22 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

The game is fundamentally about the competition between these various clans. But if everything that gave them identity and pride is gone, everything they have ever been fighting over is gone, if the very reason for their existence and basis of their identity has been stolen and all that remains is whatever number of their people willingly chose to turn tail on their ancestral everything and flee across the sea to fertile grounds...

Well, at that point-- why are there even distinct clans? How are not whatever few handfuls of samurai left not a singular united front-- effectively a single clan aligned against that force that stole everything from them, much like the rebel alliance in Star Wars?

this is a valid point, even without the star wars reference. if the clans are in exile, then theres absolutely no reason to assume the clans will retain their traditional roles, or even reason to assume they'd be fighting eachother. if a new player comes in, and you explain the setting, a reasonable question would be "then why isn't it rokugan vs onyx? why are the clans fighting eachother?", which is i think is a decent argument against onyx.

Every surviving clan has had at least one civil war.

Four clans have attempted or succeeded in coups.

The role of Emperor, the infallible and divine mortal god chosen to lead the world of men, has proven dangerously fallible and corruptible on at least four occasions.

The Sun and Moon have been killed and replaced. Twice.

After a point, it's probably wise to start retconning just so things sound less silly.

13 minutes ago, SirEuain said:

Every surviving clan has had at least one civil war.

Four clans have attempted or succeeded in coups.

The role of Emperor, the infallible and divine mortal god chosen to lead the world of men, has proven dangerously fallible and corruptible on at least four occasions.

The Sun and Moon have been killed and replaced. Twice.

After a point, it's probably wise to start retconning just so things sound less silly.

Most of this in less than 77 years.

1 hour ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

The game is fundamentally about the competition between these various clans. But if everything that gave them identity and pride is gone, everything they have ever been fighting over is gone, if the very reason for their existence and basis of their identity has been stolen and all that remains is whatever number of their people willingly chose to turn tail on their ancestral everything and flee across the sea to fertile grounds...

Well, at that point-- why are there even distinct clans? How are not whatever few handfuls of samurai left not a singular united front-- effectively a single clan aligned against that force that stole everything from them, much like the rebel alliance in Star Wars?

Right after arriving in the colonies, there would be some blending and mixing, as survival is paramount(even if not a struggle). Keeping the traditions and history of your clan would also be important. You would also have every clan pointing at every other clan saying "that was your fault!!", and while this wouldn't be the focus of anyone's thoughts while they need to be "rebuild", the colonies were already established. Once the rebuilding was done, most clans would go to the old hates and blame each other for the rise of Kanpeki.

For me, is not a case of being "too attached to Onyx". Well, as a Spider player, I'd have like my clan having the upper hand at some point, but it's not even that. It's not Onyx; it's Onyx, and Emperor, and Lotus, and Pearl, and Jade, and Obsidian and... all the other ones I'm forgetting right now. It's over twenty years worth of developement. The comparison with the Star Wars EU is quite fallacious. The movies were always the prime mover, and the rest (comics, novels, games) secondary or tertiary stuff. The SW reset, left the crappy prequels, and threw out some very good novels, but that's another discussion. L5R was always one continuing story, with all its ups and downs. Throwing it all off the window feels... wasteful. Much better than a reboot is, as some of you have suggested, a severe time skip, so new players don't feel left out, and leave what happened before for the RPG. That, I could get behind.

Functionally, a time skip is not different from a reset.

Assuming of course that if they did a reset they wouldn't just do the same stories over again.

Well, as I understand it, a reboot/reset is telling you: none or most of the event from this event didn't happen. The story starts from 0 (or from whatever pont in time they choose; for instance The Clan War), and from there some events will develop as they did, while most just won't. A time skip doesn't invalidate anything of the old events, it only makes them "ancient history". Yes, the effect may be the same for a new player, at least at the beginning. But once the player is, hopefully, hooked with the "current" story and wants more, why! you already own 20 years worth of worldbuilding. Throwing your assest away would be wasteful. I mean, several FFG lines have their own fiction lines. They could easily republish, or even rewrite old stuff as needed. Imagine a series of books retelling the major arcs of Rokugan. I would buy that in a second. And, if they have done their work right, new players should want, too.

1 hour ago, Mon no Oni said:

Well, as I understand it, a reboot/reset is telling you: none or most of the event from this event didn't happen. The story starts from 0 (or from whatever pont in time they choose; for instance The Clan War), and from there some events will develop as they did, while most just won't. A time skip doesn't invalidate anything of the old events, it only makes them "ancient history". Yes, the effect may be the same for a new player, at least at the beginning. But once the player is, hopefully, hooked with the "current" story and wants more, why! you already own 20 years worth of worldbuilding. Throwing your assest away would be wasteful. I mean, several FFG lines have their own fiction lines. They could easily republish, or even rewrite old stuff as needed. Imagine a series of books retelling the major arcs of Rokugan. I would buy that in a second. And, if they have done their work right, new players should want, too.

Except how much of it is just not worth revisiting-- how much of it is just downright embarrassing? How many times was a major change done to the world because someone unexpected won a tournament somewhere and a writer had 4 hours to try to figure out how to make that work? Maybe you would buy it, but not many would. Probably not enough to even break even. L5R tried selling novels before and they weren't profitable even at the height of its popularity.

I mean, what would be more fun? Reading a novel about events set in stone that you already know and can easily look up in their entirety on a wikipedia article with no surprises or twists to come? Or setting up a similar scenario and saying to the players "let's see how it turns out this time" with the ability to throw new twists in there and no guarantee it will end the same way?

You seem to think having a shoddily, slapped together massive convoluted background that one is expected to be familiar with every minute detail of as some sort of benefit and I just don't see it. At least if there is a massive time jump, all the characters with the convoluted backstories are gone, one could say that the human population in the colonies has recovered to a decent level, there are probably tons of cool ruins to explore and ancient artifacts to acquire in those lands (beneficial for an RPG) and if the fallen empire has simply made no real attempt to pursue in many generations, maybe just sending a few black ships across the sea on occasion... then that land too becomes mysterious and forgotten enough that one really won't be expected to have perfect knowledge of its rulers and politics and beliefs. It would become as mysterious and unknown as the Shadowlands once were. The precise details of how things went down in ancient history won't be so important as if they had been immediate background events.

It opens up possibilities for meaningful inter-clan conflict in a way that just aren't there if you are dealing with the immediate aftermath of a mass extinction and an evacuation.

By the way, since when in any story arc of L5R ever did the Shadowlands/Spider not have the "upperhand". Even the Spider coming into existence in the first place was a bunch of designer fiat making every other clan and the movers and shakers of the empire act like entirely incompetent headless chickens running around blind and useless with no self-preservation just to force a scenario where it could remotely be understood that they were going to betray over a millenia of tradition and forget every lesson they had learned in all that time to accept and promote the existence of a heretical, obviously evil entity among them spreading disease and decay and dedicated to the destruction of life and put all political power into their hands... Because absolutely everyone who was not Daigotsu was incapable of making any sort of impact or change on the world so long as that beloved Mary Sue existed.

The Shadowlands was always a massive looming threat at least equal in power as the entire rest of the empire combined and before the "Spider Clan" even had that name they had the upper hand on everything. Even when they "lost" they seemed to just gain more and more as a result. The fact that you need that "upperhand" to go to the extent that they have the throne, blot out the sun, spread disease across the whole empire and have the rest of the clans meek and cowering or running screaming from their ancestral lands under their army of demons and undead.... effectively nullifying any meaning or impact any other faction can have in the game... when is it enough?

8 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Except how much of it is just not worth revisiting-- how much of it is just downright embarrassing? How many times was a major change done to the world because someone unexpected won a tournament somewhere and a writer had 4 hours to try to figure out how to make that work? Maybe you would buy it, but not many would. Probably not enough to even break even. L5R tried selling novels before and they weren't profitable even at the height of its popularity.

I mean, what would be more fun? Reading a novel about events set in stone that you already know and can easily look up in their entirety on a wikipedia article with no surprises or twists to come? Or setting up a similar scenario and saying to the players "let's see how it turns out this time" with the ability to throw new twists in there and no guarantee it will end the same way?

You seem to think having a shoddily, slapped together massive convoluted background that one is expected to be familiar with every minute detail of as some sort of benefit and I just don't see it. At least if there is a massive time jump, all the characters with the convoluted backstories are gone, one could say that the human population in the colonies has recovered to a decent level, there are probably tons of cool ruins to explore and ancient artifacts to acquire in those lands (beneficial for an RPG) and if the fallen empire has simply made no real attempt to pursue in many generations, maybe just sending a few black ships across the sea on occasion... then that land too becomes mysterious and forgotten enough that one really won't be expected to have perfect knowledge of its rulers and politics and beliefs. It would become as mysterious and unknown as the Shadowlands once were. The precise details of how things went down in ancient history won't be so important as if they had been immediate background events.

It opens up possibilities for meaningful inter-clan conflict in a way that just aren't there if you are dealing with the immediate aftermath of a mass extinction and an evacuation.

By the way, since when in any story arc of L5R ever did the Shadowlands/Spider not have the "upperhand". Even the Spider coming into existence in the first place was a bunch of designer fiat making every other clan and the movers and shakers of the empire act like entirely incompetent headless chickens running around blind and useless with no self-preservation just to force a scenario where it could remotely be understood that they were going to betray over a millenia of tradition and forget every lesson they had learned in all that time to accept and promote the existence of a heretical, obviously evil entity among them spreading disease and decay and dedicated to the destruction of life and put all political power into their hands... Because absolutely everyone who was not Daigotsu was incapable of making any sort of impact or change on the world so long as that beloved Mary Sue existed.

The Shadowlands was always a massive looming threat at least equal in power as the entire rest of the empire combined and before the "Spider Clan" even had that name they had the upper hand on everything. Even when they "lost" they seemed to just gain more and more as a result. The fact that you need that "upperhand" to go to the extent that they have the throne, blot out the sun, spread disease across the whole empire and have the rest of the clans meek and cowering or running screaming from their ancestral lands under their army of demons and undead.... effectively nullifying any meaning or impact any other faction can have in the game... when is it enough?

this post is so confusing... you're completely disdainful of the value of the story... but then you get all bent out of shape about the shadowlands/spider and complain about them being too powerful, a thing no one who ever actually played AGAINST the spider would actually say (unless you only played against a breeder deck for that briefly, glorious bit of CE, thanks to Ornatov). I can't honestly tell what part of l5r you like. you don't seem to respect the story, but you don't act like you actually played the game, either.

I read it that the Hobgoblyn loves the idea of L5R, but finds many of the specifics of the setting to be embarrassing, just as I could do without the Empire's insistence on gratuitous Japanese that anyone with a passing familiarity with the language is liable to cringe at. They don't mention the game itself at all, just the Spider's use of plot armor, an argument which a frankly large number of fans have made on this forum as well as the AEG one when it was a thing.

2 hours ago, cielago said:

this post is so confusing... you're completely disdainful of the value of the story... but then you get all bent out of shape about the shadowlands/spider and complain about them being too powerful, a thing no one who ever actually played AGAINST the spider would actually say (unless you only played against a breeder deck for that briefly, glorious bit of CE, thanks to Ornatov). I can't honestly tell what part of l5r you like. you don't seem to respect the story, but you don't act like you actually played the game, either.

Nothing I said had anything to do with the actual game play. That is a totally different topic entirely. In terms of actual play power, the Shadowlands were only really good when they got free gold while ignoring the honor loss. After that, well... they never exactly found a strong footing again. Granted, mechanically it is weird to have a faction that can lose honor, but can't lose honor from bringing all those demons and such into play that would cause a loss for anyone else. As long as it is evil and demonic, you don't lose honor-- but if it is mildly embarrassing, you do.

Anyway, even though the Shadowlands were never strong, past say... Jade... maybe Gold... well, let's face it, after the writer's self-insert character of Daigotsu got introduced, the Shadowlands/Spider Clan got nothing but win after win after win in the story regardless of how their decks were doing in the overall format. Simply because they were the faction most tied together with the main protagonist and there was an end goal of somehow making Shadowlands into a proper Great Clan like the other factions (I guess it is good Ratlings and Naga never stuck around, or they would have been made into Great Clans too, I guess.)

Now, sure-- mechanically? They didn't have a clear play concept as a faction rather than being able to do the "evil" version of... well.. absolutely everything everyone else does... and a fair portion of their cards being printed were still monsters. That resulted in there not being really enough support for any particular deck style. Too many options and none of them with deep support.

The setting and concept had a lot of possibility and a lot of potential. But the more and more it developed, the more all the blanks were filled in and the more horrendous things that happened repeatedly narrowing the possible options and paths the protagonists could take, the more and more it feels like that potential and those possibilities evaporated. I haven't seen a single RPG of L5R take place that acknowledges literally every story event and its resulting consequence having taken place in the world. Maybe the Winter Courts to an extent, but even those? I mean... its pretty much status quo no matter what the story declared and those there are pretty insulated from everything, talking about the events as though they were happening on the other side of the world.

Picking up right where Onyx left off leaves one in an extraordinarily limited possibility space. And a LOT of that was due to the pure, unbridled favoritism the designers had towards the Spider, using their fiat to build it and cater towards it and have it utterly take over everything (after all, it was the singular antagonist, no one else could be so long as a group so evil was around.) Someone else said, they jumped the shark... but I would say they jumped the shark, the dolphin, the orca and the blue whale. They had their "this is so over-the-top it is only going to make the setting worse" moments repeatedly and each did make the setting worse... as much as there were attempts to pull back to a status quo each time.

Resetting to a pristine, untouched, unexplored world with strong clans with things left to lose and things they can stand to gain and no absolutely clear cut villain so evil and powerful that everyone must unite against it permanently lest they all just be destroyed.

You can do that by literally resetting back to a default state all the way back at Clan Wars with the fall of Hantei the 38th and just retcon in the existence of any clans or the allegiances of any families it is desirable. You can set up the existence of antagonists well before they pay off rather than having to pull those antagonists from thin air. You can have the Mantis and, yes, Spider come together in a more sensible and clean way if you understand it is your end-goal to do this.

The other way to do this is to just settle the samurai in the colonies and say "nothing important happened for so long that the events of the previous game are just all but forgotten history, everyone is settled down and the families are just marginally different based on their new environment and role, but nonetheless familiar enough and everyone has regained their footing and strength and the overwhelming enemy has simply not been a pressing issue for so many generations, everyone just sort of forgot about him."

I think the clan war would be a very fun and interesting place to start the "reboot" off in. I think it really exemplifies and captures the spirit of the setting in my opinion.

As far as I can tell, we're still speculating in a no-man's land of hearsay, via google translate, which strikes me as an elaborate game of telephone (A is said. B is heard. C is disseminated as A verbatim, despite being distinctly different). I'm still waiting for official clarification before I get my panties in a bunch.

I'm glad to hear that player interaction will likely still be a part of the game. That's a fundamental pillar, in my mind.

As for the clans, 7 is a good odd number. Talk of reboot aside, the Spider/Shadowlands omission is so glaring, I'd be surprised if they weren't being set up as off-screen antagonists, building to the point of dramatic entrance. But again, we don't know squat.

Not Google Translate, bilingual people

I wouldn't worry about translation issues and Terra Ludica is a generally trustworthy source as far as I can tell, but they of course may have misunderstood things.
The only thing that is clear is the number of clans (and the release date of "August"). There may be a Shadowlands or similar faction that does not have a clan mon, and I personally think it's not unlikely,
but as you say - speculation based on zip.

The player interaction is 90% likely, I think, after seeing the interview.

My own prediction is that FFG will:

• Continue story from where AEG left off.
• Start with 7 Clans (Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Phoenix, Scorpion & Unicorn)
• Go through the player plot choices that were decided just before Onyx.
• Develop those plot pieces for first few months - Maybe a couple of boosters starting to introduce some Spider/Shadowlands cards.
• Release a "bad guys" deluxe expansion and introduce Spider and Shadowlands cards

Then onto business as usual!

3 hours ago, Myrion said:

Not Google Translate, bilingual people

Huh. I could have missed something in the 5 subsequent pages, but kempy's post on the top of page 2 (which seemed to spawn the reboot tizzy) directly referenced google translate. Which is fine. I'm not worried...just cautious to jump on the assumption train.

I hope (and from the interview quoted, it looks like I might get my wish) they don't continue where AEG left off - I think that would be a disastrous decision, to appease a small number of fan who a)still played the game in 20F, b)cared about the story by that point, and c)actually thought Onyx wasn't an overblown fiasco.

1)Twenty years of stories is just too much for a new game. And, fundamentally, FFG's L5R is a new game. They need to sell it to a whole lot of new people far more than they need to bring back a handful of old veterans who were around for the start of Onyx. There's just far too many plot twists and turns that go into explaining what the Onyx plot is.

2)The clan votes and decisions were largely about "what will each clan sacrifice and what will they save of themselves when darkness falls". But that lose all its interest when there is no "baseline" from the clan to fall from. For a new player, starting in Onyx means the clans have always been this way ; that they haven't lost a thing. A "what you are in the dark" plotline only make sense when you know what those characters (or clans) are like in the light . It's the difference, the contrast that made Onyx interesting. Start with Onyx, and there is on contrast, no difference.

Frankly, to me, continuing Onyx where AEG left off seems like all downsides.

If we do start in Onyx, when all of Rokugan has literally gone to hell, and all of the clans now have to retake the whole Empire, my wish is that the vanguard of the invasion of Rokugan is a Tortoise Clan fleet, armed to the gills with gaijin cannons and tanegashima ashigaru, and Kasuga Masaji making some off-hand comment similar to "Okay, we tried it your way. Now it's our turn."

The thing that bugged me about the whole Spider Clan is that they, and Daigotsu, acknowledged that Fu-Leng was their kami. Fu-Leng... enemy of the Empire. When faced with a choice (accept the Spider Clan's help against the destroyers and acknowledge them as a clan OR fight an unwinnable battle and let the Empire die an honorable death), Rokugan chose to side with the Shadowlands. That choice never ends well. To me, it signaled the end of Rokugan. If the Empire chose to side with Fu-Leng, after a millennia of tradition and two Days of Thunder demonstrating why such a choice is a Bad Idea (TM), why should Rokugan keep any of its traditions or prohibitions? Thus a fleet of ships armed with cannons, tanegashima , and all sorts of gaijin advancements makes perfect sense to me.

OR

Start all over and let a new generation of players make decisions in a Rokugan with a clean slate, with a story team able to do whatever without being tied to 20 years of writing and tournament decisions. Restart the calendar to 1118 or so, pre-Clan War. There are so many decisions just in that first story arc.

Do the Scorpion even have a coup? Or does another clan attempt a coup? Perhaps the Crab with bad advice from Kuni Yori? Or the Lion, frustrated with the Scorpion and Crane dominating the courts? Or the Three-Man/Yoritomo Alliance, who are tired of centuries of being overlooked by the Great Clans?

Or does Yogo Junzo open the First Black Scroll before a coup even occurs? Or did Soshi Bantaro do it? Maybe Junzo is a good guy this time? With the Scorpion present as an official Clan during the Clan War and Second Day of Thunder, there are some new possibilities to consider.

There are a lot of possibilities and much more room for creative writing if we just wipe the slate clean and start over.

However, regardless of FFG's choice, I will still by the heck out of this on initial release and give it a go. If the mechanics are solid and the story is compelling, I will be a customer for a long time to come.

The story needs to introduce the Empire and the Clans functioning as it's intended. The richness and deepness of the world can't be probably introduced in a world in flames and chaos.

A controlled chaos with plot points of drama is great way to introduce the world to new players and old. A scorched earth setting would have more of a dystopian feel than an ordered, regimented Oriental fantasy setting.

I believe a reset to the scrolls and allowing the story to re-evolve would be the best approach.

I really hope we don't do the Clan War again... even AEG made a blatant nostalgia cash-in on that, and to a new player, it's not an inherently superior place to jump aboard (Crab allied with Shadowlands, Scorpion Clan banished, and on and on) and it's almost as obtuse, in its way, as everything in the succeeding twenty years.

clan wars has this mystique about it, because its old and this first generation of players adored it, but truthfully it hasn't really been representative of what l5r is since about 5 minutes after it ended. l5r is a game of magical samurai, emphasis very much on the magical, almost more so than the samurai. clan wars is all about the samurai. and thats great, i like the clan on clan stuff too, i'm not saying we shouldn't have that, i'm taking specific beef with the idea that the clan wars in specific was some kind of golden age as far as story goes. for someone who started in gold, looking back at it, it looks goofy and not at all like the rest of l5r, until the very end when fu leng shows up and the clans have to get their kimono's unruffled and play nice to put him down.

On 3/1/2017 at 0:38 PM, Kakita Shiro said:

The Lion looks like Matsu Koyama. I know it's probably not actually him, but still.

It really does look like him doesnt it?

If your game is all about clans conflicting with one another - and that's what L5R is mechanically - then your storyline should reflect that. It doesn't make sense for the clans to be buddy-buddy in story while the entire game is built around the same clans beating each other up like crazy. Allying late against a common foe, yes, but conflicts between the clans being the driving force of the plot is a must.

Clan War and Gold did a good job of handling that mixed with supernatural elements (the Egg of Pan Ku/False Hoturi arc and the Black Scrolls showed up by Shadowlands, the first expansion), which is L5R's sweet spot. Diamond and Celestial swung way too far into supernatural. Samurai tried to do inter-clan drama, but lost itself in trying to figure out the megagame.

All that said, I don't think they're doing Clan War again per se, for two reasons

Number one, the Scorpions. If we were starting again at Clan War, they'd be disbanded, not a clan, and infinitely better suited to being in an expansion.
Number two, the reference to returning to the RPG storyline wise, which can mean a lot of things (1E, 2E, 3E?), but here I suspect means 1E.

If we're looking at a reset button, I think we're looking at a pre-scorpion coup Empire, to set the baseline for what the clans are and what they do in "traditional" Rokugan before everything goes to Jigoku in a handbasket.

I think you guys might be getting too caught up in what "once was". FFG can do anything they want, including changing the story/outcome of certain events.

Why not have the clan war just be about Fu Leng/Spider clan/Shadowlands marching on Rokugan? Or have them corrupt the Scorpion clan instead of Crab (meaning hey, Scorpion doesn't get banished and they get to play!)?

Just because they decide to put the card game during a certain era (such as the Clan War) doesn't mean they have to keep the actual details from AEG's version.

That said, I have no real reason to believe they'd choose one time period over another, I just think having some major clan conflict brewing/taking place right from the start will be good for the game, and new players, regardless of the time period.

I still guess that they're not rebooting. Having been relocated by force to the far south, (1) The Spider will be disbanded and married off to the original clans in response to their betrayal, effectively wiping them off from the official histories, the faction recognized as nothing more but the Horde the whole time, thus the Seven Clans; and (2) the original clans will do their best to restore their identity and history, and becoming more strict with customs and way of life. ;-)