https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2018/7/17/a-most-distinguished-guide/

I think this confirms that additional PCs are Hida, Bayushi, and Shinjo, as these names are present but other Crab, Scorpion, and, Unicorn families are absent.

There is no "soft G" in Japanese romanization...

1 hour ago, narukagami said:

There is no "soft G" in Japanese romanization...

Yeah that's bugging me, too. The rest is mostly okay though.

This chart has me howling!

I don't know how to say it politely, but like, if you don't know how to pronounce 'yoshi' then maybe L5R isn't really for you.

Stuff like this makes me question the target audience.

Well, I've heard a lot of... Creative pronunciations over the years. But then, L5R has never really been the model of linguistic accuracy, eh?

Japanese romanization isn't hard to pronounce, vowels are always said one way, ah, ee, oo, eh, and oh, there are no silent vowels, only "long," and consonants are always hard. Just remembering that, anyone can passably pronounce Japanese, fake-Japanese, or Not!Japanese words. There's no need to overcomplicate it, especially with bad and straight up wrong examples.

Now what they could use is a note reminding people there's a second "i" in "iaijutsu."

Long vowels are literally longer, rather than differently sounded: 3 beats instead of 1, in theory. In practice 2 to 4 beats.

Spoken japanese is wonderfully rhythmic.

On 7/30/2018 at 11:06 PM, narukagami said:

Japanese romanization isn't hard to pronounce, vowels are always said one way, ah, ee, oo, eh, and oh, there are no silent vowels, only "long," and consonants are always hard. Just remembering that, anyone can passably pronounce Japanese, fake-Japanese, or Not!Japanese words. There's no need to overcomplicate it, especially with bad and straight up wrong examples.

Now what they could use is a note reminding people there's a second "i" in "iaijutsu."

So, please help me make sure my phonetic spelling is correct for iaijutsu.

ee-ah-ee-ju-tsu (noting the u in this case is the same sound as oe in shoe or ue in blue and flue.)

The third letter tends to get elided into a 1 beat diphthong by english speakers, but it should be a full beat. I've heard it elided down, however, by some native speakers of Japanese - ya-ee-ju-tsu and ee-eye-ju-tsu.

For comparison, daitō (long sword) (also written in Romanji as daitou or daitoo) would nominally be da-ee-to-o-o. But it might be elided to die-to-o or da-ee-to-oo.

It's awkward for native English speakers because we inherently elide doubled vowels into diphthongs.