Legend of the Five Rings Diskwars

In my, geeky, hopeless, money-sucking, obsession to chronicle the evolution of L5R, I managed to get my hand on a few sets of Legend of the Five Rings Diskwars., and I've also got to play a couple of games as it is.

I have a recollection of Diskwars being somewhat big for a couple of years back in 2000-2001, but I had never saw the L5R version, only becoming aware of it several years later.

Diskwars might be seen as a low cost wargame. Cardboard disk of different sizes  are use to represent military units. Each disk has an Attack, Defense and Toughness value which are used to resolve combat. Since disk size affects both movement and combat, this reminds me of Song of Blades and Heroes a lot, and I have to wonder if SBH might not have been somewhat influenced by it.

Personally I'm more of a miniatures gamer because I like the painting aspect of the hobby as much as the gaming aspect, and the collectible aspect of this game would drive me bonkers (I suspect that's the reason I never got into any kind of CCG), but I have to admit I had fun playing it.

There were two "Editions" of the game, Imperial and Shadowlands, in reality rather an Edition and an expansion. In Imperial Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Phoenix, and Unicorn were the available factions, with the Scorpion and Naga being introduced in the Shadowlands expansion.

The distribution model was a series of starter sets for each available clan, and booster packs.

Clan sets came with 5 fixed "flats", 2 common flats, and an uncommon flat. Each flat had an average 4 or 5 disks depending on disk size. Booster packs came with 4 flats, 2 common, an uncommon and a rare. Shadowlands worked slightly different, with a pool of 60 flats, but I suspect the difference is more cosmetic than anything else.

Rules are the same between both edition, Shadowlands just clarifying, adding errata and two more scenarios rather than changing anything, They probably are the same from basic Diskwars as well because there are few intances of different namings along the rules, e.g. Daisho was probably Swashbuckler, Counterspell was Surge and there are other. Many of these disappeared in the revision from Imperial to Shadowlands, but not all of them.

The rules themselves are pretty simple for the most part. I felt duels needed better explaining but I'm not sure how they would work in actual play as there was no way to initiate a duel with the disks we had. We did a mock up and my doubt is if hits incurred in the duel would carry over like missile or spell hits. I suspect it does, but it would be nice to have confirmation.

Most any other issue would likely stem from wierd disk interactions, but most disk are fairly simple so I don't know if there are obviously broken disks. In our games Soshi Bantaro did very well against the Lion army which had three shugenja forcing me to adjust my strategy, but when I played Crab with a single Kuni Yori, he didn't bothered half as much. It might just be that Scorpion pairs well against Lion, but not so much against Crab. Then again I managed to win with Lion (in no small part due to the Death Seekers ability, which also raised questions) but lost with Crab (probably because I took few elements which made the Scorpion abilities more effective).

Storywise there isn't much to add as it uses the Clan War Storyline, and only reprints one fiction from the ccg expansion of the same name in each rulesheet. In the Shadowlands expansion some of the flats also had flavour text.

The use of the Clan war storyline actually surprised me a bit, because when this game was published it had already been  wraped up for two years, so there is no reason why they had to use it. Why not explore other possibilities?

Come to think of it the same was pretty much true of the Clan War miniature rules. Every L5R branch into another market used the same storyline. I suppose that it's was a way to spare money in art and fiction, but why risk saturating the consumer with a rehash of the same basic story? The miniature game I can understand as it was released earlier, was certainly developed while the Clan War storyline was being worked and was certainly a far more complex project than L5DRW that potentially had direct ties to the RPG.

However this game was almost certainly developed with little effort. The rulebook like I said before is probably just slightly changed from the FFG original, I wouldn't be surprised the same happened with some disks, and I am absolutely sure it happened with the spells. The recycled art is no impediment and there is some art that I think is original (Iuchi Juoseng is awesome, BTW), so all in all tthere was little to lose in taking that risk here.

This is probablya moot point though because when AEG recovered all IP rigths from WotC L5RDW would probably still be one of the lines that would make sense, from a business standpoint, to cut.

Anyway here are the armies we used to test the game:

Lion Army:
Ancestral Home of the Lion
Ancestral Sword of the Lion
Scout x3
Matsu Agetoki
Medium Cavalry
Kitsu Motso x3
Akodo Death Seekers x3
Morito Tokei x2
Kitsu Toju
Gift of the Wind x2
Stiffling Wind
Gust of Wind
Essence of Water
Energy Transference
Mighty Protection x2
Delving the Earth x2
Earth Stagnation x2
Strangling Root x2

Total: 148 pts.

Scorpion Army:
Ruined Fortress of the Scorpion
Broken Sword of the Scorpion
Ninja Shapeshifter
Shosuro Hametsu
Bayushi Hisa x3
Bayushi Togai x2
Bayushi Aramoro x2
Light Infantry x2
Bayushi Supai x3
Ninja Spy x2
Soshi Bantaro
Bayushi Kyoto
Flight x2
Sure Aim x2
Path to Inner Peace x3

Total: 138 pts.

In the 2nd match:

Crab Army:
War Fortress of the Crab
Ancestral Sword of the Crab
Tetsubo
Kuni Yori
Crab Berserkers x2
Hida Amoro
Ginawa
The Damned x2
Hida Yakamo
Hida Tsuru
Hida Sukune x2
Fury of Osano-Wo x2
Path to Inner Peace x3
Mighty Protection x2
Strangling Root x2
Essence of Water
Energy Transference 

Total: 145 pts.

Scorpion Army:
Ruined Fortress of the Scorpion
Broken Sword of the Scorpion
Ninja Shapeshifter
Shosuro Hametsu
Bayushi Hisa x3
Bayushi Togai x2
Bayushi Aramoro x2
Light Infantry x2
Bayushi Supai x3
Ninja Spy x2
Soshi Bantaro
Bayushi Kyoto
Gift of the Wind x2

Flight x2
Sure Aim x2
Stifling Wind

Total: 146 pts.

Scorpion lost against Lion and won against Crab.

Death at Koten

Before I move on to The Lion I'm going to side track trought Death at the Koten, the 2009 L5R graphic novel.

The novel follows the exploits of magistrate Seppun Tashime, while investigating a suicide, across Rokugan.

Art wise, while in a style I don't particularly like, it is a solid work, coloring is crisp and clear, clothing and armour is generally well done, with some loving detail like family rather than generic clan mon and avoiding some of the worst excesses of comic book artists.

There were a few problems, female faces showed a disturbing lack of variety (three basic types mixed with 3 hairstyles), I suspect the artist never saw a male with well defined abs, because I'm pretty sure they don't look like the bony plates on turtle's abdomen, and I find the absence of nipples... awkward...  I can understand it on Kyoso no Oni, but on the Yoritomo captain...

Maybe he is indeed half turtle...

The worst art offense though was the constant milking of the cow. I don't think I've ever seen it happen in comic books before, but, boy, do those Rokugani milk the invisible cow. Seppun Tashime is a particular offender, made all the worst  because this is something we are told Rokugani frown upon socially.

However is the story itself that loses the comic.

The overaching device moving the plot forward is that of a talk between master and pupil which also serves as expository tool.

So far so good.

The problem is that there is alot of exposition going on on this story. In fact the enire novel feels like an expository tool for the setting of Rokugan. I suspect the writer's intent was to provide a window upon the world for those that might otherwise be unfamiliar with L5R, or it might have been a straight out guideline from AEG, which I can understand. However my own stance on such matters is that if you write a compelling enough story and characters the reader will be inevitably drawn to the setting, and, in this case, I feel that this atempt to shed a spotlight in as much of Rokugan as possible, harmstrings character and plot development.

For instance the titular Death at the Koten is only marginally related to the main plot, if at all, there are a  few leaps of logic from Tashime that would make a bad writer of detective stories blush, and every clan must have a cameo no matter how unnecessary, but of course everything was materminded by the Scorpion .

Basically the story is incredibly disconnected, the plot feeling constructed as hell instead of arising naturally from the setup. The student sometimes lampshades some of the unlikely twists, or at least I hope those are intentional lampshades, but just because the writer is aware of the inplausibilities it does not make them more acceptable.

Ultimately, this is a readable book, just not a very satisfactory one. For someone unfamiliar with Rokugan it doesn't provide much reason to try and find out more, for those familiar with the setting it doesn't add anything new if at all.

Overall I would only recomend it to the die hard or completist fan.

The Dragon

Like The Crab before I approached the The Dragon with a fair dose of apprehension. I'm a complete and utter Dragon fanboy, and the Dragon by their very nature is open ground for some of the worst sins of writing and characterization.

To put it simply, I fully expected to hate this novel.

Fortunately it's not as bad as I expected.

It is full of infuriating moments, but you can actually get past them.

I would actually like to know if this was writen after Enlightened Madness or if the Tamashii debacle was something that was planned well in advance with WotC still in the loop, because the first chapter, or rather the epilogue seem a bit of a sendup to it. I think the novel predates the story by about a year, but I might be wrong.

Basically the novel follows Hitomi's path during the Clan War and her quest for vengeance against Yakamo, with Daini's contact with the Naga as a sub-plot.

Hitomi is a fairly one-dimensional character, but overall does manages to keep the reader interested in her misadventures. It is a pity though that her main foil for her is Mirumoto Yukihera, not because it's obscure CCG character (in fact he may not even be the same character), but because Ree Soesbee, unfortunately, decided to make him a complete monster designted villain. Apparently we are really supposed to be rooting for Hitomi and the kami forgive us if we think she might be monomaniacal. Kitsuki Yasu also gets a bit derailed, and Mirumoto Sukune, which has always been hinted as an interesting character, including in this novel, is left in the shadows again, when he could have probably been a more interesting sympathetic foil to Hitomi.

Daini is a somewhat more rounded character, but much of his development occurs off-stage and by the end of the book that is very much an informed attribute. I suspect that is Naga coming of age ritual was supposed to show us that development, but if that is the case, then in my opinion it failed, mostly because while we are told the ritual was a sucess, it reads very much like a failure. Daini did not achieve any sort of enlightenment, he just didn't fail fast enough not to be enlightened...

Then there are the little quibles, or not so little in the case of the passage of time. Apparently Ree Soesbee is a firm believer of time moving at the speed of plot. No problem with that, except when two characters need to perform different tasks, one taking a few minutes, and the other a few months. They meet just before starting those tasks, and meet again immediately after finishing those tasks...

The hyperbole I used for emphasis above is much less exagerated than what you might think if you haven't read the novel. I have to wonder if Ree Sesbee has a grasp of time at all...

Oh, and incidently, obi are not used to keep armour in place. In fact armour doesn't work that way at all...

In the end this is a fairly enjoyable novel though. It's not boring like The Unicorn, or pointless like The Phoenix. It's main problem is that it could have been so much better. It has quite a few interesting premises that are not followed through.

The Crab

I have to admit I aproached The Crab with some trepidation.

The Crab clan and characters are often depicted as mere stereotypes, and sterotypes I don't like at that.

Fortunately my fears were unfounded.

While there are quite a few things I don't like, there is a lot more that I like.

This novel covers Kisada's disgruntlement with the Empire through the Scorpion Coup and Yakamo's feud with Hitomi culminating in his landing at Otosan Uchi.

This is done mostly through the eyes of Kisada, Sukune and Yakamo each of whom is well characterized. In fact, most characters are, with the exception of Kuni Yori, which pretty much falls into a stereotypical Evil Vizier role.

Yori even has his Evil Tower of DOOM.

Speaking of Yori, I really disliked how magic was handled in this novel. It has much of the same problems it had in The Phoenix, but I believe them to be far less excusable here.

Surprisingly, the fight scenes, were another place where I think the writing failed. For the most part it managed to avoid the unstopable badass complex, which is no mean feat considering this book stars both Kisada and Yakamo, but still there were quite a few problems, like weapons and armour not working the way they are supposed to (altough the worst I've seen so far is in The Dragon), and tactics that make no sense. On the other hand Stan brown is refreshingly accurate in regards to logistics and movement rates.

I did notice that there is a significant drop in the quality and pacing of the writing in the last third of the book which is where most of these problems can be found.

Overall though this was a rather entertaining book. It's a shame there is a noticeable drop in the writing quality by the end of the book and that Yori was cast in the flat out evil coucilor role, but this was made without making Kisada look too much of a fool.

I easily recommend this one to any L5R fan.

The Phoenix

How shall I put this nicely?

I hated this book.

It made The Unicorn look good in comparison.

It's still a work of art compared to Wind of War though!

I usually don't like how magic is portrayed in most fantasy novels and started reading this novel fully aware of that and trying to aoid making any judgment based on that, but while I didn't like how magic was depicted I wish that was the only problem it has.

The plot concerns Tadaka's efforts to uncover Junzo's ploys in the Shadowlands, and the unlocking of the Black Scrolls by the Council.

There is also a romantic sub-plot involving Isawa Kaede and Seppun Ishikawa (already started in The Scorpion), that isn't that interesting, and, if I remember correctly, will never get any kind kind of resolution.

What I find most puzzling is that Sullivan had made The Scorpion characters rather compelling, but in this book e never managed to make them anything other than bland. There are a few exception, Ob the mujina, but he is a comedic sidekick without much depth to it, as well as Kaede and Ishikawa but with no real development from what they already were in the Scorpion.

All other characters seem to be nothing else but spell-slinging automatons with little individuality. Tadaka seems little more than a plot expository device, Ujimitsu never goes beyond an in-universe joke. The reader is never given a reason to care about these characters.

The only moment of emotional depth was the Destruction of the Long Tail Nezumi. This part of the plot was extremely powerful and well done, but ended up highlighting the vapidity of the rest of the book.

On the other hand it seems Sullivan oercame his fascination with Natto writing this book. There is only one mention to the stuff.

Not related to the plot itself, but The Phoenix is the first novel that include a map of Rokugan. It has some interesting choices, Kyuden Kakita is put near Beiden Pass, about the same place where, canonically, Shiro Matsu is usually put and make it's sacking far more logic. Another difference is that in this map the Crane have no lands bellow the Spine of the World either, which kind of raises the question on where Asahina lands are.

Sullivan also continues his tradition of creating a new family. Beside the aforementioned Long Tail nezumi tribe, there is also the Heike vassal family of the Phoenix, which is similar in concept to the Morehei of the Crane.

In the end I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. Completist or Phoenix diehards might want to get it, but you've been warned!!!

The Crane

The third installment of the Clan War series, and the first one writen by a member of the AEG storyteam.

Probably due to this it's one of the novels that most conforms to the generally acepted canon.

As I expected it also undoes nearly everything that was established in The Unicorn.

It follows the problems of the Crane following the coup, namely the Crane-Lion war, the kidnaping of Hoturi, the sacking of Kyuden Kakita and Kyuden Doji and the final confrontation between Hoturi and his clone.

It's standard gaming novel fare, with Crane characters somewhat Mary Sueish, but not obnoxiously so. In fact the only character that annoyed the heck out of me was Shiba Tsukune.

Do you know what the Phoenix do to keep warm in winter? Really?! Is this all Shiba Tsukune can say? Honestly...

This derailment aside it's a fairly enjoyable book as long as expectations are kept at a modest level.

The Unicorn

The Unicorn by Allison Lassieur is the second book in the Clan War series, and if I said The Scorpion aged badly, then The Unicorn is a saponificating corpse.

I honestly didn't remember it being as bad it is.

Well, ok, calling it a decomposing corpse might be a tad unfair, as this novel is mostly mind-numblingly bland and boring rather than outright bad, and even so it is still miles ahead of Wind of War in terms of quality.

It deals with the struggles of a disgraced Unicorn Battle Maiden Otaku, ahem, sorry, Utaku Tetsuko in dealing with banditry in the Wasting Disease afflicted lands of Rokugan, the efforts of Ide Tadaji to help his friend Doji Hoturi, and the Battle for Beiden Pass from the Unicorn point of view.

I don't know the reason why unlike the other books in the series The Unicorn one doesn't focus on it's respective Thunder, altough I suppose The Scorpion doesn't either (Kachiko still plays a large part unlike Kamoko though). It is possible that there was no original plan to make the Thunders the main characters of the series and it was something that emerged organically from the writers.

Either way using a obscure character is not necessarily bad, the problem is that Lassieur doesn't really give us reasons to care about Tetsuko, and the entire book is a bit of an exercise in futility.

I suspect, looking at the publication dates, that, at least, the first three books were commissioned at the same time and that there was little or no communication between the authors, and that because of that Laussieur chose not to commit herself to develop a plotline that might be invalidated by later releases. If that was the case she did herself a great disservice, as it did left us, if I remember correctly, with a plot that was invlidated by later releases and some pretty important cliffhangers like Ide Tadaji, that got no resolution. Might as well have taken the risk and try to do a memorable book.

Then again this book might have been her attempt at doing that...

Overall I would say this book is mostly of interest to a completist.

It's not horrible, despite a few weird pieces of characterization like the peasants in former Scorpion lands, the Tadaji storyline, or the Otaku being called Utaku at this point in the timeline which is an obvious result of WoTC guidelines. It's just entirely forgetable. Maybe the writer was just trying to establish how the Unicorn are distinct from the other clans but the author ended up with something that seems entirely diconnected from the rest of setting.

The Scorpion

Like I've said a few days ago, I've aquired a few of the L5R novels I didn't had and I've been reading them all, starting with the Scorpion.

The Scorpion is the first of the seven novels dedicated to the Clan War.

It actually deals with the Scorpion Clan Coup rather than with the Clan War proper, with focus on Bayushi Shoju's character.

It's a fairly decent novel, but while I remember enjoying it it doesn't seem to have aged that well.

The writing flows, and characterization is well done. Manipulation scenes are, in my opinion, nearly impossible to do believably, but Kachiko's manipulation of Hatsuko works well enough.

As a bonus point, there is a new family mentioned, the Inoshiro. Unfortunately their affiliation is not explicited, but they seem to be Crane, or possibly Seppun vassals.

Where I think The Scorpion fails is in the managemento of time. The entire planning and execution of the coup feels like it has occured within a period of about 3-4 months which broke my ssupension of disbelief this time around.

I wasn't entirely happy on how the magical aspect of the setting was handled either. It's clear that Stephen Sullivan was trying to keep it toned down, and, to his credit, he was largely sucessful in it, but there were still a few instances where it was used to little narrative advantage.

Finally, why such fascination with natto? At one point it seems Rokugani eat nothing else but natto.

Overall though, it is an enjoyable novel to read, depending on your tolerance for gaming fiction, and L5R fans won't be disappointed.

Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition Roleplaying Game review- Part 6

Finally we arrive at the Book of Void the GM chapter, which is the at the same time the best and the most infuriating part of the book.

It starts of rather impressingly by describing the types of campaigns that can be made in Rokugan with a few suggestion. It falls into exoticism at times but nothing too serious. The type of campaing setups described, amongst others are the classic magistrate campaign, the Legionnaire campaign, Imperial Cartographers, the Rank 0 campaing where you play pre-gempukku characters. The main problem I have with this part is a nomenclature problem and an assumption problem on the part of the designers.

The nomenclature problem is that of the restritcted campaign. Taking a campaign style and then slapping it with a name that can be seen as pejorative is not exactly a great pitch. Calling it something like the household campaign would work. It also assume that the normal that campaigns where everything is allowed are the norm, which is something I have extreme difficulty to accept as matching reality. Further it gives no help on how to design such campaign it only tells it may be a "superior game". This drove the problems I had with how the Gentry advantage hadn't been dealt with back to fore. Space might have been a problem, but no atempt is even made giving advice other than the discuss with the group which applies to every campaign.

The other problem I had involved how Two-Player games and campaigns were described. The designers pretty much assumed that the normal group will have more than three players, which might be true, but I think is a dangerous assumption to make. One of the reason I hate games with heavy nich protection is the fact that they tend to render the game unplayable unless the GM takes extra steps to prevent it. Now, L5R isn't that narrow, so it generally works well with few or even just with a single player, but, more inportantly it isn't a pick-up game, so it is perfectly natural that even in large groups players will have for some reason miss sessions.

However the designers pretty much assumed that two-player games are an oddity and apparently didn't even consider the possibility of single-player games. Worst, some of the two-player campaign pretty much relied on disempowering one of the players. And when I talk of player disempowerement I'm talking about narrative disempowerement, not necessarily about any mechanical assimetry, which may be perfectly sound (The Student/Teacher campaign is an example where the player with the student character in no way loses narrative focus).

For example the Magistrate/Eta assistant is an egregious example of this flaw. Not only does the eta player receives a mechanically inferior character, but pretty much the setup used means the character must fade in the background.

Fun hum?

Ironically while this setup is, in my opinion, horrible for a two player game, it would be great for a single-player game, independently of the character being played...

The rest is very sound GM advice. One thing I particularly liked was the discussion of Polti's Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. I knew Shawn Carman was an adept of this book and I think it was a great idea. I would have liked that there were CFSs directly associated to the situations, but further along the chapter there are quite a few of them so this is not problematic.

There is also a discussion on the differences between "Asian" and "Western" storytelling, which I think is naive, and sometimes outright laughable. One thing that particularly bothered me was the complete conflaction of Japanese and Chinese storytelling, and a narrow one at that, but that pales to the complete misrepresentation of "Western" storytelling. I couldn't help but get the feeling the authors were so enamored on how "Asia" is so different that they were like the proverbial blind men touching different parts of the same elephant. This was made even more jarring by the fact that in some other sections they seemed to be far more genre aware...

I really hate exoticism in whatever variant...

Another section that had me raise an eyebrow was the section on how to genre-shift a campaign, specifically the cinematic campaign part where they reference another AEG game, the now defunct 7th Sea.

It was at this point that I understood why I wasn't particularly enjoying this new edition. There were several moments were I felt the writers were going in some awesome direction only to stop just before they reach their destination and throwing us out of the car.

In this particular case what it bothered me was how Drama Dice and Brutes where so underexplained. In the case of brutes it took me merely a couple of minutes to create a working system, but I had the advantage of knowing 7th Sea Sea and I can understand that space limitation may have constrained the writers. However working drama die rules needed at most a couple of lines to create and integrate seamlessly. My guess is they remembered the Drama Die rules but then felt no need to follow follow up on it...

We then have poison rules, a very nice bestiary, in which the Nezumi finnaly receive their Void equivalent.

Finally we have the location Guide. As I said in the first part of this review, I really hate the new map, but the good parts first:

• Clan owned territory has been reduced, back to their 1st Edition borders. This allows space for GMs to use the unaligned territory, as Imperial, Minor Clan or just as plain disputed territory.

• There are fewer locations. Again this leaves more space for GMs.

• All entries were writen anew. There is no copy/pasting, no legacy items.

• All faction are represented, including all Minor Clans.

I have already mentioned most of the bad bits in the first part , but to reiterate:

• It's a simplified map with bits that are even more non-sensical than they already were, suddenly disappearing features, and teleporting features.

• There are fewer location overall, but there are several new locations. This is not a problem per se, but considering the importance they had for the plot, not finding the City of Rich Frog or Nanashi Mura is a bit puzzling. To compound this problem a few of the new locations seem a bit bland or theme parkey.

• Even with fewer entries there are missing items on the map, and entries that contradict the map.

The included CFS are also cool and the included adventure seems be functional altough I would prefer to see it in actual play to make an informed judgement.

So at the end of the day what do I think of L5R 4th Edition?

I've got a lot of mixed feelings on this edition.

The Good: Clear writing, editing, GM advice, completeness, they managed to finally make me interested into kata.

The Bad: Lack of design transparency, legacy issues, wilfull design decision like mechanicaly impairing Minor Clan characters.

The Ugly: The map, the refusal to use inclusive language.

It seems plain better than 3rd Edition, and it is a very complete book. However, at no point did it wow me like 1st Edition did.

I think my main problem is the overabundance of sub-systems. It's certainly the main difference from the original game, but I suppose that at this point the designers have to worry if excising some kind of legacy system will drive away customers. In my case it doesn't help that I don't feel design is very tranparent. It might be that the time I've been out of touch with the system has impaired my ability to evaluate design intentions, but, for what it's worth, it's not a problem I've ever had before.

In the end what this means, is that, having two unplayed games in my RPG shelf (ok, L5R is in the hard drive), I'm much more interested in pitching and playing Mouse Guard than L5R, and with AEG's apparent stance on the use of inclusive language I'm not even sure I want to sent any money their way...

Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition Roleplaying Game review- Part 5

Onward to the Book of Water.

This is the book of optional mechanics. Advanced Schools, Kiho, Paths, Minor Clans, Kata, Maho, whatever you name is here.

Spider Clan is first, not much to be seen here, altough I'm suspect because they on of the storyline points I dislike. Their schools seem to be ok.

Next up are the actual Minor Clans, Badger, Bat which have been mercifully been remade from the abomination they were in 3rd Edition (where they were essentially the Kitsu, Iuchi and Kitsune rolled into one), Boar (which has a rather fun school), Dragonfly, Falcon, Fox, Monkey, Oriole, Snake (THE ORIGINAL!!!), Sparrow (which lost much of their artistic ability and probably still are the worst bushi school), and Tortoise. These schools are, by design, supposed to be worse than than their great clan counterparts.

It's a design decision I despise. And they suceeded at it.

It's not so bad in shugenja schools, due to the meat of their strengths being in spell choice, or Courtiers schools which depend a lot of GM fiat, but amongst the bushi it is very much true. Apparently this is supposed to be a simulation of the setting, but the extent to which it has been taken is extreme to the point that it breaks verisimilitude. Worst of all is that in reality what it does is to remove narrative control from the players that choose to play a minor clan character. This wouldn't be so bad if all of these schools were inherently fun to play, but only the Usagi and Heichi bushi have mechanics that promote experimenting and fun. No playtester should gloat that they suceeded in mantainig the Suzume Bushi as the worst school ever.

Next up are the Imperials, including the now defunct Hantei and Toturi families. The current Imperial family is not included but in my opinion the Hantei bonus can be used without a problem.

After the Imperials come the Brotherhood monks. The main difference is that monks now have a trait bonus as well (altough due to an editing mistake they had also been included in 3rd Edition). Kiho came later in the chapter.

Ronin are next with 5 rank-1 path. It's kind of wierd that ronin paths come before paths are explained, but I suppose the mechanic isn't that complicated that it would cause confusion. It does make this chapter the more disorganized in the book

After this we have mass battles. Again there nothing new here, but there is a lack of provision for naval and shadowlands battles.

Also in the Book of Water we can find the Ancestor rules, which return in a form more similar to their 1st Edtion incarnation. Now, I had absolutely no problem with 3rd Edition ancestors, I think their only problem is that they were introduced and then promptly ignored with little atempt of integrating them in the line, but I have to admit these new rules look very cool. I only have two problems with them; 1) They are not transparent. It's not easy to assess the value of a homebrewed ancestor; 2) Ancestor are now very much a tangible setting element, an implication whose effect I'm not sure suit my taste... Kuni Yori is awesome though...

Following the Ancestor we have advanced schools and paths, which I feel should have come right after the Imperial families. Advanced schools work in the same manner they did so before, which is one of the reasons I'm not so sure the problem with shugenja has been solved. There is one school per Great Clan plus Spider.

Path however have suffered a make-over: They now replace the technique of the same rank. I liked how path worked but the new method is just as good, and for those who played 1st Edition they might remember that this was a frequent homebrewed solution in those days. I do have problems with some of the paths chosen and what they imply:

•  Crab: Berserkers and Oni-Slayers. 100% support in turning the berserkers in a path, I'm more worried about the meaning of the Oni-Slayers. If they intend to drop the Kuni Witch-Hunter as a basic school and instead release the Oni-Slayers as one in a series of paths representing the variety of witch-hunter training I'm all for it. If not then I think we on our way to have the same bloat that plagued 3rd Edition. And I say this as someone that generally loves lots of schools and was a fervent admirer of the 1000 Schools of Rokugan.

• Lion: The Deathseeker and Bishamon's Chosen. These both scream bloat to me. That the Deathseeker in particular is considered a Rank-1 path chills me, but I will probably just use it as the Hayameru school. Bishamon's blessing seems to exist solely due to some simmetry rule that say one path should be a bushi path and other a shugenja path.

• Mantis. Can you say bloat? In fact most shugenja path seem extraneous. Yes, the tensai make sense, but the rest...

• Worst of all are the miscellaneous alternate paths. Yes, Emerald and Jade magistrate make sense, I can concede the Legionnaire paths, but the Champion paths??! I might convert them to something else but it does not bode well when the core book already shows some signs of bloat...

After paths we have the crafting rules. They're simple if a bit oriented towards commercial products, which is odd as artitstic production has a much bigger place in the game. Nothing to write home about but not horrible either, except for the part that no player can craft a katana (strictly speaking no NPC can either but NPC work at plot behest), as crafting is based on price and katana are said to be priceless...

Incidentally this does beg the question why the designers are almost annoyingly insistent in saying samurai are not worried about monetary matters, but then insist on having price lists and basing crafting rules on them. Resource mechanics are not at the vanguard of RPG design these days and if you feel the pursuit of coin should be a background element of the setting they might actually be the best way to handle economics...

The next section is that of kata. Now in previous editions I hated kata with a passion. They were probably the only mechanic I saw no redeeming quality whatsoever. In 4th Edition I almost wish they replaced the schools. I am not convinced in the advantage of a few of them however and a few others like Breath of Wind Style feel a bit finicky.

After Kata come Kiho. Kiho have also been reworked, but it's been more a matter of streamlining and refocusing rather than outright reconstruction. Some Kiho don't seem very clear (Flee the Darkness, Way of the Willow), but again the design team seems to have done a good job of balancing things.

Finally we have the Maho and Taint sections. Thematically I liked how they were handled the rules being far more similar to the orignal 1st edition rules. Taint rules in particular seem to follow far more the original book of the Shadowlands rather than anything published since. I would like to see them in play to make a better assessment.

Novels

Got a few of the L5R novels I've been missing from Noble Knight. Now I only need to find Wind of Honor and Wind of Truth to have the complete line. I'm not sure if I'll comment on them as soon as I can of if I'll do it by comparing the publication dates with the RPG line.

Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition Roleplaying Game review- Part 4

Following the Boak of  Earth comes the Book of Fire that covers character creation and options. Systems covered are the skill system, Advantages/Disadvantages, Families/Schools, equipment and Spellcasting. I will mention again that in my opinion the layout was greatly improved in relation to 3rd Edition. We are talking about a big book, but everything flows more naturally and in the PDF the existence of links helps.

Points of note:

• There is no longer a limit to Insight Rank. I suspect this is merely the codification of something that in practice was already the norm.

• Carapace no longer exists, replaced by reduction. This is the opposite move of what I have mentioned in Part 3 with skill roll penalties,. Reduction is a straight modifier unlike carapace. If you prefer straight modifiers it's an improvement, if you prefer the dice penalties it's not.

• Armor now both provide an increase to the TN to be hit and provides reduction. This is more realistic, but again it is one more thing to track. Personally I favour Armour as a source of damage mitigation rather than increasing TN to be hit.

• As I mentioned before quite a few schools have techniques that allow dishonorable actions to have no consequence. Examples are the Yasuki and Yoritomo Courtiers, the Shosuro Shinobi and the Ikoma Bard. This is not a new problem, in fact it was the only ability of the orignal Ikoma Omoidasu, but in my opinion it makes the existence of Honor meaningless.

•  There are some odd choices of schools. The Hiruma school is a mix of the Ancestral and Scout with the Ancestral being dominant. I suppose it would make sense if the Scout school became merely a path in this edition but this mix feels strange. Another problem was created by space constraints, and exposes how timeline neutrality is not completely possible, the Shinjo bushi school was not included, the Moto bushi being favored. I understand why the Moto where chosen, but I would have straight out prefered the Shinjo had made the cut as they were the primary school for most of the setting history and because I much prefered the slight Arabic flavour the Unicorn than the cookie cutter pseudo-barbarian, pseudo-mongol stereotype they now are. The same happened with the Henshin that had to compete with bot the Asako courtier and Agasha Shugenja.

• Other school that I'm not completely happy, and I will admit it's mostly for a silly reason is the Tattooed Order. The reason? The tattoos only work if they are not covered by cloth... Yeah, I know it's silly, but I really dislike that an art convenience to display Tattooed monks be made part of the setting particularly in contradiction with other depictions like Hitomi who had a tattoo that was hidden and she could still use at will. But I suppose this is easy enough to ignore. Less silly reason not to be entirely happy with this school is the fact that the tattoos are yet another sub-system and ,worst of all, one that is quite opaque. I understand why they are no longer as they were in 1st Edition, but why not integrate them with the Kiho system? Why create another sub-system? I'm also disappointed that again there is no suggestion on how to create tattooed characters that are not part of the order like Kitsuki Taiko, Doji Reju, Hitomi, or Agasha Tamori.

• No more generic schools. 

• In general, however, schools seem to be pretty well balanced against each other. I've found no obvious stinker nor any obvious uber-school, altough I would prefer to have about a month of play to be more certain. I'm less happy with Shugenja schools, but I'll go into that in the next part of this review.

• Emphasis no longer provide static bonuses but rather allow re-rolling 1s. I'm not sure this was a good idea. Yes, 3rd edition L5R was bogged down by an excess of static modifiers, but the problem were not static midifiers per se. The problem of static modifiers were the fact that they came from multiple sources, were more often than not situational. In this case I think AEG has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Re-rolls tend to be more cumbersome than static modifiers and in this case the oerall roll probabilities do not become more transparent.

• There are less mastery abilities.

• The skill list has again been reworked. Some skills were split, other were merged. I have to admit I miss the rationale for many of the changes ,and tend to prefes broad skills but this is probably not a dealbreaker, altough social schools might have been somewhat shafted a most of the split skills were social.

• Advantages/Disadvantages were slightly reworked. The inherent/granted split was removed but they are now divided into Mental/Physical/Spiritual/Material/Social. I have a problems with a few specifics ones. Namely... 

• There are a few sets of Advantages/Disadvantages where you can't choose multiple options from the same set or the opposed set. Frankly, I don't see any narrative reason why a Character can't be blessed by both Hotei and Benten, or why it is impossible to be a Dark Paragon of Will and be Consumed by Perfection, and it doesn't look like it would mechanically unbalance things either, so I intend to ignore that particular rule.

• Dangerous Beauty. Not so much a problem with the Advantage itself, but with the fact that yet again it uses heteronormative language. This is disappointing because; a) Originally it had no such wording, and b) AEG was aware of the issue, it was brooched with relative frequency in their boards and I remember a lengthy discussion I had about it some three years ago in which Shawn Carman participated, which make the mix of dismissivness, cluelessness, if not outright arrogance, this issue is still treated with when mentioned to AEG all the more difficult to excuse. If I had read the comments made around the release of the book I doubt I would have bought it, and I do kind of regret giving them money again because of something which was one of the reasons I had stoped buying their products in the first place. Is it that hard to use inclusive language? Was the language used in Way of the Scorpion that terrible? Is it that difficult to replace "opposite" with "appropriate"? 

• Gentry has absolutely no game effect other than whatever the GM decides. The problem is that no help is given to the GM on how handle this advantage. Worst, suggested costs are as high as 30 points and it is suggested that PCs pool their point together to create the holding. So what we have here is an extremely expensive advantage without any mechanical effect, that tells the GM should do what he is already supposed to be doing, and doesn't even help him in doing so. WTF??! I'm going to ignore it, Social Position will not be limited to a single rank and will be used to replace it. Complete waste of space.

• Multiple Schools. My problem with this advantage stems from my issue with shugenja schools and as I said I will elaborate further on it, but my misgivings stem from the fact that I don't think that the problem with multiple shugenja schools and Advanced Shugenja schools has been solved. Shugenja paths yes, but the rest not so much. 

• Ishiken, at 8 points only allows the casting of Void Spells. I have mixed feelings about this one. I tend to dislike that to dislike that the only thing it does is allowing the casting of Void Spells, but I suppose I'll have to see how they intend to implement Void mages. If they are supposed to be represented by the printed Isawa shugenja school I suppose it makes sense.

• Dark Fate. Again this is a legacy issue which means those sacred cows were quite safe. This is the interesting advantage that is considered a disadvantage. Yes, the player is relinquishing some narrative control. Eventually. It is still an advantage, and it would be enough to price it under Great Destiny, maybe at 2 or 3 points.

• Spell casting also receives a face lift. While the difference are relatively minor they have a relatively big effect, in particular the fact that raises may no longer be used to cast spells without expending slots. Concentration rules were also simplified in a manner similar to 4th Edition D&D. However the best change in my opinion is how Importuning was iplemented. I think I would still prefer that spellcasting became skill based, but I have to admit this goes a long way in making Rokugani feel at least somewhat religious and I'm tempted to try and pitch a game where shugneja are limited to the basic spells.

• Another interesting difference in spells is that they now have keywords. I'm actually a bit surprised that they took so long to implement it considering AEG is a CCG company and the use of keywords in RPGs is around for a while now. They seem to work well, altough I'm worried on how they might be used in the future. As it is Sun, Moon, Crystal and Obsidian seem keywords that should have been included from the start and I'm kind of worried there might be the temptation to include these and others like Shadow in an ever inflating list.

• The Spells themselves seem to be well balanced, at first glance, altough False Whispers can be used as a social equivalent of nuclear bomb, and I'm sure I missed some interaction somewhere.

• Weapons have also been changed. Many lost their special properties which are now exclusively granted through skill masteries. The problem is that other weapons have not lost their special abilities, and there seems to be no clear rationale why, nor are the damage codes and costs very logic.

Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition Roleplaying Game review- Part 3

The Book of Earth is that of mechanics proper. During the countdown to the release of the game it was made a big deal on how the sacred cows of the game were thoroughly examined and put dow if found wanting.

Well, I'm happy to report that no cow was hurt in the making of this book...

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of changes, but they are just not nearly as dramatic as they were sometimes made out to be. The core system is the same from 1st and 3rd , a dice pool where you roll trait plus skill and keep ta number of dice equal to trait against a GM defined Target Number or the result of the opposing roll with results of 10 exploding.

The only systems that were cut out were the Dojo and Vassal Family systems, and considering their simplicity they probably will be re-introduced. I hope to be wrong  because I disliked how they had been implemented, vassal families don't need mechanical interpretation other than the ocasional path to represent specialized training, and Dojo can be fully represented witth Paths.

Some things that were changed:

• Void points can only be used once per turn, are harder to recover, and some of the Void Uses were removed/changed. I probably will ignore that limitation and re-introduce the Persistence use from 3rd Edition. I'm also pretty sure I'll be using the Speed use instead of the Initiative Bonus from 4th, because I'm not convinced Initiative has been as nerfed as it should in this edition and the old option seems to be more muted.

• No more Tides of Battle rolls. I think this is a good change, ToB was interesting, but slowed down combat resolution significantly eliminating the benefit of rolling Initiative only once per encounter.

• The Wound Buffer is now in the first Rank instead of being in the last. I'm undecided on this one. It reduces the importance of Initiative which is good, but it may also give a sense of false security to players.

• Action were far better defined and clarified, in a way similar to WRFP 2nd Ed. However I'm not sure the problem with multiple attacks has been solved at al. As it is attacks are complex actions, that with the appropriate technique become simple actions, so the power boos is still all there. I suspect that it would be far better that attacks were always simple actions that could only be used once per round, and that the extra attack technique removed that limitation, or instead, considering that the extra attack maneuver found it's way into this edition, it should give free raise that can only be used towards that maneuver.

• Stances were expanded, there is now a Defense and a Center Stance. Center Stance is pretty much Focusing from 3rd Edition, but with a temporary Initiative bonus as well. Full Defense was also changed, now it only add half the defense roll to the TN to be hit. Frankly there is nothing much to be seen here, Full Defense just became even less atractive an option, the Center stance is nothing new, and the Defense posture is necessary because no kind of action is possible on Full Defense any longer.

• Feint. I tend to dilsike feinting rules in general, for most RPG it should be assumed to be a part of the standard attack roll. It makes sense in some more detailed combat systems, 7th Sea being an obvious example. In L5R and this edition in particular it becomes even more of a sore point for me. Raises to increase damage may perfectly be used to simulate putting extra strength in the blows, hitting unprotected areas, or putting the the target in an unbalanced position. Instead we get a tweaky option that only has benefit if the character has an high attack and relatively low Void, and is limted by Insight Rank making it nearly useless. To add insult to injury this edition codified a lot of the status condition, so there is absolutely no reason why Feint couldn't just be used to inflict the Dazed or Stunned conditions.

• Iaijutsu. It has been graciously streamlined, ending the horde of rolls that were required to resolve duels and somewhat integrating it better with the normal Round/Action structure. Unfortunately I think this is one of the Sacred Cows, and one of those that could happily be slaughtered without prejudice. There is realy no reason for Iaijutsu duels to be solved any differently from other conflicts just because of something that happened in only two movies. On the other hand it might be interesting to experiment this system to solve every type of conflict from combat, to social repartee.

• Honor. This is another change where I have mixed feelings. It has been chaged so that it is in a 0-10 scale instead of the previous 0-5. Honor rolls are now an optional rule about which GMs are warned that it can unbalance the game in favour of High Honor PCs. The only fixed benefit of Honor is increasing the results of rolls made to resist the efects of Fear, Temptation and Intimidation. The way I see it we are again faced with a sacred, and again nothing was really done with it. And this is not a new problem, I used to love Honor, but less and less I see what it adds to the game. Imean we're bombarded that in Rokugan Honor is more important than steel, but the fact is that the rules never reflected that and now less than ever before. In 1st and early 2nd edition Honor was subjective to the point of Scorpion honor being defined almost in reverse. In 3rd edition it became largely objective but it started to introduce the exceptions which became even more prevalent in this edition. Merchant skills cause honor loss, unless your a merchant, Low skills cause honor loss, unless your a ninja. Basically you only have low Honor because your school says so, which make the point of having Honor in the first place moot. Why not conflate Honor with Glory? Why not use Pendragon's Passion system? It was the original inspiration for Honor, and Traits and Passions would work great if the main focus of the game is the conflicts of Bushido. Why not use something like FATE's aspects, Burning Wheels belief and instincts or a few other belief and conviction systems I can't remember? What's worst is that you can't really end up ignoring and ignoring Honor because there are a few school techniques and kata that depend on it meaning that you have a cascade of things to change after it.

• Most penalties are now measured in dice rather than straight modifiers as in 1st edition. This makes sense as it increases the importance of skills as a buffer to prevent the loss of kept dice, however straight numeric modifiers are generaly easier to judge by the GM and are also widely used. This is a fundamental flaw of the Roll and Keep system and there is no easy way to solve it. I'm afraid it might make action resolution more cumbersome, and I suspect most GMs will feel they have more thing to keep track of.

• Status Conditions have been codified and compiled in a nice little section.
  

• Stance declaration is made before Initiative is rolled. How? We are not told... This is not a big issue, and those that played 3rd Edition won't be phased with it as the seeds for this rule were already there, but I've got to admit I hated the dismissiveness people who posed  the same question  on the AEG boards before I checked it out were treated with. "L5R your way" is all well and nice but at least provide a baseline we can wotk with! And it's somewhat disrespectful telling someone there is no problem with an undefined rule only to then reveal that you haven't even using the rules that are defined...
  

Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition Roleplaying Game review- Part 2

The first chapter proper is the Book of Air that gives the overview of the setting, history, cosmology and social mores and customs. The history in particular is nicely done in broad strokes making it seem far less jarring and more complete than the equivalent section in third edition.

It is also obvious that they did try to make this edition as timeline neutral as possible, but unsuprisingly that proved to be impossible to do completely and understandably the writers defaulted to the current timeline when that happened. I will discuss this further in some specific cases in the remaining parts of this review.

For those familiar with the setting there isn't much to add. While I like Rokugan a lot, but it is a standard fantasy setting with a coat of Japanese laquer. This isn't necessarily bad but the exoticism might become disparaging at times, in particular when the trivial is seen as essential, and when the different elements that are pastiched together are not carefully integrated.

Also of note, in regard to previous editions, is the end of the "Rights of the Challenged" or rather the fact that the challenged party no longer decides the method of the duel. It was something I felt didn't mesh with the way Rokugani are described to be obsessed with Honor and if you look at societies or periods with shame cultures and duelling as the main method of settling social disputes it didn't made sense either.

Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition Roleplaying Game review- Part 1

"We are all legends. Our only choice is how to end the tale."

This review is pertains to the PDF being sold on DriveThruRPG, and it is not a playtest review, I've only read the book and did some mock skill/combat simulations to try and get the hang of some of the changes made. I should also point out that I'm mostly aiming it to people who are already familiar with L5R (which probably makes it an exercise  in futility as it means my target audience either has already read the reviews they were interested in, or has aquired the book).

I've divided it in six parts as it is quite a long review.

Starting by the physical (or in this case electronic) product itself it is a 403 page (405 if you count the covers) 148 MB PDF, bookmarked and hyperlinked, altough the bookmarks could have been better organized (e.g. colapsable bookmarks would improve useability) and some sections lacked links.

Costing 35$99 it is also priced at the high end of electronic products, but, considering the overall production values, not dramatically so.

Still this is a massive improvement for AEG which had a very restricting PDF policy that meant that in some cases pirated PDFs were equal or better than the official PDFs. This was particularly painful in the more recent releases, where AEG would sometimes realease an expertly done PDF preview (supposedly from the production files), and the poor slobs like me who bought the PDF release got a scan of the physical book.

The book is divided in six chapters starting with Introduction that includes the mandatory "What is Role-Playing?" section some general information and an overview of the major changes from previous editions. The layout is clear, text is legible and the artwork, altough mostly recycled from the CCG, is generaly great. In fact I was surprised because, when I left the RPG in 3rd edition, I felt the artwork was horrid, but they really seem to have turned around their Art Direction since then. The only piece that really disappointed me was the Lion battle maiden in page 92, everything else when not brilliant was at least competent. The water-color/woodblock print looking pieces at the start of every chapter in particular were awesome

A small mention on the map as well, however. 

I hated it. 

I mean, I really hated it.

The only good thing I can say about it is that it is prettier than 2nd Edition map. Apparently, for some undiclosed reason, AEG was forced to use the map intended for their Art of War boardgame which you can see on the right as it was presented for their Kotei tournament (the boardgame itself has been on hiatus for about 3 years now). The diffences from the RPG map are very minor.

It's obviously a very simplified map, with a lot of features moved, altered or removed. I'll discuss this further bellow but comparing it with 1st and 3rd edition it is really sub-par and the choice to use it is made more painful because, at least until recently, the French/Spanish publisher of L5R (which did the layout for this edition) had PDF copies of the nice 3rd Edition map on their website.

Also of note, in my opinion, is the fact that no text seems to have been copy/pasted from previous editions. This does not make a product necessarily good or bad, and I might have missed something, but it does imply a willingness to rebuild the game from the ground up.

Reborn

"No plan Survives contact with the Enemy"

It's interesting how that quote sum up this blog nicely.

At about the same time I started this blog, over an year ago, I was offered a mangement job in the company I worked with at the time. It was a significant challenge, particularly from someone who doesn't come from a business administration background and without any previous management experience. It also came with a nicely increased paygrade. Natuarally it also came with increased resposablities which kept me from updating this blog until recently.

And in the time since then things changed a lot.

I've achieved great sucess, and learned we are only as good as our last result. I've seen the best amd the worst of corporate culture, and learned a lot about people and office politics.

Meanwhile, L5R also changed, a new edition was launched this summer, and much to my glee. AEG seems to have changed their stance on PDFs, so I've aquired the new edition on DriveThruRPG and have been pouring over it.

Because of this, my plans will be slightly changed, I will make a simple review of the new edition, and only after that review will I start reading the product line. My objective has become to see how my opinion of 4th Edition is nuanced by that reading.