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The world of Rokugan has a long and a storied history in role-playing. Not as long as Glorantha or Greyhawk, perhaps, but still long. It started as the backdrop for the Customizable Card Game Legend of the Five Rings. The game took its name from Miyamoto Musashi's treatise on swordsmanship, The Book of Five Rings, and was set in a fantasy world based on Oriental, especially Japanese, myth and legend. It was filled with magic, combat, and an evocative and imaginative feel. The world of Rokugan was one where seven Great Clans fought with each other for land and prestige. Tagged as a world “where honour was a force more powerful than steel,” it caught the imagination of many gamers, especially those fond of the films of Kurosawa and the samurai legend, spawning, among other things, a role-playing game.
The role-playing game had a First Edition, with several supplements, which led to a Second Edition. There were some difficulties during the Second Edition, which led to a number of the supplements being published with stats for both Alderac Entertainment Group's house Roll and Keep system as well as for the D20 system. Also during this period, the supplements jumped ahead a number of years in the metaplot storyline. This was okay if you played the CCG, since now the RPG was in pace with that game, but problematic if you only played the role-playing game, since it led a number of difficulties such as the sun and the moon switching gender, seemingly overnight. AEG came out with the Third Edition of this game, and since I had been trying to get my various gaming groups to play this game since the First Edition, I decided to finally run a game in Rokugan.
Starting Up
Over the long history of the game numerous supplements have added additional schools and options for character creation above and beyond the binary options of samurai/shugenja presented by the First Edition of the game. Many of these options have made their way into the core rulebook in the Third Edition, so that now each clan has four options (samurai, shugenja, courtier and other—tattooed men for the Dragon Clan, inquisitors for the Phoenix Clan, et). Our players took advantage of the new options, and created a number of different characters. In addition to the options presented in the main rule book and The Four Winds supplement, Alderac Entertainment Group has provided online updates to the various schools presented in the First and Second Editions. In our game we started with three players: a Crane duellist (an update of an original First Edition character), a Phoenix void shugenja, and a kitsune shape-shifter who was a member of the Fox Clan and attended the Maya Herald school. After the first session we added another player, who chose to play a Unicorn scout. These four players formed the core of the campaign. As the game progressed we added (sometimes for only a session or two, because of scheduling conflicts) a Crab and Lion samurai, a Lion sodan-senzo (a type of ancestor shugenja), a Unicorn shugenja, and a Phoenix inquisitor.
The Third Edition of the game is primarily set up to be played in time period of the current storyline of the Customizable Card Game, but has a brief overview of Rokugani history, including the default time periods of the First and Second editions (which were set during previous CCG storylines). Since I was most familiar with the First edition time period, we decided to set our game during that period. The main Third Edition rulebook doesn't support this period very well, but since I already owned just about every single one of the First edition sourcebooks, this lack of background in the main rulebook didn't affect our game very much. There were a couple of the options in the main rulebook which I had to restrict, since they were part of a later period in Rokugani history than we were going to play.
Building Character
Character creation went smoothly. It went on longer than I would have liked, but I suspect that is the fault of indecisive players rather than any default in the system. I made an NPC (an ally for one of the PCs) and it only took me about fifteen to twenty minutes. Characters are made by choosing a clan, which serves provides political and familial connections to characters, as well as a basic outlook on life (so they serve the same basic purpose of splats in most games) and a school, which functions essentially like a class. These schools provide a number of different special abilities to the characters as they gain experience. In a change from previous editions, shugenja now gain a special ability in addition to their ability to cast spells, adding welcome variety to spell-casting characters. The schools each teach a different curriculum, which is represented by a series of skills. The choice of clan and school also affects the character's attributes, which gain a bonus based on the player's choice. There are eight attributes which are sub-categories of the eponymous five rings, Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Void. Each ring is comprised of a physical attribute and a mental attribute, except for Void, which represents spiritual strength and has no associated attributes. For, example, Air governs Reflexes and Awareness. Raise both these attributes and the associated ring goes up. Some rolls in the game are based on attributes, while others are based on rings, encouraging well-rounded characters.
The players are then given a number of points to buy additional skills, as well as advantages and disadvantages. As is usual in systems of this kind, advantages cost points and disadvantages give back points. The advantages and, in particular, the disadvantages seem well balanced in play. When one of my players was examining the options in making his character, he turned to me and observed, “Man, all these disadvantages are really harsh.” So kudos to AEG for making disadvantages that are actually disadvantageous. We did have a small hitch when one of our players wanted to play a character from one of the restricted options, but we found another clan and school that suited him, and so averted that possible crisis.
I decided to have my players play characters who were of a higher social class than usual, taking advantage of the Glory and Status rules in the rulebook and placing the characters in important positions in the their respective clans and families. The basic premise of the campaign was to send the characters to the village of Beiden (an important landmark in the world of Rokugan) and to give them important positions. The Fox Clan shugenja, who had connections with the Imperial government, was appointed governor, the Phoenix shugenja was assigned to rebuild a shrine to Amaterasu and the Crane was appointed head of the Imperial garrison in the town. The village is situated in a mountain pass, with important military uses, and the governor was supposed to choose a clan to administer it. All the clans were sending emissaries, and so we had the set-up for a nice political game. The Crane player was instructed by his lord to ensure that the Crane Clan was given control of the time, setting up potential conflict between his duties to the clan and his duties to the Empire.
Combat and Other Hazards
The Unicorn character rode into the village wounded, after the Unicorn embassy he was travelling with was attacked by bandits. This led to a number of tense confrontations with the bandits, some of which broke out into combat (players being players). Combat in L5R has a reputation of being extremely deadly, and this edition does not vary from that tradition. Characters are harder to hit, which helps to lower mortality rates a little bit, once hit, it is as easy to die as ever. While none of the characters in our game actually died, there were a number of places where characters were near death from a single katana blow. This shows one of the great dichotomies in this game, which can be seen from read the rulebook, but which play only serves to highlight. Fully a quarter of the character options are for samurai, essentially fighters, who get a number of amazing martial arts abilities. However, combat is so deadly that smart players avoid it. While this is certainly realistic, and a little restraint in combat is to be encouraged, my players sometimes felt like the abilities which were on their character sheets were not very useful because actually entering combat in order to use those abilities was asking for a beating. Of course styles of play vary, but it was something we noticed. With all that being said, combat went quickly and simply and my players really enjoyed using their nifty abilities. Until one of them got hit...
We had two large scale battles in the campaign, both of which were largely an excuse to try out the mass combat system. This system has been a feature of all of the editions of the L5R RPG, probably because of the war-like nature of the world. Those players who were playing samurai had a good deal of fun racking up glory and performing heroic actions like duelling the enemy commander and stealing banners. My shugenja player had more difficulties, since there really isn't any mechanism built into the mass combat system for the casting of spells, especially for a character, who like this one, is mostly a non-combatant healer. She felt out of place, and didn't have a whole lot of fun during the battle. So, the mass combat system was a mixed success.
Growth and Campaigning
We consulted together and the players wanted their characters to progress faster (we were only playing once a month or so, and they wanted to be sure that they didn't spend the entire game at Rank One), so I gave out the amount of experience suggested by the game for moderate to fast progression, reaching a plateau around Rank Three. Our shugenja tended to progress faster than the samurai, but that is because attributes are weighted more heavily in figuring out progression, and they are more important to shugenja, so she tended to dump most of her experience into raising her attributes. This led to the common situation in L5R, where she was stronger than most of the samurai, since she was a Water shugenja, and the Water ring governs Strength. To be a better spell-caster, she had to be stronger. In addition, the players were a little bit miffed when I enforced the rule that you had be taught your next technique, since they were on a quest and their teachers all lived back in their own lands. This led to a number of situations where the characters would be discussing their next move, and one would suggest, “I think the dragon is in Crane lands. Really. I mean it this time. Me, gone up a level? Why do you ask?”
This was the longest running campaign I have ever run, and it was only really broken up by the fact that I had to move. One of my goals as the game-master was to show as much of the unique world of Rokugan to the players, so after the bandits, I sent them on a quest to find the captive Elemental Dragons, a quest which took them all over the map from Beiden to the mountains of the Dragon in the North and from Shinomen Forest to the Mantis Islands. They sought wisdom from the Oracle of Void, from the tattooed monks and from the sleeping Naga. A couple of players had no interest whatsoever in Japanese culture, went away wanting to know more, at least insofar as it impacted their characters in the game.
Conclusion
This game can be a little overwhelming to jump into, especially for those players with no previous knowledge of Rokugan or Japanese culture. We had a house rule that let those players who were only familiar with Western culture to take back any faux pas which they made during play, since things that seemed perfectly reasonable to them would have been shameful to their characters. Additionally, the game seems sometimes to almost presuppose a knowledge of the CCG, which may be a stumbling block to some. In connection with this, it is heavily skewed toward playing in the same time period as the current CCG storyline, so if that isn't your cup of tea, you will have more work ahead of you.
In spite of these minor quibbles, this was an enjoyable game. The book is fun to read, but the game is better to play. Other than the occasional discrepancy between the importance of combat in the game and its deadliness, the game runs smoothly and is very enjoyable. This game remains a unique fantasy offering for all those wishing to tap into the samurai mystique. I highly recommend it.
