A Return to Rokugan Part 1

I really didn’t plan on playing Legend of the Five Rings again. No, I just wanted to satisfy my craving for role playing and anything would’ve been OK for me. But I did have a certain theme in mind. A few months ago I ran into an article about “Kaidan”. Kaidan is a collection of Japanese tales of the ghostly and supernatural. Just around the Edo period, a game called Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai grew in popularity. The game consisted of players gathering around a hundred candles each taking turns telling Kaidan. After each kaidan, a single candle was extinguished until all but one was left. This whole “game” was considered to evoke a supernatural entity or event. This game in turn led to an increased demand of ghost stories and folk tales to be gathered from different parts of Japan thus giving birth to the literary genre of Kaidan. I was blown away - the whole thing evoked imagery of a mysterious and supernatural orient of antiquity - the kind of mythical out-of-time horros we see in current J-Horror then combine it with the dangerous and elegant samurai of Feudal Japan - I had a game that I wanted to run. I scoured the web, hoping to find the perfect book and system. I even considered brewing one of my own. In my oversight, I forgot that this sort of thing was already published. An RPG exactly about this subject is in existence for almost 12 years to this date. Legend of the Five Rings had oni, ghosts, samurai, geisha and every stereotype from the samurai/ninja fantasy genre that you can shake a katana at.

So I hit up the torrent sites and searched for old L5r books online. L5R RPG, it seems from its original inception, is already in its third edition. I read reviews of the new system, gathered opinions and compared differences from the first editions. From what I have read about the L5R series, I found the following information: L5R has switched hands between AEG to WOTC then back to AEG; Do not bother with the second edition at all-it was a bad transitioning phase for the game line; the third edition hearkens to the first edition more than it does to the second (forget the second edition) thus conversion from first to third is done easily; there was a d20 version of L5R (waste of time); The third edition adds a bit of complexity to convey more variety especially in character creation. With all that information in mind, I ended up downloading almost all of the books anyway.

The contemporary timeline of Rokugan including everything post Time of the Void is utter crap, however. There are characters that shine (Naseru, Sunetra and Hachi) but the overall setting and events were based on the results of the CCG tournaments. I found that characters that grew and outshined the dull and uninspired setting were dispatched with random impunity; their storylines ending in an unspectacular fashion. This did nothing but fuel my opinion against the current canon. I had to look somewhere else for background setting - I looked to Ree Soesbee's and John Wick's First Edition.

To be continued