My fiancee and I recently got into L5R and the bug has hit us pretty hard. I have played RPGs for nearly 2 decades now primarily playing Pathfinder, DnD, and CoC. She wasn't a huge fan of the high fantasy of DnD or Pathfinder, but was really attracted to the art from L5R. So since we are all sheltering in place for a while due to Covid-19, I picked up the beginner box and ran our group through The Topaz Championship. Our group loved it.

My fiancee really liked the system too and wanted to try her hand at running a session or two. She decided on trying to run the Wedding at Kyotei Castle. We know there are pre-generated characters, but our group wants to try our hand at making our first characters. I can see that there seems to be a decent difference between the pre-gens in the beginner box and this adventure, but I am struggling to figure out how much experience our characters should have.

Is there a way for me tell that I am missing, and if not, and ideas as to how much would be enough and still have a balanced fun session? Thanks in advance!

Sorry, it seems your post was in moderator Limbo and only now has put before the rest of the users.

I have to be hones I am unfamiliar with Wedding at Kyotei Castle but I am always a fan of people creating their own characters (unless it's a one shot).

If you guys are using the bond rules in Courts of Stone, I would assume a valid option to make your characters having a bond with one of the NPCs to give them a reason to be there.

Experience wise, I would say, start as real beginners.

Kyotei Castle is for school rank 2 characters. If not all member of your group are at that level, they need to "train up" a bit with other adventures or they WILL get overwhelmed by the challenges in that adventure. Mangus Grendel can confirm this with you as his group tackled it early in their career and nearly got mauled by the experience. You can read about it on the thread "New Campaign Characters" in the "Your Stories" sub-forum.

Edit: Just confirmed, his description is on the first page, about halfway down, and after "The Scroll or the Blade".

That's a pretty fair assessment.

Theoretically you don't have to get into any fights: you could leave the peasants to their fate and not intervene when the wedding procession is surrounded but that largely reduces your PCs to observers.

I'd say rank 2 is a good balance of challenge - if I was creating characters specifically I'd use the Veteran Samurai character creation rules (50xp plus a title) as that will also give your characters a glory or status kick - given that the other guests and hosts include two (vassal) family daimyo, a provincial daimyo, a very famous general, and the husband of a clan champion, 'generic scruffy ronin #3652' is not getting an invite unless they have a bond or ally advantage connected with someone there...

Note you can have a fun session with lower XP characters, just.....don't expect everyone to survive. Most starting characters can take a bandit in a fair fight without getting badly hurt (they're better armed than the Poisoned Water Sake ruffians but basically the same NPC) but the bandit leader and Itto are a serious challenge to take on at the same time. Your players will learn to hate the ability Get Them, You Fools!