The Book of Air
The elements originally interacted with different parts of the game. Air with spells, Earth with defense, Fire with dueling, Water with terrain and province assignments, and Void with card drawing.
With enough expansions, those connections eventually broke down entirely.
It's Christmas time, and I have 47 hours off, so it's time to sit down with a glass of Northern Irish cream and read and rant about the fourth chapter of L5R 3rd edition: The Book of Air. The Book of Air is 60 pages, and we're running towards the end of the book. The opening story is longer than the other and is an old man giving a demonstration of magic to a promising shugenja student along with some Yodaisms and fortune cookie wisdom. There is no plot and it conveys no real information about what magic is capable of in the setting or what people can do with it. The only real setting information is that apparently temples in Rokugan have statues of Benten in them.
Yes. That Benten. Really.
The chapter proper begins with a one page rant about how there are largely indifferent spirits all over the place, and magic is performed by entreating, bargaining with, or dominating those spirits into doing stuff. It's kind of neat fluff, save for the kind of stupid bits about the alternate spirits of evil that bad guys get to have evil interactions with instead. In the RPG the only real effect is that it gives license to the MC to troll you by announcing that your character has offended the kami and now they can't use magic anymore or whatever. But since the system lacks basic interaction mechanics and is held together almost exclusively with mind caulk, the MC could probably do that to you anyway, so really not much of a change.
Next, we get into a 7 page rant about cosmology, which is about gods, spirits, and alternate dimensions. So, really high level shit that probably doesn't make any difference in your game because most of the characters have no ability to interact with any of this at any point in the game. There are various evil things, various quasi-Buddhist dimensions you won't ever get to see, and dragons who are better than you. And the people of Rokugan worship the 7 Lucky Gods.
All Rokugani religion is essentially from the scrolls of Rumiko Takahashi
Then there is a two and a half page section on “Nemuranai.” These are a perfect excuse for characters to have magic items. Shinto is essentially animism, and there are spirits in everything. If you have a helmet or a pair of sandals, there are kami in them. And if you awaken the kami in an item, the item turns into a magic item that does some stuff. So you could plausibly just hand out magic trinkets as characters leveled up like you were playing a fantasy adventure game. But the book specifically tells you not to and rants about how nemuranai are super duper rare and non-transferable because kami forbid that player characters ever got nice things. By the way, the word “nemuranai” appears to be Japanese for “never sleeping” and if you image search it, weird creepy shit comes up.
Almost half the chapter, 24.5 pages worth, is the “spells and magic” section. This is the part where they tell you what the Shugenja School Rank actually
does (just two chapters after telling you what the bushi and scout school rankings did). Your school rank is both your skill in casting spells and your maximum spell level. You can multi-school, but that is a sucker's game and you should pretty much always just power through a school – they go up to
eight. Spells are divided up into five rings, and you get one spell of each ring type per day for each point in the ring you have. Also your “attribute” for casting each type of spell is the ring value. The TN to cast a spell is 10 + 5 times the spell level. Since rings (except Void), are the
lower of two stats that are generally speaking unrelated, even very powerful shugenja are going to have 2s in some of their rings and be practically speaking limited to just casting two first level spells each day from those elements. Even such “paltry” shugenja can therefore cast “summon earth” twice per day, which despite rants about how you aren't allowed to make magical jade with it, is apparently capable of making
gold at the rate of 1,200 pounds per casting. Seriously, that's a spell that every Shugenja automatically knows, and the lowest level of casting
completely skullfucks the entire economy and turns the setting into a bizarre post-scarcity farce.
The bottom line of course is that while shugenja are more encouraged than most to split their stats around to pick up ring values so they can keep more dice on spellcasting checks and gain insight levels that they can plow into their school rank and get more rolled dice on spellcasting, they don't really miss out much on swording or talking. There's not a lot of reason to believe that a member of a prestigious courtier school is going to be
much better at jibber jabber than a Shugenja who cares about their air magic. Indeed, even 1st level spells let you make magic weapons out of elemental funk, and the benefits of that over wielding a regular steel weapon are about what you'd get from a bushi school. Basically, Shugenja >> You.
Void Magic is special in a lot of dumb ways. The most obvious way is that the ring costs half as much (or less) than any other ring to buy because Void is a stat instead of being the lower of two stats. The other way is that void magic runs off your current void points instead of your void rating for calculating dice pools. That's normally a disadvantage, but void magic includes a bunch of ways to increase your void points beyond your normal maximum. It's pretty trivial for a level 4 Void Shugenja to be rolling and keeping 10 dice on any Void spell she
really wants cast. The big problem here is that aside for some weird metagame bullshit of moving dice around, none of the spells in the basic book actually do anything you much care about. There are expansion books with more spells, and presumably
somewhere there's a void spell out there where it actually matters that you can consistently cast it with an action value over 60, but in the core book it's just some spells to build up and then spend your daily void points to either have one really big roll or have a more modest bonus to all your similar tests for an hour. You learn and cast one or the other depending on how your MC has decided to handle skill tests. This makes most of the spells useless in most games, but it's a damn bit better than fucking
Courtiers, who often get fixed powers that only do anything if the MC has decided to run skill checks in very specific and kind of obscure ways (for example: the Yasuki and Bayushi courier schools have abilities that trigger iff your MC has decided that the way to handle social tests should be to have two characters both make tests against a low static TN and award victory to whoever made the most raises and still succeeded – which is a possible but unlikely way to handle such tests).
Shugenja schools, as mentioned earlier, go up to 8. But the spells they let you learn only go up to 6 in this book. There are higher level spells elsewhere, and if you go into the spell research rules in other books it's not a
whole lot of downtime to create one from scratch if you're powerful enough for a 7th or 8th level spell to be something you'd be able to cast. The real issue of course is that while going up in level entitles you to cast higher level spells (and gives you more dice to roll on casting checks), it doesn't actually give you any higher level spells to cast. You need to get access to a spell scroll, and with the rules in this book they are 100% gated by the MC deciding whether or not to give you one. So aside from the starter spells (including the completely economy destroying
Summon Earth discussed earlier), you have no control over what (if any) spells you get, and there's no particular reason to believe you'll get spells that have anything to do with the ring you invested in.
Anyway... Monks. In Japanese and Chinese history, monks often played a very large and important role. The various monasteries didn't have a pope and often were not even nominally in fealty to the local nobility, so they were able to wield more political and military power even than the European bishops. So it's no surprise that monks were kind of a big deal in L5R even in the beginning. Of course, when it started, the “monk” role was given to the Dragon Clan. The Dragon Clan were more “Tibetan” than the other clans (just as the Unicorn Clan were more Mongolian), and their strongholds were mountain monasteries. They had monks who were like Shaolin monks, and they looked like this:
A fire breather of the Dragon Clan. Would also be accepted in the Wu Tang Clan.
Anyway, later on they decided that monks dedicated to a more “five ring” flavored enlightenment should be a thing and then there was a giant piece of confusion between characters who were “monks” and characters who were aligned with the monk
faction. And so, eleven and a half pages are spent describing the various flavors of Monk in Rokugan, and most of that goes into describing their quasi-spells called “kiho.” The rules for learning kiho are unparseable, in that the “main” restriction is that you're supposed to have a ring value equal to the mastery level of the kiho, but it also has this hanging sentence that “Such a character” is limited by his rank in a school with the monk descriptor. But that's not attached to a clause that refers to any particular character in particular or type and all the rules for learning kiho seem to be under the heading “Non-Monks and Kiho” and I have no idea which sentences in this word salad are supposed to apply to Dragon Clan Monks and which are supposed to apply to Shinsei Monks and which are supposed to apply to Shugenja and which are supposed to apply to other people. It's all argle bargle.
Kihos are supposed to be like when monks go all Dragon Ball, which probably sounds cooler than it is.
The Kiho themselves are mostly tradeoffs, and in most cases quite terrible. You spend a bunch of XP to learn them, and then you have the option to spend a void point to make a questionable trade. There are some winners in there but they seem to be accidental. For example, Air Fist makes you trade damage away to gain accuracy, which of course you would then use to pay for raises to grapple, throw, disarm, or otherwise disable an opponent and not give a shit about the damage. Mostly, you don't care about kiho, and the fact that you can't figure out how it's supposed to work or what it's supposed to cost is therefore not a big deal.
The book spends six and a half pages talking about Shadowlands Taint. The Shadowlands are a thing which have changed a lot over the course of the game, become much more black-n-white and a lot
less interesting as it was fleshed out. Rokugan has a big wall in the south like the Great Wall of China (but in the South), and on the far side are the Shadowlands, an area filled with blight and monsters. In the original presentation, there were creatures from the Shadowlands that were basically assimilated into Rokugan culture, and they were something that people dealt with on the level of mercenary human bushi – not a source of honor but not a source of shame either. And there were things in the Shadowlands that were just mischevious and uncouth, and dealing with those things was dishonorable because it was embarrassing for the most part. And there were things in the Shadowlands that were just rampaging monsters or dangerous animals. And finally there were things in the Shadowlands that ate people and demanded human sacrifices and stuff – and they were just plain evil.
As the game and story went on and Marty Stue characters needed ever more powerful and wicked enemies to triumph over, the Shadowlands became a more and more monolithic villainous land. Essentially, it stopped being like the original WFRP Chaos Lands, and became more like the later incarnations of Chaos: a skullfuck babyeater emporium that corrupted everyone that touched it and made them mutate and grow vaginal dentata. Apparently the writers never got the memo that your enemies being more evil doesn't make you more good, it just makes the choices you make to fight them easier and less interesting. The Shadowlands came up with a new plan every couple of months and never ever won, so Fu Leng ended up being like Skeletor or Dr. Claw.
Much of the Taint section is filled up with arbitary Warhammer style chaos mutations and I don't care.
The Maho Tsukai are like evil blood-powered wizards. There's three and a half pages dedicated to their off-brand of sorcery. It's
really weird. But basically, being a blood speaker is actually pretty rad. You have to stab people for hit point damage to cast spells, but you use an actual skill instead of a school ranking as your casting skill and you don't need to fuck around with spell slots. Periodically, you need to drain some blood out of someone to lower your shadowlands taint or you'll turn into an NPC monster, but despite using loaded descriptions like “sacrifice an intelligent being” it's actually a pretty small amount of damage and not a super big deal. Plus, you're allowed to become a blood speaker without signing up for any of this classist school nonsense. You don't have to be a natural shugenja or part of a special family, you can just fucking do it. Blood sorcery is way more egalitarian than Rokugani society as a whole, and fits closer to modern ideals than the so-called “good” kami based magic. Indeed, while the Shadlowlands Taint section has a big rant about how anyone who gets Shadowlands taint on them are totally fucking doomed, the Blood Speakers can keep tainted people going indefinitely with no doomage by just spilling 4 hit points worth of blood from time to time (characters have 14 hit points per point of Earth ring, so that isn't a lot).
The first blood magic cards didn't even cause you to lose honor, and regularly made their appearance in “good guy” dueling decks.
Maho attack spells are pretty much terrible, but some of the buffs and conjurations are pretty awesome. The big selling point of course is that you can grab the high end shit like Summon Oni as a starting character. It's TN 30 to cast, and requires 8 hit points of blood, but it's fucking
summon oni. If you throw down some of the expansion material, that shit can get nuts. Basically every character should get into Maho in a big way. It doesn't even matter what your stats or other skills are, you'll have
some ring that's good, and be able to throw down some decent magic even if you're a bushi.
And that's the end of the chapter. The summons can't really be parsed without reference to the next chapter, and we'll get there next.