OSSR: L5R 3rd Edition

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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: If you were doing a L5R reboot, do you think it would be acceptable to ditch the faux-Cambodia/Vietnamese/Korean aspects
This is a silly thing to suggest on a couple of levels, because ultimately you're both giving up way too much in terms of bitchin' costume and set design while reclaiming relatively little in terms of conceptual space. I say this because ultimately Confused Yellowface Adventures isn't dealing in faithful treatments of any particular culture. Rather, what you're doing is lifting sweet hats and gorgeous iconography wholesale. And when people think of Cambodian and Vietnamese landmarks, they often think of amazing Buddhist shit. And you're not ditching vaguely Buddhist imagery in such a mash up setting because:

1. You're not retarded.

2. A lot of the awesome Indian shit you're ostensibly replacing it with is already cross pollinated with Buddhism and thus actually looks an awful lot like a bunch of the stuff you just crossed off. Things don't actually get that confusing until you start adding obviously Hindu stuff.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sun Dec 28, 2014 12:37 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I feel if you just want to use certain religious iconography then you don't necessarily to import the rest of the originating regional tropes over unless you want to. If I was doing an actual historical recreation of fantasy (South)east Asia for my Indiana Jones adventure, including Cambodia would be a no-brainer because of Angkor Wat; you can't exactly just stick it over in the middle of China without rendering the conceit a mockery. However, that chicken was already fucked when you said that kitsune and nagas were a matter-of-course in your setting. I don't think that anyone outside of history majors really cares if Gaulian or classic Germanic architecture shows up in your faux-Carthagian cities once you have centaurs and orcs and shit running around.

That said, you can only go so far with the idea. While I don't think anyone would really object to people unearthing Montezuma's Palace in the middle of faux-California or faux-Texas in a fantasy alt history game, people unearthing the faux-Wampanoag or ancient faux-Viking trading post in this area would be taking it too far. Either your concept has to expand to the Northeast coast or you have to ditch it.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by OgreBattle »

A good anchoring point is the Tang dynasty of 600-900 AD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_dynasty

This is when China had contact with India, Persia, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and so on. The capital city of Chang'an had people from everywhere connected by the silk road trading and living there so anything from the west can also be found here and there if you wanted.

Europe at the time is in the Shit on the Streets ages so you can also have your party of Persian Ninja, Chinese Wuxia, Japanese Ninja, and Indian Monk travel there to loot the treasure coffers of the fallen roman empire while fighting off barbarians with jesus powers.

Of course there's no need to be entirely period specific since this is a fantasy setting so you can have 16th century style Japanese samurai and ninja while 13th century Mongols are gathering in the steppes and the Chinese have 17th century gunpowder weapons in development. But the Tang dynasty is a good anchoring point for getting them all to interact.

*the 17th century was also a golden age of piracy/naval explosions, where you have guys like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga who's dad was a Chinese pirate lord and mom was a Japanese from a feudal samurai household and then he gets into naval battles with dutch mega-corporations.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Sun Dec 28, 2014 5:21 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

On BBC mobile, when you go to Asia, it gives you the ability to branch to "India" and "China." For British people, "Asians" refers to Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Afghans, but Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Koreans are all "Orientals." In California, it's kind of the opposite, where "Asians" refers to Cambodians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and so on - but the various flavors of South Asians are generally not. Almost no one refers to Arabs as "Asians" despite the fact that much of the Middle East is literally in Asia.

Another related issue is that a lot of "Oriental" mythology has direct similarities to South Asian mythology for good reason. Japan, China, and Cambodia all have their Nagas, but they have them through Buddhism, which has them because Hinduism. Japanese depictions of Naga aren't a whole lot like Tamil depictions of Naga, but there's a common root there that's pretty obvious. Now, mythological variation being what it is, your Naga in the game are going to need to cut a bunch of stuff just from Cambodian lore (or whatever) to be consistent. Because cooperative storytelling games have to be much more coherent and internally consistent than regional mythologies do. But a lot of Indian material is going to have a huge amount of overlap.

So adding Indian material to Oriental Adventures, for the most part, would be a combination of confusing and counterproductive. Most of the Indian material you'd want to add would necessarily involve cutting Chinese content you'd also like to have. By going Indian with your Vanara through Hanuman stories, you'd be necessarily cutting Chinese stories through Sun Wukong. And I don't think you want to.

To bring this a little back to L5R, Alderac tried to put other parts of Asia into their world, and what we ended up with was the Burning Sands. And I think almost everyone agrees that was quite bad.

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Post by Aryxbez »

Frank Trollman wrote:To bring this a little back to L5R, Alderac tried to put other parts of Asia into their world, and what we ended up with was the Burning Sands. And I think almost everyone agrees that was quite bad.
What was wrong with Burning Sands, it seemed cool, some type of Aladdin-arab type junk going on right? I also liked the idea of Yotodai, or Romans over in foreign yonder. Though, I do agree the latest storylines I heard where they mad a "second Rokugan" near those lands now, and kinda deal w/more foreigners isn't as good.

The Reboot idea also seemed good, as Nezumi would definitely have to be a Day one option for me, or I wouldn't play a Rokugan game (I like to play unusual/underdog races, like Prinnies in Disgaea, or Elcor in Mass Effect). Speaking of races, what's a Mujina, L5R seems to imply a goblin, though googling implied Badger people?
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Post by Username17 »

Aryxbez wrote:
Frank Trollman wrote:To bring this a little back to L5R, Alderac tried to put other parts of Asia into their world, and what we ended up with was the Burning Sands. And I think almost everyone agrees that was quite bad.
What was wrong with Burning Sands, it seemed cool, some type of Aladdin-arab type junk going on right? I also liked the idea of Yotodai, or Romans over in foreign yonder. Though, I do agree the latest storylines I heard where they mad a "second Rokugan" near those lands now, and kinda deal w/more foreigners isn't as good.

The Reboot idea also seemed good, as Nezumi would definitely have to be a Day one option for me, or I wouldn't play a Rokugan game (I like to play unusual/underdog races, like Prinnies in Disgaea, or Elcor in Mass Effect). Speaking of races, what's a Mujina, L5R seems to imply a goblin, though googling implied Badger people?
Let's handle that back to front. In Japanese folklore, a Mujina is a yokai that is a badger shapeshifter. In L5R, the Mujina were a kind of mischievous goblin known for their great speed and for being kind of dicks. The Crab Clan also put them to work in their mines because yolo. In later L5R works, there was more stuff put in about the mujina that made them really fucking weird - basically multiple authors feuding with each other by writing up crazy crap about Mujina. Like, having an entire dimension of mischief for them to be from. I'm pretty sure that the L5R Mujina came into being because the artist who did the Mujina cards in the first edition didn't know what a Mujina was and it was the 90s and he couldn't just look it up on wikipedia.

On the Burning Sands thing: people fucking hated it. It came out with AEG's "Rolling Thunder" plan, along with the Hidden Emperor plotline for L5R. AEG blames Rolling Thunder for the huge drop in sales they had during that period, but I personally blame the incredibly bad storytelling. Fucking Ninja Emperor, man! Ninja Emperor! Legend of the Burning Sands was dumb in a lot of ways, and no one likes it. Part of it was that it was put out simultaneously with like 3 other games and was just never that well supported. Part of it is that the deeper you go into the "meta" of the L5R world the dumber things get. Part of it is that there were twelve fucking factions which is way too many for a tertiary spinoff. But mostly it's just that there was never any real point to it. In L5R, you're trying to take control of the empire. In Burning Sands... what? What are you supposed to be trying to do?

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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Can someone explain the entire Ninja Emperor thing to me again, slowly? From the butthurt it causes certain fans (not just Frank, I've seen it happen to other people on the Nifty and other places) it seems to be a lot more stupid than just declaring that the Emperor is a Cowboy Emperor or a Pirate Emperor.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by schpeelah »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Can someone explain the entire Ninja Emperor thing to me again, slowly? From the butthurt it causes certain fans (not just Frank, I've seen it happen to other people on the Nifty and other places) it seems to be a lot more stupid than just declaring that the Emperor is a Cowboy Emperor or a Pirate Emperor.
Googling reveals ninja are untouchables, the bottom rung of the caste hierarchy, considered subhuman. A Ninja Emperor makes as much sense as a Pagan Catholic Pope.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Even beyond that there's a lot of stupid to walk someone through. I'd volunteer, but my memory of it was very fuzzy because honestly, I started planning my exit strategy at about the time everyone in Rokugan decided it was OK to allow the foremost Scorpion Clan femme fatale anywhere near the new Emperor even though she had a hand in killing the last one. You'll never believe this, but she started poisoning him pretty much immediately.
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Post by name_here »

Wait, did they know she was involved in killing the last one? And she escaped being publicly flayed alive?
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Post by Whipstitch »

Well, I should first admit that depending on how you look at the lineages you could argue that she didn't have a hand in killing the last emperor, since the throne changed hands a couple time because her husband, the Champion of Clan Sneaky Snake Scorpion assassinated an Emperor but only managed to hold onto the throne for less than a week, a situation she parlayed into becoming Empress because apparently she's -that- good at providing fan service. She's supposedly super respectable in-setting but from a fan perspective it's hard to remember because her life is a list of broken betrothals and political assassinations. Also, she's the subject of cards like this one:

Image

She wasn't the dumbest part of the setting by a long shot, but I distinctly remember thinking she was too on-the-nose to hold my interest.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Can someone explain the entire Ninja Emperor thing to me again, slowly? From the butthurt it causes certain fans (not just Frank, I've seen it happen to other people on the Nifty and other places) it seems to be a lot more stupid than just declaring that the Emperor is a Cowboy Emperor or a Pirate Emperor.
Basically: the Ninja Emperor refers to Akodo Toturi, who was being infected by the Lying Darkness/the Shadow/etc. He's called that because he was gaining the powers of the Shadow as the infection got worse, and the Shadow was the force that empowered the Goju ninjas, who are the actual shadow-walking darkness-magic-type ninjas of the setting. After metaplot fuckery involving him marrying the Oracle of the Void then committing seppuku to pass his position to her (since she represents the Void, she can't be corrupted by the Shadow), in order to remove the taint of the Lying Darkness from the imperial line.

Pointless backstory of the ninja:

1) Ninja were originally used by the Scorpion (no matter what they say), as their assassins.
2) Ninja were vilified by the Empire at large for being honorless black ops killers.
3) When the Emperor found out that the Scorpion used ninja, he ordered them all to kill themselves.
4) The Scorpion obeyed the edict on the surface and had the least important member kill themselves publicly, then had the real elites go completely underground and live double lives.
5) Ninjas are still around, but they're actually traines for the Shosuro Shinobi school, whose purpose is to act as distractions for the plainclothes Shosuro assassins to kill their targets in the confusion.
6) The Shosuro tapped on the power of the Lying Darkness to enhance their sneaking and other ninja skills via the kage-yakiin shadow brands; hence the association of the Lying Darkness with ninja.
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Post by Login »

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" clan. Wick, who is rightly treated with disdain for many reasons, nevertheless wrote a fantastic version of ninjas in the Scorpion Clanbook -- and that clanbook was actually stellar in and of itself. One would have expected that the writers would have taken advantage of this. One would be wrong.

The Shadow is a Yog-Sothoth boogeyman that eats your face. Literally. Its minions are called ninjas. But that's different than the "ninjas" that wear pajamas. The keywords literally mean both things in the game, so yog-sothoth ninjas can and will fight human-ninjas.

Scorpion had both kinds of ninjas in its ranks -- said the Hidden Emperor storyline. If that sounds like a retcon from a shit writer glossing over a better writer's work, then perception has matched reality. The Yog-Sothoth ninjas were not part of the ninja purge because they didn't exist in canon when Wick was writing. As a matter of fact, the faceless ninjas had never been a part of any official history: it was the regular, human ninjas that all went underground after the purge. The association between the kage-yakiin and The Shadow was also an effective retcon.
Image
Ninja.

Image
Ninja.

See the difference? The vastly more retarded one is from Hidden Emperor. Neither of them are affiliated with the Scorpion Clan. It took real-world years before the CCG could support an effective, thematic, Scorpion ninja deck. Years.

N.B.: Though conceptually retarded, the latter ninja was fun in play.
Bayushi Kachiko was wife of Bayushi Shoju. Shoju killed the last not-possessed Hantei Emperor because a prophecy said that the Hantei would go all Shadowlands. Shoju was killed by (Lion Clan Champion*) Toturi. The Scorpion Clan are purged; the survivors go into hiding. The last Hantei -- who Shoju couldn't catch -- ascended to the throne and married Kachiko, the most beautiful woman in the land, out of spite. Kachiko poisoned NuEmperor in a process of slow, exquisite torture and triggered a massive civil war because Fuck Every Last One of You Fuckers.

Literally, no one suspects that the implicit rape victim, the vain, shallow, manipulative, chief political mastermind from The Clan of REVENGE, has anything to do with the Emperor's sickness. That is canon. Back inna day, we thought that would be the worst plot hole the game would endure. We would now cry, if we had tears left.

Shoju killed the wrong Emperor. NuEmperor, weakened by the poison, became vulnerable to possession by Fu Leng, God of Eeeevil. However, because the Emperor's body was weakened by the poison, Fu Leng couldn't Manifest His True Form. Thus, once the Good Guys (tm) caught up with Kachiko, she is instructed to keep poisoning the Emperor lest he grow strong. This leads to the end of Clan War storyline -- the first story arc (which was originally was going to be the only story arc -- AEG flip-flopped on that when they realized they had struck gold).

The Clan War storyline fails because it was a poor execution of a nifty idea -- and that poor execution was the result of continuous retcons. But Hidden Emperor? Hidden Emperor was self-indulgently bad in concept. There was not one point of the Hidden Emperor storyline -- not one -- that was more enjoyable than shitting in one hand and clapping.


*Champion = Daimyo, though originally, before the rpg, it really didn't. It was better when it didn't.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

I've heard bad things about Ree Soesbee, and something about inventing the Horiuchi Clan for her special snowflake NPCs. How bad is it?
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Post by Login »

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 -- but she doesn't. She ignores your paltry narrative to favor her own. You're both in the same room, but you're miles away. This problem has two possible levels:

Level 1) Her story is some bullshit soap opera that is safely isolated from the earth-shattering events the PCs have embarked on. The PCs and GM ignore each other. The result is an imperfect, perhaps even terrible, relationship, but at least everyone has some fun.

Level 2) Her story demands that your story go fuck itself with rusty bottlecaps. You either leave the table or suffer.

An example within L5R: the Naga are a shockingly important faction. They are pretty much the most potent force against the Shadowlands imaginable (b/c they are incorruptible), they have a nigh-unstoppable military, they're telepathic with a gestalt world-mind that prohibits interpersonal strife (!!) making them the highest-morale fighting force conceivable -- but they are routinely ignored in the story, even to the point of absurdity. Being ignored in story = getting shitty cards, and the Naga were god-awfully designed. (Deliberately so at the beginning -- but that's a different rant.) Ree's story had the Naga effectively join the Crab: one of their Strongholds shares a Crab alignment. They're so pathetic that they are subservient, thematically, to a second-tier mainstream clan. Why should we print decent cards for you when you could just use this other faction's cards?

Meanwhile, the Nezumi, the ratlings, who have no significant place in the major plot, get their own stronghold and tons of support. Why? Ree likes Ratlings.

So the Unicorn offshoot she creates causes no harm because it doesn't have a lot of card support (Level 1). The Ratling/Naga dichotomy, however, causes tons of harm (Level 2). What does a Ratling victory in the CCG even mean? The Naga could, conceivably, rule a human empire -- they have the manpower and the will to do it. They could also, conceivably, and justifiably, wipe the Rokugani out. But what would the Ratlings do with that power? And how could they get it?

The HE story premise is itself an example. In Clan War, the winner of the CCG (conceivably) becomes Emperor. That's how I literally explained the game to new players. In the later stories, what does winning mean? No one knows, and the writers don't care. Entire tournaments would be dedicated to helping out a single dude (The Hooded Ronin) do some random shit b/c fuck your byzantine politics/military romance: it's getting in the way of my Obi-Wan fanfiction.

I met Ree Soesbee at a random LARP once. I had played through one of her L5R adventure modules with friends. It was not good at all. It featured a nigh-invincible demon that Sammy Haights its way through the adventure, vulnerable only to one particular McGuffin. It can easily insta-gib PCs, so there's no practical reason why a) the PCs should even engage it and b) it can't accomplish its goals without PCs discovering it and getting the McGuffin to kill it. I expressed concern about the (pointless) lethality to Ms. Soesbee, in person. She enthusiastically affirmed that she and her fellow developers were hoping to make the monster very dangerous. Somehow I had, despite the universal conventions built into human language, complimented her.

Ree writes for Ree. If you want a good story, you can damn well write it yourself.

The entirety of the Hidden Emperor storyline is basically her baby, so if you want more of her greatest hits, just seek out information on that.

Be warned, though. The post-Clan War L5R story isn't just long: it's tedious. Its problem isn't deliberate retcons: those are few. Its problem is that nothing interesting ever happens. All the good guys are perfect, all the bad guys are 80's cartoon villains, there is no real social system or recognizable normal human interaction -- it's all dates and names and metaphysics (the first refuge of a fantasy hack). By the middle of HE, Rokugan is a static utopia filled with automatons that only vaguely parody human behavior, and it's been that way ever since. There are less painful ways to feed geekrage than forcing your way through that effluvia.
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Post by Longes »

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?
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Post by Koumei »

I highly approve of ninjas being linked to the Scorpion Clan.

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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 "chicken" (the poultry, not cowards).

Was he completely full of shit, or is there some truth to that based on some edition or splatbook mentioning that or something?
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Post by Username17 »

The Horiuchi story is one of "obsessive straw grasping" by the authors. The Unicorn shugenja are mostly named Iuchi. But there is one shugenja in the first set named Horiuchi. Obviously a cadet branch or something, and for many years no one cared. And then someone decided to start writing mary sue fanfic about Horiuchi Shoan. And noone would care except the person doing it was an "official author" who got to write actual official storylines, rpg elements, and tournament legal cards.

This insistence on latching on to trivial details of the setting or tournament games and expanding them into long winded fanfics is something the L5R people seemed to sincerely believe made them look clever. And to be fair, if you do that once it probably does. But if you do it every. Fucking. Time. It starts to look like you're just spouting bullshit and using the thinest of post hoc justifications for your ramblings.

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Post by Login »

Koumei wrote: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 "chicken" (the poultry, not cowards).

Was he completely full of shit, or is there some truth to that based on some edition or splatbook mentioning that or something?
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Wick, in Way of the Scorpion, the best thing Wick has written (to my knowledge), made ninjas STUPID. Because ninjas are STUPID. It was good.

Why are ninjas stupid?

• They wear black at night. If you want to hide at night, wear dark blue.
• They wear pajamas in highly-populated areas where people do not wear pajamas, and do so in order to not stand out.
• They use cheap and ineffective weapons. Smokebombs suck. Shuriken are really hard to use and more annoying than anything else.

Real-life ninjas were espionage agents that looked like Everyone Else. L5R is supposed to be Kurosawa, not anime -- that is literally how it was described in Clan War. (That is obviously now wrong; in HE onward, it gained the ridiculousness and banality of bottom-of-the-barrel anime and this status remains, if only due to the inhuman, wooden behavior of the protagonists.) Back inna day, pulling L5R towards Kurosawa was a big deal. That was what Wick felt his job was. That's why katanas are uber-deadly, described as 4-foot-long razor blades -- several times.

But ninjas are totally sweet (and mammals)! Totally Sweet != Plainclothes Poisoner.

So Wick threaded that needle by having two types of "ninjas." Effective saboteurs/assassins/spies that are not shit, and Stupid Ninjas, a.k.a., ninjas in training.

The Scorpion (Shosuro) Assassin school (the only "ninja" school in the original rpg) would make its trainees dress in pajamas and ooga-booga people. A quote I recall from the book: "Congratulations. You're a distraction." During the buzzing of a target area by young trainees, the real agent would do his or her job. When it was all over, the trainees would run away and the target would be dead, files stolen, and so on.

Here's where it gets sweet.

Your boss is a sociopathic fuckstain that murders people who fail him and is protected from retaliation and just correction by a rigid caste system. You have no real social power to counter the latter. You just failed him.

Did you fail him because:

• You were tactically outmaneuvered by foes who took advantage of that rigid caste system and your culture's lack of imagination, and, not to put too fine a point on it, are now taking advantage of your boss' personal and moral failings to cover their tracks?
• You were hard-pressed to defeat Eeevil Neeenjah Magic!!!!!11!!!1!

You're motherfucking right it's option two. So the myth of "invincible ninjas" spread.

Now, the Shosuro Assassin school does have (level-inappropriate and inferior to shugenja b/c fuck you noncaster) super-powers. But no one believes that you have those powers: black-clad "ninjas" are the real sorcerers here.

That is well fucking done.

Wick's tale is that "ninja" is a corruption/mishearing of "niwatori" (sp) (afb) which means "chicken," which is what the Shosuro call their trainees. My japanese can't speak to that, but seems legit.



Soesbee-Incorrect

Ninjas are called ninjas because. Seriously, we're talking about a writer who cannot conceive of the effects of massive paranatural events on the bulk of the population (peasants) in high fantasy, so details like nomenclature are well beyond her. Ninjas are identity-consuming mind monsters spawned from an alien god that pre-dates existing gods and gets "destroyed" when it gets a name (which, apparently, any mothefucker could have done ages ago), except, it didn't get destroyed and is now the Shadow Dragon, even though that is senseless and has no explanation, and ninjas share a name with ninjas even though they honestly have no conceptual or physical or even fucking geographical overlap since the Goju (family of shadow monsters) were not the only example of espionage agents in Rokugan so there is no reason why they have the same name and fuckitaalll burn it burn it all the fuck down.

Incidentally, L5R's story gives zero plot support for shugenjas being elite espionage agents.

Game mechanically, what splat is the best espionage agent? I'll give you infinity guesses.
Last edited by Login on Thu Jan 01, 2015 7:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Login »

Longes wrote: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?
Rokugan is Japan for middle-class white fanboys: this was true before the term "weeaboo" existed, so, to reflect that, I don't employ that term (which may be slightly inaccurate here). Culturally, it's Japan, even when that doesn't make sense (given the size of the empire, for example). Rokugani monks are Shinto, with an inchoate side of Buddhism, so if you google shinto monks, you now have more rp material on your splat than the rpg itself provides.

Don't sweat being monk. Just act like a caricature and you're fine.

_______

N.B.: Fairly recently, the L5R CCG introduced Buddhism, and turned it into a monster-worshipping cult of Madness(tm). I am not even shitting you.

This is due to another problem with the setting, one that is an explicit retcon of the original game world: there is one good guy faction, and everything else is a bad guy. . . and the bad guys are always bad.

The bad guys are uglier than good guys.
Their tits are smaller.
Their speeches are less clever.
Their plans are never as awesome.
Their stats are inferior.

And on and on. You're dealing with six-year-olds here.

So if there are two religions, one of them has to be Eeeeevil. If there are two philosophies, one has to be fallen/unholy/leper/outcast/unclean.

This gets really fucked up with interclan conflicts, since every clan is a good guy. This means that every time clans engage in mass murder, it's okay: both clan heads in a conflict are seriously well-meaning and honorable people.

L5R is a world where the celestially-ordained caste system is literally true. The gods and cosmic forces literally say murder is right, not-murder is evil.

Unless you're Phoenix, in which case you can totally do a pacifism thing.

It's fanfiction where the rules change depending on which Mary Sue takes the stage today. So if the Lion murder their way through Crane lands for shits and giggles, that's okay, because the gods are bloodthirsty monsters -- the Lion are now on stage. Earlier, a Phoenix army martyrs itself for the sake of Peace between two other factions, that's totally not a sinful failure of samurai duty to protect the homeland -- the Phoenix are now on stage.

Again, this didn't really become a trope until after Clan War, the first storyline. It isn't that the Clan War specifically wrote that L5R was orange and blue morality, it was that the setting implied that you were in for some gritty grimdark. That's what civil wars are, after all. Clan War was underwritten, and the lack of material led players to fill in the gaps. After the first rpg and during the close of the first arc, the authors explicitly and enthusiastically rejected this, deliberately filling in gaps with bullshit.

Example: Hida Kisada is a piece of shit, and we loved him for it. He's the daimyo of the Crab Clan, which, back inna day, was Might Makes Right. Their original strong deck, their first real deck, was a Shadowlands deck. "Once we're done using the Shadowlands, we will totally turn around and defeat the Shadowlands, pinky-swear!" Mmmmmm, gimme some of that sweet, sweet self-delusion. Crab was cool, even if you didn't play it. (N.B.: The ability of the Shadowlands to use mystical airborne AIDS for soul-raping was decidedly weaker in story back then, so using the Shadowlands was NOT inherently corrupting: it was a choice.) Kisada has a pasty weakling son. He sacrifices said son to Eeevil in order to get Real Ultimate Power. What a fucker, right?

No, wait. Sacrifice is misleading. He doesn't just sacrifice him.

He crucifies him.

And parades his crucified son before his army. I. Shit. You. Not.

Image

Except not. Post-Clan War, Kisada totally gets forgivness/manly regret and is so awesome he later comes back to life (with a bunch of other "heroes") and becomes a living God, literally the God of Persistence (because what says "Persistance" like taking illegal and immoral shortcuts to reach a completely unjust goal where others besides yourself pay the price for your inquity?), and he's awesome and perfect and respected and badass and he murdered his fucking son but that's okay because it turns out that he felt really bad about it and it wasn't really his fault it was this other guy who was using dark magic and he seduced him and it wasn't really his orders and the circumstances demanded that he fuck you fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou forever and ever amen.

The shugenja who performed the crucifiction is Badguy damned ugly leper outcast unclean.
The guy who benefitted from the crucifiction is now a God.
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Post by Longes »

Game mechanically, what splat is the best espionage agent? I'll give you infinity guesses.
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.
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Post by Login »

Longes wrote: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 table and in-game circumstances.

In the very first adventure I ever played in L5R, a shugenja used his out-of-the-box Commune ability and short-circuited the adventure, save for GM-asspulling. (This was Wick's built-in adventure in 1e. It's crap, but interesting crap since it exposes the system's failures dramatically.) Ninja does a naughty thing but his clan allegiance Must Remain Secret --> young shugenja figures out said identity with one spell. Being able to talk to local Earth Spirits is, as written, reliable psychometry. It's huge. In addition, Secrets on the Wind is remote viewing (which makes it abusable/broken in both the rpg and ccg).

Spells still allow you to maximize your stats in the most cost-effective ways in L5R rpg, and everything (with a few high-school-rank exceptions) in L5R rpg is about stats. Thus, a mundane courtier is usually inferior to a Air shugenja, who can parlay their magic into both social manipulate and disguise, making them better infiltrators than the ninja and better courtiers than the courtier. Same crap you get from other poorly-designed fantasies.

<Edit: And you get more spells than other splats get special abilities. Again, sound familiar? This is the nastiest problem: spells are easier to grab than, say, kiho or kata, and have greater conceptual space. Thus, jumping between minigames is cheaper for shuggies than for others (and kiho and kata weren't even things in 1e). Unless the GM prevents you from getting new spell scrolls through arbitrary dickery (again, sounds like Some Other Game) you will have more spells than a monk will have kiho or a bushi will have kata. And some splats need GM approval before they can even get super-powers, even if the CCG explicitly hands them said powers! (Ninja and Togashi monks beg for kiho.) L5R rpg is written by the same kinds of self-indulgent power-fantasists that plagued White Wolf: when I make a potent character, it's rp, when you do it, it's powergaming.>

The five-minute-workday is where the inconsistency kicks in. If I hand the shuggie six or seven social challenges, spaced out over a day, then yeah, he may be overwhelmed. The problem here is that it's inconsistent and usually involves a PC/GM pissing match as the latter contrives more circumstances to burden the former but tries to make sure said circumstances don't overwhelm the noncasters. Sound familiar? The problem is that even if there is a place for mundanes when casters run out of juice, a) casters can get juice back fairly quickly and b) casters can often win so big in their minigames it overshadows the wins noncasters can make. If I win the social minigame in the Emperor's court by eleventy-zillion, the fact that you won the last four social minigames will pale to compare. (That first adventure anecdote was an example of this.)

Bushi can still serve as reliable cuisinarts because of the five-minute-workday. But the other minigames? Politics, investigation, rhetoric, fraud? Shuggie >> you, even at low levels, most of the time.
Last edited by Login on Thu Jan 01, 2015 7:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Login wrote:and fuckitaalll burn it burn it all the fuck down.
Login wrote: fuck you fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou forever and ever amen.
I like the cut of this guy's jib.
bears fall, everyone dies
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Post by Maxus »

I think he'll settle here very well.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Username17 »

Yeah, it's sometimes hard to convey how thoroughly L5R's story people shat the bed. It wasn't just the Ninja Emperor thing, but it was certainly emblematic of how totally off the reservation the L5R storyline had gotten. But it had been going that direction from the beginning. Every addition to the story was worse than the one before it until some sort of bottoming out in probably about Hidden Emperor 2. Consider the storyline that Hida Kisada had been tricked by the sorcerous wiles of the traitor Kuni Yori into flaying his own son alive in order to power a dread war banner of a dark god. Hida Kisada has only one power in the game, want to take a guess what it is? It's immunity to sorcerous wiles. Really. There is literally one character in the entire card set that plotline couldn't work with, and it's that one.

Anyway, while John Wick's rants taking the piss out of ninja enthusiasts were genuinely funny, they were a terrible fucking idea and he should have been fired the minute he submitted them in manuscript form. There are, as previously mentioned, four core playable character archetypes: Samurai, Shugenja, Monk, and Ninja. That's it. Those are the four. You may find Ninja or Monk fans annoying on a personal level, but the authors of the game are not allowed to say so out loud, because doing so is offending like a solid quarter of the fanbase. It would be like if the author of an edition of D&D said straight up that Cleric players were lying shitweasels and whiny manchildren. It might be funny, it might even have a bit of truth, but the corporation should understand that having an author take a deliberate dump on such a large section of the fanbase cannot possibly end well.

It's literally like the Tiefling and Gnome Video was for 4th edition D&D, but someone doing it for one of the four core archetypes instead of a third tier player race.

-Username17
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