is there a chance my beloved rats will come back? probably the only reason for me to get back into the game
Ratlings?
As much as I would like that. Unlikely.
As single neutral card in "Enemies of the Empire" expansion.
Unless Rich Wulf is randomly hired by FFG, I doubt it.
I'm 900% sure that the RPG will have all sorts of non-human love. I fully expect Naga/Ratling/Ogre/FiveRaces PCs in the core rulebook, no matter how inappropriate they would look like.
Hopefully we can just call them Nezumi and do away with the R-word.
I could see them and other non-humans popping up eventually. I wouldn't expect them in the short term though. Well, except a few baddies like a random oni, goblin, undead, or ogre.
Have my fingers crossed for an early bog hag for the Spider, but that's a different situation.
Weren't they literally erased from having ever existed or something of the sort?
I recall something about the Nezumi being in a way against the spirit of the future or past or something and it kind of did them in entirely and it seemed like it was even more permanent removal than the Naga going back to sleep for 1,000 years.
The creatures really weren't supposed to be a central focus of the game concept and it tended to negatively impact things when they were forced to be crowbarred into literally everything somehow. Its why at various times the game designer decided to just remove them completely from the game as any sort of real force.
They might make it into an RPG expansion book at some point, assuming an RPG is undertaken with any real effort. But the thing is that the creatures, the monsters and the like... well, that would require you to be playing the game in such a way that exploration was a major part and likely require that combat be something that could be undertaken lightly... It was included when L5R was adapted to fit Dungeons and Dragons because... well... they changed everything they could to try to force it to merge with Dungeons and Dragons. Which means it was forced into a mechanical system all about exploration and casual combat.
But really, L5R tends to be more about politics, investigation, perhaps subterfuge and any combat has to be handled rather seriously due to its lethality. One hit and you may well be useless or dead.
So something that is so far out of the central focus of the game and completely removed from the politics, investigations and war games that make up L5R because it isn't integrated into the whole human societal system in any way tends not to fit very well. It is kind of like if you turn on House of Cards, Law and Order or CSI one day and the episode was about a crime that was committed by gremlins against a poltergeists.
They're still around. Not all of them were destroyed or whatever by Tomorrow.
There better be some kind of non human faction or I will be bored again. Samurai edition was crap because they got rid of everything interesting.
They're still around. Not all of them were destroyed or whatever by Tomorrow.
There better be some kind of non human faction or I will be bored again. Samurai edition was crap because they got rid of everything interesting.!?
!? Maw's Grave is SE was just nice one. Just playing Samurai edition tournament in Sun and Moon and including border (IG1, DaK and GotE) expansions it's really nasty deck to play (scored 4-1).
Forgot about Spawning Grounds 2.0 being in SE.
But really, L5R tends to be more about politics, investigation, perhaps subterfuge and any combat has to be handled rather seriously due to its lethality. One hit and you may well be useless or dead.
All these things can be spiced up by having non-humans around, resulting in much more enjoyable stories than your Standard Rokugani Samurai Drama . Facing off an arrogant Ashalan courtier who sees you as a child, getting weird and confusing clues from a crime scene because the perpetrator was a Naga, outwitting Nezumi infiltrators, or challenging a Crane courtier to death only to have her name her Ogre bodyguard as her champion are all things that allows the GM to put the adventure into an overdrive and present a highly unusual challenge by throwing the normal human limitations out of the window.
But really, L5R tends to be more about politics, investigation, perhaps subterfuge and any combat has to be handled rather seriously due to its lethality. One hit and you may well be useless or dead.
All these things can be spiced up by having non-humans around, resulting in much more enjoyable stories than your Standard Rokugani Samurai Drama . Facing off an arrogant Ashalan courtier who sees you as a child, getting weird and confusing clues from a crime scene because the perpetrator was a Naga, outwitting Nezumi infiltrators, or challenging a Crane courtier to death only to have her name her Ogre bodyguard as her champion are all things that allows the GM to put the adventure into an overdrive and present a highly unusual challenge by throwing the normal human limitations out of the window.
Personally, all of that is less enjoyable for me than human equivalents.
But really, L5R tends to be more about politics, investigation, perhaps subterfuge and any combat has to be handled rather seriously due to its lethality. One hit and you may well be useless or dead.
All these things can be spiced up by having non-humans around, resulting in much more enjoyable stories than your Standard Rokugani Samurai Drama . Facing off an arrogant Ashalan courtier who sees you as a child, getting weird and confusing clues from a crime scene because the perpetrator was a Naga, outwitting Nezumi infiltrators, or challenging a Crane courtier to death only to have her name her Ogre bodyguard as her champion are all things that allows the GM to put the adventure into an overdrive and present a highly unusual challenge by throwing the normal human limitations out of the window.
Personally, all of that is less enjoyable for me than human equivalents.
The whole point is that there are no human equivalents
.
But really, L5R tends to be more about politics, investigation, perhaps subterfuge and any combat has to be handled rather seriously due to its lethality. One hit and you may well be useless or dead.
All these things can be spiced up by having non-humans around, resulting in much more enjoyable stories than your Standard Rokugani Samurai Drama . Facing off an arrogant Ashalan courtier who sees you as a child, getting weird and confusing clues from a crime scene because the perpetrator was a Naga, outwitting Nezumi infiltrators, or challenging a Crane courtier to death only to have her name her Ogre bodyguard as her champion are all things that allows the GM to put the adventure into an overdrive and present a highly unusual challenge by throwing the normal human limitations out of the window.
Personally, all of that is less enjoyable for me than human equivalents.
The whole point is that there are no human equivalents
Nonhumans are awful.
Non humans were the best part. I want the shadowlands back as they were at the least. If it's just different coloured samurai again will be a big old yawn fest.
But really, L5R tends to be more about politics, investigation, perhaps subterfuge and any combat has to be handled rather seriously due to its lethality. One hit and you may well be useless or dead.
All these things can be spiced up by having non-humans around, resulting in much more enjoyable stories than your Standard Rokugani Samurai Drama . Facing off an arrogant Ashalan courtier who sees you as a child, getting weird and confusing clues from a crime scene because the perpetrator was a Naga, outwitting Nezumi infiltrators, or challenging a Crane courtier to death only to have her name her Ogre bodyguard as her champion are all things that allows the GM to put the adventure into an overdrive and present a highly unusual challenge by throwing the normal human limitations out of the window.
Personally, all of that is less enjoyable for me than human equivalents.
The whole point is that there are no human equivalents
Actually, it is inevitable that there are. It really is.
Happens any time when you put supposedly "alien" species into your setting...
In fantasy you get your elves, orcs, dwarfs, halflings, goblins, etc.
In Star Trek you have your vulcans, klingons, romulans, ferengi, cardassians...
In Star Wars you have your romanians, twi'leks, hutts, gungan, wookies, bothan....
Here is the thing. They all end up just being humans in funny masks. Even those times you give them different numbers of limbs or non-humanoid body shapes. Even when one gives them a full made-up language or a funny way of talking or gives them universally some sort of communication deficient... they all just end up being humans in masks. Their drives, their motivations, their goals, their fears, their rational, their faiths.... it is all going to be based on humans.
Actually, you know what? That's giving it too much credit. You see, what actually happens? They are less than human.
If you have a human well.... anything.... there is no real telling for sure much of anything about the individual. Maybe you'll get some clues based on physical appearance and maybe what you can tell about their organizational affiliations, but that's about it. The individual could be just about any mix of traits below that.
But once you have an individual who isn't human-- there is a strong tendency to make them all identical. Instead of recognizing that a single society, let alone a species that likely has many different distinct societies with little to no connection to one another, is going to run the total gamut of personality types and specialization and ethics and ways of understanding the world so that they could survive in a world where they all have different roles within the necessary complex societies necessary that these sentient species could all survive.....
Rather instead just knowing the species, you know a lot about their personality. You may be able to automatically discern their spiritual views, their favorite food, their most notable skills, their favorite past time, their general temperament, their ethics, etc. All based on their species alone. You could have 10,000 of them and they will not show the diversity in personality you would find in a single small village of humans.
In fact, often the whole species is built around a single trait to such a degree that absolutely everything, everything , about them must tie back into that trait. Their arts, their religion, their ethical codes, their pursuits, their interests.... vulcans do science, klingons do war, ferengi do money... and that is all they do and that is all a member of that species could ever do in every single facet of their lives or they become a pariah to their whole species.
Think about it this way. You are walking through the desert, thinking you are getting close to civilization. You got caught in a sandstorm and have run out of food and water. You see a group of figures on the distance, they don't seem to spot you yet but you can tell out to them. Do you call out for help....
1) if the group are humans?
2) if the group are elves and dwarfs?
3) if the group are hobgoblins and orcs?
Unless you are working with a storyteller who is intentionally aiming to subvert expectations, the correct answers are
1) can you give me more information about how they look?
2) Oh, yes!! I am saved!!
3) I hide as best I can! I am in no shape for a fight and that's the only possible outcome to getting their attention.
Species alone, only humans can be complex enough creatures that there need be any hanging questions about their morality.
This does not make these other people "compellingly not human" because by all means you could have a human who has all of these non-physical and non-mystical traits, who is otherwise identical to this race. All that has been done is clone this single extreme human thousands of times and call it a "race". And really, the end result of it is such that this species as presented could not remotely imaginably form the necessary society to create the things that they have within the world. They generally lack the diverse specializations and views necessary to make their tools and create their buildings and form their languages and even successfully breed and raise their children to adulthood.
What is automatically far worse than that is that when you are dealing with L5R.... you are already dealing with a breed of human who has been set up to be one of these alien species. As much as L5R has gone around claiming it is about samurai-- it isn't. It is about klingons. The people who designed the game had so very many ignorant and just plain false information about what samurai were, how samurai behaved and how the society actually worked and set that down as their canonical groundwork and never fixed it. They took the most extreme stories of single individuals and implemented them as if they were a norm that everyone was supposed to be somehow living up to at all times lest they be compelled to gut themselves like a fish.
The very idea that the people of Rokugan act remotely like real people and take realistic approaches to their problems and deal with things in a way that use any sort of common sense was utterly thrown out because someone ignorantly heard third hand about some misunderstanding about how things were handled in feudal Japan and thought that should be how things are done in Rokugan. But what you end up with?... Its a world in which no one could imaginably survive long enough to create the next generation without seriously thick plot armor protecting them from the consequences of the broken societal rules that no actual society would ever have put into place.
So since you are already dealing with humans who have to act according to the nonsense expectations that nonhuman characters usually have to be created within, once you add nonhumans to the mix their spectrum of allowable personality traits becomes so very narrow as to not allow for well... much of anything. Instead you are left with basically one personality for the entire species and have to rely heavily upon extreme physical features and/or a lack of ability to communicate clearly and functionally to indicate that they are meant to be alien.
Non humans were the best part. I want the shadowlands back as they were at the least. If it's just different coloured samurai again will be a big old yawn fest.
And this is where it gets weird. There are some game worlds where I might tend to agree with you. Games about exploration of the frontier and combating big nasty beasties, perhaps a variety in size and shape becomes desirable. Let's say we want to use those unrealistic stereotypes that nonhuman characters are more or less required to be. If one is choosing to make their character a dwarf, they are conveying a lot of information about that character's background, origin, belief system, leisure activities, prejudices, etc. And one is conveying a different set of information if they choose to play a gnome or a dark elf or another properly developed and explored race. As silly as it is to posit that everyone in the society could act in the same manner and somehow still have a "society" is ridiculous, but to short-hand info dump it works.
The color-coded uniforms in L5R already convey all of that information. If one is wearing Mantis green, there is every reason to expect the person comes from an island, is used to riding on boats, is good with a bow, is neither the paragon of honor nor the most dastardly of people and will have a weakness for money.
You tell me you are a snake man and... well.... look, 90% of the humans in the society aren't even trusted with basic weaponry, have no human rights and can be killed on a whim, our society is completely xenophobic and unable to deal with the lightly lighter or darker skinned people who live beyond our borders and we are liable to kill any of them upon first sight and destroy everything they are carrying in order to get rid of any possible blight of the curse of foreignism.....
So how exactly am I supposed to react to you, snake man? Because literally everything indicates I should either be trying to chop your head off as first glance or running away in terror to gather a large enough group to make sure we can do the job right.
Aside from storyteller fiat that suddenly made otherworldly beasts acceptable which blatantly ignores that this is a society of people who find 99% of humanity itself unacceptable before dealing with monsters... what exactly is at play here?
Is Rokugani samurai society as presented really the kind of society that should ever be palling around with mermaids and ratpeople instead of reacting to them 10x more violently and aggressively than they do foreigners or commoners who pick up weapons?
Edited by TheHobgoblyn^ Actually, I was thinking along the line of obvious and hard-to-ignore differences like how the Nezumi have tails, the Naga can crush people with their bodies, and the Ashalan have this ancientest race thing going on. You most likely can't have these with a human even though they mix up things quite a lot.
^ Actually, I was thinking along the line of obvious and hard-to-ignore differences like how the Nezumi have tails, the Naga can crush people with their bodies, and the Ashalan have this ancientest race thing going on. You most likely can't have these with a human even though they mix up things quite a lot.
Okay, and how does that relate to actual story or character?
Remember, the humans of L5R are an elite, classist, racist, xenophobic lot that have some really ridiculous notions of honor and are known to kill over someone failing to live up to some pretty impossible social norms even when they are under the most dire and extreme of circumstances.
Already you are proposing that such people are going to be simply by buddy-buddy with scaly venom-fanged snake people and filthy flea-bitten human sized rats when they aren't even okay with the merchant over there picking up a sword and defending himself from being eaten by zombies. Where if they are about to be eaten by an Ogre and some group of people who spoke a different language whose skin happened to be a little lighter or darker than theirs saved them, they would show their gratitude by charging at them with swords drawn and slaughter every last one of them as "honor demands it".
But, hey-- some random half-fish flesh-eating fish-person arises from the deeps, by all means these same individuals are going to dress the person up in their best finery, declare the monster an honorary member of the elite aristocracy and name her their Pearl Champion... because.... well, story fiat demanded it so.
You really don't see the disconnect here? You don't understand how what we are discussing here is antithetical to literally everything the entire foundation of the fictional society we are speaking about is based on and really ought to cast so much of what they do into question. Surely one can see upon even cursory reflection that this is an artifact of the game that someone put obviously no thought into whatsoever.
And what do you get out of it? That character there has... a tail? In what way, shape or form would a character having a tail ever come into actual meaningful play? At least if you were talking about their spiritual beliefs and methods of warfare or such... well, you would have something to point to that has some sort of actual narrative potential.
They crush their opponents with their bodies? Well, if that is some sort of monster out there that is a threat to the empire and people need to fear, it would be... something. On an actual PC though? It would just be some sort of talent or trick that would serve to be an alternate attack option that would either be powerful enough to be the only combat trick the character ever relies on, be underwhelming enough that there is no reason to ever use it... or would be precisely as effective as anything else the character could perform to deal damage... in other words... how does it actually matter? At the end of the day, combat is still going to boil down to throwing a handful of dice... and in the CCG, even less than that.
What potential was ever actually gained from incorporating those creatures as a core aspect of the game that was more valuable than causing the utter schism of crap that comes from trying to justify that this society treats its own people like animals and refuses to even allow them to be armed knowing full well there are nightmarish creatures abound and would never allow one of them to rise within their society short of imperial edict making one individual the exception regardless of the extent a commoner might go to.... but is more than happy to take a burrow-dwelling, filthy, cowardly rat who can barely speak and has no etiquette or education and instantly adopt them as aristocracy and dress them as a samurai over even the slightest assistance or duty performed in assistance of a samurai?
The answer is... none. Maybe it would have been possible to tell a sensible, compelling story involving the Ratlings had Rokugani society been fundamentally different than presented. But in any Rokugan that would remotely accept Ratlings as equals, you **** well bet that same Rokugan would be arming every Crab village along the wall with muskets, swords and towers for the peasants to man when no samurai are available to respond. You can be sure any such Rokugan would be recruiting commoners and merchants into the samurai class by the thousands to make up for the losses they suffered in the wars against the cosmic forces. You can be absolutely certain that such a Rokugan would have open relations with every other nation in its world and have foreigners flocking across the borders to join the ranks of their clans and they would be bringing every technique and weapon and technology they could to bear in order to stop the current "destroyer of worlds" that currently threatens the empire.
But that isn't the Rokugan that we were given. The one we were given is one was one where there were iron clad prejudices against the vast majority of humanity and every single aspect of lifestyle that was even slightly divergent from their own. Such a Rokugani being as openly accepting and encouraging of monster participation in its elite ranks was just writers being stupid.
Maybe Ratlings on their own, in their own little bubble, are capable of telling a compelling story. If they just had their own little side show that in no deeply meaningful way impacted what the human were doing. Sure, there could be that-- I am perfectly open to accepting that you could even do a compelling campaign regarding the various creatures of Rokugan and how they interact with the humans of the land...
Of course, the problem is always, ALWAYS , it is forgotten that 90% of Rokugan is not a member of some clan with an official family name and a katana at his or her side. That those people if viewed from any perspective but their own are likely to come across as insane, if not downright villainous. That the creatures should be primarily interacting with that other 90%-- the 90% made invisible in the games revolving around the samurai politics and campaigns of war. About the people who live under their tyranny, who are compelled to try to find a way to survive despite having to live under rather insanely strict rules. The ones who are out in these villages and farms with nightmarish monsters roaming throughout the night and are forbidden from even overtly arming themselves to protect themselves, their families and their neighbors against these monsters under threat of death.... And even if they do absolutely everything right, it is still entirely possible that they will be beaten, robbed, killed or compelled into sexual servitude for these overlords for no other reason than it amuses and entertains the overlords. And they are expected to take that with a smile lest their entire family be punished for their uncooperativeness.
Those are the people the creatures should be primarily interacting with. And, you know-- that probably is quite fertile ground for one to grow a real compelling story from. But the problem is, that would require actual proper critical examination of Rokugan and an admission of the difficult aspects that by in large the ones selling the setting absolutely want to hand-wave aside and brush under the rug. Which means since the people the creatures should be interacting with, the ones who it would make sense that they could forge friendships and alliances and have interesting and complex relationships with are intentionally made as absolutely invisible as possible.....
Well, the moment you have creatures, it requires that the creatures interact with and be accepted by and be treated as equals to a group of human beings for whom every aspect of their nature, behavior, values and beliefs indicate that they should instead be violently cut down if they were to ever be spotted by one.
Nonhumans are awful.
That's kinda a funny quote, specially since Kakita supposedly learned the Iaijutsu and his swordmanship from a nonhuman, a Kenku.
Nonhumans are awful.
That's kinda a funny quote, specially since Kakita supposedly learned the Iaijutsu and his swordmanship from a nonhuman, a Kenku.
Filthy rumors.
And don't forget about dragons who are, by definition, your celestial betters. Awful too?
And don't forget about dragons who are, by definition, your celestial betters. Awful too?
Fine as heavenly/mythical beings. That they manifest, awful.
I came in with 4th ed, and there wasn't much Nezumi support/info at least in the books I read. I really don't know much about them, and would love to learn from the community. @Buubba9 and Toqtamish, what did you like about them?
The rest of my post is primarily about comments made by TheHobgoblyn. Elipses (...) were used to indicate portions that I cut for the sake of succinctness.
...
All these things can be spiced up by having non-humans around, resulting in much more enjoyable stories than your Standard Rokugani Samurai Drama ...
Personally, all of that is less enjoyable for me than human equivalents.
The whole point is that there are no human equivalents
Actually, it is inevitable that there are. It really is.
...
Here is the thing. They all end up just being humans in funny masks. ...
Actually, you know what? That's giving it too much credit. You see, what actually happens? They are less than human.
...
But once you have an individual who isn't human-- there is a strong tendency to make them all identical...
In fact, often the whole species is built around a single trait to such a degree that absolutely everything, everything , about them must tie back into that trait...
Species alone, only humans can be complex enough creatures that there need be any hanging questions about their morality.
...
...
@TheHobgoblyn, I share your critique of standard sci-fi/fantasy species treatment: an entire species is often reduced to a single culture, and even a single personality. In the setting that I'm making for my home group--which is sort of standard fare medieval fantasy--I'm specifically trying to work against that tendency.
That said ... so? Everyone gets to play their own game. If some groups have fun by quarantining or caricaturing certain human traits in other species, that's okay. You may not think it logical or narratively sophisticated, but that's okay; it's their game and their fun. You have yours.
To your second post:
^ Actually, I was thinking along the line of obvious and hard-to-ignore differences like how the Nezumi have tails, the Naga can crush people with their bodies, and the Ashalan have this ancientest race thing going on. You most likely can't have these with a human even though they mix up things quite a lot.
Okay, and how does that relate to actual story or character?
...
You really don't see the disconnect here? You don't understand how what we are discussing here is antithetical to literally everything the entire foundation of the fictional society we are speaking about is based on and really ought to cast so much of what they do into question. Surely one can see upon even cursory reflection that this is an artifact of the game that someone put obviously no thought into whatsoever.
And what do you get out of it? That character there has... a tail? ...
What potential was ever actually gained from incorporating those creatures as a core aspect of the game that was more valuable than causing the utter schism of crap that comes from trying to justify that this society treats its own people like animals ... but is more than happy to take a ... rat ... and instantly adopt them as aristocracy ...
The answer is... none ...
I'll reiterate: different groups get to have their own fun. If the fun of playing a rat person or a snake person is merely being such a person, that's okay . If it's fun for some other reason, that's also okay!
It's also perfectly okay to want a logical, complex setting. I, personally, prefer such a setting.
And neither of those is in conflict with each other! Maybe they are in conflict with the L5R source material that's available (which I don't have outside some 4th ed books), but the wonderful part about RPGs is that we can hack them and mod them all we like until we have what we want. (Though that flexibility isn't an excuse to publish a bad game)
So what's my point? Please don't poop on other people's fun. Encourage fun. Promote fun. Inquire about other people's fun when you don't understand it. Provide thoughtful explanations of what is and isn't fun for you ("I" statements are good). So, I request, as one member of the community to another, please don't publish tirades that poop on other people's fun.