I asked this over on the L5R Reddit, and there seems to be some disagreement, so I thought I'd pose it here:

Is there any way to save the target of Kitsu Spiritcaller's ability? For example, if I had "Reprieve" or a way to honor the target of her ability, could I use "Stand Your Ground" to keep them around a little longer?

The confusion seems to center around Delayed Effects and the ability to respond to them through an interrupt or reaction.

Yes you can use either Reprieve or Stand your Ground, or other similar effects to prevent that character from leaving play.

This should be pretty straight forward. The interrupt is a cancel effect, and at the moment when the character would leave play the interrupt prevents them from leaving play.

Both cards create a replacement effect "do x instead" which substitutes the character leaving play. The only issue to watch for with replacement effects is that you cannot pay a cost with a replacement effect that stops the effect (such as funeral pyre)

I reviewed 'Delayed Effects', 'Triggering Condition', and 'Replacement Effects' in the rules reference. Interrupts are played in response to the triggering condition. Delayed effects push that condition out to a future point in time, at which you would have an opportunity to use an interrupt ability.

I think the L5R redditors may have been confused by the following line, though note it is only specific to Reactions:

Quote

"Delayed effects resolve automatically and immediately after their specified timing point or future condition occurs or becomes true, before reactions to that moment may be triggered.".

Quote

A reaction is a triggered ability whose text is prefaced by a
boldface “Reaction:” precursor. Always resolve a triggering
condition before initiating any reactions to that triggering
condition.

Since you always resolve the triggering condition before initiating the reaction, I don't see why you couldn't initiate a reaction to the resolution of the delayed effect as well.

If it would have said "Delayed effects resolve automatically and immediately... before interrupts to that moment may be triggered" that would be a different story.

Awesome. Thank you guys. I think I (and perhaps others) were making it more complicated than it needed to be.

The line LuceLineGames quoted doesn't prevent you from reacting to the delayed effect. What that line actually means is that the delayed effect basically happens first, before anything else.

So if you had a card brought back with Kitsu Spiritcaller that had the ability "Reaction: At the end of the conflict in which this card was participating - draw a card." then the delayed effect from the Spiritcaller putting that card on the bottom of the deck would always come first before you could react to "at the end of the conflict" with the card's ability.

This doesn't mean you cannot react to the triggering condition of the card leaving play. It just means the delayed effect comes first, just as forced reactions come before any player invoked ones. Interrupts come before reactions, and before triggering conditions resolve, so once a character leaving play becomes imminent then reprieve and stand your ground.