The Gaming Den

With some good luck, they'll get an influx of MtG players who want rules that work from the system, and actually have to make D&D not shitty. Much more likely, it'll be as popular as the WoW supplement for D&D. WoW was garbage because Blizzard literally becomes less creative as they iterate...

One of the peculiar things about white supremacists is that whenever they play their fantasies out, they are always the villainous bitch-ass cuck even as the protagonists in their own stories. This is because history is a thing. If we’re going to start judging people based on their race and we use w...

So Samurai and Ninja come with conceptual limits. We can imagine a very powerful Ninja or Samurai. But there are still limits inherent in the concept. But Shugenja has no limits. Reading books and having shit happen is a concept that is by definition unlimited. I can partially buy that. Part of the...

DrPraetor wrote:(you know, amidst all the sexism-erasing, in the original L5R, is there a consistent answer to whether interclan marriage is a thing and how surnames and clan membership is handled for the offspring?).

Patrilineal, save for the Matsu 'cause they down wit' da snu-snu.

@login, you are incorrect. Pedantry below. Mamoru is really reaching back. How is that reaching back? He's from the first expansion, sure, but that's the point: he's around before the Lying Darkness was introduced in the game. There was no retcon making him into a spawn of the same. It's possible t...

As Lago mentions, in most East Asian storytelling there really isn't that strict of a distinction between "feeble robed guy that shoots elemental power" and "I am good at swinging a sword." That isn't even a distinction in all of Western storytelling. Gandalf sworded dudes aplen...

If you wanted to make the game have the longest possible shelf life, I would think you'd want to do both things - the Samurai could start his level 1 career as a lone Bushi, a third son who isn't entitled to dick diddly, but as he goes up in level he becomes automatically entitled to an army of his...

Not rebooted back to Imperial, rebooted back to the "We should really make a fantasy setting inspired by Japanese and Chinese stuff." That is what happened at our table, which is why we stopped: we didn't have the time to make a new game. L5R is best when it's a varnish, an idea. I recrui...

You don't need to work hard for moral dilemmas in fantasy asia. You really, really don't. Feudal Japan is one big moral sinkhole. The world is run by women hating murdershits and everyone respects them. What do you do? Become ninja and join an anti-daimyo resistance? Great, the daimyo use their peas...

Bakemono are almost always rendered as Goblins in L5R, due to CCG keywording. Goblins are always Shadowlands. Always. (E.g., Always Chaotic Evil.) Shadowlands are leperoutcastunclean. This means that nothing bad that ever happens to them will ever matter, ever. That makes them a poor example here. S...

Well there still needs to be a lot of that because it's a game. In real life the way you find out which areas of public need get which amount of support is with studies and investigative committees. That's effective but it's also super boring and not something you need 5 magical ninjas to do. The w...

@login L5R wiki agrees with you, and I'm not looking deeper: Goju was earlier. Even so, that still says that everyone with the "ninja" tag is either a minion of the Nothing, or traces their training directly to someone who was. Nope. http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/showimage?prefix=pri...

Except that every non-Lying Darkness ninja learned from Shosuro though, who was the original coruptee. No. a) The Lying Darkness' first direct human contact was with Goju. (Maybe.) Depending on which story you're using (there are two directly contradictory tales), this happened either at the fall o...

The good parts of L5R are written by the players, as they play. I wish that were marketing bullshit, but it's true. It happened to my friends and I, both for the CCG and the rpg. Thing is, every day, a L5R author wakes up and shits on another bit of canon. Eventually, they shit on something that you...

At high ranks, shugenja win the game. At low ranks they are sufficiently weak and have few enough spells to leave something for Bushi and Ninjas and Monks to do. This is almost always not true. When it's true, it's usually because the five-minute-workday makes it so, and that varies depending on ta...

Question. I'm about to play a Togashi monk in a game where GM, by his own words "I'm the reason Shadowlands have monks" (he means that he played in a CCG tournament, not that he wrote them). What basic facts and social conventions of Rokugan do I need to know so I don't look like an idiot...

Incidentally, one person was explaining to me, as I sort of got into a campaign that never panned out, how "ninja" was not an in-setting word for assassins in L5R and that's just the word players use, but the (limited) dictionary of L5R specifically had "ninja" as a word meaning...

No one gave a shit about the Horiuchi. Ever. Ree is the sort of writer who, as a GM, plays her own game. You may have played with a person like this: they have this self-indulgent world laid out to entertain them. Your PC, and the PCs of others, create a narrative that you all find enthralling -- bu...

The Shadow is Ree Soesbee's baby. Ree Soesbee cannot write. Ree Soesbee was employed to write for L5R for the duration of the Hidden Emperor arc. Before Hidden Emperor, ninjas were undersupported in L5R in nearly every way. Scorpion had no ninja synergy or support, and they were the "ninja"...