ever feel a calling to something less basic than manning the wall keeping out the Shadowlands? With military service so critical, how do the Crab feel about individuality?

I could see a lot of roleplaying potential in making the Crab clan into an unpleasant, authoritarian military state, or a bunch of macho, Conan-esque, "war is glory" badasses, or both. The entire clan could have a horrified, shell-shocked attitude in the face of so much death and duty, or they could cling mightily to the code of bushido to remind themselves of how different they are from their Shadowlands foe.

But the Crab in Way of the Crab are just bland. Crab PCs as presented in the book seem to have conflicts with other clans just because the book says they do, rather than because of any meaningful social/historical/political reason than might be interesting to roleplay.

Overall Evaluation: I should point out that Way of the Crab is not without its good points. I enjoyed the description of the Crab lands (but it's too short, and there's no map). More to the point, there are a lot of little details and asides that I think can add a lot to Crab roleplaying. The section on Crab swearing is pretty cool, and I liked some of the political and historical quirks -- due to an ancient grudge, for example, the Crab's regular diplomats cannot deal with the Crab's main enemy, the Crane, so negotiations are up to the Crab's uncouth soldiering families. If there had been more of these kinds of roleplaying hooks, we could have really had something, but it's a case of "too little, too late."

Probably the best way to sum up what's wrong with Way of the Crab is to look at the credits page, where the authors thank Arnold Schwarzenegger for providing "inspiration." The book I wanted would have thanked the late, great Toshiro Mifune.

With this book, and the equally-empty Way of the Unicorn and Way of the Dragon, AEG have eroded just about all the good will I felt toward them after reading the Legend of the Five Rings rulebook. I continue to play LotFR -- I love the setting and the challenge of roleplaying in an alien culture -- but I will look long and hard at any future AEG products before buying.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Way of the Crab
Author: Rob Vaux Category: game Company/Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group Cost: $14.95 Page count: 120 Capsule Review by Eric Brochu on 07/26/98. Genre tags: none	When it is, I celebrate. But by the same token, if it sucks, you're gonna hear about it. Unfortunately, Way of the Crab for the Legend of the Five Rings RPG is in the latter camp. Impressively, it manages to contain almost everything I dislike in an RPG book, while simultaneously ignoring everything I love about Legends of the Five Rings. While everything I discuss below is a genuine problem with Way of the Crab, it also is a problem with a lot of books put out by a lot of companies. And yes, I know it might be a bit unfair to use this book to rant about some of my dissatisfactions with the gaming industry in general, but I think these are valid gripes, and the fact that my criticisms of Way of the Crab fit many other books just as well doesn't make it any less guilty. So what, specifically, bothered me enough to justify writing this long review of a fairly minor book I didn't much care for? I'll try to explain: Bad Fiction. This is a big problem in the RPG industry right now. I would like to blame White Wolf for this, but the truth is it's been around far longer. It's only been the last few years though, that virtually EVERY new release opens with a five-to-ten page salvo of amateur fiction. I guess the theory is that introductory fiction helps draw the reader into the fantasy world, but I can't help but feel that it has simply become a way for writers to get into print a lot of fairly lackluster prose that wouldn't be published otherwise. The result is that reader gets frustrated with the cliches and melodrama and the book (which should really be about the game, anyway) starts with a strike against it right at the beginning. This is not to say that there aren't game designers who can also do good fiction -- Robin Laws leaps to mind as someone who has proven himself, as do pretty much all the guys down at Pagan Publishing -- but the rest should really spend more time developing their skills before inflicting upon us yet another fantasy tale of a child swordsman-in-training coming of age facing some horrific demon-thing. Bad Art, and Plenty of It. Leaving aside the cover, the art in the Legends of the Five Rings rulebook was pretty good. Way of the Crab is nowhere near that standard. What makes it doubly irritating is that there is so damn much of it. A dozen artists are credited, each with several pieces. As a result, there is a minimum of a quarter-page picture every second page, plus numerous half-page, full-page and even double-page drawings. The majority have little or nothing to do with the text. These gratuitous doodles are not what I paid $20 Canadian ($14.95 US) for. Another thing that disappointed me here was the lack of any meaningful stylistic direction to the art. The anime-inspired Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles have (appropriately enough) anime-inspired illustrations. The grubby, gallows-humour Warhammer Fantasy RPG has always featured grubby-looking, gallows-humour art (by many different artists, I might add). Legend of the Five Rings has many possible directions that could be taken to help give it a medieval-Japan feel: they could try imitating the sketchy, fluid look of the Lone Wolf and Cub comics or other "historical" manga, or the otherworldly look of traditional Japanese art, for example. A few pieces do go in the latter direction, but a few pieces do not a consistent look make. Borders: I was going to put this under Bad Art, above, but this is such a particularly obnoxious trend, I'm putting it all by itself. Way of the Crab is, like many RPG books, marred by big, blocky borders around the text on every page, filling all the margins. In Way of the Crab, these margins take up almost a third of the page width, and over a third of the page area as a whole if you count the top and bottom. What a cynical practice. All this does is reduce the amount of text on each page. And while many pages have sidebars in the margins, many others do not, and those that do rarely run down more than half the length of the page. Compare the sidebars here to the dense, information-packed ones GURPS uses -- and when GURPS books don't have anything relevant to put in the sidebars, we get full-page text instead, not just empty space. Sneakiness: One reason I have this book is that I wanted to find out a bit more about the intriguing-sounding Kolat mentioned in the Legend of the Five Rings rulebook, which promises more information in Way of the Crab. Well, I'm happy to report I am curious no longer. According to Way of the Crab, the Kolat are (drum roll, please): an "enigmatic order" and ... um, well, that's about it. Yes, thanks to Way of the Crab, I have no further interest in trying to find more information about the Kolat. After all: "fool me once ..." And I do hope the AEG people will understand if I don't rush out to buy the Shadowlands sourcebook just so I can find out what the heck the "shadowlands taint" they keep talking about is. (Please don't tell me there wasn't room to reprint it: any book that has nothing better to do with its last four pages than reproduce the character sheet from the Legend of the Five Rings rulebook twice is not a book with space problems.) I know AEG wants to do what it can to sell as many copies as possible of each new book, but instead of using these kinds of sneaky tactics, how about releasing quality product? Is that really such a naive idea? Lack of Content: This is what it all comes down to. All the other things I mention above are really part of this one. The real problem with Way of the Crab, and so many similar products (I'm looking at you, Mr. White Wolf angst-ridden-supernatural-creature subgroup-book and Mr. TSR Complete class/race/other-meaningless-straightjacket Book) is that it is so fundamentally empty. The book is roughly 10 pages of interesting material padded with another 110 pages of filler: filler art, filler fiction, filler borders, filler history (any chapter on history that has long sections of dialogue is going on waaay too long), filler pregenerated characters (does anyone ever use these?), etc. Not to mention the pages devoted to the Legends of the Five Rings CCG, the double-page chapter headings (!), and the maps of the Crab castles (which could conceivably be useful if they came with keys and room descriptions). What's missing are any of the things that I (and I'm sure many others) loved about the original Legend of the Five Rings rulebook. That book presents a magical, exotic culture, bound by social class, rigid codes of behavior and heroic ideals. Way of the Crab instead presents a bunch of generic fantasy RPG cliches in samurai clothing. Where the Legend of the Five Rings main rulebook drew from the history, culture, society and religion of Japan and other Asian lands, Way of the Crab draws from AD&D. I really wanted to see how the Crab clan lived. How do Crab samurai interact with their daimyo? How do they interact with the peasants? What is it like in their swordsmanship schools? What happens when the uncouth Crab travel to other lands? Do any Crab samurai ever feel a calling to something less basic than manning the wall keeping out the Shadowlands? With military service so critical, how do the Crab feel about individuality? I could see a lot of roleplaying potential in making the Crab clan into an unpleasant, authoritarian military state, or a bunch of macho, Conan-esque, "war is glory" badasses, or both. The entire clan could have a horrified, shell-shocked attitude in the face of so much death and duty, or they could cling mightily to the code of bushido to remind themselves of how different they are from their Shadowlands foe. But the Crab in Way of the Crab are just bland. Crab PCs as presented in the book seem to have conflicts with other clans just because the book says they do, rather than because of any meaningful social/historical/political reason than might be interesting to roleplay. Overall Evaluation: I should point out that Way of the Crab is not without its good points. I enjoyed the description of the Crab lands (but it's too short, and there's no map). More to the point, there are a lot of little details and asides that I think can add a lot to Crab roleplaying. The section on Crab swearing is pretty cool, and I liked some of the political and historical quirks -- due to an ancient grudge, for example, the Crab's regular diplomats cannot deal with the Crab's main enemy, the Crane, so negotiations are up to the Crab's uncouth soldiering families. If there had been more of these kinds of roleplaying hooks, we could have really had something, but it's a case of "too little, too late." Probably the best way to sum up what's wrong with Way of the Crab is to look at the credits page, where the authors thank Arnold Schwarzenegger for providing "inspiration." The book I wanted would have thanked the late, great Toshiro Mifune. With this book, and the equally-empty Way of the Unicorn and Way of the Dragon, AEG have eroded just about all the good will I felt toward them after reading the Legend of the Five Rings rulebook. I continue to play LotFR -- I love the setting and the challenge of roleplaying in an alien culture -- but I will look long and hard at any future AEG products before buying. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 2 (Sparse)