@sndwurks: D&D5E is actually Pathfinder's biggest competitor. What I mean is, Pathfinder took the lead as WotC rolled up D&D4E. But 5E has recaptured the territory. One of the key strategies for doing so was broadening 5E's appeal beyond the existing 3E/Pathfinder or 4E player bases. FFG needs to basically do the same with the L5R license more broadly.

Which I feel can be done better with thematic reboot than a "canon" reboot.

There is also the argument against the Star Wars EU analogy in specific, being that Disney is not returning to the timeline of Episode 4. They are advancing the timeline forward and moving to a thematic reboot as well. The continuity of L5R is not the continuity of Star Wars EU, after all. The continuity of L5R is the continuity of the Star Wars films.

Its like the Star Trek reboot. Its shiny, its new, it lensflares... its just not close to as good as the originals and shouldnt have tried to tell the same stories a different way.

Which of the originals? Because some of those original episodes and films were real stinkers. Others were great.

Likewise, the first reboot film was pretty fun, but I felt Into Darkness was fairly dire (though even that has its fans, I assume).

Faithful to the original or not, in any medium, really has little bearing on whether something is "good" by most measures of such things.

@sndwurks: D&D5E is actually Pathfinder's biggest competitor. What I mean is, Pathfinder took the lead as WotC rolled up D&D4E. But 5E has recaptured the territory. One of the key strategies for doing so was broadening 5E's appeal beyond the existing 3E/Pathfinder or 4E player bases. FFG needs to basically do the same with the L5R license more broadly.

I feel that you have oversimplified your case here, so I am going to address it before jumping to what FFG/L5R can take away from it. The move from D&D 3e to 4e was an attempt to revamp the rules, appeal to a new generation of gamers raised on video games and MMOs, and take the brand in a new direction. This move was largely mixed due to problematic brand decisions and a failure to properly market and present the new edition to current and old gamers. Pathfinder took the 3E engine and fixed a few things and marketed it directly to the 3E players who did not wish to give up the system that they wanted to play. As D&D found its market share shrinking, they decided to move in a new direction, drawing on the surge of "retroclones" and creating a game with an old-school feel combined with modern design sensibilities, which has led to 5E. Time will tell if this move will strength the outlook on the brand.

And now back to L5R, FFG stands in a position similar to WOTC toward the end of the 3E's lifecycle, in that they have a property that has been struggling and a critical decision must be made. Do they take the Pathfinder route, keeping the system essentially the same, filing off some of the problems and repackaging the same system as something new? Or do we see a huge shift in the design, composition, and setting of L5R akin to those seen with 4E? Or perhaps they take a page from 5E, emulating the feel while updating the system? None of us truly know, and since the property has changed hands to a new company, we can imagine that they will have more flexibility to make bold decisions free of the constraints that AEG likely found itself.

(Note: The CCG [now LCG] and RPG will likely be approached much differently in terms of how much to change, so we could easily see radical shifts in one with more conservative revision in the other.)

Except that the Clans that it introduces aren't acting the way those Clans "should" act -- the way that exemplifies the traits that players find likable and resonant.

Well, if you're genuinely rebooting and retelling the Clan War story, they're free to have the clans behave more in a way we would recognize today as characteristic of those clans. If that means reengineering the story a bit, since they wouldn't be bound by extant canon in a reboot, they'd be free to do that.

I'm agnostic on reboot vs. continuation (with ignoring a bunch of stuff) vs. what people seem to be calling a "thematic reboot," but many of the issues being raised with each have solutions that are readily available. Here, it's actually "baked in" to the idea of a reboot.

@Osmos

So there is the old saw about 4E being marketed to the MMO generation and there is certainly truth to that. I think former WotC employees have flat out said as much. I remember one ad that explicitly contrasted playing 4E to playing online. Plus there are all the implicit arguments that you could make about how the game itself is structured. So sure there is truth to the idea that WotC went after the demographic playing MMOs. The obvious-in-hindsight issue was that MMOs are not interchangeable with tabletop roleplaying games. People who want to play WoW do not necessarily want to write a character sheet and roll dice. And they might legitimately wonder why playing out a MMO-stylized RPG "in longhand" or "by analog" so to speak has any advantages over playing actual MMOs. We'll come back to this.

Now the mistake almost everybody makes when talking about the failure of D&D4E is conflating it with the success of Pathfinder. This is very important: Pathfinder did not succeed because Fourth Edition failed . What actually happened is that Paizo was already a key player in the market for D&D 3.X materials. That is, existing 3.X customers were already Paizo's customers before anyone (including Paizo) had a clue that Fourth Edition would entail major business changes that would, among other things, cut Paizo out of WotC's D&D-branded business. When WotC basically fired Paizo, Paizo was therefore already in a position to simply pivot into Alpha and Beta on Pathfinder right down to republishing their own 3.5-compatible materials to work better with Pathfinder. Everything was already in place, especially the OGL. The crucial takeaway is that Pathfinder succeeded because WotC stepped away from an existing customer base after grooming a third-party to out-compete WotC itself in that space. You might be thinking, what was WotC thinking? The 3.5 player base definitely thought that, and the result was a fresh Edition War. But for a subsidiary of Hasbro, this move made sense. The space they left was simply not big enough for them. The thinking was, there is a larger market out there for D&D (see above).

Okay -- is there anything to learn from this in terms of FFG buying L5R and abandoning the CCG model for its own LCG model? Well, there is not much to learn from the story of why Pathfinder succeeded. The only thing AEG is really handing over to FFG, in terms of customers, has to do with the setting. That's the one thing WotC took away from Paizo. There probably is something we can glean from the separate story of D&D4E's failure, however: you cannot assume that customers of one kind of product will automatically like a completely different kind of product just because you market it to them. WotC itself seemed to take this lesson to heart when it set out to develop D&D5E. Fifth Edition was marketed from its inception to people who want to play tabletop RPGs rather than to MMO players who can theoretically be transformed into tabletop RPG players. Hasbro/WotC was correct back in 2007-08: there was a bigger market for D&D than the 3.5 player base they effectively turned over to Paizo. But they looked for those customers in the wrong place.

As it turns out, there are people out there who never played any tabletop RPGs before who wanted to try them. Now D&D is right back on top of those ICv2 polls. Similarly, I strongly suspect FFG believes there are a lot of people out there who have never played the L5R CCG or the RPGs who want to -- even if they don't know it yet.

The distinction between the Star Wars movies and "everything else" is irrelevant. In fact, not even Disney cares about that distinction. But before we get blown off-course, let's go back to basics.

For our purposes, let's distinguish between the folks who create, own, publish, manage, etc., IPs, franchises, licenses, products, etc., on the one hand and the folks who purchase, use, discuss, experience, etc., products on the other hand. We'll call the former developers and the latter consumers. When the product involves characters, setting, story, and plot, developers need to ensure there is some amount of continuity. Not all continuity is strictly maintained. It really depends on how an IP is marketed. Generally speaking, there has been a shift in US audiences toward a preference for stricter continuity -- especially since the late 1990s.

Continuity is not equally important to all consumers. Some people don't care about it at all. Some only care about it broadly. Others, called fans, care really deeply about it -- often times to a degree that the developers did not intend or foresee. If you study the history of sci fi and fantasy "fandom" from the 1960s, you'll find that it was consumers rather than developers who formed communities (through conventions and newsletters before the internet) united by their obsessive interest in IPs like comic book super heroes, the Lovecraft/Derleth mythos, Star Trek, Godzilla, Star Wars, etc., etc. The notion of canon, a detailed and coherent account of a fictional setting , came out of fandom.

So how did this concept come to mean "official" or "authoritative"?

By the late 1980s, developers were just beginning to realize the profit potential in marketing to self-organized fan communities. By the mid 1990s, IPs that had been basically defunct were being revitalized in part thanks to fan groups keeping interest alive while developers were busy elsewhere. Star Wars, for example, came back in a big way: after nearly a decade of basically nothing, there was an explosion of comics, novels, action figures, video games, etc., and ultimately Episode I in 1999. By that time, the unofficial fan community had been coopted into the official fan club, which was an important marketing tool in the strategy to kick the Star Wars IP back into full gear for the Prequels. One example really stands out among all others, for the purposes of this conversation: LucasFilm hired Leland Chee to oversee continuity. Chee had heretofore been a fan doing QA with LucasArts. These days, Chee is working with Disney on deconstructing the previous continuity. Because Disney is perhaps the company that best understands the value to be leveraged from how fans consume an IP, i.e. , canon.

Okay, so I went ahead and got deeply into the tangent I wanted to avoid but again the historical analysis here really just leads us back to these same two crucial takeaways:

(1) creators primarily care about continuity; canon is primarily a fan issue

(2) de-canonization doesn't have to mean information is irrelevant

So we can forget about debating the "levels" of Star Wars canon or whatever else about Star Wars. What the Disney example demonstrates (the two points above) is brand-agnostic. These points completely apply to FFG's position vis-a-vis L5R.

I would be wary to use Disney and the revival of the Star Wars movie as a point of reference. At least until the first movie comes out.

For all we know, it could be a complete disaster and everything we love about the franchise will be pushed aside and even the new trilogy (1-2-3) will look like masterpieces in comparison.

My point is, we don't know until FFG gives more details about how they want to use their newly acquired IP and we see how it actually turns out.

@Tetsuhiko:

Sure, we have no idea whether L5R will be a success under FFG's ownership. I agree completely. What I'm trying to point out ITT is more about catching certain assumptions we L5R fans are making as we anxiously await more info. A lot of the discussion on this board, for example, assumes X will be "in" or "out" going forward. Even just today you can see us debating about whether Clan War would make a good jumping off point, with folks weighing in on the assumption that FFG would just literally re-run Clan War exactly as it previously went. But they don't have to. They can take whatever they want and, in the Disney model, nothing is "in" until they say so -- but crucially, that doesn't necessarily mean everything else is "out."

As someone with less than a year of play in my mawashi here is my view of the situation. As FFG has been known to include lore with each set of netrunner cards and there is a lot of great lore buit up. The problem is most of us newbies have no idea about most of the lore. All my knowlage is stuff I got from the L5R wiki and all of that realates soly to crab clan. What FFG needs to do is not restart but retell. Perhaps with a few small changes but let new people know about the ritch history of the clans.

@Manchu

I was not necessarily conflating 4E's failure and PF's success. Both happened for very different reasons. I still maintain that 4E could have done much better than it did, but a series of missteps, including the layout of the books, the powercreep of the game, and bad marketing, all contributed to an overall negative perception of the product. Having played and appreciated the system for what it was , I was still critical of some of the choices that WotC made. Likewise, PF was already entrenched in the 3.X market and due to WotC's much more restrictive license, capitalized on the segment of players who did not wish to migrate to a new system. It was a successful move that has allowed Paizo to be very successful, but with the resurgence of interest in 5E, who knows what that will do to their market position. The point is that both companies chose different strategies to the ending of 3.5 that had differing degrees of success.

Now, it is helpful for our discussions because FFG stands in an interesting position. It can do quite a lot of things with the brand, the card game, the RPG, and other future product lines, but the philosophical question that everyone attempts to answer is how much should FFG change the product. For me, I have no say in how much they should or should not change. I am currently not a game designer, so I leave those pointed questions to those who have the best background to make them. While I have my own personal preferences for how much needs to change, and spend some time on these boards saying so, I realize that at the end of the day, FFG needs to approach the brand in their own way and make critical decisions to ensure its longevity.

At this point, I do not think we are going to convince each other of anything, Manchu, but thank you very much for this discussion.

My final point is that continuity is what has kept L5R alive these 20 years, and it did that by reaching out to its community to build its story. The people who have been writing this story for the past 15 years in some cases were people who came to the game as fans. The history of storyline prizes also built that world. L5R's chief selling point in the market was that continuity and interactivity.

By removing the continuity to the past, FFG would be taking steps which would be extremely unpopular with the established player base. Even if by doing so, they make the game more accessible, it will be difficult to get those players back. Now, if they were making a different form of media? That might be okay, but the card gaming market is not that big. Resetting the storyline back to the Clan War is an unnecessary action, when the same results can be achieved through a thematic reboot.

Kept it alive or kept it on life support?

All existing fans of this IP need to face the fact that we're not going to cut it for FFG. (And honestly the writing is on the wall for CCG players.) Like any business, FFG needs new customers -- and beyond being a source of revenue for FFG, the IP itself needs new fans. What I'm hoping for is, L5R will not merely survive but thrive under FFG's stewardship. I believe the potential is there. For all its riches, L5R currently has accessibility issues both mechanically and in terms of its setting and storyline.

I honestly don't know what is meant by "thematic reboot." The only clue snwurks gave is that this would make the Clans distinct. But I honestly think they are already distinct.

Just wanting to touch on the Crab clan. What makes characters (and clans can be considered characters in the sense that they have an identity and flavor of their own) is change. Character development is what makes stories interesting and worth reading. The Kuni family was happy to use the taint to their advantage, and seeing a hero become corrupted trying to use the enemy's power is a theme seen over and over again in literature, especially in a fantasy setting. The Crab, as the hardened defenders of Rokugan against the outside hordes, succumbed to temptation and hardness because they're only human. What makes a Crab a Crab is NOT who/what they ally with. It's how they act and why they make the choices they make. The Crab didn't like being unappreciated by the rest of the clans and didn't have time or interest in observing all the niceties and tea ceremonies. They had a job to do, and rudeness was a non-issue compared with the threat of absolute destruction. They, like every person, thought they were RIGHT. And when people think they are right, they sometimes make choices that betray their own values and duty. That's just good storytelling.

Where is it stated that the Kuni happily use the taint for their advantage?

Everything I've read says that they're willing to study it , to understand their enemy, unlike most Rokugani.

Where is it stated that the Kuni happily use the taint for their advantage?

Everything I've read says that they're willing to study it , to understand their enemy, unlike most Rokugani.

That's the same thing, in my mind. My source is the Way of the Crab book, 1st Ed and I'm putting it in my own words from memory. The book is not in my hands right at this moment.

Using taint for advantage, under most interpretations, sounds quite close to accepting the taint, which isn't part of their methods. Every source I've read on the Kuni as a whole has shown them willing to use every weapon against the Shadowlands, up to and including the Crab's own tainted samurai, but unwilling to budge on the matter of actively choosing to be tainted.

Using taint for advantage, under most interpretations, sounds quite close to accepting the taint, which isn't part of their methods. Every source I've read on the Kuni as a whole has shown them willing to use every weapon against the Shadowlands, up to and including the Crab's own tainted samurai, but unwilling to budge on the matter of actively choosing to be tainted.

I tend to agree with that assessment. I've always thought of them as the symptom implying the rotten core that had infested the Clan, that indicated the general direction the Crab would be headed in during their rebellion.

Having the shock announcement wore off now... I think that FFG is in a good position to just reset the game. mechanic wise, It's best that they introduce something new entirely if it would fix the existing baggage that current L5R have now. Better to create a new game from ground up rather than trying to keep the old format and fail badly at it.

Story/Lore. That's what mostly concern the current players. I think the players have accepted that FFG will change a lot of things mechanically. But of course, being L5R, most people are invested into a clan or two that they like and would prefer that they preserve them. That's cool. It's what makes L5R being L5R.

However, I think it's also quite good for FFG to just make a time skip of a few hundred years. The onyx edition will forever be known as the "The Dark War of Seals/Spider's Betrayal" in which the story probably takes place within 10 years after Evil Portents, which of course can go either way... But for FFG new product, it's been 200 years later since the dark war of seals. The land was at peace for the last 150 years...... and of course, at the start of the new LCG, trouble starts brewing around the corner by a new/old unknown threat.

That would solve FFG need to preserve the story, since it's their IP anyway, to retcon the entire thing would be a waste since they own the material anyway. Why retcon your own stuff? Just move forward wayyyyy beyond it. So FFG can throw a bone or two as easter egg mentioned in flavour text for the rich history of l5r, yet at the same time move ahead with a new story. So it's a new fresh start for everyone.. veteran and new players alike. New Emperor, new clan champion. Some clan might no longer exist... that sort of thing. They will have more freedom to go wherever they want and yet have the current history at the background.

Personally I'm more excited to see Emerald Empire (R2K).... flying Fortress of the Crab? Yezza... but that might clash with their netrunner series... but who knows, it's their IP now. If they think samurai in space works, if properly done, it might just work.

Using taint for advantage, under most interpretations, sounds quite close to accepting the taint, which isn't part of their methods. Every source I've read on the Kuni as a whole has shown them willing to use every weapon against the Shadowlands, up to and including the Crab's own tainted samurai, but unwilling to budge on the matter of actively choosing to be tainted.

I tend to agree with that assessment. I've always thought of them as the symptom implying the rotten core that had infested the Clan, that indicated the general direction the Crab would be headed in during their rebellion.

Sun Tzu would be spinning in his grave... "Know your enemy." At least the Kuni understand that.

Kept it alive or kept it on life support?

All existing fans of this IP need to face the fact that we're not going to cut it for FFG. (And honestly the writing is on the wall for CCG players.) Like any business, FFG needs new customers -- and beyond being a source of revenue for FFG, the IP itself needs new fans. What I'm hoping for is, L5R will not merely survive but thrive under FFG's stewardship. I believe the potential is there. For all its riches, L5R currently has accessibility issues both mechanically and in terms of its setting and storyline.

Yeah, this is key for me. Something needs to change if this game is going to succeed and survive.

I have a lot of thoughts on what could change, but it doesn't need to be any of those things, it could be an entirely different set of things FFG comes up with.

But trying to make L5R keep going as is, even taking the philosophies that ran the CCG and trying to squeeze them into an LCG box, just isn't going to work.

Accessibility is *huge,* and that means taking a hard look at all the shibboleths, all the things that make L5R players nod and go, "That's what makes us L5R players, and what makes L5R unique," and realize that everything that makes them feel like part of a specific, separate culture from other games, makes other gamers feel the same way. And L5R can't survive without those other gamers.

Kept it alive or kept it on life support?

All existing fans of this IP need to face the fact that we're not going to cut it for FFG. (And honestly the writing is on the wall for CCG players.) Like any business, FFG needs new customers -- and beyond being a source of revenue for FFG, the IP itself needs new fans. What I'm hoping for is, L5R will not merely survive but thrive under FFG's stewardship. I believe the potential is there. For all its riches, L5R currently has accessibility issues both mechanically and in terms of its setting and storyline.

I honestly don't know what is meant by "thematic reboot." The only clue snwurks gave is that this would make the Clans distinct. But I honestly think they are already distinct.

A Thematic Reboot is similar to what was done with the new series of Doctor Who. When Doctor Who went off the air in 1989, there was an attempt to restart the series with a film / backdoor pilot in 1996. It did not succeed. It was not until 2005, when the BBC started up with a new series of Doctor Who, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, that it caught on again to the successful show that has been running for the last 10 years. Part of the reason it succeeded is because it refocused the show on the core conceit of Doctor Who, that he is specifically a weird time-travelling alien in a blue Police Call Box who vaunts off with young British women for wacky adventures.

The 2005 series of Doctor Who was accessible to new fans of the show, while still enticing to old fans of the show. It maintained the continuity of the show, while updating the game for modern audiences.

In the case of L5R, a thematic reboot would be to move the continuity forward to a point where many of the characters we know are no longer present. This is easily done by moving it to the reign of Iweko X (not 10, but a future Iweko of some kind). Iweko X is a young, weak emperor incapable of keeping the Clans in check. A recent rebellion by one Great Clan led to a harsh punishment placed on them, leaving them in a weakened state. Enough of the Great Clans look upon this act as a mistake, either being too harsh or not harsh enough, to show the Emperor as being foolish. As the Emperor struggles to appear relevant, one Great Clan moves against another Great Clan for power or to settle an old grudge.

And thus, we have the same situation leading into the Clan War, approachable to new players without the baggage of the Second Day of Thunder hanging over its head. It allows you to form the Great Clans along their iconic lines, and it allows you to make call backs to the previous continuity without invalidating it.

If we remove the 20 years of continuity, what IS Legend of the Five Rings? If you remove the interactive story, the history built by the community, and the mechanics of the game itself, what is left? Preserve at least one of these, and FFG will make significant in roads to preserving the player base that presently exists and turning them into ambassadors for the brand. Out of these three, the continuity is the easiest to preserve.

Doctor Who is now and has always been about an alien with a police box-shaped time machine who picks up British girls. Where's the reboot, "thematic" or otherwise?

If there is any lesson about continuity to be learned from Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, it's that continuity should not get in the way of developers telling new stories so that an IP can do more than simply survive; it can explode to new levels of popularity.

When you look at how the existing L5R setting developed, there is a lot of retroactive and duplicative storytelling. Freezing all that in amber and then fastforwarding to X years in the FUTUUUUURE ... what's the point? What does this achieve?

To me, this is a schizophrenic argument. The motivation behind preserving existing canon seems to be that it's somehow crucial. But by fastforwarding past it, you're constructively shoving it into the background where it won't matter. So is it important or not?

Contrast this to starting with whatever FFG considers are the essential elements and letting the storyline progress organically from there, drawing on the previous canon or not -- whatever makes the most sense for the product line. This is the Disney approach.

Kept it alive or kept it on life support?

All existing fans of this IP need to face the fact that we're not going to cut it for FFG. (And honestly the writing is on the wall for CCG players.) Like any business, FFG needs new customers -- and beyond being a source of revenue for FFG, the IP itself needs new fans. What I'm hoping for is, L5R will not merely survive but thrive under FFG's stewardship. I believe the potential is there. For all its riches, L5R currently has accessibility issues both mechanically and in terms of its setting and storyline.

Yeah, this is key for me. Something needs to change if this game is going to succeed and survive.

I have a lot of thoughts on what could change, but it doesn't need to be any of those things, it could be an entirely different set of things FFG comes up with.

But trying to make L5R keep going as is, even taking the philosophies that ran the CCG and trying to squeeze them into an LCG box, just isn't going to work.

Accessibility is *huge,* and that means taking a hard look at all the shibboleths, all the things that make L5R players nod and go, "That's what makes us L5R players, and what makes L5R unique," and realize that everything that makes them feel like part of a specific, separate culture from other games, makes other gamers feel the same way. And L5R can't survive without those other gamers.

Despite my longtime interest, I would consider myself an outsider to the L5R community at large. I didn't care for 3rd and didn't even try out 4th ed of the RPG, and the card game was not played around here so I never got invested in it. I completely agree with keeping the things that make it uniquely distinct and special.

Also, +1 for using the term shibboleth.

Doctor Who is now and has always been about an alien with a police box-shaped time machine who picks up British girls. Where's the reboot, "thematic" or otherwise?

If there is any lesson about continuity to be learned from Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, it's that continuity should not get in the way of developers telling new stories so that an IP can do more than simply survive; it can explode to new levels of popularity.

When you look at how the existing L5R setting developed, there is a lot of retroactive and duplicative storytelling. Freezing all that in amber and then fastforwarding to X years in the FUTUUUUURE ... what's the point? What does this achieve?

To me, this is a schizophrenic argument. The motivation behind preserving existing canon seems to be that it's somehow crucial. But by fastforwarding past it, you're constructively shoving it into the background where it won't matter. So is it important or not?

Contrast this to starting with whatever FFG considers are the essential elements and letting the storyline progress organically from there, drawing on the previous canon or not -- whatever makes the most sense for the product line. This is the Disney approach.

Nothing "schizophrenic" about it. Making the existing storyline the base from which it's built, while not making the new game beholden to the plot and setting exactly as the rather awful "Kanpeki's Bad Day" storyline left off at the point of the sale, is probably the best compromise in terms of alienating the fewest existing fans of CCG, RPG, and/or setting, while at the same time providing the least-daunting and least-baggaged starting point for new fans/customers.

Doctor Who is now and has always been about an alien with a police box-shaped time machine who picks up British girls. Where's the reboot, "thematic" or otherwise?

If there is any lesson about continuity to be learned from Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, it's that continuity should not get in the way of developers telling new stories so that an IP can do more than simply survive; it can explode to new levels of popularity.

When you look at how the existing L5R setting developed, there is a lot of retroactive and duplicative storytelling. Freezing all that in amber and then fastforwarding to X years in the FUTUUUUURE ... what's the point? What does this achieve?

To me, this is a schizophrenic argument. The motivation behind preserving existing canon seems to be that it's somehow crucial. But by fastforwarding past it, you're constructively shoving it into the background where it won't matter. So is it important or not?

Contrast this to starting with whatever FFG considers are the essential elements and letting the storyline progress organically from there, drawing on the previous canon or not -- whatever makes the most sense for the product line. This is the Disney approach.

Nothing "schizophrenic" about it. Making the existing storyline the base from which it's built, while not making the new game beholden to the plot and setting exactly as the rather awful "Kanpeki's Bad Day" storyline left off at the point of the sale, is probably the best compromise in terms of alienating the fewest existing fans of CCG, RPG, and/or setting, while at the same time providing the least-daunting and least-baggaged starting point for new fans/customers.

I'd like to see them skip past Kanpeki, resolving his story in the background, and do something with his daughter. About time to have a prime time, female Shadowlands leader that isn't an Oni.