The Book of Earth
Later editions of the card game could often afford some pretty amazing paintings, but went with a simplified card format that doesn't look as good.
The Book of Earth is 75 pages long and is basically a setting primer. The closest thing to an introduction that it gets is an italicized story about a samurai fighting and shouting shonen anime aphorisms. It doesn't tell you a lot about the setting and is not terribly well written. When a piece of italicized text goes much over half a page I think most people just don't read it, so I don't think this clunkiness does the book a lot of harm. But it doesn't help either. The book doesn't really set up answers to the more fundamental questions of “What the hell are we doing?” at this point (or arguably,
ever). The game asks you to come up with a character concept on page 82 but it doesn't start talking about how to put together an adventuring party (or even particularly explain that that is what you're expected to be doing) until page 274. I
think you're basically supposed to run around having D&D style adventures, but some of the proposed character types are quite useless on adventuring expeditions. So really, who knows?
The chapter proper begins with a description of the eight major clans. When the game first came out there were
six major clans, and one of the draws of the card game was that they all played differently and were optimized towards winning the game in different ways. The Crane were optimized towards honor gain and were best at winning through honor. The Phoenix and Dragon were optimized towards winning through enlightenment because they were the only ones that could get out all five ring cards. The Crab, Lion, and Unicorn were all warrior clans and optimized towards different manners of fighting: the Crab were defensive, the Lion were offensive, and the Unicorn were about mobility. From a simple concept explanation, since a military victory required you to succeed offensively and nothing else really mattered that the Lion would be the only good military clan, but with the actual original card set the reverse was pretty much true – Crab (whose “defensive” prowess mostly corresponded to
having higher numbers than you) and Unicorn (who could burn half your provinces without actually fighting your army and then economics their way to an army big enough to crush whatever you had left) were very powerful and Lion was mediocre and unreliable (heavily dependent on getting good early draws to get anywhere). Enlightenment victories were like getting a hole in one in golf or a perfect game in bowling – something a fan and frequent player of the game might never actually see, so the Dragon and Phoenix were kind of joke factions. This put Crab, Crane, and Unicorn on a very different and much higher power level from Dragon, Phoenix, and Lion. As card expansions came out and the metagame changed, those positions changed a lot – developers would quite explicitly print cards with the intention of making one clan or another weaker or stronger – and it was quite often
not to make a more balanced game but merely because they wanted to see such and such a clan win or lose more often.
Every so often, L5R writers and authors remember that “phoenixes” and “Unicorns” in East Asia actually refer to Hou-ou and Kirin, but mostly they use representations of Western phoenixes and unicorns because to a very big degree this is a yellowface game rather than actually Asian fantasy.
The swords of the Crane are pretty much for show, they actually win the game by holding lavish parties and composing compelling poetry.
But I said eight clans. The other two major clans in this book are Scorpion and Mantis. Scorpion began the game as a “disbanded” clan that had various ninja and subversive agents who still believed in the cause. Obviously, they became a playable faction with the first expansion and a few expansions later they could even win games. The Mantis are a bit dumber than that. They were in the original bit just an example minor clan. You could get some Mantis soldiers if you wanted as neutrals. But the thing is that the actual cards had really cool art, and they became subject to the Boba Fett effect: fans took them way more seriously than their position in the story warranted because they had green armor and double kama fighting style and that was “awesome.” A few cycles of fans writing storyline and becoming developers and the Mantis got upgraded to being one of the major clans.
See if you can spot the reason for this clan being upgraded to “major” status while the Hare and Monkey clans remain obscure.
The clans, the monks, and even the Shadowlands all get dealt with in just two and a half pages (the bird riding northern nomads, the rat people, and the various flavors of sketchy spirit folk who live in the area but aren't part of the empire are ignored for now). And then we're off to a history of Rokugan. This is not a set of broad strokes to generally get a feel for things. This is a 19 page rant covering twelve hundred years of history picking out all the events that the authors think are awesome from the card game. If you
hadn't spent the last 10 years with a subscription to the L5R fanzine getting regular storyline updates, you will be very confused. There are seriously
five entries for the year 1133, and this is one of them:
L5R, 3rd edition wrote:Moto War: year 1133
While the Clans fight against the Living Darkness at Oblivion's Gate, the Moto family of the Unicorn engage in their own war. Shinjo's return brings the nomadic Moto from the Burning Sands, who ride beside their cousins of Rokugan as they meet the Dark Moto of the Shadowlands in combat. The Dark Moto are led by none other than Otaku Kamoko, who has sacrificed her own honor to lead the corrupted Unicorn to destruction. Using fierce tactics of Khan Moto Gaheris, the undead Moto are crushed, unifying the line of the Moto once and for all.
If you weren't already
very conversant with L5R trivia this would basically be like pokemon talk. Hell, even if you are, that's pretty opaque. And it's basically all like that, for a quarter of this chapter. Event after telegraphic event. It was hard for me to choose one, because the level of WTF on all of it is very high. I kind of wanted to do the Death of Toturi in 1133, but only because Toturi's first child is born in 1136. I like to consider myself fairly conversant in L5R trivia, and
I don't know how that's supposed to work. Seriously, he commits
seppuku and keeps having children born for the next six years. That's some seriously potent sperm, a laughably bad set of explanations by his widow, or some deeply confused writing by the guys producing canon. I'm guessing it's the last one.
L5R's storyline is a confusing shambles, and in 2005 was basically incomprehensible even to the people writing it. They had at that point been going on for a literal decade, riding the hype event rollercoaster and also attempting to write in the results of card tournaments, beloved fanfiction, and even card misprints into canon in order to create the illusion of a living world that the players had a say in. Now a lot of this was typical John Wick styled bear world bullshit – where your clan doing well in a tournament
might result in your major personalities falling to corruption and your clan being nearly destroyed
or it might result in your clan conquering extra territory and getting credit for saving the day. Because there were no established rules as to what tournament results or events the story herds were going to select to riff off of in the main story
and no telling whether they were going to riff off of them in a positive or negative way. And another lot of it was that since the players pretty much all played someone on team good guy, the villains never ever
won anything, so there was constant threat creep and at the same time the villains were a bunch of failtards who only ever made any progress because of MC dickery rather than player contribution.
The main shugenja of the Crab Clan turned into a melt-faced demon traitor because the Crab did well
in a tournament.
I can think of a lot of things to put at the beginning of this book that would have been more helpful than this ADHD report of everything ever ranted about in the Imperial Herald for the last 10 years. In fact, I can't really think of anything that would have been
less helpful. These 19 pages could have been spent on giving more information about the clans. Or describing who and what lives in and near the empire. Or telling the players what you're supposed to do in the game. Or fucking
anything.
We then get two and a half pages about social classes in Rokugan, which appears to have been cribbed rather directly from Japanese history. That includes rants about untouchables and stuff. It's all pretty strange, because L5R
isn't Japan, it's
Fantasy Asia. There are female samurai warriors and snake people and talking spirit badgers and shit. If I just wanted a dry recounting of how Kuge are different from Buke and Eta are different from Heimin, I could have just read a book about feudal Japan. This book's
one job was to sell me on how the fantasy elements interact with the game's pseudo-Japanese society, and it doesn't even bother trying. This is a world where the mines have Mujina working in them and it's possible to be less socially respectable than a giant snake without actually committing any crimes. Telling me that someone is not considered human
doesn't tell me a lot in a world where there are actual non-humans and some of them rank higher than most humans.
The “Home and Hearth, Customs and Laws” section is twelve and a half pages long and is best described as “a random collection of essays about Rokugan.” Some of these are really about Rokugan and talking about the Emerald Magistrates (who speak for people who speak for the emperor and act like judges) or the superstitions of various clans. Other parts of it are rants about Japan, such as spending a third of a page describing the game of Shogi in almost enough detail to actually play it. It veers wildly between assuming you know quite a bit about Japan and/or China and attempting to patiently explain the strange foreign ways of Orientals to the reader as if they were the most sheltered of white people with wholly white people problems who doesn't even know what Sailor Moon is. Honestly, the biggest problem here is that Japanese society was actually
incredibly brutal in its patriarchy, while Rokugan is not. In Rokugan you can be a female samurai or daimyo and no one thinks that is strange. So glibbly saying “it's basically Japan” doesn't
really hold water, and every time they copypasta some material from an all about Japan book, it comes off pretty flat.
This is a giant snake with boobs that is a warrior and also more socially respectable than most people. Once you've introduced that, using the historical Japanese social castes unaltered doesn't even parse.
A special callout goes to the subsection in
adventurers, which lists some ideas on how samurai might be allowed to go on adventures in the Rokugan context. The thing is that while it throws out some ideas like packs of Emerald Magistrates or Imperial Cartographers, but none of this is addressed to someone who doesn't know what's going on. Basically, you're playing D&D I guess, because the fact that
you play a party of adventurers is not actually stated directly anywhere in this book. The context is that you're already familiar with the L5R game's previous editions and that you came to
that game from 2nd edition AD&D, because if either of those things aren't true none of this is going to make any sense to you.
Three pages are dedicated to telling you the names of the hours and present other such clock and calendar trivia. All hours and months are given multiple names, and I'm genuinely not sure if that's a retcon to attempt to harmonize multiple different accounts of that shit was supposed to work in different L5R publications over the years or not. In any case, this section also had one job, and given that it had 3 pages to do it, it should have succeeded: it was supposed to talk about how the seasons mean different things in different parts of the empire because the empire is
geographically basically China. So there's a barley growing north and a rice growing south, and they have different planting seasons. And it didn't do that, so I'm going to call this section a waste of space.
The 1 page Lore of the Land section is mostly about natural disasters and natural animals. There is also a dry list of plants that grow in various parts of Rokugan which hilariously also includes some rocks. I assume that when they mention “cinnabar” that they actually mean dragon's blood. But honestly, who knows? Maybe mercury sulfide grows in fields in Rokugan. Perhaps more hilariously, they forget to mention that Rokugan has access to
rice. And
lime is listed with the
flowers and not the
trees. There's no explanation for anything in the list, it's just a pile of words that someone grabbed from somewhere and doesn't make any sense.
What follows is 33 pages of more in-depth information on the clans. It's actually only 28 pages when talking about the real clans, and then it starts talking about monks and ronin brotherhoods for 5 pages. And um... then it talks about some Shadowlands families for another two and a half pages. That stuff isn't actually a different section that I can see, so I guess that it's really just supposed to be a 35 page section even though it's called “The Clans” and a couple of the pages are about groups that live in The Shadowlands and are very specifically
not Clans or even formally part of the empire. It's just odd is all.
This section also the first mechanics of the book, not that they are in any way explained. See, whatever family you are a member of gives you a +1 bonus to one of your attributes. So if you're in the Crane Clan, if your family name is
Asahina you get +1 Willpower, if it's
Daidoji you get +1 Reflexes, if it's
Doji you get +1 Intelligence, if it's
Kakita you get +1 Agility, and if it's
Yasuki you get +1 Perception. Now note that you haven't been told what these modifiers
mean, or how big of a deal they are (they are a very big deal). But the bottom line is that min/maxing calls upon you to make certain kinds of characters with just a few family name options. And since there were already a bunch of characters that did various stuff and had various names, there are almost certainly going to be characters that you are
heavily encouraged to be in a different family to replicate. So for example: the Kakita family has some famous duelists in it, who are probably pretty happy getting a bonus to Agility, it also has some famous
courtiers in it who basically only care about Awareness, Perception, and Intelligence and are definitely
not OK with getting saddled with an Agility bonus.
Kakita Noritoshi lives and dies by his Agility score and is glad to get a family bonus to that trait.
Kakita Taminoko will tell you where to stick a family Agility bonus. And if you do not do this, her daimyo will gain 2 honor.
Each of the clans tells you who the clan champion is, and each of the families tells you who the canonical family head is. They don't actually mention this in this section
per se, but those are all for the year 1166, which is nearly 40 years after the events of the original game that most people actually care about. So these guys are like the sons and daughters of the mighty warriors and crafty shugenja that players of the card game were attracted to in the first place. It's a bit like writing up a Star Wars game and just putting in all the mentioned characters from late in the careers of the Solo twins and just not feeling that there was any great need to explain that is what you were doing.
To expand on this, most of the family writeups want to tell you at length about what various family members were doing during the battles with the Lying Darkness. I don't think they should be doing that. Firstly because that was a stupid plotline and secondly because Oblivion's Gate was 33 years ago when this book is set, so all that shit happened when the
parents of the protagonists were children and weren't involved. So this is ranting about political maneuvering and military campaigning that your grandparents were involved in. It would be like if a game about contemporary college students spent much of the writeups of each of the fraternities talking about what positions they took on the Volcker recession.
Some families also were involved in blowing up the Moon. Because event power creep got out of hand there for a while.
So all told, I would say this is not a great chapter. It spends a lot of time referencing events that no one cares about and almost no time explaining basic Yoda shit like where you are and what you are doing.
And that's basically the chapter. Next up: The Book of Water. That's where they tell us how to make a character and sort of accidentally gives away some parts about how to play the game. It's just as long as the Book of Earth and has a lot more mechanics in it, so it'll probably take a bit longer to disect.