Legend of the Five Rings - History

This episode we take a look at Legend of the Five Rings; the roleplaying game that invites us to become samurai and explore the Emerald Empire of Rokugan.  Honour and glory are to be had, as well as lots of opportunities to really, REALLY carefully phrase what you say for fear of offending one of your social betters...

This is part one of our L5R episode - part two will feature a round table discussion where we put on our rose-tinted glasses and talk about our favourite memories of the game. 

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
TWITTER: @savepodcast
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOST: Iain Wilson
VOICEOVER LADY: Keeley Wilson
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast. Legend of the Five Rings.

SPEAKER_00: 0:24

Hello and welcome to another episode of Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast. I'm your host, Ian. On today's show, we're going to be looking at Legend of the Five Rings, AEG's fantasy RPG set in the Emerald Empire of Rokugan. Unlike a lot of RPGs, L5R started out life as a collectible card game of all things, but its rich magical background was so well suited to telling stories, it very quickly became an History History Back in my university days, I had a lot going on RPG-wise. During Freshers' Week, I discovered the university's role-playing society and the joys of the Star Wars RPG. A trip into one of Glasgow's virgin megastores, a hallowed metropolis of role-playing goodness, led me to discover a locally produced game called Slay Industries that completely blew my mind and led to a campaign that was several years long. Years later, they are currently still sticks with me as one of the most stylistically clever sourcebooks I've ever seen produced for an RPG. It might sound like I'm being guilty of donning the old roast indeed specs here, but I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that I don't think I've ever got as much out of any other system supplement than I did out of this one. It was probably for this reason, the fact that the content was causing a near meltdown of my fragile little brain, that caused the book to self-destruct into a pile of loose pages after only a few read-throughs. Anyone who has owned either Karma or the first edition of Slay Industries will know exactly what I mean by this. A subscription to the wonderful Valkyrie magazine introduced me to a little company called White Wolf, which resulted in a buying frenzy that some might have dubbed obsessive and a desire to own every new book and system they produce. Rather embarrassingly, it also fuelled a desire to run a crossover campaign. Wouldn't it be so cool to get all these supernaturals together in one game? Thankfully, mercifully, that never happened. I realised what a horrible idea this was and pulled the plug before this monstrosity was spawned. Nonetheless, I ran games of Vampire, Mage and Wraith and ended up buying up other books that were buffed during this renaissance of darker games. Cult and Nephilim were two of my favourites, although after one a bot of attempt to run the latter, I realised how something could be cool on paper and extremely impractical, complex and unwieldy in execution. However, competing for my attention and the contents of my wallet was a little something called the collectible card game craze. Like most gaming junkies at that time, I started with Magic, but quickly moved on to Vampire the Internal Struggle, or Jihad as it was known back then. Honestly, I can't can't conceive of a poorer name for a gaming product and I wonder how many CCG message boards, chat rooms and fan sites have been flagged for attention by the NSA and GCHQ for that reason alone. I enjoyed both games immensely but, as Inquest magazine showed me, the market was filling up with hundreds and hundreds of games. If Magic and VTES were good, why shouldn't I check out all the others? This is where the deceptive lure of CCG is so insidious and so clever. Compared to investing in a new RPG, the entry footprint of a CCG is relatively small. A couple of boosters and a starter, at least back in the 90s, would set you back a tenner. It was once you got hooked that they got their claws into you and things really started to hurt. Nonetheless, I embraced this new hobby with gusto. In addition to magic and vampire, I dabbled in Star Wars, Star Trek, Illumina Matty, Rage, Middle Earth, Mythos, The X-Files, the list was fairly long. The dangerous thing though, I enjoyed them all. And because of this, I wanted to collect them all. Yeah, that could be costly. Thankfully, another game came to my rescue and resulted in me becoming so focused on it that I ignored all the others. Back in the late 90s, my main CCG was Star Wars. I was, and still am, a huge fan of the expanded universe, and after the first few expansions the CCG had really begun to hit its stride and was doing a great job of capturing the feel and theme of the films. It chimed nicely with the West End Games RPG that I was playing at the time, and besides, there was nothing quite like that feeling of opening a pack and getting one of the main characters in your rare slot. Depending on how you looked at it, I was also very fortunate as one of my friends owned a shop that was mostly dedicated to collectible card games, but which also sold a selection of RPGs and sourcebooks. It was a great spot for hanging out too, we did most of our gaming there, a wise move on the owner's part as he knew full well that none of us could resist the urge to impulse buy a couple of boosters for whatever CCG we were currently playing. It was there one Friday evening that said owner came over to me, I think I was just finishing up a game of Star Wars actually, and asked me if I was interested in a game called Legend of the Five Rings, or L5R for short. I'd seen the game being played by a few of the guys in the shop, but had never paid much attention to it, the whole samurai thing had never really done much for me, so I'd largely just written it off as another fantasy game. He explained he was running a sanctioned tournament in a few weeks, which was very dramatically named The Day of Thunder. and he was hoping to have a player represent one of each clan that was the name for each of the game's main factions. There was one clan that nobody was playing and he made me an offer. He'd sell me a starter set and some boosters at mates rates and give me a whole load of cards for this clan that he didn't use on the proviso that I entered the tournament. Never being one to look a gift horse in the mouth and forgetting that old drug dealer adage of the first one is always free I acquiesced completely completely disregarding the fact that I had a week to learn a game that I had never played before in order to compete in a tournament full of guys who played this game religiously. I hurried home with my bundle of loot and plunged into the starter box, boosters and piles of cards that my friend had given me. After a weekend of poring over my new goodies, I came to one inescapable conclusion. Everything about L5R blew my mind. It wasn't just a game, which I absolutely bloody loved, as it was largely about the interplay at the table between multiple players, but the setting, the story and the history. Alderac Entertainment Group had created an absorbing and immersive world, with an evolving plotline and some fascinating characters. Each clan had a distinct identity and thus play style, but the little bits of fiction on the cards helped players understand the broader tale being told. I began collecting cards just to piece together the narrative. This was in the days before online wikis existed to summarise everything in one neat place, you know. Therefore, imagine for a minute my face when the self-same friend who got me hooked on the CCG came up to me a few months later, grinning widely and holding up an L5R role-playing game. He tapped the cover and then pointed at me before cocking his head to one side and raising an eyebrow. I nodded. Of course I'd play. The L5R RPG was published by Alderac Entertainment Group, henceforth known as AEG, in 1997 and is a fantasy RPG set in the fictional empire of Rokugan, a place that is heavily influenced by not only Mythic Japan but other Asian culture's legends. However, this isn't simply another, hey, aren't samurai so cool with their honour and everything type of setting. Yes, Fugile Japan can make a fascinating time period to set a game, but the Emerald Empire isn't Fugile Japan any more than D&D's Forgotten Realms or Medieval Europe. It's ultimately a fantasy setting, so expect to find a cast of trolls, goblins, spirits, animal people, demons, dragons and undead alongside everyday humans. One of the most fascinating aspects of the rulebook is the time it devotes to describing Rokugani culture. It is this that really helps make the point that this isn't just D&D with katanas. Everything in Rokugan revolves around the samurai caste and the samurai, in return, centre their existence around their honour-based code of Bushido. Because honour is such a personal thing, Rokugani have to be very careful not to give offence to a samurai because doing so tends to result in a duel or being cut down if you're an unfortunate peasant. As a result, a culture has developed that is painfully polite and extremely carefully spoken. Rokugani do not value honesty, they value people who appear sincere in what they say. Outbursts of passion are considered uncouth, and a samurai is expected to maintain a dispassionate, emotionless demeanour at all times. Needless to say, there are some characters who excel at needling away at this mask. Indeed, a quick mind and a sharp tongue are just as deadly as a good sword arm in Rokugan, and the potential for courtly intrigue in this setting is huge. That being said, this unique color does require some investment on the part of the players and the GM. It's well worth it though. As I said, without this backdrop, L5R can quickly just become generic fantasy game with an Asian twist. Unlike the CCG and its expansions, which forged ahead with the timeline of the Emerald Empire, the RPG is set before the main action of the card game, taking place a couple of years prior. The setting is extremely rich, detailing everything from the day-to-day life of the people of Rokhagan, all the way to the creation of the world by the divine sun and moon. Players take on the role of samurai, the nobility of Rokugan, and they can choose to be either bushi, warriors, or shigenja, priests and priestesses who receive magical powers from the divine beings they worship. Because of how much care and attention has been poured into the setting and its background, it's possible to run many different kinds of story, from investigative to courtly to horror-based. As we'll see later on, AEG took this diversity to heart when writing adventure modules. Character creation is points-based, with players allocating values to traits, that is, innate abilities such as strength, intelligence and perception, and then skills, which are learned abilities that samurais taught throughout their life. Skills might be things such as swordplay, calligraphy or oratory, basically anything you could learn at school. They were also broken down into high skills and low skills, with the former being courtly skills, the kind of things that good samurai were expected to use in their day to day. Prowess with a sword, the tea ceremony and origami, these are all examples of proper high skills. Low skills on the other hand, well, this includes things like poison, gambling and stealth, things that are generally generally useful but which are considered beneath a samurai and will probably result in a loss of honour if you're caught using them. Alongside these two numbers is the concept of rings and yes, there are five of them. A ring is, with one exception, a pair of traits. For example, the ring of earth is made up of stamina and willpower. The ring's value is the lower of these two values. The fifth ring, void, or more accurately, nothingness, represents an inner reserve of strength and points that a character can use to pull off great deeds in times of need. The value of rings are important for a number of reasons, but two major ones stand out. The first is that they are key to advancing your character's insight. This is a number made up of your total rings multiplied by 10 and your total points and skills. At a certain threshold, this unlocks more powerful abilities. For Bushi, this equates to powerful moves that can be unleashed in combat, whereas Shugenja become better at spellcasting. The second use of rings comes down to magic. Each spell is key to a specific ring. A Shigenju will be using the value of the ring when attempting to cast a spell of the corresponding element. Depending on what clan and role a player takes determines their honour and glory, two facts of life that are of immeasurable importance to samurai. Glory can be thought of as social rank. The emperor, as the son of heaven, has the highest glory and everyone defers to him. Peasants, on the other hand, have very little glory. Characters generally earn glory through great acts of derring-do and courage. Honour, on the other hand, is a character's investment in the concept of Bushido, the code of the samurai, and their belief in its righteousness. Characters with a high honour are seen as trustworthy and are generally treated better than characters with a low honour. However, they have to constantly live up to higher standards than a character with low honour who can generally behave in a much more selfish manner. When put into situations where they could compromise their beliefs, honourable characters can fall back in their honour ranks to try and salvage the situation. Character creation was rounded out by a system of advantages and disadvantages. The former were good aspects of your character that cost you points, whereas the latter were detrimental to your character and gave you points. One fun aspect of this was that certain merits were cheaper for certain clans. Crab clan samurai were more likely to be big lads, and therefore the large advantage cost them less, whilst those pretty boys in the crane found it cheaper to purchase Benton's Blessing, the standard you'd good looking and charming advantage. When it comes to the system, L5R uses AEG's roll and keep system. In short, when faced with a task, the GN gives the player a target number, or TN, and the player then rolls a number of dice equal to the appropriate trait and skill, and keeps a number of dice equal to the trait. If they roll equal to or over the TN, they succeed. For example, in combat, a character will roll agility and the relevant weapon skill to hit, keeping the number equal to their agility. The system can become more nuanced through the concept of raises. If you want to do something extra fancy, you can raise the difficulty of the TM by 5. If you then succeed in your role, you pull off a more spectacular victory. Magic makes great use of this to do things like extending the duration, range and effects of spells that are cast. Often, certain acts of preparation, for example aiming with a bow, allows a character to get a free raise, which is to say they get the benefit of a raise without having to raise the TN. One other feature of the roll and keep system is the concept of exploding dice. Every 10 you roll explodes, which is to say you get to roll that die again and add the second number to the 10. If you get another 10, you roll again and so on and so forth. While the system is a lot of fun, it does mean that combat is pretty lethal, a reputation that L5R established fairly early on in this run. The really great The great thing about the core L5R book though was it was a complete game. You had everything you needed to start running adventures out of the box. There was a complete guide to the history of Rokugan, an overview of life in the Emerald Empire, comprehensive character creation rules, two schools for each clan plus rules for Ronin, masterless samurai for those angsty edgelords out there, detailed skill resolution and combat systems which included rules for skirmishes, dueling and mass battles, more information on weapons and Somebody certainly took a leaf out of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's book. However, with hundreds of fans of the CCG clamouring for more, the folks at AEG did not rest on their laurels. Over the next three years, they released no fewer than 35 supplements. Foremost amongst these were the Way of the Clans series. Splatbooks, they gave a detailed overview of the history, structure and culture of Rokugan's great clans, along with expanded character creation roles. A particular fan favourite, and which played in nicely with the Rokugani theme of ancestor worship were the history tables, which allowed you to establish a legacy for your character's family. Perhaps your ancestor was a hero, a villain, or something else. Regardless, these tables were great fun for players and GMs alike. In a nice nod to the CCG, each of the clan books also included sample decks for each clan. However, by far the most interesting thing in the clan books were the new schools they included. Schools were the roles the players chose for the samurai Whilst in the core book they were limited to Bushi or Shigenja for the main families in a clan, the clan books allowed for more variety. Why not be a diplomat, an engineer, a witch hunter or a courtier? These offered more variety for players and GMs alike and really expanded the scope of what could be done with the game. There were also extensive write-ups for prominent NPCs for each clan and these, along with the substantive history chapters, helped breathe life into Rokugan. This is vital for a setting that wants to break away from accusations that its subject matter is entirely made up of idealised stereotypes. By having different characters with distinct personalities, motivations and backstories, it goes a long way to showing, look, it's not just some D&D samurai mashup where everyone spends the whole time screaming about honour and killing themselves when they do something wrong. Of course, these books weren't perfect. There was definitely a feeling of power creep, and that whichever clan had most recently received a clan book was Flavour of the Month. Following on from the success of these books though, clan books were released for the minor clans, ronin, monks and the naga, the mysterious serpent people from Rokagan's past. These broadened the scope of what could be played, but some players felt that they took away from what had always been the focus of L5R, the great clans and their families. Fun as the clan books were, these weren't the only products produced by AEG. A whole swathe of adventures, dealing with different themes were released between 1997 and 2000. Taking a leaf out of early D&D's book, these were numbered and coded to give the prospective GM a good idea of what was being covered. For example, the S series of adventures dealt with the Shadowlands, the B modules were themed around Bushido, whilst the M adventures all revolved around magic. In total, there were 11 modules released with 3 dealing with the Shadowlands, 2 with though, two with Magic, one with the Imperial City, one with Entry, and two with the infamous City of Lies. Three of these products, City of Lives, Tomb of Aouchiban and Otisanouchi, were large box sets that contained multiple booklets and other goodies such as maps. These box sets are generally held in very high regard. City of Lies, in particular, is frequently cited as one of the high points of the original L5R run. This use of numbered modules and box sets was also a clever marketing strategy. In a day and age where the market was dominated by storytelling games, and where supplements were more concerned with character building than with published adventures, the L5R products tugged at a cord of nostalgia. The way they were presented was similar enough to D&D that many gamers, consciously or not, felt a natural affinity with them. Various other source books were published that were neither splat book nor adventure, but special mention must be given to the Book of the Shadowlands. Published like an in-world document, the Book of the Shadowlands largely relegates any game crunch to sidebars, and instead provides an extremely atmospheric look into one of the game's darkest settings. As someone once put it, this publication was more like an immersive storybook than just happened to have RPG rules included. Re-reading this book, you get the impression that there was an intention to publish a lot of volumes in a similar style to this and while some later books like Way of the Shadow attempt this to a degree, none of these publications comes close to Book of the Shadowlands in terms of atmosphere or presentation. Saying this and taking it all into account, it should come as no surprise that L5R won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game of 1997. So far so good. However, AEG were about to introduce something that would divide fans. You see, in our circles, and especially in an established setting, there is one word that can often cause hackles to rise. Metaplot. In essence, a metaplot is an overarching story that affects all aspects of the game. White Wolf are the most infamous in this regard. They'd release things in one book that would affect all other books that they were going to release and, by extension, your campaign. L5 and its players were no strangers to this. The card game has and had a metaplot for years. However, the publishers of the RPG made a conscious choice to stay away from it, preferring instead to centre their game in a time period that predates the events of the CCG's metaplot. For those unfamiliar with the card game, the pivotal event that propelled the timeline of it forward was an attempted coup by the Scorpion Clan, which ended with them being banished, a new emperor in power, and significant changes to the leadership of the other clans. This sets the scene for a civil war in Rokugan and all the events that take place during the card game's arc. However, the creators of the RPG chose to set the action of their game prior to the coup, giving players and GMs a more stable canvas to paint on. After all, when one of the major clans is outlawed and the other six are at each other's throats, it makes it kind of hard to conjure up a and-you-all-go-on-an-adventure-together premise. AEG touched on the Scorpion clan coup in their Ottosan Uchi publication which detailed the imperial capital. In the third book included in the box, The Scorpion's Sting, a rough adventure framework is given for playing out the key aspects of this fateful event. However, it makes it quite clear that not all game masters nor all players will use this book. The writers point out that this is a big event, it affects the entire empire and, if you fancy it, you can mess around with it to have it fit your chosen timeline. It serves, if you like, as a bridging point between different points in Rokugan's history, but it was never mandated in a White Wolf-esque and further supplements will take these events into account kind of way. Then, in 2000, AEG released 2nd Edition. Now, it's not strictly fair to say that 2nd Ed was the first time AEG had played with the settings timeline. As I just mentioned, Otis and Uchi included details of the scorpion coup and several other later first ed supplements are set in its aftermath but these jumps in time were fairly short and fluid. The coup itself is barely two weeks long. Second ed was when someone at AEG yelled full steam ahead and propelled the metaplot forward at a rate of knots. Whilst first edition was set roughly two years before the coup, second edition is set around two years after the coup. In addition this is considered to to be the default setting for the new edition. Needless to say, this caused some problems for first edition players who'd quite happily been plodding along in their pre-coup timeline and were looking forward to second-ed products, which were now all set in a future that hadn't yet happened in their games. Likewise, for new players who picked up second edition and had to take in all these, well, such and such a clan is now in hiding and this family has been dishonored and this thing is now happening over here, it could all feel feels slightly overwhelming, a bit like that time I walked into a cinema half an hour after a film had started and tried to catch up. However, this wasn't going to be the only leap in time Second Ed made. One of the earliest releases was Time of the Void, a supplement that detailed the entire Clan War arc that encompassed the first few years of the card game's existence. To put this into context, whilst the entirety of L5R's first edition moved the metaplot on by maybe a year or so. This one book looked to tie up several years worth of metaplot, including, spoilers by the way, a civil war between the great clans of Rokugan, a plot to poison the Emperor, the Crab Clan's abandonment of their ancient oaths and their subsequent alliance with the forces of darkness, doppelgangers, the return of the Scorpene, the invasion of the capital city, the emergence of the Naga, the revelation that the Emperor is possessed by a dark god who's planning on, well, taking over everything thing. The rise of a disgraced Ronin, the ascendancy of an alliance of minor clans, a war between the forces of darkness and the monks, the corruption of one of the great clans, the opening of the twelve black scrolls yes, that's as ominous as it sounds by the way, and a massive finale in the form of the second day of thunder. In short, it's a lot. Hold on to your hats though because we're not done yet. The Hidden Emperor sourcebook, released not that long after, details the next stage of the meta plot. Set two years after the events of Time of the Void, this setting, detailed in a single book by the way, takes up another four years of in-game time. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not that the stories being told were bad, quite the opposite in fact. Remember at the beginning when I said I used to buy the car games to learn the lore? Well, the L5R storylines were rich in detail and flavour and featured some amazing characters. The pace though, it was breathtaking. The setting had gone from being somewhere stable that you could set a campaign to an ever-changing landscape where the next supplement that came out might very well not be compatible with wherever you had currently set things. It should be noted that the addition of rapidly moving metaplot wasn't necessarily a misstep. I for one have always enjoyed metaplotting games and I know plenty of others do too. The point I'm making here though is that for some people it was far too much metaplot, far too quickly. However, the biggest change to affect Second Dead, and arguably the game's popularity, was the change to the system. Previously, as you'll remember, a player, when making a skill test, would roll a number of dice equal to their skill and their trait, and they would keep a number of dice equal to their trait. In this equation, skill equated to learn proficiency and trait to natural talent. In the new system, you only rolled dice equal to your skill and kept dice equal to your trait. In addition, skills were now capped at 10 rather than five, and a lot of skills included specialisations. Whereas in the old system, you'd learn to fight edged weapons, for example. In the new one, you could still learn that, but then specialities for different types of weapons came up too. To this day, I don't know why they changed from the old system to the new one. Indeed, given that they went back to the system of rolling trait and skill for 3rd edition, I think that's a tacit nod to the fact that this new system simply didn't work. Before we leave 2nd edition with its meta plots and added complexity, it's important to note that it was during this time that Wizards of the Coast, who had purchased the rights to the L5R card game, announced that Rokugan was going to be the setting for their Oriental Adventures line for D&D. As a result, aside from a few books released at the beginning of the Second Dead Run, most of its products were dual stat affairs, including D20 and Roll and Keep rules. D20 L5R didn't survive for long, and I'm not sure its passing was moaned by many, but it was an interesting anomaly that nonetheless. Come 2005, a third edition was released which included, amongst other things, an update to the storyline to bring it in line with where the CCG was at that time, and a Legend of the Burning Sands sister game. In L5R canon, the Burning Sands was an area roughly to the north of Rokhagan, with its settings being a gestalt of Near Eastern and European myths and legends. I never played the game, I bought a single starter for the spin-off CCG and wasn't too impressed, so I can't comment on how it played. I do think, however, that it could have worked as a sourcebook for another part of the world that Rokugan occupied, but then again, that took the focus away from the isolationist Rokugani and their drama. Production of new material for the L5R RPG had slowed massively by this point, and in the five years of 3rd edition's run, it saw only 10 supplements released. However, 3rd edition succeeded where 2nd hadn't, by returning to the system previous outlined in first edition, therefore making it compatible with the various excellent supplements released for that earlier version. In addition, some serious work was put in to clean up some of the rules bloat that had accumulated over the lifespan of first edition, and also to clear up some of that flavour of the month power creep that I mentioned previously. The designers also made skills more desirable, with benefits for taking them at certain levels, which eliminated the sometimes purely mathematical approach to the deciding between traits or skills that people had seen in first edition. When it came to character creation, the core book expanded beyond the options provided in first ed and allowed for characters to be bushi, shigenja, courtiers or one of a clan's more specialist schools. Just like first edition, the main rulebook was a complete product. You had everything you needed in here to run a game and you had rules for setting it in whatever point of Rokugan's history you wanted without being tied to a constantly shifting meta-plot. In 2010, in the run-up to the release of the fourth edition of L5R, I stumbled upon the developers' diaries that were put online cataloguing the game's construction. By this point, L5R was something I had fond memories of but which I was not actively playing. However, reading those diaries suddenly reignited my interest in the setting and the game. What was being described to me here seemed to be THE complete version of L5R. Not only did it include the cleanest set of rules to date, from everything from character creation to combat, it was also not tied to any particular part of Rokugan's vast and still developing metaplot. Instead, it provided advice for setting your campaign in whichever period suited your tastes best. It was a hefty old book, over 400 pages in length, and it was simply packed. Now, I won't go over the ins and outs of every section. 4th edition takes a very similar structure to the core books that have gone before and builds on them, but one section that really stood out was the GM's chapter. In this, there is some fantastic advice on writing all different kinds of adventures, but the part that I really loved was the piece explaining the differences in structure between Western and Asian stories. It's great reading, even if you're not planning on running L5R. Is it perfect? course not, but it certainly feels more complete and more L5R than the previous two editions had. This was the last version of L5R the AEG would produce, and in 2018 Fantasy Flight Games bought the license. Of course they did, they own everything these days. They have since released 5th edition. Now I'll hold my hands up here and say I've never played it. Fantasy Flight's penchant for bespoke dice for everything they produce kind of put me off, but reviews I red seem largely positive. It certainly seems to keep true to the spirit of the original, with a focus on the culture and drama inherent in the setting, rather than degenerating into an outing of katanas and kaiju. Oh, and like most Fantasy Flight products, it is, of course, beautiful to look at. So there we have it. 25 years after the CCG released, L5R is still going as strong as an RPG. If you haven't given it a try, I'd strongly recommend checking it out. If the Fantasy Flight version seems a bit pricey, Actually, who am I kidding? It is a bit pricey. A quick sweep of eBay should be able to net you a copy of first edition and everything you need to get started in telling stories in Rokugan. It's an extremely rich, immersive setting. Just be prepared for you and your players to spend the time learning the Rokugani culture if you truly want to get the full experience. Believe me though, it's well worth it. Before long, you'll be verbally sparring in the winter courts of the Crane, delving into forbidden lore in the libraries of the Phoenix foiling the machinations of the Scorpion, or fighting alongside the Crab as they defend the Empire from the encroachments of the Shadowlands, and believe me, you'll love it. After all, as a wise Rokugani saying goes, we tell the tale of heroes to remind ourselves that we also can be great. Oh, and speaking of which, for those of you still wondering about that tournament that got me dragged into this whole thing in the first place, I ended up coming in second. Beginner's luck or a natural And

SPEAKER_02: 35:44

that was our brief history of Legend of the Five Rings. We hope you enjoyed it. If you enjoyed this episode, then please consider leaving us a review on your podcast directory of choice. It It really helps us with visibility and we enjoy each and every one we get.

SPEAKER_01: 36:29

It's the story where chaos rolls.