In the "what eras would you like to see?" thread, Shiba Gunichi mentioned a period of time in second edition when anybody could become a shugenja just by studying. It made me think: what other setting details have been true in past editions that nowadays make you go "what the . . ."?

My personal favorite is when I went looking something up in Way of the Lion and discovered a whole section talking about how Kitsu shugenja regularly visit Jigoku. O_O That was how I learned that the cosmology of the Spirit Realms/afterlife/etc used to be VERY different from how it's presented in 4e . . .

Not really a fluff change/old trivia, but the Battle of the Broken Daisho utterly confused me the first time I read about it. It took me some time to finally understand the story between the lines, but I guess I've got it: so essentially, the Crane dude manipulated the Phoenix chick to engage a Lion army on his behalf, and she got annihilated so hard they had to make up this whole "she and her troops just stood there to teach the Lion a lesson of honorable pacifism" to cover up her failure and save the embarrassment for everyone involved. Or at least that's my take... I might be wrong .

1 minute ago, AtoMaki said:

Not really a fluff change/old trivia, but the Battle of the Broken Daisho utterly confused me the first time I read about it. It took me some time to finally understand the story between the lines, but I guess I've got it: so essentially, the Crane dude manipulated the Phoenix chick to engage a Lion army on his behalf, and she got annihilated so hard they had to make up this whole "she and her troops just stood there to teach the Lion a lesson of honorable pacifism" to cover up her failure and save the embarrassment for everyone involved. Or at least that's my take... I might be wrong .

You are, in fact, completely wrong about this- there was no manipulation, the Phoenix showed up on their own, in keeping with their inability to mind their own business.

The Crane and Lion were going to have a stupid, wasteful throwdown. The Phoenix teleported in to prove a point to both of them. The Clan Champ could only be in one place at a time, so while she was talking to the Crane, the Lion are faced with a small army of Phoenix- historically buddies of the Crane- and start chopping away. The Crane do likewise, because they definitely didn't invite the Phoenix, and their prideful commander cuts down the Phoenix Clan champ to kick things off. He later broke his daisho out of shame and sent it to the Lion commander, which is where the battle's name comes from.

The Shiba just stood there, not drawing, because they were that committed, which is why the Battle of the Broken Daisho is such an important story to the Phoenix. That's the length they're willing to go to for what they believe.

The really confusing part is that nobody bothered to move a few hundred yards to either side, and just go around the Phoenix. Or shoot over them with bows.

3 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

The really confusing part is that nobody bothered to move a few hundred yards to either side, and just go around the Phoenix. Or shoot over them with bows.

Eh, both were engaging an army that teleported into point-blank range. It's not like they were taking losses, after all....

There was that time waaay beck when Mikaru was a Naga, because of the Foo rule.

Not so much lore, but I've always found Iuchiban's keyword collection hysterically funny.

5 minutes ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

Not so much lore, but I've always found Iuchiban's keyword collection hysterically funny.

Yeah they could replace it with Iuchiban himself keyword and describe it in rulebook.

Hello,

I did not know that it was a thing for anyone to be able to become a shugenja at one point in the rules; and frankly, I quite like it. Shugenja are priests not wizards nor witches, so it makes sense that if one is pious enough, gods, or their avatars, will answer their prayers. One would need to learn the language of the gods and show proper devotion at all times, however it does not seem to wide of a stretch to me.

In asnwer to Kinzen's question, well, that is my favourite "What the... ?" element.

Perhaps my favorite "What the..." moment comes out of the RPG, 2nd Edition "Legacy of the Forge". There's a artifact or some nonsense that is being guarded by an Oni. An Oni that doesn't think he's an Oni anymore and worships Amaterasu (sp). OH and the big kicker was that the Oni was summoned by the Kitsu family to guard said object. Not secretly either, it's found in a scroll detailing the whole summoning and all that.

Reading the 1st Ed RPG book, Hantei ordered the Crab to build the Wall after Fu Leng was defeated.

Oh, and Doji was selected as the Emperor's first champion...

8 hours ago, Mirumoto Kuroniten said:

I did not know that it was a thing for anyone to be able to become a shugenja at one point in the rules; and frankly, I quite like it. Shugenja are priests not wizards nor witches, so it makes sense that if one is pious enough, gods, or their avatars, will answer their prayers. One would need to learn the language of the gods and show proper devotion at all times, however it does not seem to wide of a stretch to me.

I would totally be on board with "anybody can learn this" if it were paired with a meaningful requirement of study, devotion, purity, etc. Implementing the latter in a game context, though, doesn't tend to fly very well. A friend of mine helped write the Kabbalah book for Ars Magica , which players had been begging to get for years ; when the book came out, the general reaction was "this is amazingly well-written and I'm never going to play a kabbalist." Because being a good kabbalist and being a fun PC turned out to be very, very different things. I suspect the same would be true of shugenja, because players are not generally going to like the idea that they suffer massive penalties to their prayers the moment they come into contact with blood or death, have to spend half their waking hours in prayer and other religious tasks while their bushi and courtier friends get to RP, etc.

It also makes the low number of shugenja (and the Phoenix's dominance in number of shugenja) totally nonsensical.

"Oh crud, Asahina Bob died, now we're down a shugenja and his descendants-"

"Eh, screw it, just send Daidoji's Kate's kid to school."

It's not a lousy idea (I kinda hate"you must be special to do magic," since in folklore it's largely a matter of application) but it torques an already rickety setting a little too far. I can see why they quietly binned it.

45 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

I suspect the same would be true of shugenja, because players are not generally going to like the idea that they suffer massive penalties to their prayers the moment they come into contact with blood or death, have to spend half their waking hours in prayer and other religious tasks while their bushi and courtier friends get to RP, etc.

As a side note, my gaming club is doing exactly this with shugenjas and monks, and it looks like the key is simply making the religious tasks interesting and complex enough to not exclude RPing.

1 minute ago, AtoMaki said:

As a side note, my gaming club is doing exactly this with shugenjas and monks, and it looks like the key is simply making the religious tasks interesting and complex enough to not exclude RPing.

If you've got a good enough grasp of the religion in question, that can work. But the RPG materials kind of fall down on that front.

15 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

If you've got a good enough grasp of the religion in question, that can work. But the RPG materials kind of fall down on that front.

Well, I was mostly referring to enhancing the "fantasy" side of things. So instead of having boring prayers and rituals a shugenja should deal with all sorts of supernatural stuff ranging from fantastic to freakish on a daily basis (this is supposedly their job, after all), and maybe even get into transhuman identity crisises as the line between "human" and "spirit" blurs for them.

If you know what I'm sayin' .

2 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Well, I was mostly referring to enhancing the "fantasy" side of things. So instead of having boring prayers and rituals a shugenja should deal with all sorts of supernatural stuff ranging from fantastic to freakish on a daily basis (this is supposedly their job, after all), and maybe even get into transhuman identity crisises as the line between "human" and "spirit" blurs for them.

If you know what I'm sayin' .

Oh, I do -- since I do that kind of thing all the time in my campaign -- but I still think the RPG materials don't provide you with much of a foothold for that. Nearly every aspect of "supernatural stuff" is presented as a thing to fight when it gets uppity, and half of those are Tainted; interaction of a non-combat sort, and what role religion plays in life, is pretty neglected.

Yeah, the whole "Priest, not Wizard" thing needs a lot of development.

A lot.

1 hour ago, Kinzen said:

I would totally be on board with "anybody can learn this" if it were paired with a meaningful requirement of study, devotion, purity, etc. Implementing the latter in a game context, though, doesn't tend to fly very well. A friend of mine helped write the Kabbalah book for Ars Magica , which players had been begging to get for years ; when the book came out, the general reaction was "this is amazingly well-written and I'm never going to play a kabbalist." Because being a good kabbalist and being a fun PC turned out to be very, very different things. I suspect the same would be true of shugenja, because players are not generally going to like the idea that they suffer massive penalties to their prayers the moment they come into contact with blood or death, have to spend half their waking hours in prayer and other religious tasks while their bushi and courtier friends get to RP, etc.

To be honest that sounds really bad and maybe the solution was to make it playable instead of torturing it into a shape that fits the constraints of the setting. A character becoming a shugenja, special or not, is a potentially dope thing that can happen and GMs should work with players to facilitate it instead of stammering and sweating profusely while paging through the rulebooks to see if such a thing can even occur (this happened once [it was me and it was anxiety-related please don't judge]).

I mean, the story/setting can be whatever (this is key to my point; my issue is not with how settings are written) and so can mechanics, but in a game they should exist for the purpose of playing it. That means exceptions should sometimes be made for players.

2 minutes ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

Yeah, the whole "Priest, not Wizard" thing needs a lot of development.

A lot.

I think it's time to accept that shugenja are a billion different things in the setting, one of which is priest. They are also warriors, hunters and smiths. Some shugenja really are straight up wizards and I think that's okay, personally.

2 hours ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

It also makes the low number of shugenja (and the Phoenix's dominance in number of shugenja) totally nonsensical.

(...)

It's not a lousy idea (I kinda hate"you must be special to do magic," since in folklore it's largely a matter of application) but it torques an already rickety setting a little too far. I can see why they quietly binned it.

Well, not necessarily. Its all a question of how difficult it is to study and dedicate oneself to be a Shugenja. Just compare how many people are airplane pilots in real life, or astrophysicists. And both things are supposedly even easier to study, because of the matter at hand - elemental kami - are not only living beings, but have their own wants and desires, or even be malicious!

There is also the matter of money. Study can be very expensive. That can even point to another reason for Phoenix dominance on the number of shugenjas: they invest a lot less in huge armies and wars, using those funds towards shugenja instruction.

2 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

As a side note, my gaming club is doing exactly this with shugenjas and monks, and it looks like the key is simply making the religious tasks interesting and complex enough to not exclude RPing.

So am I!

1 hour ago, AtoMaki said:

Well, I was mostly referring to enhancing the "fantasy" side of things. So instead of having boring prayers and rituals a shugenja should deal with all sorts of supernatural stuff ranging from fantastic to freakish on a daily basis (this is supposedly their job, after all), and maybe even get into transhuman identity crisises as the line between "human" and "spirit" blurs for them.

If you know what I'm sayin' .

Oh, I like this. What kind of ideas you have?

For some reason, I can't stop thinking about the Shugenja guiding his friends to Yume-do or some other realm that could translate to the Astral and then killing the very concept of the corruption afflicting a place.

41 minutes ago, Buttlord said:

I think it's time to accept that shugenja are a billion different things in the setting, one of which is priest. They are also warriors, hunters and smiths. Some shugenja really are straight up wizards and I think that's okay, personally.

I absolutely agree.

2 hours ago, Buttlord said:

I think it's time to accept that shugenja are a billion different things in the setting, one of which is priest. They are also warriors, hunters and smiths. Some shugenja really are straight up wizards and I think that's okay, personally.

Wizards I can get in any fantasy RPG. Games that give me a well-crafted way to model the stuff I read about all the time in Japanese folklore and religion? Not so much. Ergo, my issue is less that I have anything against the wizard model per se, and more that I go, "oh, this again. Sigh."

4 hours ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Well, not necessarily. Its all a question of how difficult it is to study and dedicate oneself to be a Shugenja. Just compare how many people are airplane pilots in real life, or astrophysicists. And both things are supposedly even easier to study, because of the matter at hand - elemental kami - are not only living beings, but have their own wants and desires, or even be malicious!

There is also the matter of money. Study can be very expensive. That can even point to another reason for Phoenix dominance on the number of shugenjas: they invest a lot less in huge armies and wars, using those funds towards shugenja instruction.

In which case, especially with shugenja, is it really something anyone can learn through "mere" study?

The Phoenix have never been described as terribly wealthy (nor, in fairness, as broke). If cost were a factor, the Mantis, Crane, and Crab-via-Yasuki would be the big shugenja powerhouses (one out of three is- and before you go, "but the Crab have an eternal war to fund, gotta say, shugenja would more than pull their weight there), and the Dragonfly and Bat probably wouldn't field shugenja as their only in-house School.

Gunichi, I'm going to chop your post a little bit here, because there is some things that, I feel, demand a little more focused responses. Hope you don't mind!

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1. In which case, especially with shugenja, is it really something anyone can learn through "mere" study?

"Mere" study? No. But study and true dedication ? Yeah, I think so. But then, I see Rokugan as a lot more "wuxia" than probably most people do. Half the bushi Techniques, for example, seems to me more mystical than possible, achievable things in real life. Also, monks in Rokugan already do reality-defying things through nothing but study and dedication. If a "nobody" trained by a monk order, someone that might even be a hinin by birth, can set his fists ablaze with holy fire with nothing but training, I don't see how a Shugenja should be different.

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The Phoenix have never been described as terribly wealthy (nor, in fairness, as broke). If cost were a factor, the Mantis, Crane, and Crab-via-Yasuki would be the big shugenja powerhouses (one out of three is- and before you go, "but the Crab have an eternal war to fund, gotta say, shugenja would more than pull their weight there), (...)

Huh, weirdly I always project riches in the Phoenix Clan that don't actually exist. I don't know why, they just "seems" rich to me!

But, of course, you are correct that they are not particularly rich or poor compared to other clans. Now, about the clans you brought up: the Mantis portrayal always looked horribly inconsistent to me, and all that economic power they supposedly have is... problematic, I think. What they even have to make them so rich ? Boats? Crane, Phoenix and Crab have as much coast as they have, so that shouldn't be a factor. Commerce? What products do they have, considering they can't just sell foreign spices, weapons and products to Rokugan at large? But even with all of that, the Mantis is tiny . Supposedly, anyway. As with most things regarding Rokugan, this is not that well thought out, I guess... So, their numbers alone should preclude the Mantis to take the dominance on this field from the Phoenix.

Crab, as you said yourself, have an eternal war to fund, and war costs a lot of money. Not to mention their fortifications, another enormous money sink. But I totally agree that they would try to invest as much as they can get away with towards Shugenja training... but how many of those shugenja even survive or stays untainted long enough to matter? And with the amount of money they spend during decades training a single shugenja that might not even survive his first battle, imagine the amount of peasants armed with Teppo they could put on the wall?

Now the Crane... Given their story, I actually have no problem at all accepting that they could slightly approach the Phoenix on the mystical studies. But we also have to remember that, despite being lavishly rich, they also have to fund huge armies and constant war with the Lion, Crab, Scorpion and I don't think that maintaining the upper hand at court is cheap in any way, shape or form.

So, getting back to the Phoenix: what they do or have that could make them so dominant in the shugenja department, if we make their abilities a matter of study? Firstly, the fact that, as we saw, the Phoenix is the sole clan that have no other primary concern besides their priestly orders, so the clan's resources can be focused on that. And secondly, and maybe more important, the fact that no other force in the entire empire can compare to them when it comes to the amount of knowledge and secrets they have, regarding the mystical arts!

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and the Dragonfly and Bat probably wouldn't field shugenja as their only in-house School.

Agreed. But then, I think that is the flaw of how the Schools system works, the inconsistencies regarding scale of the base setting and a few other things, and have nothing to do with the costs of maintaining the shugenja schools working.

59 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Gunichi, I'm going to chop your post a little bit here, because there is some things that, I feel, demand a little more focused responses. Hope you don't mind!

Pfffft, I do it all the time, chop away!

59 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

"Mere" study? No. But study and true dedication ? Yeah, I think so. But then, I see Rokugan as a lot more "wuxia" than probably most people do. Half the bushi Techniques, for example, seems to me more mystical than possible, achievable things in real life. Also, monks in Rokugan already do reality-defying things through nothing but study and dedication. If a "nobody" trained by a monk order, someone that might even be a hinin by birth, can set his fists ablaze with holy fire with nothing but training, I don't see how a Shugenja should be different.

Monks don't directly speak to the elements that make up all things... and I think that's why shugenja are supposed to be special- monks represent what any sufficiently dedicated mortal can achieve. As we both more or less agree, the setting has plenty else wrong with it, hence my contention that "anyone can do it" isn't stupid, but IS bad for the house of cards that is the L5R setting.

59 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Now, about the clans you brought up: the Mantis portrayal always looked horribly inconsistent to me, and all that economic power they supposedly have is... problematic, I think. What they even have to make them so rich ? Boats? Crane, Phoenix and Crab have as much coast as they have, so that shouldn't be a factor. Commerce? What products do they have, considering they can't just sell foreign spices, weapons and products to Rokugan at large? But even with all of that, the Mantis is tiny . Supposedly, anyway. As with most things regarding Rokugan, this is not that well thought out, I guess... So, their numbers alone should preclude the Mantis to take the dominance on this field from the Phoenix.

Re: The Mantis and boats- the Phoenix navy doesn't even get MENTIONED, and after the War of Fire and Thunder, their sea lanes are choked off by the Mantis-claimed island (which was frickin' stupid, but, you know, whatever). The Crab, despite having those slimy slimy Yasuki and a willingness to be pragmatic and sully their hands with commerce have too many other concerns, or something. And the Crane are stinkin' rich.

59 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

So, getting back to the Phoenix: what they do or have that could make them so dominant in the shugenja department, if we make their abilities a matter of study? Firstly, the fact that, as we saw, the Phoenix is the sole clan that have no other primary concern besides their priestly orders, so the clan's resources can be focused on that. And secondly, and maybe more important, the fact that no other force in the entire empire can compare to them when it comes to the amount of knowledge and secrets they have, regarding the mystical arts!

If they'd ever beaten another Clan outright, I might buy that... but if all the Phoneix do is read scrolls and pray at temples, then more than the Mantis and the Ox would have mugged them for real estate. Besides, the Henshin are the "study" bunch.

59 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Agreed. But then, I think that is the flaw of how the Schools system works, the inconsistencies regarding scale of the base setting and a few other things, and have nothing to do with the costs of maintaining the shugenja schools working.

Hence my contention about "anybody can learn to be a shugenja" placing even more strain on an already-rickety setting.

(With that said, why the base Dragonfly school isn't a Courtier school I'll never know, since they spent most of the setting's history politely telling people the Dragon didn't want to see them... we got a generic ronin school near the very end of 4E, but the Minor Clan Alliance continues to have almost no actual courtiers, even though they honestly need them the most.)

16 hours ago, Kinzen said:

Wizards I can get in any fantasy RPG. Games that give me a well-crafted way to model the stuff I read about all the time in Japanese folklore and religion? Not so much. Ergo, my issue is less that I have anything against the wizard model per se, and more that I go, "oh, this again. Sigh."

That's fair. I do agree that the religious/superstitious elements of shugenja could be played up more, even the really wizardy ones.