I just sent in a draft of my L5R chapter, after beating my head bloody against it for the last week or so. Note to self: when estimating the amount of work involved in writing a chapter for a game book, word count on its own is not an adequate metric. This is not, repeat, not like writing fiction. It’s more like writing your undergraduate thesis.

I even have a bibliography. 4th edition books consulted in the writing of this chapter: core, Emerald Empire, Enemies of the Empire, Great Clans, Imperial Histories, Book of Air. Books consulted from previous editions: Way of the Dragon, Creatures of Rokugan, Legend of the Burning Sands. Also the L5R wiki. 4th edition books not consulted: Strongholds of the Empire. (And Second City, but that’s because my gaming store doesn’t have it in yet. Otherwise you bet your ass I’d have been eagerly looking up just what an Isawa Archaeologist does.)

Now I think I need to go feed myself and maybe drool at the TV for a little bit while I wait for my brain to regrow. I need it for some of these other projects whose deadlines are breathing down my neck . . . .

Okay, so you have the alternate history for the founding of Rokugan that I laid out in my previous post. Where do you go from there?

Another sidebar in Imperial Histories mentions that Hantei didn’t have to step down and let his son Genji become the Emperor. What if he’d gone on ruling forever, as an immortal kami? Well, that’s more or less what happened with Togashi in canon: every Dragon Clan Champion until the Second Day of Thunder was in fact the founding kami, under a series of aliases. So you could easily have the same thing here, not even bothering with the cover story. Emperor Togashi just goes on ruling.

Since a) he’s canonically very reclusive, because of the way his gift of foresight works, and b) we’re aiming for mystic weirdness here, I figure he withdraws more and more from Rokugani society as the years go by. People almost never see him; ise zumi or other members of the two Imperial families (the Mirumoto and the Agasha) carry out his orders, or relay them to everybody else.

Until the dawn of what is, in canon, the Gozoku era: the late fourth century.

(I’ll take a moment here to acknowledge that really, if you go changing something as major as the Emperor of Rokugan — and therefore the entire shape of Rokugani society — you should logically end up with a highly divergent AU, not the same historical events reworked. But that would mean really re-inventing the L5R wheel, and besides, I think it’s fun to keep filtering canon through this lens.)

So how do you get the Gozoku conspiracy when the Emperor is an immortal kami with foresight?

Short answer: because Togashi foresaw it, and let it happen. Man, it’s hard to deal with a powerfully precognitive character, and not have them come across as a total dick.

I’ve said before that the setting for Legend of the Five Rings is really well-developed, such that you can have all sorts of fun messing with it. The most recent book for the fourth edition supports this in interesting ways; in addition to giving all kinds of historical info, it has sidebars scattered throughout, suggesting AU scenarios that might have resulted if events had gone differently.

One of those concerns the founding of the Empire. Canonically — for those who don’t know — nine kami, the children of Lady Sun and Lord Moon, fell to earth (and one of them fell through the earth into Hell, where he became corrupted). The remaining eight gathered mortal followers and held a tournament amongst themselves to decide who would rule this realm. Hantei won, and the other seven founded the Great Clans, and that was how Rokugan got started.

The sidebar in Imperial Histories asks, what if a different kami had won?

It gives a few sentences for each of the other kami, reminding you of their personalities, and outlining the general flavor that would have resulted if Doji or Hida or whoever had set the tone for all of Rokugan. The one that caught my eye the most was this:

If Togashi had been destined to defeat Hantei, he would have built an Empire far different from anything imagined by his siblings — a place of mystery and enigma, where religious contemplation and individual enlightenment were the highest goods. A GM who wishes to make Rokugan closer to the sort of mystical martial arts setting depicted in many Asian films might find a Togashi Dynasty suitable to the task.

Granted, I am playing a Dragon PC (a member of the Clan that kami founded in canonical history), and a Togashi monk to boot. But I think those lines would look shiny to me even if I weren’t, because I’m a fan of movies like The Bride With White Hair (which is the first example that leapt to mind). And so my brain immediately started playing with this notion. How could you redesign L5R for a timeline in which Togashi won?

I’m splitting this into at least two parts because the more I think about it, the more interesting notions come to mind. Everyone, and L5R geeks in particular, are invited to hop in with comments and suggestions. For this first part, I’ll start with the founding of the Empire and the Great Clans.

Trying to minimize the amount of stuff you have to design from scratch, with mixed success.

Warning: the following post will not make the blindest bit of sense unless you’re familiar with Legend of the Five Rings. If you aren’t, please continue on to the next blog post. Thank you for your time.

***

So in our session tonight, one of the PCs — a Shosuro trained in the Bayushi courtier school — goes with our NPC companion to hunt down this Yogo who’s wanted for a crime. In the course of questioning the peasant innkeeper, she realizes he’s lying. And, being a Shosuro, she opts to subtly intimidate him into telling the truth, rather than backhanding him across the face for lying to a samurai.

A Crane in the common room of the inn overhears this. He’s a Doji trained in the Kakita dueling academy, and is trying to make a name for himself as a duelist, so he comes over and starts blustering to the Shosuro about the way she’s treating this innkeeper — basically ginning things up into an offense so that he can challenge her to a duel. She (very rightly) calls him out for eavesdropping on somebody else’s conversation and butting into business that isn’t his, and so thoroughly upsets him that he tries to slap her. Whereupon the NPC companion — a Mirumoto bushi from the Iron Mountain school — steps up and rams the butt of his katana into the Doji’s ribs.

Stuff and things, we run and get a magistrate to okay the duel (to first blood only), the two guys face off. This could go badly, because the Mirumoto is a great skirmisher, but is much less experienced at dueling. The Shosuro, however, has told him that his opponent has the Brash disadvantage, so the PCs and their NPC companion are doing all kinds of little things to needle the Doji and put him off his game. Which we succeed at well enough that a) he basically false-starts, gets bashed in the ribs again, and has to be ordered back into position by the magistrate, and then b) he continues with his strike even though the Mirumoto went first, and the duel is therefore supposed to be over. But he misses — not because he meant to, but because of the damage he took from a certain now-broken rib and the first cut — and so it’s an all-round disgrace for the Doji.

And this is where things start to get fun.