55 minutes ago, Kakita Shiro said:

What if they just dumped everything post-Goddess IV? We'd restart with Iweko I and the Age of Exploration.

So there's another chance for Chiisai?

Just now, kempy said:

So there's another chance for Chiisai?

Yes, but that's on AEG not the story itself.

1 hour ago, Kakita Shiro said:

What if they just dumped everything post-Goddess IV? We'd restart with Iweko I and the Age of Exploration.

if FFG had put me in charge, its what i'd do. obviously, spider's role in rokugan is problematic. restarting here lets them take a new swing at it. similarly, and this is just my opinion, it lets them take another try at Kanpeki, who i think is emblematic of many of the problems with the Spider. i'm sure other clan partisans have things they think are major screwups with ivory, but i think we can probably all agree that the spider's schizophrenic role, as represented by turning Daigotsu's prophesied "most powerful shugenja of all time" son into a WWF looking monk/courtier/samurai mishmash, is one of the more egregious. i'm not saying i wanted Dags 2.0 but making Kanpeki everything EXCEPT what he was supposed to be, and what it would have been reasonable to expect him to be, given his lineage, and thereby dragging his clan in a bunch of directions, was just an epic miss in my opinion.

there were ways to make the spider work, ways that were actually expressed in the fiction at that time, but never capitalized upon. possibly because AEG didn't really know what the onibutts they were doing while they were doing it. i think, with the 20/20 hindsight of EE/Ivory/20F, you could probably construct a much more coherent narrative for the spider, which would have a pretty wide ripple effect on the entire story.

I remember hearing a rumor that the original plan was for Fu Leng to be purified/redeemed and that to be the reason why the Spider were recognized as a Great Clan. The way the rumor got told, the reason for scrapping that plan was that it would have alienated the part of the playerbase who really wanted the Spider to be the evil Horde of yore, which I can see being a problem -- though less of a problem than the "little from Column A, little from Column B" incoherence we got instead. And of course I have no idea whether there's any truth to the rumor or not.

But man, I weep for lost opportunities. That is a Spider Clan story I would have given my left arm to see.

If they were going to rewind and reboot at some prior point of the story, I'm not sure why they would, out of all the places in the story, choose to go back to just after one of the most hated stories in the history of the game (GIV) and then replay through a time in the story that was rancorous among the playerbase and not particularly well-loved.

My personal (and entirely speculative) opinion is that they aren't going to rewind to anywhere, but I at least get the draw of doing something like revisiting a super-popular, iconic story like Clan Wars. But reliving endless fighting about the Spider being made a Great Clan? *shudders* No thanks.