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CARD BARDS | PAGE 1, 2, 3
Legend of the Five Rings is set in an imaginary land called Rokugan. On its surface, Rokugan resembles the Kamakura-era Japan of "The Tales of the Heike," the period of near-constant clan warfare that is the setting for Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies. Samurai and peasants, geishas and ninjas, traveling poets, magistrates, generals and craftsmen populate Rokugan. Castles high above treacherous mountain passes overlook river valleys full of farms. Walled cities are home to marketplaces, geisha houses and jade works. Feudal obligations bind families to their clans and clans to the emperor, and the central virtues are military prowess, personal honor and filial piety. But Rokugan is also a world in which enslaved goblins toil in iron mines, corrupted priests use blood magic to bring the dead back to life and tattooed warrior monks belch fire on the battlefield. A cloud of corruption and evil has blighted entire provinces, and hideous soul-stealing monsters called oni have emerged from these Shadowlands to terrorize the Emerald Empire. A thousand-year-old race of snakelike Naga has awakened from centuries of hibernation to meddle in human politics for inscrutable reasons. And while the Hantei family has ruled Rokugan for 37 generations, the 38th Hantei emperor has fallen mysteriously ill. (If you've been paying attention, you already know why.) Faced with this vacuum at the center, the dozen or so different factions that share power in Rokugan have all seen the opportunity to make a grab for land, settle ancient scores and seize the Emerald Throne for themselves. You may wonder how a card game can possibly convey all of this. A typical game of L5R progresses like this: You start with your faction's stronghold and four provinces in play. With the modest amount of gold that your stronghold produces, you buy more gold-producing holdings like mines, farms, ports and trade routes. All of these holdings are represented by beautiful, elaborately illustrated cards that you play from your hand. So are the personalities that you next use this gold to hire: samurai, shugenjas (magicians, sort of), monks, poets, diplomats, battle maidens, assassins, Ratling warriors and dragons. (These are the bodiless, immortal dragons of Asian mythology, not the fire-breathing flying lizards of the West.) You can also hire ninjas, bloodspeakers and vile creatures from Rokugan's Shadowlands like goblins, ogres and oni -- if you're willing to accept the loss of honor that such dark doings bring with them. Think carefully before you do. As it was in Japan, honor is central to Rokugan. Gain enough honor and you will win the game; accumulate enough dishonor and you will lose it. With the right card, you can force a samurai in your opponent's army to marry a barbarian, which dishonors him. With another, you can make his personal dishonor shame his entire family, which causes a great loss of honor to his clan. With a third, you can force the samurai to take his own life in a fit of despair. On the other hand, if your opponent has the imperial favor (which he can earn if his family is more honorable than yours, and he has sent one of his men to lobby the emperor for it), he can have the emperor cancel the loss of honor, making it impossible for you to shame him or force the dishonored samurai to commit seppuku. Or, if he has the Scorpion Clan Diplomat Bayushi Goshiu on his side, he can force you to lose as much honor as you've made him lose. ("It would be unwise to mention such crimes in the court," says Goshiu's card, "when I could speak equally of your own with an even greater eloquence.") Another way to win is through warfare. Form your samurai and their followers into armies and loose them on your opponent's provinces. You can outmaneuver your opponent with cavalry, use archers and spearmen to pick off his followers with ranged attacks or have your shugenja conjure magical earthquakes to throw his troops into disarray. If you overwhelm your opponent on the battlefield, you can destroy his provinces and drive him from the game. You can also win by achieving enlightenment. The enlightened player is a jack-of-all-trades, demonstrating mastery in dueling, magic, attack and defense, as well as what I can only describe as emptying your mind. In my experience, attaining enlightenment isn't any easier in L5R than it is in real life. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - All of this political, military and spiritual maneuvering takes place in the context of a story full of conspiracy, betrayal, honor, murder, passion, revenge and glory, set in a world with a thousand-year history and a complex mythology whose gods are always nearby. With its depth, high drama and a cast of hundreds, Legend of the Five Rings is a modern epic. But it is an epic in a strange new form that makes it extremely difficult to apprehend as a whole. Every personality in the game, from lowly Toku to the terrifying Hitomi, has a role in the story. But you won't find this story written down in full anywhere. Snippets appear as prefaces to the rule booklets that accompany each of the game's new supplements and editions. Parts are printed in the quarterly magazine that FRPG publishes for dedicated players. Enthusiasts glean information on key characters from postings the game's designers make to Usenet, archiving them on Web sites and discussing them endlessly on mailing lists. And a lot of it travels by word of mouth. Although -- or, more likely, because -- the story of L5R is so hard to pin down, it lives in the minds of its audience like no other. The game's design team has worked out the back story in such elaborate detail that every card in the game feels like part of a coherent whole. Everything about the characters -- their names, abilities, the clothes they wear and the weapons they wield, even the color of their hair -- emerges from the details of the overall tale. The cards you play are fragments of an implied reality, and you can feel it. As you put them to use, your mind starts making connections between these fragments, and a narrative emerges. Suppose you are playing as the Crane Clan. Doji Yosai, an honorable but underpowered samurai in your clan, faces a much tougher opponent in battle. You play To Do What We Must, which lets a samurai with great personal honor sacrifice himself to bring down his opponent. When any of your personalities dies, Kakita Shijin (the Crane Clan Poet) lets you add his personal honor to your family honor. As you play these cards, you are not just beating down your opponent and moving closer to victory. You are also telling a little story about your brave samurai giving up his life and bringing honor to his family. This story fits into the epic nicely: In the story, the Crane Clan is militarily weak and must use political maneuverings, patronage of the arts and its close relationship with the emperor to make its gains. The story of Yosai's death is a mere subplot to the story that is your game, which itself is a tiny subplot in the overall story of the Clan War. But it is a story that you yourself have told -- a little movie that you have cast with the characters you chose for your deck and directed by the way you played your hand. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - L5R's designers periodically hand over narrative authority to the players in a more profound way. They do this at special storyline tournaments, whose competitors are vying not just to win prizes and bragging rights but to determine where the story will go next. While a storyline tournament is in progress, the game's design team studies the decks that the players are using and listens to what the contestants say as they play. If a samurai does something particularly striking in a storyline tournament, the next set of L5R cards to hit the market may contain a new, "experienced" version of the samurai, altered to reflect what the design team thinks his experiences on the battlefield or in court have wrought. And the faction that wins the tournament will usually find itself changing in the next chapter -- not necessarily for the better. The most spectacular storyline tournament to date, unquestionably, was the Day of Thunder. From the beginning, FRPG intended L5R's first storyline, the Clan War, to come to an end in August of 1997. On the Day of Thunder, they expected one of two things to happen: Either one faction would defeat the monstrous forces of Fu Leng, driving his armies of goblins and oni back to the Shadowlands and reuniting the shattered empire, or Fu Leng would triumph and plunge the empire into darkness and terror. The Day of Thunder itself was a storyline tournament held at the national gaming convention GenCon, in which 240 L5R players from around the country came together to compete against one another and find out how the Clan War was going to end. What actually happened at GenCon astonished everybody -- as the tournament's finalists, just before the last round, conspired to cut a deal changing the terms of the conflict so the story could end with glory to both their clans. And true to form, the results of this tournament have never been written down in full: Everyone knows that the old Lion Clan general Toturi became emperor, and that his boyhood friend Doji Hoturi gave his life to bring down Fu Leng, but the details of this climactic battle, improvised on the spot before an audience of hundreds by L5R's head writer, John Wick, is now another part of the oral mythology that permeates the game. To find out exactly what happened on the Day of Thunder, you have to ask someone who was there. The current story, The Hidden Emperor, has continued from Toturi's accession to the Emerald Throne. After two years of peace and reconciliation, someone -- we still don't know who -- has drugged Toturi, stuffed him in a sack and stolen him away. Over the past year, six bimonthly chapters of The Hidden Emperor have hit the stores, each one containing a weirder and more disturbing twist than the last. FRPG has dropped hints that there will soon be a new faction entering the game -- but who? The Ratlings? The shadowy and sinister Ninjas? The even more shadowy and sinister Kolat? The game's creators aren't saying. But they have told us where Toturi is being held. This weekend, L5R players all around the world are going to bust him out. The Storming of Morikage Castle is an unprecedented event: a storyline tournament involving thousands of players around the world simultaneously from Jan. 15 to 17. It promises to be the largest CCG tournament ever run. Members of the design team will be visiting some of the card and game store locations, and special correspondents will be reporting in from others. When it's over, each store's representative will fax results in to FRPG for the design team to review. The winning faction will be declared the rescuers, and presumably the old general will be brought back to Otosan Uchi and reinstalled on the Emerald Throne. And we'll finally find out who snatched him in the first place. My Scorpion Clan, and my beloved Kachiko, falsely accused of this vile crime by scheming Crane Clan magistrates, will be able to return from their exile in the Burning Sands and get back to the business of keeping the Emperor's nose clean. Or maybe not. All that the FRPG insider that I asked about the Morikage
tournament would say is, "There will be a resolution to that question that
should be (mostly) satisfying." The smiley that he tacked onto his e-mail
suggests that if my clan wants a better future, we're still going to have to
fight for it. Robert Rossney plays the Scorpion Clan in Boulder, Colo. |
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