I'll be honest, I'm not fully sold on sects as described.Grek wrote:Sect-based intrigue.
A Sect is an empire-wide society of powerful individuals which explicitly recruits without regard to heredity, formal training or social class. Each Sect has an ideology and a grand vision for the future which requires some combination of political, military, social or cultural influence to accomplish. As a result, anyone who rises above a certain level of notability is expected to declare themselves for one Sect or another, based on their political and moral views. The PCs are assumed to be a group of individuals who have a diverse range of backgrounds and capabilities, but who have all pledged their loyalty to a shared set of ideals.
(To put things in more familiar terms, being part of a Clan is like being Flemish instead of Sudanese, but being part of a Sect is like being a Bonapartist instead of a Republican.)
Each Sect wants to see their members assume positions of power within the government, as to better implement their vision for the future of the world. Military conflicts, assassinations and diplomatic maneuvering are all common and accepted ways to seek power and influence for your Sect.
We're operating under the baseline assumption that all the PCs are in the same sect. I think that's a requirement, because otherwise the team members aren't meaningfully members of the same team. But once we've made that assumption, why are we presenting the other sects as being a co-equal character concept when none of the others are compatible with being a player character?
It seems like it makes more sense to have whatever the faction the player characters are assumed to be members of to just be the assumption. You don't even necessarily need to have a name for it. Meanwhile, the various antagonist factions don't all have to be co-equal with each other, let alone with whatever faction is so mainstream that all of the PCs are members. You can have a faction of corrupt eunuchs and ministers who are very highly placed, and a "faction" of largely independent demonologists who individually feed people to their respective pet tentacle demons.
I think it's poignant at this point to discuss the various antagonist factions that L5R trotted out at various times. Now a caveat of course is that of course the way canon accumulated in L5R, everything eventually went to shit. Ninja Emperors and crap. But there were periods when antagonist factions like the Blood Speakers and the Kolat worked pretty OK. But it's also important to talk about antagonist factions that never worked particularly well.
Obviously, the Crab Clan and the Scorpion Clan spent some time being the bad guys. This is obviously non-functional because those are also normal character generation options for the player characters. Similarly, any character generation option like the choice of "Camarilla or Sabbat" that can make you an antagonist faction is just a way for the entire campaign to die during character generation.
Some of the later antagonist factions like the Lying Darkness were dumb just because they were dumb, rather than for any specific structural issues. But you got factions like Yogo Junzo's Army that were bad for the game because they were too greedy. Yogo Junzo's Army was so over the top in villainy and power that it was obviously top priority all the time, which in turn meant that all the other villains and threats were essentially meaningless. You were supposed to care about your oath to your liege versus your word as a samurai, about your loyalty to friends versus loyalty to family. And none of that mattered because you actually just followed the advice of whoever was telling you to stop the giant army of Deadites from murdering everyone and feeding their children into agony engines.
There is no logical connection between those two claims. The first one is obviously true, the second one does not in any way follow from that. If you're in a border area with undeveloped markets, getting things sent in through your family connections might be more important.deadDMWalking wrote:The Empire is surrounded by hinterlands because obviously.
Therefore there are areas where clan affiliation means less.
If we're in a big city where I can just buy poison, then the fact that as a member of the Serpent Clan I can get some sent in every month doesn't mean very much. If we're in a hinterland with nothing but a local blacksmith and Deckard Cain to buy things from, those packages of poison could be a super big deal.
The rest of your argument is basically gibberish because your very first syllogism is total nonsense.
-Username17