9 hours ago, Schmoozies said:

The Tonbo its similar as a Phoenix Samurai-Ko broke her engagement to a Lion general to marry her true love a Dragon Samurai (funny how often Lion aggression crops up in the formation of minor clans ). The Tonbo were formed out of the fall out from the broken engagement as an attempt to curtail the Lion from declaring open war against the Dragon and Phoenix.

From a Watsonian perspective it is one of the best ways for the Hantei to keep their primary rivals in check.

6 hours ago, Mangod said:

For the record, the currently existing Minor Clans are:

1. The Badger.
2. The Centipede.
3. The Dragonfly.
4. The Falcon.
5. The Fox.
6. The Hare.
7. The Mantis.
8. The Sparrow.
9. The Tortoise.
10. The Wasp.

Besides those, there was the Boar, the Snake and the Tanuki, all of whom are extinct in the eyes of the Empire.

The remaining five Minor Clans who were created post-present timeline are the Monkey, the Firefly, the Ox, the Bat and the Oriole.

We might also have a Cat clan, but that is, as of yet, to be confirmed.

20 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

So why are you so eager to get them to flood the game with random Hare Clan, Boar Clan, Sparrow Clan, Falcon Clan, etc. characters? And not just characters, I would have to wager, because those traits would be useless unless there were event and attachments that trigger off those clan traits. But there are never going to be enough cards for any of them in a set of cycles so as to really make it anything more than a meta dead-end. I used to be in the mentality to try to use them in the old CCG, but they were never useful and it feels like they would be even less so in this LCG.

1. Nice strawman. Again. No one is going, "we need enough Badger Clan personalities to make a Badger Clan deck." We do have Mantis fans looking forward to some version of their old faction, but since that is a thing that design has sort of hinted they're doing anyhow...

2. Neutral personalities will remain a thing. Especially when legality shifts.

3. There is no inherent need for the Flying Purple Hippo Clan keyword to mean anything- right now, the Mantis Clan keyword doesn't mean a **** of a lot.

Quote

And what sense does it make to make a distinct Dragonfly Clan character if the main thing they are supposed to do is serve as go-betweens for the Dragon Clan and the rest of the empire? Shouldn't that just be printed as a Dragon Clan faction card? Wouldn't it just neatly streamline stuff to give Dragon Clan a new family that has a dragonfly as its symbol and everyone will immediately recognize it and say "Hey!! Yeah, those guys were called the 'Tonbo' before!" And then they would function the way they are meant to and would be about 100 times more useful than a neutral card with a printed clan trait that it would just be all the more wasteful to ever print cards that interact with it.

What sense does it make to arbitrarily alter a thing that mostly exists as setting texture just to fill a niche that the LCG might not even need filled?

There are ways to make playing an "affiliated" neutral card work better for a given clan without making them an in-clan thing- and in fact, doing so frees up design space to do weird things one might not have expected.

And finally... we're in the Lore subforum, so the LCG is not king here. There are perfectly good reasons for minor clans, particularly and especially in the RPG, where they add depth, nuance, and underdog factions to a setting that can feel disturbingly monolithic at times- and which, going by what you have written here, you wish to see become even moreso, despite the fact that there really isn't any particularly compelling reason on the conceptual level. Execution on individual clans may be terrible (for example, I routinely forget the Oriole were ever a thing), but this persistent issue you seem to have with the very notion of minor clans is much harder to support.

Honestly, from a Lore point I think the idea that the Great Clan need to be more monolithic and the Minor Clans eliminated to be abominable.

The setting is much better served from a narrative and verisimilitude point of view by having the Great Clans be far less monolithic than they are now and by having a far greater number of Minor Clans (knowing full well that the praticalities of writing a game line and setting means that we probably won't be seeing much more clans than there currently are or existed in the CCG).

3 hours ago, Suzume Chikahisa said:

The setting is much better served from a narrative and verisimilitude point of view by having the Great Clans be far less monolithic than they are now and by having a far greater number of Minor Clans

In my campaign I had twenty-two of them, using nearly every MC that got mentioned in the original lore, plus one I invented. Most of them never played any significant role in the story -- the exceptions being the Snake Clan ronin revenge duelist I mentioned before, and the Salamander Clan Champion one of the PCs wound up marrying after plot events meant he couldn't be Clan Champion anymore -- but they cropped up in all kinds of small places, especially during the part of the story where the PCs weren't important enough to get direct access to influential Great Clan samurai. It definitely made the whole thing feel richer.

Shackling what the RPG and story are allowed to depict to what the LCG can render as a playable faction would be a terrible idea. Fortunately, we don't have to do that.

On ‎9‎/‎30‎/‎2018 at 4:31 PM, Suzume Chikahisa said:

Honestly, from a Lore point I think the idea that the Great Clan need to be more monolithic and the Minor Clans eliminated to be abominable.

The setting is much better served from a narrative and verisimilitude point of view by having the Great Clans be far less monolithic than they are now and by having a far greater number of Minor Clans (knowing full well that the praticalities of writing a game line and setting means that we probably won't be seeing much more clans than there currently are or existed in the CCG).

This. From an RPG player/GM it makes the world far more interesting to be able to have decent political intrigue within a clan or even within a clan family (between two clan family vassal families, say), or - if playing as not god-level characters, to be lords of minor clans trying to survive around the feet of the giants stomping through the political scene.

Heck, 'founding a minor clan' would be a rather interesting campaign for high-level players.

On ‎9‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 4:17 PM, TheHobgoblyn said:

And soon after that, the "Falcon Clan" was absorbed into the Crab Clan, thus setting the precedent that it is completely normal and acceptable for minor clans to just join Great Clans in order to avoid military action being taken against them.

As of To The South , the Falcon clan is still a separate entity, I believe.

On ‎9‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 6:00 PM, DGLaderoute said:

The key point I think you HAVE touched on is that making them distinct and flavorful should not also result in them outshining Great Clan samurai, or doing what GC samurai can or should be doing, only doing it better. They should pretty much always be subordinate to the Great Clans, because it's them that the story and game needs to continue to be about.

Agreed. It should be extremely rare for a minor clan to outclass a great clan, even in a specific field. I see it as far more likely for the whole "minor clan holds this piece of land that for some reason the Emperor doesn't want a great clan getting its grubby mittens on" purpose.

On a related note - reading some previous edition fiction...

Since we are to assume that any previous edition 'history' is correct until we see it contradicted - something from the Crab-Crane war, about seven hundred years ago:

"When the war ended, the Emperor issued an Imperial edict banning large-scale open warfare among the Great Clans....the Unicorn Clan eventually claimed they were exempt, as their Clan was not present in Rokugan in the fourth century, and they were not listed in the edict..."

The edict is in the past, so in theory that same loophole is still there - which in the current timeline may or may not be in their favour.

Either way, it means their war with the Lion Clan (which the events of A Swift End pretty much have to have formally opened the ball on) will neither require nor provoke imperial intervention. Which may be another reason for the stand-offishness in Flying Chariot, Standing.

6 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Heck, 'founding a minor clan' would be a rather interesting campaign for high-level players.

Genius. I could see this pretty handily being adapted from the Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign. I think I might start plotting something out to pitch it to my group, I know they enjoyed the Pathfinder campaign.

13 hours ago, Kaito Kikaze said:

Genius. I could see this pretty handily being adapted from the Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign. I think I might start plotting something out to pitch it to my group, I know they enjoyed the Pathfinder campaign.

I'll have to look into that one. But, yes, I think it could work.

I mean, you can't - in rokugan - just say "I'm gonna go off and be clan now" - it requires imperial recognition to allow you to elevate one PC to the status of clan champion (and grant them and theirs a recognised family name if you don't already have one), but that can either be part of the campaign backstory or the 'opening event'.

After that, all sorts of possible storylines open up.

• A new minor clan's lands rokugani holdings are - by definition - being taken from someone else, and at least one faction of that someone else is likely to be unhappy about it.
• As previously mentioned, just because you and your immediate family are now the [insert animal here] clan doesn't instantly provide you with minions If you were a reasonably well-to-do vassal family within a clan, you might well have soldiers and servants already sworn to you specifically, alternatively your 'parent' clan(s) might provide you with a 'parting gift' of personnel, and the lands you've been given might well have people living there. But whatever resources you get handed, odds are they won't be enough to easily do whatever job the Emperor has tasked you with.
  • If you're an under-manned minor clan with responsibility to guard a given territory, or the caravans on a given road, or whatever, either recruiting ashigaru or hiring ronin is an option. But ashigaru are poor fighters compared to samurai and any peasant made ashigaru isn't working on the harvest, and the wrong sort of ronin....can cause as many problems as they solve, especially if a clan isn't that rich to begin with.
• Founding shrines and schools - developing new techniques is all well and good when you're an RPG writer, but getting any competent sensei to train up your soldiers to take up residence on your lands will do to start with.
• Clans are forbidden from making war on one another but it's amazing (especially from the limited perspective of a minor clan) what you can get away with calling 'skirmishes'.

I will suggest you take a look at 4E Secrets of the Empire p. 10-12 it details how to create a Minor Clan with some examples, and also has a section called So You’ve Founded a Minor Clan. Now What? I found it useful for my own Campaign.

What about adapting Pendragon for a longer-term campaign?

11 hours ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

What about adapting Pendragon for a longer-term campaign?

Doable. The Manor system is largely modular and could be adapted to any setting with some tweaking from what I remember. Even the generational game can be adapted by reskinning the Arthurian themes. I'd say you probably want to tone down shugenja, but then again it might no even be necessary.

23 hours ago, Nheko said:

Secrets of the Empire...as a section called So You’ve Founded a Minor Clan. Now What?

It's pretty brief (a sidebar) but interesting, and largely lines up with what people have been talking about

So You’ve Founded a Minor Clan. Now What?
What happens after a samurai manages to do something so amazing as to be named founder of a Minor Clan? Most of the time, the Emperor grants the new Minor Clan some land. Sometimes the land is taken from a Great Clan; sometimes it is land that is unaligned or has been left uninhabited. Whatever the case, the clan founder must recruit followers – both samurai and heimin – to live on, tend to, and administer his lands. Recruiting samurai is fairly easy, since there are always a few samurai willing to swear fealty for a chance at glory and advancement within a new clan, even a Minor Clan. Peasants can actually be harder to recruit, since they are usually tied to the lands where they were born. In some cases a clan founder may actually have to beg the Great Clans for permission to take a few of their heimin for his own use. Once the founder has recruited his initial group, he must begin turning his lands into a proper home for his nascent Minor Clan. In some cases there will already be villages or a castle on the lands gifted to the Minor Clan by the Emperor, but more often the new clan will need to build its own villages, dig its own rice paddies, and construct its castle from the ground up. Such construction is both time-consuming and expensive; although the Emperor may sometimes gift the new clan with the resources for its initial work, this is by no means assured. Most clan founders must struggle to acquire the resources they need, which can again lead to becoming indebted to a nearby Great Clan. Finally, the Minor Clan must survive. It is easy for a new clan to be swept up and destroyed by the tides of the political seas, or become so subservient to a great Clan that it loses its individuality and is absorbed. Few Mi-nor Clans have skilled courtiers, so finding political allies without overcommitting oneself is the key. Isolation can also work, although this limits the availability of outside resources and trade.For any Minor Clan, surviving these first few years of existence is the key to long-term success. A GM seeking a compelling high-stakes challenge for a group of PCs may find the origins of a Minor Clan the ideal setting.

The different reasons to found one are interesting - the comment that any successful bunch of ronin might start calling themselves a clan and ultimately get recognised as a clan by default (with the emperor's agreement, of course) is interesting, as is the comment that you might get minor clans established by one emperor immediately disestablished by his successor.

Another suggestion from 4E: Naishou Province Module. It has a very good description of the area and you can use the adventure to set your own Minor Clan.

Cat Clan confirmed, per the corebook! The Nekoma Family are a group of shinobi for hire who masquerade as various types of performers.

1 hour ago, Kaito Kikaze said:

Cat Clan confirmed, per the corebook! The Nekoma Family are a group of shinobi for hire who masquerade as various types of performers.

Very curious how they formed.

And how the Scorpion feel about that...

17 minutes ago, Hida Jitenno said:

Very curious how they formed.

And how the Scorpion feel about that...

Probably the way they feel about most of the other Shinobi families and schools (superior and apt to point out how amateurish they are)

Just now, Schmoozies said:

Probably the way they feel about most of the other Shinobi families and schools (superior and apt to point out how amateurish they are)

Though I'm not aware other Shinobi families who are so literally stealing their schtick as to be actors.

3 minutes ago, Hida Jitenno said:

Though I'm not aware other Shinobi families who are so literally stealing their schtick as to be actors.

That just shows you how good the other Shinobi are, Scorpion don't even suspect it.

They also mention the Moth and the Bat Minor Clans, which was unexpected...

On 10/11/2018 at 4:37 PM, Hida Jitenno said:

Though I'm not aware other Shinobi families who are so literally stealing their schtick as to be actors.

There use to be in the old canon the Sesai family of the Shiba who were shinobi, not actor per sé, I wonder if the Cat Clan being so close to the Shiba lands are related to them... ?

7 minutes ago, Nheko said:

They also mention the Moth and the Bat Minor Clans, which was unexpected...

Very interesting. I think the Moth is completely new. I made one once, before the Spider became a thing, as one of Emperor Daigotsu's Lost Clans.

Yep, the Moth is new.

Btw did you make the one in the Court of the Minor Clans?

I’m really curious about this incarnation of the Bat Clan and see how similar to the old one is...

Regarding the above talk of shinobi, I don't want to spoil anything but the fluff in the back of the Scorpion novella provides some great clarifications on the nuance of shinobi in FFG's lore.

1 hour ago, Nheko said:

Yep, the Moth is new.

Btw did you make the one in the Court of the Minor Clans?

Unlikely, unless someone from my game submitted it without telling me.

Is it a fully-corrupted Lost who looks to the Ashura as the perfect warrior, essentially a dark mirror of the Lion clan?

2 hours ago, Nheko said:

There use to be in the old canon the Sesai family of the Shiba who were shinobi, not actor per sé, I wonder if the Cat Clan being so close to the Shiba lands are related to them... ?

The Sesai still exist, and have been mentioned in one of the Phoenix stories.