I am wondering this because my players are about to attend a wedding at Benten Seido. They gathered with some NPC and they'll go together to the sanctuary next session. One of those NPC is a maho tsukai.

I'm not a lore expert but I remember reading somewhere that maho tsukai would feel terrible physical pain when entering a sanctuary. But besides that I don't find anything specific. I assume Benten would not be very pleased about that, which is not convenient for me because I'm using the Benten Seido wedding hook from the Emerald Empire book and I feel like the presence of the maho tsukai would distract too much from the main event.

I'm ok making the NPC leave before (and raise some suspicion) but I'm curious about how it would go if the NPC do enter the sancturay. I'm also open for ideas to spice things up.

Hello Samurai!

First of all, english is not my native language. So, if this post contains some mistakes, I'm sorry!

So, I have one question.

Do the virtues of Bushido have an exact opposite in the virtues of Shourido?

For example, is Will the opposite of Sincerity or another virtue of Bushido?

I'm building a campaign for my best friend (alone). He will face against some samurai who rejected one virtue of Bushido for a virtue of Shourido. This is why I need to know if there are some oppositions between Bushido and Shourido.

Thanks for reading me.

Let the kami guide your way!

Not that I actually want to play a character like this, but if I were a min-maxer (or a particularly cruel GM), what would be the most efficient way to build a rokugani samurai using all the rules from the official 4th edition books?

I’m curious what the absolute most broken/optimized character you can come up with would look like.

I’ve been looking into the rules for taking multiple schools in L5R 4e, and I want to make sure I understand how everything works. Here’s what I know so far:

• Taking a second school requires the Multiple Schools advantage (10 points).
• Taking a school from a different clan also requires the Different School advantage (5 points).

I have a few questions about how switching or adding schools actually functions:

1. Switching schools before an Insight rank‑up
Is it allowed to take on a second school before your Insight Rank increases, effectively starting at School Rank 0 in the new school until your Insight goes up?

I understand the rule preventing your combined School Ranks from exceeding your Insight Rank, but does anything stop you from switching early while you’re partway to the next Insight Rank?

2. Trait bonuses from the new school
When you switch schools, do you gain the new school’s trait bonus?
Example:

• Kakita Bushi gives +1 Reflexes
• Daidoji Iron Warrior gives +1 Agility. If a Kakita Bushi switches to Daidoji Iron Warrior, does the character gain the +1 Agility?

3. School skill lists when switching
Does switching schools add the new school’s skill list to your character?
Using the same example:

• Kakita Bushi skills include Etiquette, Iaijutsu (Focus), Kenjutsu, Kyujutsu, Sincerity, Tea Ceremony, and one Bugei/High Skill.
• Daidoji Iron Warrior skills include Battle, Defense rank 2, Iaijutsu, Kenjutsu (Katana), Kyujutsu, and one Skill.

Does the character automatically gain Battle, Defense rank 2, and the Kenjutsu (Katana) emphasis?

4. If skills must be purchased instead of granted
If you have to buy the new skills with XP, do they count as school skills for the new school?
This matters for advantages like Prodigy (+1k0 on School Skill rolls).

5. Previously purchased skills
If you already had a skill before switching (e.g., Battle), does it become a school skill after switching?
Again, this affects things like Prodigy.

So I understand the premise of the system:
- All d10s
- it is a xky system

But what I am getting a little confused about is The Ten Dice Rule

I understand the premise that no more than 10 dice should be rolled, but the more I try to break down the logic, the more confused I get.

I understand that 10k5 stays the same
I understand that 12k5 -> 10k6
And I believe that 14k9 ->10k10 + 2

But what I am getting confused about is what happens when there are odd numbers; take, for example, 11k5. Does that become 10k5 because only 1 extra die would have been rolled, not 2

And in a similar vein, does 13k5 effectively become 12k5 because 13 is not a multiple of 2, and if that's the case, then 13k5 -> 10k6

The last example I don't understand is one from the book: "A roll of 13k9 would become 10k10 + 2, because the two extra rolled dice that exceed the Ten Dice Rule become one extra kept die, and the additional odd rolled die becomes a bonus of +2."

I understand that 13 dice can't be rolled, and so it is kept at 10ky
I also see that as there were 2 extra dice rolled, it would increase the kept dice by 1
Making the new one 10k10

What I don't understand is +2

Because in this example, the number of kept dice has not exceeded 10

If the roll was 14k9, then I would understand it, as it would be 14k9 -> 10k11 -> 10k10 +2

I hope this all makes sense and someone can explain the rule in a clearer was to help me understand

We just had a session and one of our PCs was possessed by lord Moon, he suffers lord moon’s curse as a disadvantage.

In would last session the player was taken over by lord moon and proceeded to start a skirmish with us.

We have the hand of jade. The reason according to Lord moon is that we were nearly all poisoned and nearly lost the hand of Jade as a result.

We managed to subdue our party member and had a talk with Lord moon which is how we know he is after the hand of Jade and why he claims he wanted it.

He offered us a deal to give it to him willingly or he will take it.

We asked Lord moon if we could have time to think.

We don’t want to give it to him but at the same time we don’t really know what to do with it.

We are new players and were told at the start of the campaign along with our quest here take Excalibur/holy hand grenade of Antioch (just make sure Elton point to the, five is right out)

So we don’t actually know what we want to do with it or who can be trusted. We were leaning towards giving it to the Kunis/Hidas as it is ancestrally theirs.

But I think as a party we don’t think we are able to trust anyone with it.

Anyway back to my point and what my question is.

We asked Lord moon for time to think and he said sure, he would give us a month/the next full moon, and he would come visit us again.

I assume he would possess our PC again.

What I am wondering is if our PC is possessed again and i challenged Lord moon to a duel would I be duelling our PC and his stat block or would I be duelling Lord moon and his stat block.

The reason I am asking is because Lord moon attacked us as he said we couldn’t be trusted.

My thinking and maybe more hoping is if I challenge Lord moon to a duel and won, that would hopefully prove ourselves to Lord moon meaning that we can be trusted with the Hand of Jade.

My concern is that the PC is courtier, so in theory not much of a challenge. And so if I did duel the PC and won would that not earn enough of Lord moon’s respect “big deal you beat an amateur”.

My other concerns are Lord moon calling a champion who is OP, he is Lord moon after all and can’t be trusted.

Or the duel uses Lord moons stats so buffs our PC again making it an OP/unwinable duel

I imagine that a lot of this is just down to DM preference.

But what I am trying to work out is if challenging Lord moon to a duel is a good idea or a horrifically bad one.

And what the consensus amongst DMs is on how they would play it out

Shinjo-no-Kami

Greetings!

You may remember me as that guy who drank too much cactus juice and cobbled together the Rokugan Remapped project. Today, I want to share with you another project I started working on with the artist Alena Voevodina, also known as RageRat:

Kami (Re)imagined.

For all of their importance to the L5R lore, we don’t actually have many art depictions of the Founding Kami in the canon. The most recent lineup we have is from the 4^(th) Edition, and we also happen to have a simplistic depiction of Doji-no-Kami from 5e. So one of the aims of this project is to fill that gap we’ve had as of late.

It isn’t the only one though. Being the history nerd that I am, I couldn’t simply settle for some abstract fantasy depiction, where clothing, arms, and armor would look like they would fit seamlessly in modern Rokugan, not one contemporary to the Founding Kami. I wanted to account for the 1000-year difference between them, and take inspiration from the early Japanese history to determine what their attire and weaponry would probably look like.

To that end, I teamed up with RageRat: I provide the references and the vision, and she puts it on the canvass. Go check her out by the way: she is big on Chinese fantasy, and I find that her art style fits the East Asian theme very well.

 

Today, I’d like to present the first art from our lineup: Shinjo, the Child of the Five Winds.

Below, I describe the general approach to this project, as well as the finer details of this particular piece. Keep in mind we’ve only just finished Shinjo, and RageRat has other things to work on aside from this project, so it’s hard to predict when the next one is going to be ready.

 

Methodology

Now, I wouldn’t be me had I not gotten nerdier about it all than was probably necessary. In general, when considering the baseline for what the Kami would look like, I set my timeframe roughly at the early to mid Asuka period (late 6^(th)—early 7^(th) centuries), with some additions from the late Kofun (the preceding era). This would correspond to the Sui and early Tang dynasties in China and the Three Kingdoms period of Korea. At the time, with the rise of the Yamato State, Japanese culture (especially among the court elites), experienced massive influence from China, with writing, fashion, armament, philosophy, and administrative models becoming major fixtures of cultural import. The kingdoms of the Korean Peninsula played a major part in this exchange as intermediaries and projected their own influence on Japanese clothing, arms, and armor of the period.

I decided this would be a fitting parallel for Rokugan, which also experienced unprecedented centralization and cultural transformation during the foundational period, when the Kami were active. Depending on the vague cultural vibes and backgrounds of the Founding Kami, I slanted their design more towards the “Mainland” or Japanese side, with some following the latest, highest trends of Asuka fashion, and others resembling the more traditional, late Kofun-era aristocracy.

It should also be noted that the arts in this lineup won’t necessarily depict the Kami at exactly the same time. The early Imperial age of Rokugan was a lengthy period of several decades, almost a century really, and the characters might be depicted the way they may have looked earlier or later within that period. Accordingly, the corresponding historical era is also relatively broad, especially given the fact that precise dating of artistic sources may be rather difficult to gauge.

 

Shinjo: Child of the Five Winds

With Shinjo specifically, it was evident from the get-go that she presents a prime opportunity to showcase something outside the general East Asian cultural sphere, given her proverbial Journey to the West. Central Asia, which can roughly be equated to the places Shinjo journeyed to with her clan, was at that time a patchwork of ever-changing polities and a crossroads of cultures. Iranian and Turkic nomads, trade kingdoms and city-states of Sogdia and Bactria, statelets of the Tarim Basin, Sassanid Iran, China, Buddhist Gandhara and the broader India—all left their cultural imprint on the region that was the central intermediary hub of the Silk Road. It is no coincidence, then, that we chose to depict Shinjo first: out of all the Kami in the lineup, she was probably one of the more interesting to work on.

Shinjo is depicted here during the mature stage of her journey. Her outfit presents a mixture of Central and East Asian elements to reflect both her origin and received influence. I based her attire mainly in the Sogdian fashion of the late 6^(th) to 7^(th) centuries, such as represented in the murals of Balalyk Tepe and Panjakent, as well as Sogdian archaeology of the period. It also features both female and male fashion pieces of the period. Some of the accessories, including her weaponry, represent distinct Turko-Mongol, Japanese, and Chinese influence.

 

Clothing

The most prominent clothing item is a purple cloak based on the Balalyk Tepe murals. These cloaks are depicted as worn by female figures at a banquet, and feature decorative ribbons and a prominent lapel on the right side. This particular lapel represents Hephthalite fashion that can be traced back several centuries from the period and is featured in both Sogdian and Tarim Basin murals (such as in the Kizil Caves), both in male and female attires. The ornaments on the cloak are based on the traditional Sogdian motifs of the period, including those depicted in Balalyk Tepe. The winged horses on the outer rim are based on the Afrasiab murals (near Samarkand).

The shirt underneath the armor, with the circular collar, is based on murals from Panjakent and Afrasiab. It represents predominantly male fashion, although similar shirts seem to have also been worn by women.

The boots with stamped line pattern are based on an archaeological find in Kuh-i-Surkh, Tajikistan.

Mural from Balalyk Tepe (detail), late 6th-7th century. The figure that inspired Shinjo is seated second from the left.

Panjakent mural (detail), 7th to early 8th century.

Boots from Kuh-i-Surkh, may date from between the 5th-8th Centuries.

 

Accessories

Shinjo’s hairstyle takes after those depicted on female figures from Balalyk Tepe murals, tied with the ribbon from the same source, which is dyed in the traditional purple of the Kirin/Unicorn. Her flower-shaped earrings with pearl beads are also inspired by the same figure from Balalyk Tepe, as well as the colored dot on her forehead, which is likely the influence of the Chinese huadian (“flower makeup”), popular in China since the Northern and Southern dynasties period.

Belt plates and fittings are after the finds in Panjakent, representing typical Sogdian belt assembly.

Two elements here are of East Asian origin. One is decidedly Japanese: a carnelian bead necklace with several magatama beads made out of Jasper. It is a callback to older, Kofun-era aristocratic regalia; while gradually phased out with the onset of the Asuka fashion, they were likely still worn by regional elites and religious figures. Magatama (comma-shaped beads) signified spiritual protection and were an elite marker in the Kofun period, found in almost all late-period burial mounds (which gave the era its name, kofun).

Most significantly, Shinjo holds a fan in her hand—a parting gift from Doji-no-Kami. This fan is a typical tuanshan, a circular fan that became popular in the Tang dynasty. Curiously, they are often called reunion fans: the character 團, which can mean “group” or “circle”, and is used to spell the name of the fan (團扇, tuánshàn), is also used in the word reunion (團圓, tuányuán). Accordingly, its circular or oval shape came to symbolize family unity, reunions, and happiness—very appropriate for the symbolism of a parting gift. The two cranes flying above the waves are meant to symbolize Shinjo and Doji themselves.

Various belt plates from Panjakent, 7th to 8th century.

Magatama necklace excavated from Handayama Tumulus Cluster, near Hamamatsu, Late Kofun Period (circa 6th-7th century).

Lady With Servants, attributed to Zhou Fang (detail), 8th century.

 

Arms & Armor

Shinjo’s armament is perhaps the most eclectic part of her outfit. The lamellar armor set with a mail shirt underneath is based on the Panjakent murals and represents the kind of armor typical for Sogdiana and the larger Central Asia of the period. Missing from the picture is the helmet based on the Kanai-Higashiura find: I wanted to show off the hairstyle more than I did the helmet (typical main hero syndrome).

The archery kit consists of a typical Japanese yumi longbow, a Japanese tsurumaki (woven bowstring holder), and an hourglass quiver made of birch bark, popular with the various nomadic peoples of Eurasia at the time. Quivers of this type from around this era are depicted in the Panjakent murals and found at various archaeological sites such as Moschevaya Balka in the Caucasus (presumably Alans) and Karos in Hungary (Magyars).

Finally, the saber is supposed to represent the iconic Chuluunbold, gifted to Shinjo by the Ujik Khan, with its characteristic white tassel on a lanyard wrapped around the hilt with stingray skin wrapping. This is the most contentious piece in this “reconstruction”: overall, this piece is based on the earliest Turko-Mongol sabers, which started to emerge in the 2^(nd) half of the 7^(th) century around the Altai and surrounding steppe regions. They were quite unlike the later sabers with the pronounced curve and false edge: these early sabers were single-edged swords with only a slight curve and often a slightly offset hilt, and coexisted with similar swords without any curvature at all.

The problematic part is that, as always, it is hard to say where the sword ends and the saber begins. That’s because no weapon type simply springs up overnight: they are always the result of continuous weapon evolution, with changes and alterations slowly accumulating over the course of decades. Additionally, precise dating is difficult: we can see the weapons of this type in the Turkic archaeology of the period, on Turkic kurgan stelae, and potentially even on the Panjakent murals, but the dating bracket is always within a span of several decades, even centuries in the case of the stelae.

I made a contentious decision to base the decorations and fittings on the sabre on a much later Kolosovka saber (probably Khazar in origin), which I later regretted. My initial reasoning was to show off the kind of decoration fit for a royal figure like Shinjo, which Kolosovka saber has in ample supply; however, it is a much later saber, dating from at least 9^(th) century (and probably into 10^(th)). While functionally it undoubtedly belongs to the same type of early sabers, its ornamentation is of a decidedly different (and later) culture. Now, this kind of artistic license is perfectly acceptable in fantasy, but the pedant in me still regrets that decision just a tiny bit, wishing I’d chosen a more period-accurate Turkic sword.

Panjakent mural: depictions of lamellar armor.

Quiver from a Panjakent mural (detail).

Potential early saber on a Panjakent mural (detail).

Turkic kurgan stele, Tuva, 7th to 9th century. Note the sword and the characteristic belt plates.

Saber and single-edged sword finds in Kolosovka, 9th-10th century. 1 & 2 is the saber that served as an inspiration for Shinjo's.

The same Kolosovka saber, modern replica.

 

I’d like to express my gratitude to Eran ud Turan, a living history group dedicated to researching and reenacting the material culture of Early Medieval Iran and Central Asia. Their work has been of immense help in my research.

And naturally, I’d also like to thank RageRat for letting the images in my head come to life.

 

Next up: Doji, the Beauty in the Snowflake.

I was wondering if anyone here tried one before? I like the mix of combat and social aspects. Is it a viable subclass for longer campaigns? What are his strengths and weaknesses?

Hi I am new to the game and have joined a new 4th edition campaign.

I am playing as a Crane, Kakita Bushi.

I was looking into things for my characters advancement and came across the advanced school called Kenshinzen, but it has high stat requirements, specifically Fire - 5 and void - 4.

I currently have stats of:
Air - 3
Earth - 2
Fire - 2
Water - 2
Void - 2

I guess my questions are:

1. what is the difference between the two schools
2. am I cooked 😅, is it too late to pivot into a different school
3. which one is better/is it worth i

t - subjective I know, but I am curious to hear what people think.

When creating my character I was wanting to try and play the cliche “one with the blade archetype”.

So I started by making a Kakita duelist. I sunk xp into reflexes and iajitsu. He so should be good in a duel.

Problem is that he has not had a chance to duel anyone yet. We have mainly been playing a social/political/investigation game so far.

We have had one small skirmish but I couldn’t use any of my perks/skills/masteries etc.

So I was thinking of making him more well rounded and suited for combat in general, again to be truly one with the blade in all of its forms, but priority on duels but can certainly hold his own in a normal battle.

Though I don’t know if battles and skirmishes are different from each other. The rulebook seems to use the words interchangeably, though that could just be my poor interpretation or understanding of the rules.

The other reason I want to flesh out his combat abilities is because we have a rather “small” party 4 PCs including myself and 3 NPCs

We have:
Me - crane Kakita bushi
A lion shujenga PC
A dragon investigator PC
A crab monk PC
A scorpion can’t remember his school NPC
A NPC who is a book worm can’t remember her clan or school
A hulking beast of a woman who has a gajin name, Priya and loves her horse. Can’t remember her clan or school A beast, but she seems to love to eating and fighting.
And finally a surly teenager NPC who we have taken custody over as we suspect her to be an ishiken, so we are currently escorting her to the phoenix clan to see if they can confirm our suspicions.

So I fear that me and priya are the only one suited for combat and so would like to improve by abilities

Any thoughts and suggestions are welcome