I started a new thread instead of posting this in the actual 2016 Kotei season thread because I didn't want to distract them from the effort of bringing more Stores into the fray. Go guys and good luck!

However, a Kotei season without story prizes or a Metagame of some sort feels weird.

It seems, as a community, we could do something about that, designing story choices and rewards those Kotei winners could pick.Of course, using the current storyline would be a bad idea. We do not know FFG plans and the risk of having all our efforts swept aside by the official canon seems too great.

It still leaves us with another possibility. We could, as a team, decide of a alternate story environment and go with it. I think there is three choices:

-An alternate timeline like Iron Rokugan, KYD, the Five Rings Heresy (in which the heresy becomes the real clan structure), the Togashi Empire, etc.

-A moment in history less developped. According to the wiki, the reign of many Hantei are a blank state. We could select one of these moments and create a story of a conflict.

-A new alternate timeline developped by us. It could take any number of shapes, but my own personal preference would be a ''Star Trek'' reboot sort of timeline. Tomorrow is reawakened and threathened to destroy the realm of mortals. Since it exists outside time itself, it starts eating reality backwards. The transcendents manage to save some people from destruction by leading their souls into the Realm of Dreams and those heroes coming from many moments in recent history finally kill the threat for good. Time is now back to the Clan Wars era, but all those survivors comes back from the realm of mortals. Using their knowledge of future events, they prevent key moments in history and change the timeline forever.

If you are interested, the first step would be to choose a timeline. I have many ideas for many of them (as some of you might have noticed from the Onyx Empire thread, I'm a big fan of alternate timelines), but I really want a project that would gather as much support and interest as possible.

After, if and when we have this starting point, we would need to identify where we want to go and how the kotei winners could influence the timeline. In the best case scenario, we could end up with a fan setting similar to Heroes of Rokugan.

Whether or not the story prizes mean something entirely depends on FFG after this season.

That was the point of using an alternate storyline and keeping it a fan project. The same logic applies to the 2016 koteis. They are in no way official, but it's good to keep the community alive.

Of course, many questions will almost certainly occur to you as you read this. Foremost among them, you are probably wondering what will happen to our upcoming events, including the Fall Kotei Season and the European Championships. All of these events currently scheduled will go on as planned, as CCG events. We’ll continue collecting the results, and will add those to our list of all currently outstanding tournament and event results. All of this will be provided to FFG, who will do their best to incorporate it into L5R and its setting once they’ve relaunched the Brand.

So it can be assumed that some sort of agreement has been reached, wherein the story prizes for this year's events will count, but in a form that is at this time unknown.

I'm talking about this:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/189209-2016-kotei-season/

This is an upcoming fan Kotei season and not the current one.

It's not a bad idea. I would definitely go with an alternate timeline, myself, to make it clear that it isn't a sanctioned storyline. Or,make it something taking place in other realms, like the Realm of Thwarted Destiny. Perhaps, something affecting existence requiring heroes/villains from across the realms to be gathered again, like the fallen gods of the Ivory Kingdoms rising.

But, KYD would probably garner the most interest.

Whether or not the story prizes mean something entirely depends on FFG after this season.

AEG did say this , though:

Of course, many questions will almost certainly occur to you as you read this. Foremost among them, you are probably wondering what will happen to our upcoming events, including the Fall Kotei Season and the European Championships. All of these events currently scheduled will go on as planned, as CCG events. We’ll continue collecting the results, and will add those to our list of all currently outstanding tournament and event results. All of this will be provided to FFG, who will do their best to incorporate it into L5R and its setting once they’ve relaunched the Brand.

So it can be assumed that some sort of agreement has been reached, wherein the story prizes for this year's events will count, but in a form that is at this time unknown.

That's why I posted what I did. Ultimately whatever FFG uses from the fall season depends on them. It does offer up a chance that we'll see some cards based on the tournament choices, if only in flavor or as a reference.