1 hour ago, Yoritomo Reiu said:

In terms of actual usage, none of the above would apply. The emperor/empress would be referred to as heika (陛下), either by itself or following their title (can't remember off the top of my head if that's tenno or kotei in Rokugani).

I believe I've seen Tenno used in L5R before. So I'd go with Tenno-heika.

On 9/3/2017 at 1:10 PM, shosuko said:

Alright, that sounds useful - then comes the next question, do I dare commit to garbled japanese titles... or do I just call people by their title in english...

That is up to you. We used -sama for everything in our 4e (and earlier) games. It depends on your group and how picky the GM is.

4 hours ago, Mirith said:

That is up to you. We used -sama for everything in our 4e (and earlier) games. It depends on your group and how picky the GM is.

Well, I'm the GM - the story we're starting is a political story within Otosan Uchi. The players are all Crane, and the story will focus on Crane politics, so there will be a lot of overlap of family names. There won't be much overlap of positions, so it sounds like a good way to do it. I don't trust just googling "administrator" or "chief officer" or "artist" to find these things, but I think using military ranks will work for the characters who have them.. but I think mixing those foreign sounding words with English titles for other characters might be a bit off... I think I'll do some research to see what will fit.

By-the-by - does anyone know what you would call a calligraphy artist, scribe, or an animal trainer?

10 minutes ago, shosuko said:

By-the-by - does anyone know what you would call a calligraphy artist, scribe, or an animal trainer?

Lunch!

- Oni no Tsuburu

27 minutes ago, shosuko said:

Well, I'm the GM - the story we're starting is a political story within Otosan Uchi. The players are all Crane, and the story will focus on Crane politics, so there will be a lot of overlap of family names. There won't be much overlap of positions, so it sounds like a good way to do it. I don't trust just googling "administrator" or "chief officer" or "artist" to find these things, but I think using military ranks will work for the characters who have them.. but I think mixing those foreign sounding words with English titles for other characters might be a bit off... I think I'll do some research to see what will fit.

By-the-by - does anyone know what you would call a calligraphy artist, scribe, or an animal trainer?

I would assume a scribe is a scribe, and for calligraphy, a calligrapher maybe?

As for animals, it would depend on the animal. Like Head Falconer for Falcons, or stable master for horses.

I mean in Japanese, sorry.

Bookmark this: http://rut.org/cgi-bin/j-e/tty/FG=r/inline/dict?sDict=on&COMMON=1

I advise you to bookmark it because you can customize a bunch of things about that dictionary, and I've set it so the default is to display things in romaji (the Roman alphabet) rather than Japanese writing. I've also made it so that it will default to checking the box you can see there for displaying only "commonly used words" -- that will mean wading through far, far fewer search results. You can always uncheck that if you search for a word too obscure to count as commonly used.

There are obviously many hazards to just relying on a dictionary without knowledge of the language (that's how you end up with place names like Shiro sano Ken Hayai), but for a home game? Eh. I don't see a problem with it.

The 'Sengoku' RPG has a several-page long appendix with numerous titles and terms of address for various Japanese ranks and professions.