I've got a group starting that has never experienced the L5R universe before. We're going to start off a week from today. Before going into the Starter Kit does anyone know of a nice concise way to intro players into the world? A brief background and history that would be easily digestible for new players before jumping into the Topaz Championship.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
LCG L2Play Rules has some stuff:
Second half of the book has a clan intro of sorts. You can ignore the card parts, but its a brief overview.
This is the intro fiction to give an idea of the setting:
The bezt practice I can advise is...
... exactly the same as with other "setting rich" games...
start with a particular locality of your choice, and work outward from there.
More specifically for L5R, start with the local village, then the province, and then send them on missions to other provinces and other clans... with a detour to the wall at some point.
L5R has a lot of details, but it's almost all at high level of government... the local, however, is where you start making things your own, as well as establishing one clan's patterns for the players.
My version of intro to the setting right now is running the game in the Dawn of the Empire era.
You could write up a little cheat sheet for some of the etiquette bits. When I do setting rich, I'll write up a quick paragraph for each of the major factions and the general politics/people that would be commonly known.
5 hours ago, General Zod said:You could write up a little cheat sheet for some of the etiquette bits. When I do setting rich, I'll write up a quick paragraph for each of the major factions and the general politics/people that would be commonly known.
Actually a guy who ran a 4E campaign at Origins had a really nice one of these, both for the clans and the individual NPCs. Now I wish I had kept it.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm working up a short paragraph or 2 to give some broad strokes of the general setting and history. Hopefully that'll be enough to get us started.
The Clan Champion Letters they are doing at the moment are pretty good "state of the world" introductions. They also introduce quite a chunk of interesting plot treads both players and GMs might want to consider pursuing or be inspired by.