This is a common problem GMs struggle with at first: Why characters from such different clans would ever work with each other.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to have all the players work for imperials, who are theoretically neutral. Many games have the players acting as Yoriki to the Emerald or Even Jade magistrates, or have them working for some other imperial organisation such as the legion.

However, the only thing you really need to consider when forming a party of characters is to determine who they work for and why. Just remember that it is perfectly fine for a samurai of one clan to work for a lord of another. High ranking samurai tend to trade vessels like pokemon for a variety of reasons. Maybe a lord owes another a favor, or there is some sort of exchange program going on where clans trade samurai to learn from each other, Maybe s samurai is for all intents and purposes a political prisoner and must cooperate or face consequences worse than death, or perhaps the lord is simply dealing with an issue that is such a threat that other lords have "donated" a few bodies to protect their own interests or just to say that they helped. Even Samurai from clans that are currently at war with each other can find pocket cases where a samurai is allowed to work for a rival lord. That samurai would be met with the bare minimum amount of respect (if that) and and transgression would be punished MUCH more harshly, but it is still in the realm of possibility. In fact, working with your Gm and finding out why your character is working for this particular lord is a great way to delve into your character backstory and find their unique mark on the setting.

Also, it is even possible for Samurai to come together and go on a quest independent of their lords. Maybe they are all good friends and have need to do something that is important or known to only them. However, aside from immediate emergencies it will be hard to justify to ones lord why they are repeatedly acting independently, often in life threatening situations. This type of scenario is better suited for shorter campaigns and one shots. That said, samurai fresh from their gempuku often take a year or so to do a walk about the empire and get into all sorts of adventures that do not require oversight from their superiors.

Bottom line, there are for more reasons (interesting ones too) to figure out why samurai from different clans WOULD work together rather than why they wouldn't. Just focus on their unifying factor and everything else should fall into place.

Your propositions are interesting and I'll note them for later. to help the discussion, I have some solution to make them working together.

You can use a tournament with specials rule like forming a group with characters from another clan, and thus you can jump to the "good friends" part.

some month ago, I started a session with all the samurai waking up in the same room with only underwear on them and they work together to get out. only after, they found out their belonging to a different clan. Then, they worked together to destroy the conspiracy that had imprisoned them.

Recently in my games (non-L5R) I have taken to having the players figure out themselves how they know each other and why they are working together. Trying to force a party together can result in players feeling like it's "out of character" and only begrudingly go along. Having them decide how to get the party got together themselves (mostly) guarantees it will be on terms the players have "bought into," so to speak.

As for L5R I think two solutions could be

1) Clan Wars era. Due to extraordinary circumstances all of the social rules, and society in general, are in disarray. It would be easy for samurai of different clans to unite for a common goal to save the empire, etc.

2) Decide with the input of the players to limit the party to one or two clans (plus imperials, ronin, and minor clans.) Done well, it provides and opportunity for people to play characters of clans that they normally wouldn't.

One thing my gaming group has found highly effective is the Warrior Pilgrim Party. So every character is on a warrior's pilgrimage, and they just end up next to each other with some classic fire-forged friendship. The possibilities are endless here because warrior pilgrims hit a nice middle-way regarding their social status and loyalties.

Representatives of a new brokered alliance between the clans. Not only they have to achieve their goal, but they need to maintain the fragile alliance between clans.

I like to use the idea of the tournament. Pick the winners of different events and put them to work under an Imperial.

Supporting a group of Imperial Cartographers, exploring new lands for the Empire.

Magistrates, enough said.

There are also unusual alliances between clans that exist that can help you if you have the right components:

Shosuro-Ikoma Alliance - Who takes care of the true History of Rokugan.

The Crab Witch Hunters, the Phoenix Inquisitors and the Scorpion Kuroiban - Watch against Maho-Tsukai.

I actually prefer to run single-clan games for this reason. It allows a unity among the PCs that's hard to achieve otherwise. I can always allow a single PC with Different School or Hostage if they really want to play an outsider.

3 hours ago, Suzume Tomonori said:

Recently in my games (non-L5R) I have taken to having the players figure out themselves how they know each other and why they are working together. Trying to force a party together can result in players feeling like it's "out of character" and only begrudingly go along. Having them decide how to get the party got together themselves (mostly) guarantees it will be on terms the players have "bought into," so to speak.

3

That's precisely what FATE does during character generation, and those reasons become Aspects on your character sheet that then have mechanical consequences.

A Winter Court campaign can be interesting too. The PCs are all attendees, and the adventures force them to work together for success. Works great with experienced roleplayers when you give them slightly conflicting goals and missions outside of the adventures. For example, a crane and scorpion may be working together to locate a servant who absconded with a valuable heirloom, while the crane's negotiations for his lord's marriage is stymied by the scorpion's attempt to seduce the would-be bride...

8 hours ago, suburbaknght said:

I actually prefer to run single-clan games for this reason. It allows a unity among the PCs that's hard to achieve otherwise. I can always allow a single PC with Different School or Hostage if they really want to play an outsider.

Yeah, that's my preference. Either single-clan or at least "reasonable ally" clans. It does help that very few of the people I played with were super-invested in L5R and more interested in playing a fantasy samurai game. They thought all the clans were cool in their own way. I did a playthrough with "Magistrates" and varied clans when we did City of Lies, but that campaign is obviously set up with multi-clan characters in mind.

Everyone seemed to have fun either way.

Of course, if player groups are made up of players heavily invested in the setting and in specific clans, especially if they are antagonistic ones, you can have difficulties with L5R in getting them all together that don't rely on the typical "Party of Strangers" game tropes. My buddy said he wanted to play 5E D&D recently and I was like "Sure, why not? It's been forever since we did D&D" I groaned silently when it turned out we were doing "Out of the Abyss" and it started with a "You wake up in a strange room" scene, lol. Fortunately, I'm a pretty easy-going guy and just want to hang out with my old nerdfriends and play games.

I think the real thing is just talking with the group ahead of time when you're planning how and what you will GM. Find out if any of your players is super-invested in a specific clan. Hopefully not, but I know it happens. Find out which ones don't care, and ask them if they don't mind doing "X" for the campaign. If your guy wants to be a big burly guy with a tetsubo, maybe he doesn't really care about being a Crab, he just wants to have a big mustache and a club and thought "Well, Crab clan has the kind of character I want to play." Perhaps he would be fine being Daidoji Mongo. Then let him build the character using the Crab school, and treat it as some minor school he learned at. One major limitation of the editions of L5R I played was the pigeonholing of characters. As the GM, you're not stuck with the RAW.

If your players are reasonable and understand the complexity of trying to run L5R, and you're willing to be flexible with the rules, there are easy ways around most of these problems that don't turn into a campaign-writing headache.

When my RPG group suddenly needed to find a new game to play at the start of this yeah, a few remembered that I love L5R and asked if I could run a game for them and introduce them to the world. I told them about all the major clans and asked them if they wanted to do all same clan or different clans, telling them that there will be different game styles available depending on what they chose. They chose to all play different clans so I wrote a story along the lines of "you all find yourselves in the same tea house, all three traveling to the same festival from different paths but they converge here", a samurai is murdered and they all feel honour bound to investigate what happened, discover a maho cult and purge the evil doers. Having bonded a little, they continue as a group to the festival where all clans are invited to attend and the PCs are all representing their Schools in contests. The Scorpion in the group has got wind that there will be an assassination attempt on a dignitary attending the festival and she is trying to work out who she can trust and who she can use to investigate this, not wanting the hosts to know to avoid potential embarrassment and political conflict. If the succeed in averting this disaster, the dignitary will recommend them for minor Emerald Magistrate positions and presto, this mixed clan group will have further reason to stick together.

As a GM, my preference is for a single clan group but with a little work and some understanding from the players that there will be some plot convenience, I don't mind mix clan groups.

I don't think same clan necessarily removes the situation of "why is your party together?" but it does remove some of the barriers. I'll get into that in a second. I agree that there are a lot of ways to bring multi-clan groups together and a lot of good suggestions have come up here.

Generally speaking, I'm not a super fan of "you're all in a tea house/ tavern and something happens to start to bind you together or there's an old man selling maps in the corner", although it looks like DarkHorse's experience was well enough planned out that it worked well. I also disapprove of waking up in a dark room with little to no memory of who you are or why you're only wearing a fundoshi. I used to do that sometimes as a GM but I have grown to find it pretty distasteful.

I also want to point out that in a pre-modern setting there's a balance to strike in how closely samurai are tied into the bureaucracy of their own clans. That is to say, it's actually kind of difficult for a lord to keep really keep close tabs on their vassals 24/7, especially if they're not the direct lord of a house. While a person might have some responsibilities in the military or civic system, they can probably also get away to hang out with friends and distant relatives pretty easily. If you're the second daughter of your Lion house and you want to go see your Third cousin Scorpion bud, your mom might be disapproving but nobody's really going to actually stop you. This can make it possible to bring multi-clan groups together pretty early on in their careers, at least. Big rainbow groups start to strain credibility but they will do that under the best of circumstances.

It's probably worth pointing out that there's a difference between what a clan thinks of another clan and what a samurai of that clan thinks of a samurai of another clan. So while the Scorpion and Lion may be at each other's throats, it is also possible for the Scorpion and Lion to have a grudging respect for each other because they both performed well in a duel the one time, or the Lion thinks he is keeping the Scorpion under his thumb for use when he needs something a little dishonorable done, and the Scorpion is using the Lion because...well do Scorpions really need a reason for that? Warrior brotherhood is weird like that.

On the other end of the spectrum, one time our group resolved to play a single clan game. But which clan to play, right? There are a lot of arguments to be made for each clan (except of course Mantis :p, and Spider weren't even on the table at the time) so we decided the only fair thing to do was to roll for it. A D8 was called into service with the understanding that we might have to suck it up and play pirates. A couple clicks on the table and held breaths later and we were all getting ready to shave our heads and climb the mountain. Dragon Time. This was great because our GM (who loves GMing) adored the Dragon Clan, so he had a bunch of ideas to throw our way. I like history and Buddhism and Way of the Dragon was actually the first L5R supplement I had access to back in the day. Our other two players were at a bit of a loss (lovers of the Phoenix Clan and a pretty even Unicorn/Scorpion split respectively) initially but we got them to come around to good characters. Unfortunately we hit this big snag when we were all set to go and we had to figure out how an ise-zumi monk who had just been kicked out of Togashi Keep for being too old, and a local shrine nun (also ise-zumi) were supposed to mesh with an up and coming Kitsuki gumshoe. I mean, these are all the same clan, but they all had very different outlooks and duties and lifepaths that made putting them together as a solid adventuring group pretty difficult. That and some other things soon (sadly) dissolved that L5R campaign and our group moved on to another idea to explore.

Anyway, the moral is, separate clans do not forbid you from teaming up, and the same clan does not guarantee you being able to work together. Also, if you wake up in a room with amnesia and a bunch of other people similarly situated, pretend to be the royalty until someone can prove otherwise. I mean, free servants, right?

Good post Aedo. I would like to add in my game, I came up with the bones of a story and then detailed the reasons why each character would be in that tea house. I made sure they all felt like they had their own personal reasons and history that lead them to that point, including some stuff that they would each want to check out and do even if the story never happened. The Dragon had recently been appointed as the samurai protector of the village and she was there to work out what the place was like and why their taxes were frequently underpaid, the Scorpion was on her way to the festival when her master sent her a message recalling her bodyguard and telling her to take a roundabout way to the Festival (she later learned her master had heard rumours about the village and was testing her pupil by sending her to check it out without any real preparation to go on because Scorpion gonna Scorpion), the Crane was on his way to the festival and although he didn't like the brash, drunken Lion NPC, there was no way he would let a fellow bushi be murdered by mere peasants and not make the guilty pay, his strict adherence to bushido demanded it.

So while it was "you are all in a tea house, there is a murder in the night" trope setup, I think everyone felt like they had a good sense of why their characters were there, why they had to band together (there is a conspiracy to murder samurai in this village, who knows who is in on it? The only people we can begin to trust are fellow outsiders to this village, let's investigate because it is the noble thing to do) and the character interactions from there created a group dynamic of at least begrudging respect that we are still building many, many sessions later.

It sounds like a good twist on an old setup, which I am all in favor of. IT also seems like it created a sort of Murder on the Orient Express or Rashomon kind of feel, which seem like good places to draw inspiration from.

Most samurai serve as representatives of their lords, who are dispatched to other lands to attend matters they otherwise cannot attend. Weddings, funerals, winter courts, shrine sanctifications, tournaments, ect. What happens when the samurai arrive is that the local lord asks for a favor and dispatches them on an investigation. Or they have mutual interest in something like being accused, jointly, of a crime. Be creative, its not too hard to find reasons.

adoption, marriage, kharmic ties, reincarnations...there are lots of options to relate with the blood of another clan and have PCs part of an extended family. Particularly with the tradition of Doji Brides.

That reincarnations one gives me a great idea for how to tie a bunch of people together.

The group all come into town for a festival (probably O-bon) or they are approached by a mystic/soothsayer. The soothsayer reveals that the people in the group are actually the reincarnation of another group of old heroes and that therefore heaven has a quest for them to do. The focus of the story is finding out how the current group relates to the old group and who's who, because character traits don't exactly match up (like the clans are not the same or what have you) and also living up to the reputation of these old heroes or maybe trying to restore their good names. The twist would be something along the lines of the quest that the current group is on is actually the incomplete quest of the former heroes who failed miserably at the moment of crucial stress or that these people weren't really heroes at all, or something that changes the perception of the old group.

Lots of options for flashbacks, exposition, world explanation from in world characters about the way things "used to be", and maybe even some light spiritual time travel.

Bam! Campaign Hook. Feel free to run with it, GM's.

I've used all of the following

• Magistrates, appointed by the imperial magistrates (Jade &/or Emerald)
• Hostages in residence
• On "walkabout" - Their lord released them for a term as ronin, either for disciplinary or fiduciary reasons.
• Border Crossing - the neighbor just across the border.
• Special Task
• Student of foreign school for special skills
• Married into a different clan
• adopted into different clan after having been ronin.

We know the true reason. It can be quite dangerous traveling across the Empire. They travel as a group from the different clans so the Dragon clan will think they are working for the betterment of the Empire instead of causing trouble. You know when a group of ruffians from those other clans are roaming, they are nothing but trouble. It is hard for the Dragon clan to maintain balance between the clans.

The Beta rulebook has included a line basically saying 'Many Samurai become Ronin and wander from their clans the year after their proving, then return to the clan afterwards' which I imagine is intended as the get-out-of-jail free card for this particular question.

I think some clans are also easier to involve.

Crab: in case of any spookyness going on, someone will want the Crab involved, as they're experts in spooks and taint and stuff.

Phoenix: similar to Crab but for spiritual matters and kami. Perhaps there is some weird kami activity in the area, and your priests have no idea... time to call the Phoenix!

Scorpion and Crane also always looking to get more favor/blackmail, so sending a bushi/priest/courtier to a different clan could be one way to get some favors.

because we need a red/orange ranger, a light blue ranger, a green ranger, a yellow/brown ranger a black/red ranger, a purple ranger and a dark blue ranger to pilot the Samurai Megazord.

Maybe all PC are undercover Scorpion Butei, each one posing as a different clan samurai, and noone knows the other's secret identities...
Or, they are traveling around a strange man with orange and purple kimono, posing as Rokugan's own Mito Komon ...

Ok, joking aside, in my experience that's a real issue. Not just because many clan members have nothing to do with samurai from different (sometime opposing) clan, but also because different clan can follow different agenda, different way to accomplish things or just different philosophy

In my experience, the very first group i was, almost everyone was from a different clan, so there where a big trouble. We all ended up died (or amost) in shadowlands so in the end there was no real problem, but everyone was pissed off and every bushi issued a duel with the other ones (duels who where meant to be solved after our trip to shadowlands... :| )

For the second group, the GM asked for a little cohoperation. Naturally, everyone did a samurai from a different clan but one of them was higher glory so after an introductory adventure we all followed this one. Eventually there was some alliance forged, someone's life was saved by the other ones, etc but in the end we all made it together because we forced some issue in the beginning. Eventually, we got a little older, work and irl happened and we had to stop playing.

Shortly after, we started a third group. Me and another one where using our old PC from previous group, so we already bonded together; one of the PC was a monk so really no issue; the GM had only to connect us with the newly found Kakita, and i can't say how he did it but it worked fine without feeling like a bad thing. The group had several little problem, in my opinion, probably because we found the limitation of the 1st edition, but having different clan was not one of them.

Fourth group was composed at 75% from characthers from previous group, and again the only one new was forced inside the narrative. We played just a bunch of sessions, then some irl problems arise and we stopped playing, so i can't say if this time worked fine as the previous one, or not

I'm about to start a new adventure, this time with a completely new group and maybe 4rth edition (or this beta, if i can manage enough time to read the book and found a way to create the dice). For this time i arranged a solution: there is a wedding between a crab samurai and a samurai-ko from a different clan (not yet decided). The crab is from a vassal family i just invented so it will fit well into narrative, and they are very open minded. The PC can be from crab, maybe cousins of the broom, or from the bride's clan. They will be forced to be together for wedding story arc, and in the future they will (hopefully ) tied by family affair. I already know one of the player (probably two of them) will agree to play crab samurai so the other ones have just to be crab or to agree to the same clan. It looks like a good way to go

One thing I did was relate the Pcs to older NPC (mentor, uncle, tutor...) from different clans who bonded during their service as Imperial legionnaires. Now old and reminiscing their youth, they gave a small mission to their related PCs to engage in together. Then the story goes, bonding, friendship and all.

it works well for mid length shonen inspired campaign.

Single clan party for me are used for focused mini campaign exploring a thematic.

Also playing together isn't always working together either. I did a short 3 scenarios arc focused on court where PCs where sometimes cooperating but more often competing and betraying each other around winter court affairs. The only "fight" scene was a duel between a PC and a cuckold husband.

More commonly is that your lords owe someone a favor and send you to take care of it.

On 10/5/2017 at 11:57 PM, KellenC said:

The Beta rulebook has included a line basically saying 'Many Samurai become Ronin and wander from their clans the year after their proving, then return to the clan afterwards' which I imagine is intended as the get-out-of-jail free card for this particular question.

There is a specific term for "Rōnin" of this kind, «Musha Shugyo» ("Warrior's Pilgrimage") listed in Way of the Wolf. They are socially neither proper samurai nor Rōnin.