Introduction
The Rokugan Campaign Setting is a 3rd party d20 book and was published a mere two months after D&D 3rd edition’s Oriental Adventures. The entire book basically comes off as an attempt to correct what the authors felt Oriental Adventures “did wrong”.
Now, let it be known that have little in the way of knowledge of Legend of the 5 Rings. I’ve read the d20 Oriental Adventures but aside from that I’m basically ignorant of the setting. Furthermore, my knowledge of Japanese society is mostly what I’ve gleaned from video games and anime.Rokugan Campaign Setting wrote:USING THIS BOOK WITH ORIENTAL ADVENTURES
The Oriental Adventures™ sourcebook presents a view of Rokugan compatible with most Dungeons and Dragons campaign settings, ready to dropped in in a moment’s notice. While this volume is compatible with Oriental Adventures, it is in a number of ways a more exclusive view of Rokugan as presented in the Legend of the 5 Rings card game, roleplaying game, and Clan War miniatures game.
In other words, I’m not going to be able to tell if the fluff is off or the book gets basic facts about Japanese Rokugan culture wrong. I guess an outsider perspective might be useful?
I had a strong suspicion that the Rokugan Campaign Setting was going to be entertainingly bad and it didn’t disappoint. That said, I didn’t expect to find enough to complain about to actually write an OSSR about it and yet here we are.
The book opens with an italicized story about two samurai meeting on the field of battle and dueling one another. For honor! Honestly, it’s not terribly written and it’s pretty short, so I can’t complain too much.
The book does have a proper introduction explaining what this book is and Rokugan as setting, including the quote I cited above. It’s pretty brief and this entire section (italicized story included) consist of a single page. The book then jumps immediately into discussing characters.
Characters – Part 1
The book decides to start this chapter by talking the various clans of Rokugan and I’m honestly confused why they lead with this. While the title is a bit vague, this section is ostensibly about character creation. The book explicitly expects your characters to be from one of these families, but the crunch here is limited to some extra skills and what languages you can speak. If I wanted to make a character in this setting, I’m going to be more interested in what classes and races are available.
This section is fairly long, too, it goes on for nearly 30 pages and honestly wouldn’t make much sense without prior knowledge of the setting. I mean, by this point, you haven’t even been told what a Shugenja is.
It seems that the authors expected the reader to at least be familiar with Oriental Adventures before even cracking open this book. I honestly skipped this section on my first reading.
Fun note, they specifically call out that Unicorn Battle Maiden family were called “Otaku” at one point but it was changed to “Utaku.” I’m actually surprised they bothered to bring it up.
Buried here is information about playing as a naga or Nezumi, though later the book basically implies that everyone’s going to hate you if you aren’t human. More on that when we get to it. Barring that, I don’t think all that many people are going to end up playing as a naga, since most of them have LA. I was amused that the book specifically informs me that only the lady nagas can turn their tails into legs so you can fuck them.
Finally, after almost 30 pages, the book finally starts talking about the classes you can play as. One of the things I didn’t care for in the 3rd edition Oriental Adventures was that several of D&D’s iconic classes where told to go fuck themselves, because they don’t belong in fantasy Asia. This book begrudgingly acknowledges that people might want to play as one of the core classes in Rokugan.
As if to make up for this positive change, the authors take shit all over it by saying that the xenophobic assholes that make up the setting will hate your character for being a foreigner. Fucking seriously?
The stupid gets even worse, as they inform the reader that Clerics might have their spell casting taken away if Mister Cavern decides to fuck with them, supposedly because they’re “too far from their gods” or some shit. Clerics can still have their fucking spells if they travel to another plane of existence, but Rokugan is apparently beyond their power?! WTF?!
As if determined to piss me off even more, we’re told that it’s not setting appropriate for Rangers to cast spell and they should get Fighter bonus feats instead. Because of all the classes to nerf, the fucking Ranger clearly was at the top of the list.
To add insult to injury, we’re told to see page 111 about Maho for more information about Sorcerers. This is a goddamn lie; all this page contains is a spell list for the Maho prestige class. It’s an honest to god page XX error. Fucking fuck!
The rest of the book seems to just assume that the Sorcerer isn’t a thing and gushes about the magic the Shugenia have. The ambiguity here is maddening, partly because Sorcerer is far and away the most powerful class “allowed” in the setting.
In all honesty, it would be trivial to snap the setting in half with a Sorcerer, but the same is likely true of the Shugenja as well. I’ll have to remember to see if they added any broken Shugenja spells when we get to that part of the book.