Monoculture - What if it wasn't so japanese?

By ArghMark, in Lore Discussion

And, Japan in 1600 was coming out of 130 plus years of Civil War and probably had the highest percentage of men under arms of any country on the planet. They mobilized over 500,000 troops for the invasion of Korea in 1592 (160,000 or so went) out of a total population of maybe 12 million. So what is the supposed population of Rokugan and what percentage are samurai? In Edo Japan it was 7-10% samurai, which was one of the largest elite classes of the era.

Here are the numbers I have for Rokugani demographics and the reasoning behind them.

https://craneclan.weebly.com/demographics.html

In times of full out warfare, you can probably add 4 times again the number of bushi Samurai listed here in recruited Ashigaru, which starts to put you at the height of the Sengoku in terms of troop numbers.

Quite a lot of what we know as "Japanese culture", particularly around the sengoku and edo periods that L5R is based, was very much inspired by earlier Chinese and Korean culture. Until the end of the Sengoku and beginning of the Edo period, Japan was often frequented by outsiders. Firearms were also frequently in use.

So much of L5R is nonsensically based on the Edo period without understanding anything actually about the Edo period. It is missing tons of the rationale and context. Like the writers just kind of second-hand heard bits and pieces of information and just tossed them in and tried to fill in the gaps with chewing gum and duct tape. And I think the person who was the most knowledgeable left fairly early on. So much of what was written in early books about the culture has had to be slowly retconned out of existence. The whole "everything is about dueling, and dueling always determines who is right and who is wrong" is one of the nastier orientalisms that has been difficult to fully dislodge. But even it is not as bad as it was during the early editions.

For example, the "Celestial Order" in Rokugan and its closed border policy are supposed to have lasted 1000 years? After only 200 years in the real world, the samurai had become so penniless that they had sold off everything except their grand pappies sidearm sword. Tons went "ronin" and were just nasty hoodlums who would threaten to cut people up if they were not given free food or lodging. Others just effectively became peasants/craftsmen because it was easier.

Pretty much everyone ended up super in debt to the merchants who were supposedly on the bottom on the social order, but were actually effectively running the country by the end.

A lot of that did come about because there was peace in the country-- the daimyo had a bunch of samurai on staff, but were only collecting so much in taxes to try to pay them. And since there were no wars, there really was no need for them. Many samurai would get their monthly stipend and then go spend it boozing and whoring until they had nothing left. And, of course, you figure that those samurai are just going to end up having 2 or more children so that just increases how many of the useless buggers you had around.

And it should be noted that those who were "samurai"-- they weren't anything special until the edo period. They had over 100 years of civil war and by the end of it, whomever happened to have been given the "officer" rank within the military was just "the samurai" as were their descendants. But it was perfectly possible to go from being a peasant to being an officer within the sengoku period-- one guy made it from peasant to effective ruler of the entire country in fact. Those strict social castes were put in place by that same guy and strengthened by the guy who betrayed him, killed his kid during another big civil war and then assumed control for the rest of the Edo period.

The cracks in the setting really begin to show the more and more one learns of the history that the setting is actually adapting its society from.

Even if you try to "adapt" stuff from other Asian cultures, it isn't particularly helpful in resolving these issues as the Edo-period Japanese stuff is really emphasized so heavily. Plus-- its not like any of the Chinese dynasties were particularly stable either.

On 8/16/2020 at 11:45 AM, KakitaKaori said:

Here are the numbers I have for Rokugani demographics and the reasoning behind them.

https://craneclan.weebly.com/demographics.html

In times of full out warfare, you can probably add 4 times again the number of bushi Samurai listed here in recruited Ashigaru, which starts to put you at the height of the Sengoku in terms of troop numbers.

Those demographic percentages from the Way of the Dragon in breakdown by clan so very much don't make the least bit of sense.

  • The Crab Clan in any given generation are the most likely to be killed of any clan and that would have put a severe damper on the ability of their population to grow. Furthermore, they had an early civil war which caused something like a quarter of their samurai to abandon the clan and run off to form the Mantis Clan. In fact, the Crab Clan has probably been the clan that has splintered to form minor clans the most frequently. They simply could not have a population that dwarfs nearly all other clans like suggested there. Too many factors would have crippled their population growth. Those 20 Goblin Winters are most definitely not going to be making up the difference.
  • On the other hand, the Crane Clan has the richest, most abundant lands and thus the most food and, thanks to that and their political sway, the most wealth. The idea that they would be tiny seems like a poorly thought-out hold over from the days when the description of the Crane Clan was "they produce wives". With high food, high wealth, and vast lands and a culture focused on poetry, beauty, and romance-- the Crane naturally would have been breeding like rabbits from those early days. And they are one of the least likely clans to face brutal death on the battlefield as they resolve most of their issues through diplomacy. The Crane ought to be one of the largest clans.
  • Dragon is too high, definitely when compared to the Crane, Phoenix and Scorpion on that chart. Everything I just listed for why the Crane Clan would expand in numbers except for the rarely being killed on the battlefield part cuts against the Dragon. They isolate themselves in a region with poor food supplies and lead a monastic order that is all about reflecting on one's inner-self. The rest of them tend towards spending all their time studying. A bunch of nearly starving monks and intellectuals are just not going to be having large families. The Dragon almost certainly ought to be the smallest clan.
  • The Lion numbers.... are.... are we even being serious here? The guys who spend all day and all night doing marching drills and are the first to go smash themselves into other clans and die in battle over little or nothing? Look-- I know they have plenty of ashigaru at their beck and call, but the actual Lion Clan just shouldn't be 2-5x the size of any other clan. They have at best the same "bounty of food" and "bounty of wealth" advantages to growth as the Crane, but the fact that some portion of them die in battle every generation which means those ones never have any descendants mean that they should actually be smaller than whatever new number is put on the Crane.
  • The Phoenix have everything going for them that I listed for reasons that Crane ought to be much larger than that chart indicates, but they also have that whole "spend all their time studying" aspect cutting against them that would be part of the reason the Dragon should be smaller than indicates. They have plenty of food, wealth and land and are very openly affectionate with each other. But, sure, I could see some number of them forgoing carnal pleasures to keep themselves pure for the kami or whatever. Still-- balancing those factors out, the Phoenix should run roughly in the middle of the pack or lower-middle. But certainly not the smallest clan like that chart indicates.
  • The Scorpion being placed lower-middle of the rankings seems about right. The Scorpion are another Clan that throws away their lives with far more frequency than most clans do and they also don't have as much food or wealth as other clans. On the other hand, this is probably the more sexually active clan meaning that they are going to be making babies whether those kids are "legitimate" or not. So their placement is about right.
  • The Unicorns numbers have to account for both that they left some portion of their numbers behind in Rokugan early on in its history that would have become the Fox Clan, but also they returned with the Moto. But then-- they were also living a nomadic lifestyle and nomads simply cannot sustain the same numbers as settled, farming cultures. Just how large were these swarms of horse riders that she came back from the Burning Sands with? It is really difficult to imagine they were numbering in the 100,000s. Feeding that many horses while living nomadically is simply impossible. While the horse riding warriors of nomadic cultures have been able to take over significant portions of land, they were supported by people actually farming the lands and giving them food and supplies (willing or not). But the way Shinjo's horde was described precludes that being a possibility. Honestly, I might rethink saying the Dragon ought to be the smallest Clan-- maybe these guys should be.
  • The Imperials aren't even on the list. Like... WTF! I suppose maybe this was written way back when the lore was basically that the "Imperial Families" consisted solely of those who were directly descended from Hantei or whatever, but-- given that the Imperials started with Seppun's tribe and Otomo's tribe, two of the larger and more powerful tribes, and that they have been the least likely to find themselves caught in warfare and dying on the battlefield in inter-war conflict-- even if one factors in that they are a bit more likely to marry ought of their family than have people marry in, they still ought to be rivaling the numbers of the smallest Great Clan easily (whether that be the Dragon or the Unicorn).
  • And then there is the ludicrous number put on Minor Clans and Ronin. First.... Ronin ought not even be on the list. Rokugan's society has very few ways for Ronin to meak out any sort of living. The idea that it has tens of thousands of ronin is ridiculous. The ways to become a ronin (unless we are counting any Ashigaru who decides to start calling themselves a "ronin" as one) are very, very few. Those that end up in that position are stuck trying to find any way to make a koku-- of which there are very few legal ones-- and then buying their food or equipment is going to be at significantly inflated prices compared to any legitimate clan samurai. It's not like Rokugan has some sort of welfare program for so-called ronin to make sure they get fed and housed. Anyone stuck in that life is going to die without heirs or give it up and just start being a basic laborer soon enough.
  • And then there are the minor clans.... there were only about 7 minor clans at the time that demographics chart was made, most of whom were quite well established as having less than 1000 surviving members. The only three Minor Clans that had been around long enough, started large enough and had enough food and wealth to grow to any significant size were the Mantis, Fox and Badger. But even those three combined should hardly add up to rivaling any of the main clans-- the Mantis could imaginably be maybe half the size of the Crab after adjusting for the fact that the chart greatly overestimates how many Crab could actually be around and the Fox are well... they started with about 10% of the Kirin, a number of them got killed by the Lion, and they have been living in the forest ever since-- so maybe tens of thousands if we are being generous. And the Badger are nearly impossible to estimate as so little has ever been written about them. But I would estimate them to probably be a bit larger than the Fox as they have had years of relative peace if not prosperity and live on more farmable land rather than inside a haunted forest.

So it seems to me like the demographics ought to break down far more closely to this

  • Crane 350,000
  • Lion 325,000
  • Scorpion 250,000
  • Phoenix 200,000
  • Crab 200,000
  • Unicorn 150,000
  • Dragon 125,000
  • Imperial 100,000
  • Mantis 80,000
  • Badger 40,000
  • Fox 35,000
  • Other Minor Clans 20,000
  • Ronin 10,000

Unless you can tell me what factor is causing the Crane population to remain ridiculously small to counteract all the factors there that would see their population boom, where Crab is getting replacements for all those who get ripped apart by demons or split off to become minor clans, and how the Lion has managed to see unparalleled population growth among its samurai (the fames Lion armies are easily explained through their superior mobilization of their peasants into ashigaru forces and don't really indicate a larger noble class).

4 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Unless you can tell me what factor is causing the Crane population to remain ridiculously small to counteract all the factors there that would see their population boom, where Crab is getting replacements for all those who get ripped apart by demons or split off to become minor clans, and how the Lion has managed to see unparalleled population growth among its samurai (the fames Lion armies are easily explained through their superior mobilization of their peasants into ashigaru forces and don't really indicate a larger noble class).

I don't find the Way of the Dragon numbers, at least proportionally, overly realistic. I personally in my numbers do not attempt to break down by clan, only split evenly between the clans and non-clan samurai.

That said, the Way of the Dragon numbers are supposed to encompass only the actual fighting forces of the clans, not the entire population of the clan. The reason the Lion and Crab numbers are so high is that they utilize a greater percentage of their samurai for warfare than other clans.

The other thing you are not considering is the availability of birth control and the treatment of women. It has been established in the real world that the birthrate goes down as the societal treatment of women goes up, when birth control is available, and there is not a cultural obligation (for example, for farming) that requires a woman to bear multiple children.

The Crane being wealthy and less war-oriented would not have developed the cultural obligation to have larger families, and their high relative status and the established availability of 'Moon Tea' would dampen the birthrates. Clans like the Lion and Crab, with a focus on their military culture, have, potentially, developed a culture with more of a societal expectation of larger families. This aspect of a society far outweighs temporary drops in population due to war or disease...see our modern world for example.

Finally, those Lion and Scorpion aren't throwing their lives away for nothing. They are being killed in battle...against the Crane. Unless Crane were such superior fighters that every individual Crane samurai can kill multiples of Lion or Scorpion, they are taking each other out at roughly equal numbers.

I understand the concern, and don't necessarily buy Way of the Dragon's numbers. But, most of all, please remember that women aren't rabbits. Thanks!

Edited by KakitaKaori
Lion and Crab, not Lion and Dragon.

Oh. I see-- I missed that they were only the standing armies. That would go a bit towards explaining things.

I guess it goes to the question of just how many people in the noble caste of Rokugan there would be though.

In 1600, the Tokugawa Shogunate had 18,500,000 people. But Rokugan is larger than Japan by a fairly significant amount. It is closer to the size of China.

The Ming Empire has 160,000,000 people.

It turns out that a society at that technology level can support a significantly larger population than I would have guessed. It is possible that Rokugan could have anywhere in that ballpark from 18.5 million to 160 million people and between 7-10% of the population could be in the noble caste. The numbers above would have only been for a population of a country with about 2 million overall residents. So actually the numbers ought to be anything from 9 to 80x as large.

Although the Unicorn Clan still poses a major problem in that regard. Just how large of a herd of horses and their riders can you really keep fed while nomadically living in the Burning Sands? If the entirety of the clan that returned to Rokugan were coming by horseback, that really puts a major damper on just how larger the Unicorn clan could be. It would be quite a different matter if the Unicorn who went riding off out of Rokugan had only been a portion of their military force, but we are told all that were left behind became the Fox Clan. So the Unicorns would still be limited by just how large a nomadic tribe of horse riders in a desert with no additional source of food and supplies could realistically be.

If the Crane are actively trying to avoid childbirth and have an effective means to do so (I was unaware there was any) then they could indeed be lower on the list rather than being pretty clearly the largest clan. I do have trouble imagining the Crab having a large enough population boom for them to become larger than the other clans even if they are actively encouraging them to have larger families. The PSTD of staring across the monster-infested wastes of the Shadowlands is going to play quite the psychological toll. The attrition from being in an endless war against an unbeatable foe and that early loss of a significant portion of their tribe that all went and became Mantis are rather big hurdles to overcome that other clans never faced.

3 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:
  • The Crab Clan in any given generation are the most likely to be killed of any clan and that would have put a severe damper on the ability of their population to grow. Furthermore, they had an early civil war which caused something like a quarter of their samurai to abandon the clan and run off to form the Mantis Clan. In fact, the Crab Clan has probably been the clan that has splintered to form minor clans the most frequently. They simply could not have a population that dwarfs nearly all other clans like suggested there. Too many factors would have crippled their population growth. Those 20 Goblin Winters are most definitely not going to be making up the difference.
  • The Lion numbers.... are.... are we even being serious here? The guys who spend all day and all night doing marching drills and are the first to go smash themselves into other clans and die in battle over little or nothing? Look-- I know they have plenty of ashigaru at their beck and call, but the actual Lion Clan just shouldn't be 2-5x the size of any other clan. They have at best the same "bounty of food" and "bounty of wealth" advantages to growth as the Crane, but the fact that some portion of them die in battle every generation which means those ones never have any descendants mean that they should actually be smaller than whatever new number is put on the Crane.


You have a very valid point with regards to population attrition caused by war. Indeed, Russia's population crisis today is a direct result of what was for them a Pyrrhic victory in WW2. As much as 70% of an entire year's worth of births were wiped out by the war. This video breaks that down. What does this have to do with Rokugan? It very much explains how the Crab's war of attrition with the Shadowlands is very much a monkey on the back of the clan's demographics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ56MYa9W8M

My demographics page, if you will recheck, uses the measured area of rokugan X (population of Japan during the Edo/area of Japan), to draw the total population number, and then divides the total by 5%, which is the sustainable amount of a non-producing elite in the period. Further down you have a population distribution and explanations as to why fighting forces are half that, etc. All of which clearly available.

Something that might help with the Unicorn is that they are not living nomadically in the burning sands right now. They are living within their territories, and they have farmers cultivating grain, etc, that are not nomadic. With that, their herds can certainly grow to a very great size.

All the numbers I am assuming come from a stable pre-Clan wars timeline. The Wall is often very quiet for generations. The current rates of attrition for clans like Crane (due to tsunami/warfare) and Crab (due to the spike in Shadowlands activity) and Dragon (due to extremely repressed birthrate) would be different from any sort of background norm.

Edited by KakitaKaori
6 hours ago, KakitaKaori said:

I understand the concern, and don't necessarily buy Way of the Dragon's numbers. But, most of all, please remember that women aren't rabbits. Thanks!

While a woman could certainly have 10 children or more in a lifetime (I have 8 uncles and aunts on one side and 7 on the other, and that’s not counting my uncles and aunts who didn’t survive early childhood) such a high birth rate low mortality was only acquired recently in our history and was not the case in medieval times. Of course one can argue that magic can act as technology in this matter to help extend life expectancy, which by the way, wasn’t supposed to mean that most people lived to their 30s a thousand years ago, it’s meant to mean that most people born wouldn’t live beyond their 5th birthday and thus bring the average down.
Anyway, my whole point for this is that, on a realistic level, the Crab probably have some kind of “breeding program” but then again, this is messed up on so many levels that it’s one of those things where you don’t want to question the consistency of the setting or we can get uncomfortable really fast. I mean, who here would support a game that shows how accurately the Crab maintain a large fighting population for centuries by enforcing a quota of children on women?

1 hour ago, Diogo Salazar said:

While a woman could certainly have 10 children or more in a lifetime (I have 8 uncles and aunts on one side and 7 on the other, and that’s not counting my uncles and aunts who didn’t survive early childhood) such a high birth rate low mortality was only acquired recently in our history and was not the case in medieval times. Of course one can argue that magic can act as technology in this matter to help extend life expectancy, which by the way, wasn’t supposed to mean that most people lived to their 30s a thousand years ago, it’s meant to mean that most people born wouldn’t live beyond their 5th birthday and thus bring the average down.

Considering the high attrition rate of prominent characters in Rokugan, they HAVE to be reproducing like jackrabbits. That is not looking at the population at large, that is just looking at the rulers of the various clans.

49 minutes ago, neilcell said:

Considering the high attrition rate of prominent characters in Rokugan, they HAVE to be reproducing like jackrabbits. That is not looking at the population at large, that is just looking at the rulers of the various clans.

I mean, we can’t really look at a single snapshot of the empire like the period of 1123-112? and say that the Empire is having conflicts like that all the time. I mean, people here mentioned how Rokugan is supposed to be the size of China and I disagree, I would put it at most at the size of the Korea Peninsula but hey, “Rokugan your way and all that crap”.

5 hours ago, KakitaKaori said:

My demographics page, if you will recheck, uses the measured area of rokugan X (population of Japan during the Edo/area of Japan), to draw the total population number, and then divides the total by 5%, which is the sustainable amount of a non-producing elite in the period. Further down you have a population distribution and explanations as to why fighting forces are half that, etc. All of which clearly available.

Something that might help with the Unicorn is that they are not living nomadically in the burning sands right now. They are living within their territories, and they have farmers cultivating grain, etc, that are not nomadic. With that, their herds can certainly grow to a very great size.

All the numbers I am assuming come from a stable pre-Clan wars timeline. The Wall is often very quiet for generations. The current rates of attrition for clans like Crane (due to tsunami/warfare) and Crab (due to the spike in Shadowlands activity) and Dragon (due to extremely repressed birthrate) would be different from any sort of background norm.

The Unicorn aren't living nomadically now, but if one figures that the potential limit on their population when they arrived back in the Rokugan-- and given they came straight through the Shadowlands on horseback, it is difficult to imagine that half their population could have been children, was something like 10,000 or 20,000-- then it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine that within only a few hundred years that small group really could have ballooned to become 100 times that size and caught up to or surpassed those clans whose populations were already in the 100,000s or possibly already surpassed 1 million.

But these numbers all look nuts compared to the typical story we are presented in L5R. It always talks about there only being a handful of schools and those schools are often presented in such a way that it is implied that the classes are small enough that any given samurai is probably familiar with everyone else who graduated around the same time. And we never see anyone from the same family or even same clan struggling to recognize someone else from their own clan.

But if the number of samurai in any given clan is between 1 to 3 million, that obviously cannot be the case.

It also makes it all the weirder that each clan only has 3-5 family names-- one would think that for simple practicality sake they would want to have a greater diversity of names just to distinguish each other better. There would inevitably be 1,000s if not 10,000s of people in the Lion Clan named "Akodo Toturi" just because there are only so many given names that people can take.

Edited by TheHobgoblyn

To be fair, the vassal families that each family has usually adopt the suzerain family name when dealing outside of the clan or vassal-suzerain interaction.

Edited by Diogo Salazar
dealing, not leading
1 hour ago, Diogo Salazar said:

To be fair, the vassal families that each family has usually adopt the suzerain family name when leading outside of the clan or vassal-suzerain interaction.

Agreed, the distinction between Doji and Tsume no Doji (for example) normally gets ignored outside the Crane.

(I mean, if you're actually talking to the Tsume Daimyo, then obviously not. But for generic Tsume Jim-bob).

Equally you have the jisamurai class who are definitely Crane clan, definitely sworn to the Doji family's service, but not entitled to be called Doji-san (though you probably would until someone specifically confirmed that was the case).

So you could have 5 'Doji Jim-Bobs' - only one of whom is legally Doji Jim-Bob; the others being strictly Katogama no Doji Jim-Bob, Morehei no Doji Jim-Bob, and Tsume no Doji Jim-Bob, and just plain Jim-Bob.

Even so, repeated names seems like it's going to be a thing fairly often. Obviously it'd be unlikely - verging on disrespectful - to name your child the same as someone you know is likely to become your daimyo or champion, but it's generally implied the number of vassal families of a given clan family is at most only single digit figures and more likely 2-3 in most cases.

19 hours ago, KakitaKaori said:

The other thing you are not considering is the availability of birth control and the treatment of women. It has been established in the real world that the birthrate goes down as the societal treatment of women goes up, when birth control is available, and there is not a cultural obligation (for example, for farming) that requires a woman to bear multiple children.

True. Rokugan definitely has women integrated into 'active' society far more than any historical culture I can think of - they're ambassadors, soldiers, generals, clan champions and high officials, and that has to have an impact on family size and birth rate; civil war aside Doji Hotaru would be pressured even if not legally required to secure an heir, and the 'adoption' argument still requires a samurai somewhere in your clan to be having babies - it moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.

I'd agree with @TheHobgoblyn - whilst I can't talk for earlier editions the fictions and sourcebooks feel like we're talking of the clans as nations of thousands or tens of thousands of samurai, not millions.

19 hours ago, KakitaKaori said:

But, most of all, please remember that women aren't rabbits. Thanks!

Also agreed. Probably the biggest difference - at least for samurai, not peasants, is that the rate of surviving labour and infant mortality is probably a lot closer to modern-day numbers; not only is there 'in case of emergency, break laws of physics' magic, but also (apologies if I offend anyone) in the setting 'traditional oriental medicine' actually works, and not just the bits which have been studied by modern scholars and since become traditional oriental actual medicine

Pulled from my Demographics document, cause I guess people haven't read it?: https://craneclan.weebly.com/demographics.html

These numbers are considered a Maximum.

Area of Rokugan: 540,000 square miles
Total Population of Rokugan (All Classes, Heimin, Samurai, and Burakumin): 81,404,990 people

Total Samurai Population of all of Rokugan:
Pre-gempuku samurai: 33% = 1,343,182
Adult, non-retired samurai: 45% = 1,831,612
Retired Adults: 22% = 895,455

From these, in the Total Adult population of Samurai of Rokugan:
Shugenja (2%): 36,632
Bushi (49%): 897,490
Non-Bushi/Non-Shugenja (49%): 897,490

This translates to about 100,000 Bushi per Clan. Some clans would have more bushi or less. Not millions. I don't try to break that down by Clan.

Edited by KakitaKaori
2 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

To be fair, the vassal families that each family has usually adopt the suzerain family name when dealing outside of the clan or vassal-suzerain interaction.

I think that is one if the very first things I would do in the RPG is to break that rule.

I understand why it exists for the card game. Only 3-5 family names per clan so that, in all, a player really only has to remember about 60 family names and they can immediately identify what clan and probably whether the card is a bushi, shugenja, courtier or ninja without ever having to look up the card or have everything memorized.

But in an RPG where you are going to have dozens of NPCs and each PC is going to want to feel super personalized-- it makes far more sense to just treat the vassal families as just regular families.

Actually... has that been done yet? Seems like all one needs for families is a choice of two rings as well as a bonus in two skills. Do the books have that covered yet or is that a fun project for the playerbase to tackle?

32 minutes ago, KakitaKaori said:

Pulled from my Demographics document, cause I guess people haven't read it?: https://craneclan.weebly.com/demographics.html

These numbers are considered a Maximum.

Area of Rokugan: 540,000 square miles
Total Population of Rokugan (All Classes, Heimin, Samurai, and Burakumin): 81,404,990 people

Total Samurai Population of all of Rokugan:
Pre-gempuku samurai: 33% = 1,343,182
Adult, non-retired samurai: 45% = 1,831,612
Retired Adults: 22% = 895,455

From these, in the Total Adult population of Samurai of Rokugan:
Shugenja (2%): 36,632
Bushi (49%): 897,490
Non-Bushi/Non-Shugenja (49%): 897,490

This translates to about 100,000 Bushi per Clan. Some clans would have more bushi or less. Not millions. I don't try to break that down by Clan.

So the numbers I gave here

  • Crane 350,000
  • Lion 325,000
  • Scorpion 250,000
  • Phoenix 200,000
  • Crab 200,000
  • Unicorn 150,000
  • Dragon 125,000
  • Imperial 100,000
  • Mantis 80,000
  • Badger 40,000
  • Fox 35,000
  • Other Minor Clans 20,000
  • Ronin 10,000

Probably do roughly add up to how many total active post-gempukku, non-retired samurai there would be and it is just a matter of shifting the numbers about a bit to what one would consider the most accurate population comparisons between clans. Like maybe I put the Crane Clan too high, maybe 50,000 of those ought to be spread out among the other seven great clans. And maybe there are factors I haven't considered that would allow the Unicorn and Dragon to escape being as tiny as I estimated them to be. (Like maybe all the Unicorn adopted a few commoner children after returning to Rokugan to quickly boost their numbers or something and everyone just doesn't talk about it because it is impolite.)

45 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Actually... has that been done yet? Seems like all one needs for families is a choice of two rings as well as a bonus in two skills. Do the books have that covered yet or is that a fun project for the playerbase to tackle?

Yes and no.

The RPG contains rules for a generic 'peasant family' for 'rise from the dust' campaigns for Jisamurai and elevated ashigaru, which lets you pick your own rings and skills (though the latter have to be Trade skills)

Path of Waves also contains more generic rules - ostensibly for ronin - where your rings and skills are generated from 'regions of origin' (mountain, forest, etc), but since it still uses schools, you could create a minor Kakita vassal family from region XYZ and then stick them through the Kakita duellist school or whatever rather than a ronin school.

I did try to do a house-rules 20 Questions template for a minor clan - you could easily do that for a vassal family.

45 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

I think that is one if the very first things I would do in the RPG is to break that rule.

I understand why it exists for the card game. Only 3-5 family names per clan so that, in all, a player really only has to remember about 60 family names and they can immediately identify what clan and probably whether the card is a bushi, shugenja, courtier or ninja without ever having to look up the card or have everything memorized.

But in an RPG where you are going to have dozens of NPCs and each PC is going to want to feel super personalized-- it makes far more sense to just treat the vassal families as just regular families.

Agreed. The card game needs simplicity and doesn't really need flesh out details as long as the world 'feels' right, where the RPG can have you dealing with precisely the sort of issues the card game doesn't. I love games featuring minor clans and vassal families because you can afford to create and destroy them without shaking up the 'official' narrative too much, whilst full clan families are virtually never touched within a story (although I do like that FFG have at least shown a vassal family - the Kaito - being promoted to full clan family status)

I think it's fair enough to have the tradition - that is, to have official legal names denote which 'clan family' vassal families are specifically vassals of. But I rarely ever use the 'shorthand' in any game I run - people dealing with vassal families will generally use their 'proper' names.

Edited by Magnus Grendel
9 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Actually... has that been done yet? Seems like all one needs for families is a choice of two rings as well as a bonus in two skills. Do the books have that covered yet or is that a fun project for the playerbase to tackle?

I would say that the vassal family would have the same skill set bonuses as the primary family they are assigned to, but then swap out the ring bonuses as desired. That way you are not drastically changing the power balance.

To use the Isawa as an example, they normally get +1 fire and +1 void as they are normally associated with both Fire and Ishiken traditions. One vassal family more known for their air focused Shugenja could swap either of those rings for air. Another family could swap fire for water. And yet another could swap out for earth. Keep their +1 meditation and +1 theology and reduce the glory value to 35 or 40. Right there you have at least three Isawa vassal family alternate rules.

5 hours ago, neilcell said:

I would say that the vassal family would have the same skill set bonuses as the primary family they are assigned to, but then swap out the ring bonuses as desired. That way you are not drastically changing the power balance.

To use the Isawa as an example, they normally get +1 fire and +1 void as they are normally associated with both Fire and Ishiken traditions. One vassal family more known for their air focused Shugenja could swap either of those rings for air. Another family could swap fire for water. And yet another could swap out for earth. Keep their +1 meditation and +1 theology and reduce the glory value to 35 or 40. Right there you have at least three Isawa vassal family alternate rules.

Amusingly, my approach was the other way round - leave the rings and swap out one skill. This was because many vassal families are particularly associated with a particular task, which maps more easily onto skills than rings.

25 minutes ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

Amusingly, my approach was the other way round - leave the rings and swap out one skill. This was because many vassal families are particularly associated with a particular task, which maps more easily onto skills than rings.

I'd agree. If a family are, say, noted shujenga, you'd expect the vassals to do the 'other stuff' - provide the soldiers and administrators for the families holdings, for example. They'd have a similar culture and geographic origin but a different skillset.

I think it might be quite important to determined, based on the backstory, whether it is one of two kinds of families.

Is it a /branch/ family-- i.e. someone from the main family founded this additional branch that is focused on something different?

Or is it a servant family-- i.e. a group that came from outside the family and serves the family directly?

If it is a branch family, I think it probably makes sense to leave the rings alone and swap out one or even both of the skills depending on how different the function is.

If it is a servant family, then the rings definitely might be different from the family they serve.

Of course, given that the idea here is to expand options for the player and the GM to create a wider variety of NPCs, then creating a situation where "the additional family grants you exactly the same package as an existing family but you get 5 to 20 less glory" does not seem a particularly tempting package for those who just want to use a wider variety of names. And I am certainly not looking to create unique schools for every one of the 8 to 14 vassal families identified in each of the 9 main factions of Rokugan. Luckily the schools in this edition give way more flexibility to the player to choose the options that are right for them, but players are going to have to choose between the 4-5 schools available for their clan regardless of playing a rarer family.

Plus they don't even come with their own unique little animal totems like the minor clans do, so its not like they will ever have the same draw as minor clans. So that means straying a bit more from the family they serve is probably perfectly fine if it makes them feel less like intentionally handicapping yourself.

Granted-- there can always be an optional rule that says "If you want to play in a more diverse Rokugan, treat vassal families as just normal families and add X to their family glory to reflect that they are not in such a subservient position."

26 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

And I am certainly not looking to create unique schools for every one of the 8 to 14 vassal families identified in each of the 9 main factions of Rokugan. Luckily the schools in this edition give way more flexibility to the player to choose the options that are right for them, but players are going to have to choose between the 4-5 schools available for their clan regardless of playing a rarer family.

I think the Path of Waves rules are good for this - guidance for geographic origins and rules for creating generic custom schools.

26 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

you want to play in a more diverse Rokugan, treat vassal families as just normal families and add X to their family glory to reflect that they are not in such a subservient position.

You can also play tunes a bit with ancestry results - for example 'elevated for service' gives you (I think) lower glory but more honour to make up for it. I can't think of any results off hand which reduce status but it wouldn't surprise me if there are some.