Have anyone purchased the book? Any reviews? It seemed to go straight to RPG Drive through without any actual publication.

Any input to what the Atlas has?

I don't know about others but I really like the book. It has quite a bit of information that packed between those covers. Tons of maps . There's also a great deal of artwork throughout but I believe that most of it was used in other books or sources. If you can get it for a reasonable price and you want general information about huge swaths of Rokugan, pick it up.

My real issue with the book is how it will relate to FFG's Rokugan.

Its a good book but not worth the price they are asking for it.

and it use to come with the map of Rokugan which in now separate and cost $8 for a pdf copy.

since most of the info is available elsewhere its not worth it if you don't need all the info in one place.

I didn't care for the book as it makes the emerald empire the size of the U.K.

There was a printed publication, the last thing AEG did for L5R rpg, just before giving the whole thing to FFG.

So maybe, who knows, if you check through minor rpg shops, you'll maybe find a copy (although I guess most of them are already looted by l5R fanatics by now).

By the way, what about this book? I feel that this is an ESSENTIAL book to have for 4th edition. It gives you, all in one place, all the organized information which has not been around for a long time.

It is crazy that 4th edition went thus far without producing a decent map like this.

One thing that I certainly love is the presentation of the different provinces in clan holdings, saying which family rules where. This is amazing since (at least for me) re-introduced a whole new level of play, the provincial level, which is important in Rokugan. Much of this information has not been available for a long time period (maybe the d20/2nd edition clan books?).

I would have loved province-specific advantages (and I'm homebrewing some)....but even without them, you get a lot of useful information.

Beware: this is a pure FLUFF book, with no mechanics in it. But you'll love it, even if you are a mechanics maniac, since there is huge amount of data which can improve your games.

I tend to HATE pure fluff books but I must say that this book is very good and, to explain myself, I need to briefly go through the history of 4th edition.

• 4th edition have given us a few early books with good balance between mechanics & fluff (Core Rules, Enemies, Emerald Empire, Great Clans).
• But then something got wrong and they gave us the dreaded " elemental series" (mostly a failure in my eyes) which seem to descrive mechanics in terms of fluff (especially regarding weapons)...but give not mechanics at all!!! They just gave us more monk orders, more spells but nothing of the many non-magical cool stuff they were describing. I guess they feared to overdo with combat mechanics and options ...but their fear ruined the books.
• Finally we got "Sword & Fan" (whose crunch to me is non-existent) but whose "fluff" was amazing and give use an incredible array of inspiration.

The Atlas falls in the same category of "S&F": these are essential fluff books which they should have published long before. If you do not have access to old editions, after reading those two books you get a whole new way to look at Rokugan.

And regarding the Rokugan's size, there is no scale on the big map and there is a small side box saying that Rokugan is small....but who cares?

4th edition is the "Rokugan your way" edition.

I've always assumed Rokugan to be enormous, maybe a little smaller than China or Europe. And still I can play that way. Nobody will come to my table and obliges me doing the opposite.

There are too many sites, too many different cultures in clans, and too many men in the armies to have an "UK-sized" Rokugan.

And concluding, if you can buy a copy, do it! You will not regret it!

I have the book in PDF form (and the map pack)

I guess I'm just jaded due to having all the 1/2/3/3.5 ed books.

If you have all these books it just feels like a waste of money

I do not know. If you own the pdf you can check whether is has or has not stuff already present in old d20 edition clanbooks.

Maybe the old books lack locations which were created in more recent times, I do not know.

By the way, maybe others do not have all those old books and, as a further point, I find very useful to have all the geographic information in one book rather than spread throughout many old books.

8 hours ago, Willisbatman said:

I didn't care for the book as it makes the emerald empire the size of the U.K.

Four times the size of the UK, actually. If you think about it, it fits the setting in terms of basic interactions: all those vast distances wouldn't help the sustainability of the current, relatively fast-paced inter-faction relations.

Maps scale is very weird. Ditto for the castle maps. Everything is tiny, super tiny.

I don't think it's possible to make a coherent picture out of the way Rokugan has been described, in terms of army sizes, travel times, speed of interaction, climate variation, cultural differences, etc. They just do not match up. The only workable answer is "pick the size you like and go from there."

As for the Atlas: any game that's gone through this many editions will run into the problem that either you're duplicating information from previous books, or else asking players to go hunt down old books that may be out of print or expensive if you can even find them. Of the two, I favor option #1 -- especially since the setting has changed over time. I just find it more convenient to have a one-stop shop for this information, rather than having to chase it through a dozen different books. The Atlas is one of the books I most often consult while running my campaign.

(Full disclosure: I wrote the Shinomen Mori chapter, which does indeed recycle information from Way of the Naga and other sources.)

19 hours ago, Willisbatman said:

I didn't care for the book as it makes the emerald empire the size of the U.K.

Not sure how you got this size, none of the maps in the book have distances on them or any other type of map key?

6 hours ago, WHW said:

Maps scale is very weird. Ditto for the castle maps. Everything is tiny, super tiny.

See above.

Now on the size of Rokugan there has never been a good number to go on.

The only map I have that has ever tried to be accurate was in the Rokugan D20 and that put the dimensions a around 609,000 mi^2, which makes it slightly bigger then the Mongolia

11 hours ago, tenchi2a said:

Not sure how you got this size, none of the maps in the book have distances on them or any other type of map key?

Some of the smaller maps have a 10-miles scale bar, like the Kaiu province map on page 25.

There is also a "Size of Rokugan" sidebar on page 77 that talks about... well, the size of Rokugan. It says that Rokugan is 900 miles north-to-south and 600 miles across the widest point (England is 400 miles long and 300 miles wide, so roughly one-quarter of the size of Rokugan).

5 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

Some of the smaller maps have a 10-miles scale bar, like the Kaiu province map on page 25.

that was easy to miss

5 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

There is also a "Size of Rokugan" sidebar on page 77 that talks about... well, the size of Rokugan. It says that Rokugan is 900 miles north-to-south and 600 miles across the widest point (England is 400 miles long and 300 miles wide, so roughly one-quarter of the size of Rokugan).

This is another reason I'm not fond of this book the guy that did this math could not have been looking at the map, if his calculations on the widest point are right then the north south would be 1,100 miles by the map.

So by these numbers Rokugan is slightly bigger then Spain that's still not that small, and from what I can find the pop of rokugan is 33 million vs Spain's 46 million so I'm not sure where they get its crowded.

I like how they include the the length of japan but not the with to make it sound bigger.

not to mention the fact that they include the sea between Honshu and Hokkaido in the distance lol.

6 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

So by these numbers Rokugan is slightly bigger then Spain

It is a lot bigger than Spain. Spain is like 192k square-miles, compared to Rokugan's 520k. Peru is closer both in size and population.

You are thinking about square-kilometers I guess .

I agree with the around 500k you came up.

On 3/11/2017 at 3:08 PM, tenchi2a said:

The only map I have that has ever tried to be accurate was in the Rokugan D20 and that put the dimensions a around 609,000 mi^2 , which makes it slightly bigger then the Mongolia

As you can see above from my dimensions i fond Rokugan to be a lot bigger then they claimed.

My statement about Spain was by taking the dimensions of England (50,346 mi²) and times it by four as some have suggested.

Also remember the numbers given are at the widest points.

Rokugans width stays pretty constant, where its north-south dimensions drop off fast.

So this gave me and average of around 485,100 mi²

My main point being that Rokugan is quite large compared to the way they tried to portray it in the book.

That said I feel the book has some good fluff about the areas of Rokugan, but you can tell it was the last book as it seem to have just been thrown together.

Another problem we have run into was the fact that while castle maps are pretty, their room setup is...interesting...and it's hard to see how they are supposed to host Winter Court or similar. Especially if you have seen floor maps for japanese or chinese castles.

13 hours ago, tenchi2a said:

That said I feel the book has some good fluff about the areas of Rokugan, but you can tell it was the last book as it seem to have just been thrown together.

Our process for it was identical to our process for every other book.

On ‎3‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 1:40 PM, tenchi2a said:

that was easy to miss

So by these numbers Rokugan is slightly bigger then Spain that's still not that small, and from what I can find the pop of rokugan is 33 million vs Spain's 46 million so I'm not sure where they get its crowded.

How much do high-rise apartments condense a population? If Rokugan is building out rather than building up, would that be enough to call it "crowded"?

On 3/17/2017 at 9:35 AM, JJ48 said:

How much do high-rise apartments condense a population? If Rokugan is building out rather than building up, would that be enough to call it "crowded"?

Again this is Spain we are talking about. They tend to build out there not up.

Limited use as a player, fantastic as a GM. Even if you never play, wonderful if you're a Rokugan trivia nerd. When writing adventures (and especially mods for Heroes of Rokugan) it's an invaluable resource. Essentially every entry is a plot hook and potential game. The book is all fluff, zero crunch, so if that's your thing you'll love it. It's also helpful when my players go off-mod and I need to figure out where they are and what's there.

Main downside is that the book can be a bit dry. This is not a sit down with a mug of tea and read cover to cover; it's a reference book. Also, much of the information is located in other places (notably on the l5r wiki) which can be easier to use and search, to say nothing of paying twice for the same information. Still, l5r wiki is often out-dated. I still love this book. The only other downside is that it's clear the writers were enamoured of some clans and families more than others so some entries often feel uninspired (poor Tamori lands).

If you're a GM, it's a must-have. If you're a player, you can do without but you'll probably still enjoy it.