OSSR: L5R 3rd Edition
Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2014 12:08 pm
Legend of the Five Rings
Role Playing Game
3rd Edition
OSSR
This came out in 2005, making it a decade old come the new year.
Full disclosure: back in the 90s, teenage Frank Trollman was one of the better players of the card game on the planet and wrote stories for their listserv (it was the 90s). This was back when the fandom was small enough that a vocal and halfway decent fanfiction writer could push the overall arc of the storyline in one direction or another, and there was a Crab Clan / Nezumi alliance for a while pretty much because I wrote one in. I had... a falling out with the AEG people where they banned me from discussing their rules (and wrote in my suggested rules change to the next edition of the rulebook without attribution), and asked me to keep writing fanfics for them – which I declined. But I still liked the setting, and when they made a d20 version in the 2000s, I ran a long running Rokugan D&D campaign (K played a Scorpion clan sorcerer in that one).
The original card game had great art for the time and a lot of flavorful characters. Of course, in the original rules that character counted as an item.
So you'll be forgiven if you discount much or all of my hair pulling about the fluff. After all, I am a known former fanboy of this setting and can probably be counted upon to shout at the kids on my lawn no matter what direction the storyline decided to go in the gosh, nearly two decades since I first became invested in this setting. Gosh, I feel old. However, I'm going to try to be aware of my own cognitive bias here and only call out direction changes in the storyline that are genuine train wrecks rather than just things that are a different color from the rosy hue of my nostalgia glasses.
This board has a little bit of hate crush on John Wick, which is understandable because he's an asshole. He really likes to break rules, and throw temper tantrums when people use rules as-is, which makes him extremely annoying to deal with as a DM or game designer. And despite that fact, he is best known as a DM and a game designer, bringing in a giant WTF from everyone with enough brain cells to get a group discount. He also was one of the major people behind L5R both in card game and RPG format. I think it important to note that he has pretty much nothing to do with this edition, having grabbed his dick to run off and make 7th Sea nearly two presidential terms before this book hit print. Wick was the guy for the first edition back in 1998, and then there was a 2nd edition which tried to have an open relationship with the d20 system, and then there's this one. And while John Wick was only directly involved with the first edition of the RPG, the game is still picking up after his mess even in the 4th edition (which came out in 2010 and is almost old enough to warrant an OSSR in its own right). The sort of trademark Wickian “I just made those rules to troll you” type lazy twists are in here just as they are in a Shyamalan movie – but it's changed hands several times since his funk was on it and some of them have been papered over. John Wick doesn't even get credit for “original concept” which is instead given to Zinser.
Anyway, this is the 3rd edition which came out in 2005. The big crossover with D&D is officially over and now real fans of Rokugan have taken over and are taking things in a bold new direction. The authors thank their playtesters (and there are a lot of them) for making this the best edition of L5R yet. There are five writers and two editors, and all of the writers give a little bit of gushing praise for their homies and the process. This is both good and bad. Obviously a high quality RPG product can only happen when people love what they are doing and these people do love l5r. On the flip side, the L5R world was already a decade old and had been doing Marvel Comics style “shocking events” of varying stupidity twice a year or more for the entire time. From a story perspective, Rokugan was badly in need of a reboot and the fanboys writing the 3rd edition were not going to give it one. And of course, the core system of L5R is honestly terrible to the extent that you need an app to follow its perplexing probability functions. It's seriously almost as bad as Cthulhutech and badly needed to be scrapped and reworked to something that could be taken seriously in the 21st century. That didn't happen either (although it'll be over a hundred and fifty pages before we get there). Basically, imagine if the obsessive fans who main Memory Alpha or Wookiepedia were put in charge of writing new canon for Star Trek or Star Wars respectively – you get a genuine love for the source material and a frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter, but a bizarre refusal to actually throw away any of the parts of the past that are genuinely bad.
Table of Contents
This isn't the full page art from the ToC, but the art from this book does look like this because it's the same artists. It's both thematic and beautiful.
Normally a table of contents would not warrant a chapter writeup, but in this case it is four fucking pages long and is longer than many books give for an introduction or foreword. One of those pages is a full page art piece, but you still have three full pages of dense text.
But the real reason that I'm doing a section on this isn't because of the ToC's tremendous length or the relative difficulty of actually finding anything you're looking for in a table of contents that has no-shit six entries for page 160 and is partially written in Japanese. I'm highlighting this because the table of contents divides the book into five “books” that are each associated with one of the five elements whose elemental rings give name to the setting. There are of course five of them, hence the legend being about five rings. It's all based on a misreading of Musashi's Book of Five Rings, where the last ring is given as “void” and filled with vacuum metaphors rather than the original intent that it was the heavenly ring representing perfection.
The elements are basically this, but with a bunch of western interpretations of those elements shoved in sideways.
The books in this book follow the elemental progression of the Musashi book and that's all very thematic. But it does set things up for an organizational structure that doesn't make a lot of sense to new readers. The Book of Earth contains setting information, the Book of Water contains character creation information, the Book of Fire contains the actual game mechanics (the core dice mechanic is explained on page 85), the Book of Air contains cosmology and magic systems, and the Book of Void has gamemastering information. There's certainly a logic to this, but information you need to make sense of most statements ends up divided between the different books and you need to read the whole thing through or be familiar with previous editions to make much sense out of anything.
Notably absent from this book is any “what is roleplaying” section, an introduction, or any sort of explanation as to what the fuck is going on at all. Once we're through the Table of Contents, we jump straight into the Book of Earth which in turn jumps right in to short writeups of the clans. So this book isn't just by obsessive fans, it's for obsessive fans. This book is absolutely gorgeous, but it doesn't even pretend to explain what the fucking hell it's doing to a potential new player.
But we'll get to the Book of Earth next time.
Role Playing Game
3rd Edition
OSSR
This came out in 2005, making it a decade old come the new year.
Full disclosure: back in the 90s, teenage Frank Trollman was one of the better players of the card game on the planet and wrote stories for their listserv (it was the 90s). This was back when the fandom was small enough that a vocal and halfway decent fanfiction writer could push the overall arc of the storyline in one direction or another, and there was a Crab Clan / Nezumi alliance for a while pretty much because I wrote one in. I had... a falling out with the AEG people where they banned me from discussing their rules (and wrote in my suggested rules change to the next edition of the rulebook without attribution), and asked me to keep writing fanfics for them – which I declined. But I still liked the setting, and when they made a d20 version in the 2000s, I ran a long running Rokugan D&D campaign (K played a Scorpion clan sorcerer in that one).
The original card game had great art for the time and a lot of flavorful characters. Of course, in the original rules that character counted as an item.
So you'll be forgiven if you discount much or all of my hair pulling about the fluff. After all, I am a known former fanboy of this setting and can probably be counted upon to shout at the kids on my lawn no matter what direction the storyline decided to go in the gosh, nearly two decades since I first became invested in this setting. Gosh, I feel old. However, I'm going to try to be aware of my own cognitive bias here and only call out direction changes in the storyline that are genuine train wrecks rather than just things that are a different color from the rosy hue of my nostalgia glasses.
This board has a little bit of hate crush on John Wick, which is understandable because he's an asshole. He really likes to break rules, and throw temper tantrums when people use rules as-is, which makes him extremely annoying to deal with as a DM or game designer. And despite that fact, he is best known as a DM and a game designer, bringing in a giant WTF from everyone with enough brain cells to get a group discount. He also was one of the major people behind L5R both in card game and RPG format. I think it important to note that he has pretty much nothing to do with this edition, having grabbed his dick to run off and make 7th Sea nearly two presidential terms before this book hit print. Wick was the guy for the first edition back in 1998, and then there was a 2nd edition which tried to have an open relationship with the d20 system, and then there's this one. And while John Wick was only directly involved with the first edition of the RPG, the game is still picking up after his mess even in the 4th edition (which came out in 2010 and is almost old enough to warrant an OSSR in its own right). The sort of trademark Wickian “I just made those rules to troll you” type lazy twists are in here just as they are in a Shyamalan movie – but it's changed hands several times since his funk was on it and some of them have been papered over. John Wick doesn't even get credit for “original concept” which is instead given to Zinser.
Anyway, this is the 3rd edition which came out in 2005. The big crossover with D&D is officially over and now real fans of Rokugan have taken over and are taking things in a bold new direction. The authors thank their playtesters (and there are a lot of them) for making this the best edition of L5R yet. There are five writers and two editors, and all of the writers give a little bit of gushing praise for their homies and the process. This is both good and bad. Obviously a high quality RPG product can only happen when people love what they are doing and these people do love l5r. On the flip side, the L5R world was already a decade old and had been doing Marvel Comics style “shocking events” of varying stupidity twice a year or more for the entire time. From a story perspective, Rokugan was badly in need of a reboot and the fanboys writing the 3rd edition were not going to give it one. And of course, the core system of L5R is honestly terrible to the extent that you need an app to follow its perplexing probability functions. It's seriously almost as bad as Cthulhutech and badly needed to be scrapped and reworked to something that could be taken seriously in the 21st century. That didn't happen either (although it'll be over a hundred and fifty pages before we get there). Basically, imagine if the obsessive fans who main Memory Alpha or Wookiepedia were put in charge of writing new canon for Star Trek or Star Wars respectively – you get a genuine love for the source material and a frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter, but a bizarre refusal to actually throw away any of the parts of the past that are genuinely bad.
Table of Contents
This isn't the full page art from the ToC, but the art from this book does look like this because it's the same artists. It's both thematic and beautiful.
Normally a table of contents would not warrant a chapter writeup, but in this case it is four fucking pages long and is longer than many books give for an introduction or foreword. One of those pages is a full page art piece, but you still have three full pages of dense text.
But the real reason that I'm doing a section on this isn't because of the ToC's tremendous length or the relative difficulty of actually finding anything you're looking for in a table of contents that has no-shit six entries for page 160 and is partially written in Japanese. I'm highlighting this because the table of contents divides the book into five “books” that are each associated with one of the five elements whose elemental rings give name to the setting. There are of course five of them, hence the legend being about five rings. It's all based on a misreading of Musashi's Book of Five Rings, where the last ring is given as “void” and filled with vacuum metaphors rather than the original intent that it was the heavenly ring representing perfection.
The elements are basically this, but with a bunch of western interpretations of those elements shoved in sideways.
The books in this book follow the elemental progression of the Musashi book and that's all very thematic. But it does set things up for an organizational structure that doesn't make a lot of sense to new readers. The Book of Earth contains setting information, the Book of Water contains character creation information, the Book of Fire contains the actual game mechanics (the core dice mechanic is explained on page 85), the Book of Air contains cosmology and magic systems, and the Book of Void has gamemastering information. There's certainly a logic to this, but information you need to make sense of most statements ends up divided between the different books and you need to read the whole thing through or be familiar with previous editions to make much sense out of anything.
Notably absent from this book is any “what is roleplaying” section, an introduction, or any sort of explanation as to what the fuck is going on at all. Once we're through the Table of Contents, we jump straight into the Book of Earth which in turn jumps right in to short writeups of the clans. So this book isn't just by obsessive fans, it's for obsessive fans. This book is absolutely gorgeous, but it doesn't even pretend to explain what the fucking hell it's doing to a potential new player.
But we'll get to the Book of Earth next time.