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Disclaimer II: I received a copy of Legend of the Five Rings, 3rd Edition, for free. Not in exchange for a review or any sort of promotion whatsoever. Todd Rowland, L5R Brand Manager for Alderac Entertainment, saw a thread I started asking if L5R was “awesome samurai goodness or crap.” Rowland contacted me and offered to send me the book so I could find out myself. Although I don’t think this altered my view of the game, it did strongly alter my view of Alderac. It’s pretty rare for a company to go out of its way like that. I believe that speaks volumes for Alderac’s view of its fans.
Disclaimer III: I knew nothing of this game before reading it except for what I’ve gleaned in forums. I’ve never played any incarnation of the game and have never played the card game.
Disclaimer IV: This is the third, no fourth, time I’ve sat down to write this review. I really wanted to run a playtest. If had done so, I think it may have cleared up some of my ideas about how the game runs. Unfortunately, my games are few and far between these days. And even though I didn’t promise to write a review, I admit that I felt compelled to because of Todd Roland’s generosity. I’d look at this review as more of a first impressions because of the lack of playtest. I did read the book cover to cover once and read over sections here and there several times.
Disclaimer V: I opened this book with an idea of what I wanted from a game. Namely, I wanted to run samurai games with quick, deadly duels where a single hit could kill. I wanted a game where honor was important and where you could take control of the idealized version of the samurai I know and love from film and television. I like Kurosawa, I like The Last Samurai, I like Samurai Champloo. This definitely had an effect on how I reacted to certain aspects of the book.
Disclaimer VI: Just kidding.
First Look
This is a very cool looking, full-color book. The front has a mahogany, cherry looking lacquered wood background with a sheathed katana tucked behind a sash wrapping around the book. The L5R title and logo are at the very top of the book. Nice and sharp.
The pages inside are done in a light yellow/white… it looks kinda like a sponge-painted wall, in a good way. It’s very easy to read text against this background. The text itself is an easy to read font, although a little small. Artwork is sprinkled in good amount. It’s not prolific, but there’s probably some art every five or six pages or so at least. The artwork is well done, but it’s nothing flashy. Personally, the art didn’t jump out at me. Although there were few pieces that really grabbed my attention and gave me game ideas, the art is professionally done and looks nice.
There is also a map of Rokugan, the nation in which the game takes place, on the inside front and back covers. It’s nice looking, but the important places aren’t labeled with names but with numbers. The good thing is these locations are each given about a paragraph or so in the back of the book, but it makes glancing at the map for things to do difficult.
Book of Earth
The game starts off with a pretty darn good piece of fiction detailing a group of ronin samurai running around, pushing around peasants, and acting like major jerks because they have swords and mad samurai skills and the peasants do not. That is, until a master swordsman from the Crane Clan comes calling…
And then we jump into the factions of Rokugan. Quick note: Rokugan is basically an idealized version of feudal Japan with several clans warring with each other put ultimately paying homage to the Emperor and the Shogun and uniting against outside threats. At least, that’s how I quickly identified it. Okay, so delving into the factions of Rokugan. There’s the Emperor and four of his families that pay homage only to him. And then there are the clans, named after animals and each having their own little niche. Personally, I love reading faction breakdowns in games, so I’m going to give you a quick overview.
Crab – Balls to the wall, literally. These guys guard a huge wall that keeps out demons and all kinds of crazy nasty corrupt stuff in the evil Shadowlands where it belongs.
Crane – Perfectionists pretty boys (because taking care of yourself is part of seeking perfection). Great swordsmen, courtiers, etc.
Dragon – Mystics with a seemingly disproportionate amount of monks. They remind me of your typical Shaolin style monks in the movies but with tattoos that grant them mystic powers.
Lion – Great warriors and tacticians who put a lot of emphasis on honor.
Mantis – Renegades and probably my personal favorite. They’re the youngest clan and are made up largely of seafarers and swashbucklers. They play fast and loose with what exactly honor entails.
Phoenix – Great mystics, but on the shugenja (wizard) side instead of the monk like the Dragon.
Scorpion – Assassins who carry out the will of their Clan and the Emperor no matter the cost to their personal honor. Another clan I really like. These guys are the beta wolves, doing the dirty deeds to keep the nation together.
Unicorn – Okay, apparently these guys were banished or ran away a long time ago to the lands of the barbarians (anyone not from Rokugan). Now they’re back and they brought a whole herd of thoroughbred warhorses. They remind me of the Mongol horde, but not as interesting. I just don’t really see how they fit in with the other clans.
Minor Clans – There are also a handful of offshoot clans running around. These usually consist of only one or two families (by contrast, I believe the big clans encompass dozens or maybe even hundreds of families). The minor clans presented are all pretty interesting. But what I really like is that this makes it really easy for players to create their own clans, possibly clans that they even are the head of.
We are also introduced to The Brotherhood of Shinshei, Taoist-type monks, and The Shadowlands. I’ll be up front with you. The Shadowlands are given a big history later on along with the creation of the world, but I’m still confused as to exactly how it happened. That said, I don’t think it’s necessary to know that story to understand the Shadowlands. It’s a big tainted area full of big tainted monsters and an evil big tainted badass leader. And it’s all kept at bay behind a giant wall maintained by the Crab Clan.
Next we go into the History of Rokugan, definitely the worst part of the entire book. Instead of interesting fiction or even bland but well explained background, we get a timeline of very dry, very boring, and very confusing events.
Maybe you’ll understand this if you’re a L5R card-collecting fiend who’s been following the game from its inception. I’m not and it was pure torture. There are many mentions made to people, events, and even entire races that have not been mentioned yet, and some that aren’t even mentioned in detail in the rest of the book. This was wasted space for me. This would be bad enough if it was a few pages. But it’s 19 pages. That’s a lot of pages for something I don’t care about and that doesn’t make me want to care about. I don’t want to go into overkill here, but I was excited to get into this game. This section really put a damper on that excitement.
Fortunately, the next section on the setting is quite good and details everything you wanted to know about Rokugan, some things you probably never thought to ask, and some things you probably didn’t care to know. There’s a lot of stuff here. You get a breakdown of the different castes within the society (including the samurai, peasants, and the unclean (people who deal with the dead, etc.). There’s quite a bit of talk over how the classes interact on a regular basis which is a great boon for the GM.
We also get a discussion of shugenja and the magic they wield. Basically, shungenja do their stuff by talking to elemental spirits and asking, or telling, these spirits to do things. They don’t throw fireballs, they politely ask a fire spirit if it could hurtle towards the Shadowland ogre and incinerate him. Or, if he’s feeling like a dick, the shungenja demands that the flame spirit do so or he’ll snuff it out of existence. Very cool, and I can see this creating some great situations in game.
We also get a breakdown of the calendar, holidays, how activities are influenced by the seasons. I really can’t think of anything they left out as far as describing Rokugan.
Next we jump into a lengthier discussion of the clans. Players can play either bushi (samurai), shungenja (wizards), or courtiers (diplomats). Each clan is given three or four sample families (at least one from each group). There’s a brief description and each clan gets a bonus to a trait. I thought this was neat, but it turned out to be the start of a big problem I have with the game. Namely, there are too many options, bonuses, and special abilities to keep track.
Book of Water
Super quick system breakdown: Each character has attributes that correlate to one of five rings. Stamina and Willpower with Earth. Strength and Perception with Water. Agility and Intelligence with Fire. Reflexes and Awareness with Air. And Void, which provides points you can spend to increase rolls.
To perform an action, add your attribute and skill, roll that many d10s and keep the highest in the number of your attribute. Add ‘em up and see if you match the TN, of which 15 is standard. So, to break that concrete block you’d add your Strength of 3 and Break Block skill of 5, roll 8 dice and keep your highest three. Tens explode, so you get to roll them again and add them to total.
There are a lot of skills listed in the book. I like the idea that they are divided into high and low skills, with low skills like poisoning earning you dishonor if you’re seen using them. Very cool. But there are a lot of skills. I’d say it’s on the same level of D&D 3.5. If you don’t have a problem with that, you’ll be fine, but…
Then we get into a plethora of Advantages and Disadvantages, rules for Honor, Glory, and Status, and rules for something called Insight Rank. You have to have the proper level of Insight to get the proper level of school. Schools are ranked from 1-5 and are based on your status as bushi, courtier, or shungenja. Each level of a school gives you special abilities. Insight is the total of your rings multiplied by 10. I’m not a big fan of math, especially when I don’t see why you couldn’t have simply added the total of your rings to determine rank. Did I also mention that Void can be used to increase your rolls by one? So if you would normally roll 5k3 (roll 5, keep 3), you’d roll 6k4. But you can also use Void for other things… And then there are raises. You can voluntarily increase the target number of an action with the understanding that if you succeed you’ll do something really cool. Think like Exalted stunt dice, only in reverse. You’re penalized for trying to succeed really well. I don’t have a problem with this as I was looking for a low-grounded sword-slinging game, but the point is it’s another fairly involved rule piled on top of a mountain of others.
Schools, remember those schools I mentioned? Well, you get into them next. They each offer an attribute bonus, starting honor points, starting skills, and starting outfit, along with a description. The descriptions are generally good and provide interesting concepts. The outfits are really awesome. I’m a big fan because they provide your character with everything he would typically have and they cut down on players fiddling over giant lists. You’re not shoehorned into having a particular weapon, but you’re told that, as a Crab, you get two of any weapon. Not 35 throwing starts, giant battle axe, and katana, but two weapons. The attribute benefit, however, is unnecessary as these are already covered by families.
You also get into techniques. These are the special powers. You get one per rank you have advanced within the school. I had a problem with these. They are often complicated, or at least worded complicatedly, and if you ever reach rank four or five I can see players spending several minutes trying to decide which technique to use. Here’s an example of a level one technique from my favorite clan’s (The Mantis) warrior school.
“The first lesson of the Tsuruchi School is that a slow archer is a dead archer. At the start of combat you may choose to roll and keep a number of additional dice on Initiative equal to your School Rank. If you do not take the Initiative bonus, you gain a number of Free Raises each round equal to your School Rank. These Free Raises can only be used to make additional attacks with your bow. You may add your Air Ring to your TN to Be Hit, doubling this bonus against ranged attacks.”
Bhuwzzah? If you have no problem with this, then I can honestly recommend this book with no reservations whatsoever. If this kind of thing gives you headaches, like me, then you may want to second think your purchase.
All of the techniques are like this, or at least the majority are. They never just let you do one cool thing. Instead, they let you do X, but only in situation A, or you can instead opt for bonus Y against enemies B. Oh, and by the way, the technique also gives you a bonus to action Z. Too much information and it appears to me this would slow down the game. Again, I didn’t play this, so all of these problems may disappear like a decapitated ronin’s head in play. But I can tell you they were not fun to read and it felt like I was slogging through a dictionary instead of a book revolving around exciting duels, talking elementals, and tense diplomatic meetings.
We get a welcomed list of sample Rokugani names for men and women. I don’t normally think this a big deal, but here it’s welcomed because I can see players struggling to come up with names that fit the world. We also get a Heritage Table, which is brilliant. It’s done through random dice rolls. You start off rolling for either a Honorable, Dishonorable, or Mixed Blessing family history and proceed from there. You could have had an uncle who valiantly defended his home from the Shadowlands. Or maybe your sister committed adultery due to being in a forced marriage with a tyrant and was forced to commit suicide in order to redeem herself. This not only gives you a background to go off of and something for npcs to discuss (Hey, wasn’t your cousin that famous swordsman?), but it also gives mechanical bonuses. Very neat.
Book of Fire
This chapter goes into the rules in more detail, including combat.
Each character has seven levels of damage with ever increasing penalties to act. You have a number of wounds equal to your Earth multiplied by 2. So, if your Earth is 3 then you have six wounds in each of the seven levels for a total of 42 wounds.
I actually like this system because it provides a death spiral, something I think is good in an epic but very grounded low-fantasy game. Just to give you an example of how deadly it can get. Negative modifiers (which are given by adding to your TN) go like this.
Healthy (No modifier)
Nicked ( 3)
Grazed ( 5)
Hurt ( 10)
Injured ( 15)
Crippled ( 20)
Down ( 40)
After that you’re screwed unless a buddy can get to you pretty quick.
For damage you add your strength to the weapon. Say you have a Strength of 3 and a katana that does 3k2 damage. You roll 6 dice and keep the highest two. So right off you figure you have a maximum damage of 20 (two 10s), but keep in mind that dice explode. So if you rolled at least two 10s out of your six dice, then you’d roll them again. Say you get two 10s and then roll a 4 and 7. You’ve now done 31 points of damage. If you did that to 42 wound character mentioned above, that’d take him down to Crippled, which means he’s pretty screwed. Factor in Void points, and it’s very very possible to cut a man down in one hit.
Again, haven’t played, but it certainly looks deadly and I like that.
You get plenty of other combat rules, including lots of detailed weapons. Lots of weapons have specific modifiers, or special rules. If you’re into tactical gaming you’ll dig this. Personally, this just felt like yet another layer of detail that’d I have to juggle, and thus a bad thing.
You also get a list of common, everyday items and their costs. Again, not a big fan of this, as I typically go the “it’s cheap you can afford it; it’s expensive you can’t afford it” route, but it’s a fairly small section.
Honor! Glory! Status! All things I want in my samurai game! And they are all given mechanics here. They’re not bad, but they’re not exceptional either. Basically, each is rated on a scale of 1-10. Once you fill up ten temporary slots, you move up a rank. So it’s possible to have an honor of 4.5 for example. You move up by doing appropriate things. It’s fairly straightforward, but one thing I like about Honor is that the higher up you are the less honor you get for acts and the bigger the fall.
For example, take Samurai A, an honorless dog, and Samurai B, a paragon of virtue.
Samurai A may gain a boatload of honor for showing sincere courtesy to his rivals, a modest amount of honor for showing kindness to those beneath his station, and gain no honor for lying to bolster his reputation.
Samurai B, by contrast, gains little honor for showing sincere courtesty to his rivals, and no honor for acknowledging a superior opponent because, as a paragon of virtue, these things are expected of him. And he takes a massive hit to his honor for lying to bolster his rep because that is beneath such a samurai, while people expect it out of a lowly scumbag.
Cool.
But then we drive away from Cool and into “No more rules systems, please…” in the form of Katas.
Now, ironically, I have a kata-esque system in a homebrew game. But in that game it’s one of the central aspects of a character. Here they are add-ons. Katas are lengthy exercises that reward players with a minor bonus. Doesn’t sound bad? Well, besides the fact that it's yet another system to worry about, each kata has a specific amount of time needed to perform, a specific amount of time (we’re talking in minutes here, like 140 minutes, 30 minutes, etc.) that the bonus is good for. And sometimes the bonuses have prerequisites and many times they provide multiple bonuses and sometimes they provide a bonus while providing a detriment. Ughh…
We get a Mass Battle system next which actually appears quite good and relatively simple, but, to be honest, the katas wore me out so much that I used this time to regain my composure and haven’t returned to it since. It’s only about three or four pages in any case.
Book of Air
We get a brief history of the spirit world. It’s not bad, but it didn’t grab me either. It’s a twist on the Titans. Sun and Moon are the parents with the kami their children. Sun was scared of his kids, so ate them, but Moon tricked him with a stone in place of one of the kids. Kids inside grow up, other kid gets strong and slices Sun open, spilling the kids to the earth. They then go on to found the clans and lead the humans. One of them, Fu Leng, falls really far and causes some sort of rip in the fabric of reality, creating the Shadowlands. He wants to F Things Up Bad. The other kami, I gathered, aren’t nearly as involved in mortal affairs.
We get a discussion on religion, which is useful and Spirit Realms. As I understand, it’s relatively hard if not impossible to go to these Spirit Realms so I wonder about their inclusion, but it’s short and presents some interesting if predictable realms such as the Realm of Constant Warfare (not sure of its actual name). There’s also a discussion of Nemuranai, which are objects that have had their spirit awakened. This jumps out of left field as I don’t think they were mentioned (certainly not very prominently) before. Interesting, but I think it adds too many layers. But it’s easily ignored.
Magic. It was described very interesting at the beginning of the game. Dealing with a word of semi-sentient elementals in order to move the earth and the heavens? Suh-weet! But my problems with the rules pokes its head in here again. I take my katana and slice it’s head off! Begone multitude of rules!
Anyway, okay you roll your appropriate ring rating plus school rank to beat a target number of the spell’s level multiplied by 5. Simple enough. Spells are appropriately broken into the five elements on the character sheet.
But then you have an affinity that you gain a bonus to casting certain elemental spells and a deficiency where you have a negative modifier with certain elemental spells. And then you have to prepare scrolls to cast spells, only you can get rid of this requirement and cast some spells simply from your mind. And you can cast only a certain number of spells from an element equal to your rating in that element. Water of 4? You can cast 4 water spells. But you can also use Void points to gain temporary slots.
There are ample selections for each of the elemental spell groups and, I have to admit, that the majority of the spells in here are very cool, very evocative, and makes me want to play a shungenja. Just to give you a quick idea of power level. A level 5 spell allows you to banish all of the earth elementals in an area. The cool thing is this immediately causes all stone and earth structures to crumble to dust as they no longer have the necessary spiritual power to maintain their forms. All the spells are like this. Neat effects with in-game reasons for why they happen.
Then we get info on Kihos, sorta kinda spells that monks can weld. Again, more rules. Unlike the relatively streamlined and clear spells, Kihos revert to the method of katas and techniques with fairly convoluted rules that do This or That or This or That And This Detriment.
Shadowlands Taint is next. Like the Honor rules, these are very solid and neat if not revolutionary. You essentially have four degrees of taint and gain it by coming into contact with the Shadowlands, its twisted creatures, or by practicing an evil blood magic known as Maho.
What I like is that there are rules for playing characters throughout the fall, even when they fall completely. There is also a system for reducing taint, although it is nearly impossible to completely eradicate it. Something I like as it makes messing with the Shadowlands very dangerous and very scary. As you gain taint, you also gain these unnatural abilities that carry some type of deformity or stigma with them. Very cool. Gives you power while maintaining the fact that you’re getting it because you’re becoming corrupt, not because of your own merits. There’s also a discussion on how to conceal taint, which I found very useful for anyone who needs to hide this from their clanmates. We even get Maho spells. In short, everything you need to know about the evil Shadowlands and also everything you need to play a character corrupted by them.
Book of Void
To close we get some GM advice. Nothing spectacular, but nothing horrible. Stats for some animals and Shadowland enemies. Useful, although I tend to create my own enemies on the fly or with a little prep work. Still, it gives a good basis for what kind of competition is out there.
We also get a suggestion of different eras to play in. I feel this could have been quite a bit longer. Each era is only given a brief paragraph or two. Not enough, in my opinion, for someone who is just cutting his teeth on Rokugan. Still, it does give you an idea of different types of games you could play if not enough on the particulars.
We also get descriptions of details on the game map. Each numbered location is given a single paragraph description. These are very short but do provide you with a lot of neat ideas for where to set games or even what to make your game about.
Just one example out of many (I’d guess around 100 or so):
“Ookami Toshi (Wolf City) – This city overlooks a sharp cliff at the mountain’s edge. Ookami Toshi is well-guarded, and contains an extraordinary messenger system. If this area ever came under attack, Daidoji runners would spread the word within days, maybe even sooner. Some say that the heart of Ookami Toshi holds a great mirror, capable of passing messages back and forth to another mirror hidden somewhere in the Empire, and that its partner may rest in the bowels of Kyuden Doji.”
Very cool. Gives me lots of ideas. Plus, if you let your players read this section, they may decide to travel to areas they think are cool which provides you some instant feedback for what kind of game they want to run. Neat.
At the very end, we get some suggested reading and viewing materials, rules on converting characters from older editions, a glossary, and an index. I know lots of people appreciate good indexes. Personally, I rarely use them, but this one seems fairly detailed. It’s five pages of the same type throughout the book, which is fairly small. I’d guess 8 point, definitely no more than 10 pt.
Conclusion
First of all, this is a well-made product. It’s nice to look out, has good art, and, most importantly, it’s easy on the eyes which makes it very easy to read. There are very few typos that I noticed. I’m refraining from giving this a 5 because the art, despite being of excellent quality, did not really jump out at me for the most part or inspire me. That said, I have no qualms about giving this book a solid 4 in Style.
Now onto the tough part. I think the best feature about this book is that it really does contain everything you need to run a game. With the exception of the complicated history section, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. You get rules for samurai, courtiers, shungenja. Rules for honor, glory, status. Rules for Shadowlands taint, rules for monks, rules for spirits. The world itself is detailed down to the calendar and what peasants do on their time off. Nothing is left out.
But at times I felt physically battered by the shear amount of rules. The basic role and keep system seems excellent. Combat appears quite deadly while offering quite a few tactical choices… in fact, sometimes are too many choices for my taste.
School techniques that offer two or three different bonuses that you have to select from each time you use the technique while providing one or two detriments at the same time… kata and monk powers with similar complications, special powers for each different kind of weapon, and on and on. There are some cool ideas that I like, such as voluntarily raising the target number in order to get a special benefit, but it’s like I have to go digging through a pile of rules I don’t want to try to understand in order to find them.
I can see myself running a game of this, but I’d heavily modify techniques, get rid of monks and katas, eliminate most of the powers for weapons, and be forced to fiddle with a lot of other stuff rather than interrupt the game in order to hunt down rules.
Because of this, I have to give the game a 3 in Substance. There is a game I want to run here and the book has the rules to run it with. But it’s so bogged down with rules that I do not want to and will not use that it will require work to mold them to my wants. In fact, I’d say it’d be more like performing surgery. Slice out memorizing scrolls here and insight rules here, cut out the unneeded fatty tissue of techniques and reconnect them to the muscle of the combat system… and then get the paddles out and jumpstart this baby’s heart back up to speed.
I don’t feel like this needs to be said, but a review is obviously colored by the person who wrote it. In this case, I’m not even really trying to be objective. I don’t like piles of somewhat complex rules, I don’t like spending lots of time tweaking characters for maximum efficiency or in looking up special abilities. If you do, pick this game up right now.
If you’re like me, though, borrow the game from a friend or read through the techniques section at your gaming store. If you can deal with that section, there’s a good chance you can deal with the rest of it. There’s a skilled, lightning quick samurai lurking in here. He’s just burdened with cumbersome armor that’s difficult to put on and that weights him down at times.
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