The Gaming Den

OSSR: Creatures of Rokugan
Oriental Adventures



Our musical inspiration for this review is the opening theme to Ghost in the Shell.

Today's OSSR is going to come at you in five parts. It's Creatures of Rokugan, produced by AEG under license from Wizards of the Coast, a product which is an expansion to a product made by Wizards of the Coast under license from AEG. Sound confusing? Yeah, it is. AEG made what was the most successful CCG that wasn't Magic before the era of Yu-gi-oh. It was called Legends of the Five Rings (L5R), and it was set in a miscellaneously Asian-but-mostly-Japanese fantasy world where the empire that was kind of like China but mostly like Japan was called Rokugan. It had factions that played really differently, it had a storyline that advanced between expansions, it had multiplayer that wasn't completely terrible while still doing 2 player well, it had multiple routes to victory, and was in general a cut above most of the Magic clones that came out during that period (that period being 1995).


And it had nice art.

Here's where it gets unnecessarily complicated. The intellectual property of the Rokugan setting (but not the rights to continue making the card game) was split off into a separate company called Five Rings Publishing, which promptly got sold to Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast decided to make Rokugan their primary campaign setting for Oriental Adventures in 2000. Then after doing that, they sold the IP back to AEG, thus making AEG the sole company able to make official supplements for an official 3rd edition setting.

Creatures of Rokugan was made in 2001, shortly after AEG had bought the rights to their own setting back from WotC. The rules are based on the OGL, but it's content is based on IP that WotC owned and expanded upon but which AEG invented and repurchased. Figuring out what they were and were not allowed to put into this book must have been a nightmare. The last couple pages of the book are Open Gaming License legalese, and I have no idea if their version is correct or not.

People have long speculated as to what exactly the fuck was going on with WotC to make them decide to use Rokugan instead of one of their older Oriental Adventures settings, and further if they were going to do that, what possessed them to then sell away their ability to make supplements for the setting they committed themselves to. But as far as I know, we can indeed only speculate because WotC has never come clean as to their thought process or motivation for pulling such a complicated maneuver.


We don't like to talk about the original Oriental Adventures. Apparently, neither does WotC.

The whole book is 109 pages, and we'll try to do it in 5 posts. So that's about 22 pages a post.

Unlike Frank, I can kinda see why Wizards of the Coast might not have gone with their native settings for OA: the original product from TSR was more than vaguely racist, and Kara-Tur had been established as part of the Forgotten Realms, which the FR team already had dibs on. Unapproachable East came out in 2003, so it's not impossible that FR already had it on its timeline of splats to churn out when OA came out, but I rather suspect that the sequence of events was something like: someone pitched OA, the FR team didn't want to deal with immediately and also didn't want to surrender any control of the setting, and someone else popped up and suggested Rokugan as this alternate property they already owned with an established fanbase...and then you have a left-hand-not-talking-to-writes-the-check-hand bit later where AEG buys back the property.

This is more like Eastern Europe-sliding-into-Central-Asia. Faerun never really had an India subcontinent analogue.

Believe it or not, this was before the fecal matter really hit the oscillator, because this book is laid out along string D&D3.0 guidelines and ruleset; later products from AEG decided to go for a hybrid thing where their L5R sourcebooks present the stats in both d20 and the setting's native d10 ruleset and...uh...yeah, the "hybrid d20" era was weird. Not as weird as when they decided to try releasing Legend of the Burning Sands as an RPG, but pretty damn weird.

So obscure no torrent exists of it.

Legend of the Five Rings already had an RPG produced for it in 1997. It was a pile of d10s “roll and keep” system. That means you roll a pile of d10s, select some, do some addition, and get a result. And like Cthulhutech, the procedure is long and cumbersome and the probability curves are totally insane. Between the years 2000 and 2005, almost all Rokugan books were printed with side by side rules for two systems: 2nd edition Roll-and-Keep and 3rd edition D&D. This proved that AEG authors could be equally non-proficient with two rulesets. Creatures of Rokugan, the book we have in our hands, is actually one of the very few that AEG made during this period for only one system: and that system was D&D. Really, I'm just contextualizing the lack of apparent game mechanical familiarity that comes in the later pages.

This book actually has a quite manageable number of writers. Seven “writers” with two “additional writing” makes for nine total people who wrote on this book. That would be a little much for most titles, but we're talking about a monster book. Monster books are inherently anthologies, with lots of stand alone pieces. So nine authors is totally fine. I think there might only be one interior artist. The credits say “Interior Artists” (plural) but there's only one name listed. I don't know why they would do that. For that matter, I don't know why they bothered doing new art at all for a lot of these pieces. Really seems like they could have recycled card art for a lot of entries and people would have been fine with that.


This is the card

This is the new art they commissioned for this book.

Shrug.

Call it Magic: the RPGathering Syndrome - or maybe Inverse Spellfire Disease. One of the popular trends when TSR was dying was to try and monetize a large chunk of their standing art by throwing it into a CCG (Spellfire, Rage, Jyhad/Eternal Struggle, etc.), and theoretically the inverse would be true for any CCGs-transitioning-to-RPGs...but it never materialized. My guess is "Look, we gave you an art budget, use it." was half the reason; the other half might be that they didn't actually own the rights to the CCG artwork, which is weird but not improbable.



Creatures of Rokugan was released after Monster Manual and Monstrous Compendium: Monsters of Faerun, but before Fiend Folio, so it really represents another incremental step in the development of the 3.5 monster book learning curve and was essentially regarded as Monster Book III for a couple years.


Hell, maybe the FR team was still hoping MC:MoF would make enough money they could get away with this shit again.

For reasons unknown to me, all of the monsters have a listed Honor score. Because they're monsters, this is essentially 0. So I don't know why they bothered.

In Rokugan, jade and certain kinds of crystals that are unhelpfully named “crystal” inherently have the ghost touch property. Except the way they decide to try to explain it is by introducing a new subtype that works exactly like incorporeal except that they are still touched normally by jade and crystal and then replacing all instances of the old incorporeal with the new one. This is definitely the most roundabout manner I can think of to affect this rather trivial setting fact.

Actual rules for jade and crystal that are written in the jade and crystal section totally exist, and they are overly complicated. There's stuff involving jade counting as being of a different “plus” for purposes of penetrating DR of certain creatures. It's important to remember that this is for 3rd edition, not 3.5. So most DR requires a specific weapon bonus to penetrate rather than a specific material or alignment like in 3.5. This bonus accounting is overly complex even for its time, but when you factor in the time it was made it's only somewhat overly complex. If this had happened four years later, we would have just had DR X/Rocks and we all would have been happier.



L5R really tried to get you to care about jade and crystal weapons, but mostly you didn't.

Let us also not forget Taint rules, which after WotC lost control of the setting was one of the many sub-systems rolled into Unearthed Arcana.

Did someone say...taint?

Taint was somewhere between radiation exposure and your own personal evil-meter, and it was supposed to be Bad and caused you mutations and corruption until you were a slavering, soulless shell of yourself. But on the other hand, Taint was the primary casting ability score you cared about if you were a maho magician, so you kinda wanted that as high as possible.

Well, that's a good start.

Jade had some special abilities to protect you from Taint, and Taint was important in Taint-based spellcasting or maho, which was a lot like Oriental Adventures telling the Tome & Blood Blood Magus to suck its veiny, throbbing, demon-headed, oozing-flourescent-green-pus cock.

Wait, so is that like demon syphilis?

There are a couple problems with this. First up, maho in OA was hideously overpowered for anyone that took a fancy to it; second off, it was hard to protect against Taint, especially if you didn't have any of the setting's native magic to protect you. The thing is, while theoretically this is a setting about more-or-less normal human samurai and conscript peasant warriors holding off armies of goblins bakemono and demons oni, outside of the novels and metastoryline normal humans don't do well going up against supernatural evil, especially when they decide it's time to emphasize the "magic is rare, no magic katanas for you!" line.

What do you mean, no firearms? They're in the DMG!

There is also a Void subtype. It gets its own paragraph, but it literally has no game effects.


It was important in the setting, it just didn't have any rules.

I won't say that all of the standard D&D classes weren't welcome in Rokugan, but defining classes like paladin, cleric, wizard, and sorcerer weren't really compatible with the setting, which mainly reduced you to a couple samurai, a monk, a shugenja/wujen, and a rogue yakuza with no honor. A lot of the more iconic monsters of the setting relied on some element of the OA ruleset (mainly for spell-like abilities) to use, and relied on the Rokugan setting to keep PCs from killing them out of general principle...of course, given that they lacked setting-specific protections, the PCs could easily end up dying or being horribly Tainted just from an encounter with a drop-in monster-of-the week.

Sadly, this setting predates Afro Samurai.

The Creatures

Pages 6-20 have 17 monsters, which works out to just slightly better than 1 per page.

The first monster is not off to a good start. It's the Ashalan. The Ashalan are not, in fact, from Rokugan. They are from a different setting that the Five Rings Publishing people tried to get people to care about in the late nineties. It was called “Legend of the Burning Sands” and was sort of Arabic-themed rather than miscellaneously Asian. I'm sure there are some fans of Legend of the Burning Sands, but I don't know any of them. As far as I know, the distinctive characteristic of Ashalan is that they are blue, but in this book they are described as albinos who get a lot of tattoos.


These are the Ashalan, not that they look all that much like what's pictured in this book.

Mechanically speaking, the Ashalan are just humanoids who have regular character classes and some weird abilities that really sound like class abilities like secret tattoo knowledge and shit. They can apparently be Paladins, which is fascinating because that character class does not exist in Oriental Adventures.

The Ashura are flying evil samurai demons that will wreck your shit. Also, when you kill them they explode in a ball of green flame.



Technically the Ashura are from the RPG set "1,000 Years of Darkness" which is sort of an alternate reality where the Big Bad won and set up an eternal rule on planet toilet-on-fire.


In this world the bad guys can win. Well, no, they're going to nerf the tournament outcome to their storyline, but theoretically.

For reasons unknown, under "Immunities" they've lumped in abilities like "Can see in darkness." My guess is they were copy-pasting from "Special Qualities" or were otherwise just new at this whole d20 thing.

Bakeneko are spirit-cats. Now, your normal cat in regular D&D has a better-than-average chance of killing a peasant (1st-level commoner); these things are CR 1 and shapeshift and wield katanas and shit. I have no idea why they don't rule the world, except that they're nominally chaotic good.


Okay, I'm not even a furry and right away this looks like a better game than OA.

The mighty Baku, guardian of dreams is kind of a clusterfuck to begin with. Baku are actual legendary creatures, which are tapirs that defend your good dreams and eat your nightmares. Some Baku turn evil and eat your good dreams. Anyway, the real pictures of Baku look this:



Yes, really. It's a genuine mythological creature. Shut up.

And the real animal it is based on looks like this:



But for reasons that don't make any sense to me, they show the Baku with a lion head and a rhino horn. Maybe it's to make it look less like it came from a different card game?


This is the L5R Baku, and they are sticking by it.

But I think the real failure here is that the Baku they envision is CR3. This book is supposed to be running on the 3rd edition D&D engine, and in that ruleset, interacting with the dreamworld at all doesn't really come online until character level 9. So any dreamworld monster that is less than CR 7 is basically a piñata. When they eat your bad dreams, you get the benfits of bless as cast by a 16th level Cleric when you wake up. Bless lasts for 1 minute a level, so that won't even get you through the toothbrushing ritual that is spell slot preparation. That shit takes an hour.

The demons/evil spirits in Oriental Adventures are the Oni, represented by the title ____ no Oni. They're summoned like demons and can make more of themselves, and if they steal your name (it's complicated and doesn't happen much) they become super powerful.

There are a lot of oni in this game, which go from "mooks I can't kill without magic" to "according to the flavor text I should be shitting my pants in terror, but it's CR 13."

The Elemental Terrors probably need a bit of explanation. L5R was inspired in large part by Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings. That book is divided into five sections: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void. These are sort of the five great elements in Japanese Buddhist philosophy, but the “void” is really supposed to be “Heavenly Purity” and the other elements are really nothing at all like the Aristotelian elements we are used to in RPGs. For fuck's sake, in that system plants are water and animals are fire. But in L5R we have a very superficial reading of those things, so our elements are basically the Fantastic Four plus Galactus. Le sigh.

Anyway, one of the ways to win the game is to become enlightened by putting out all five “rings.” These are cards that require you to do something weird in order to trigger being allowed to play them, and then once you have them they give you a lasting benefit. It is generally very difficult to put out all five rings, because their various triggers are in different parts of the game, thus requiring you to win duels, win battles, cast spells, and empty your hand all while having different specific cards in your hand at the right triggering moment. Naturally, in some of the later expansions there were ways to make that considerably easier in a number of ways, but the point is that the “ring victory” was originally a lofty and rather difficult goal.

But there was also the “bad guys.” The Shadowlands were full of monsters doing bad stuff, and one of the things they introduced early on was oni whose shtick was that they were associated with one of the elements of enlightenment, but totally corrupt and evil instead of enlightened. And because they had already sort of binned the Musashi or Buddhist “enlightened” meaning from these elements in favor of more traditional Gaijin RPG elements, we ended up with something not unlike Ravenloft Elementals.

Originally, there were just Terrors for each element, but at some point they decided that there should be lesser terrors and greater terrors and shit. This section provides ten monster writeups, which are the “greater” and “lesser” varieties. We are also told that there are “true” elemental terrors somewhere, but they don't have stats. What do you think this is, a monster book?


Some of the elemental terrors seem pretty badass, others appear to be aborted chickens who can't even stand.

It doesn't help that as the setting got older, more shit was added to the mix. So you had the Lying Darkness/Tomorrow, and the crystal magic of the Burning Sands, and the magic of the Nezumi/ratkin, and the great dreaming hive-mind of the Nagas, and whatever crap the Unicorn Clan brought back with them after playing Mongol for a couple generations, and then there were Dragons and the Oracle of Jade and the Oracle of Thunder and the Oracle of Obsidian and...well, you get the idea. A lot of this stuff was defeated/retconned/downvoted into setting oblivion in later editions, and it barely makes any appearance here at all.

Seriously, you have an entire empire where magic is a thing. Craft a couple Jade Golems, march into the Shadowlands and wreck the place. Of course, that would be a decadent gaijin's thought process...

All of the Elemental Terrors get the Elemental Type in this book, because why wouldn't they? Well, the reason they wouldn't is because the elemental type is written for what amounts to oozes made out of air or water – creatures with no discernible anatomy and bodies made out of pure whatever. The Elemental Terrors are really obviously not like that, having what appears to be joints and sinews and presumably stomachs and spleens. So really, the model for these creatures should be Genies, not Elementals. But they aren't Outsiders, they are Elementals because the authors don't really understand the ins and outs of 3rd edition creature typing. But then, just to insult you, the greater Void oni actually are Outsiders, so they had to have known that was an option. They just didn't do it because no reason.

On the plus side, that means your ring of elemental command is a lot more useful in this setting than you thought it would be.

Ancient History wrote:

AncientH:

The demons/evil spirits in Oriental Adventures are the Oni, represented by the title ____ no Oni. They're summoned like demons and can make more of themselves, and if they steal your name (it's complicated and doesn't happen much) they become super powerful.

I love this game.

Also your reviews, or whatever.

The thing with the shadowlands was that there was rather a lot of it. If you go wreck stuff up in the shadowlands, you mostly just find more shadowlands, with more and bigger oni.

Also, the L5R card game had plenty of ways to fuck over powerful units. Golems would likely be followers, meaning that your best answer would be to simply shoot them, or to duel their person, then laugh as the golems wandered off. On top of that, jade worked by being a sort of corruption magnet. So, you still accumulated taint at the normal rate, it just all went into the jade. Different sources have differed on whther that means your jade falls apart or turns into some crazy "evil jade," but neither one leads to long term success with golems. (Also also, jade is super-expensive. Enough jade to make a golem would also be enough to equip an army of archers, which would be massively more effective).

Also, L5R is the best game.

I once went 1:4 at a tournament, and still took home the best prize. For sportsmanship. Because that was what that scene was like.

Yeah, well, I had a Hare deck. 'nuff said.

I liked the xky system used in the d10 version. It was a lot more palatable than the WW system (especially given at the time the TN on any given die could be anywhere between 2 and 10, but was usually 9 or 10 because fuck you for being a player and not playing "what the DM would most like to want to tell an awesome story about"). Now if you kept all the dice you rolled, that would be ideal, as you could then guarantee that every single time you rolled a pool, every bonus or skill point was actually doing something.

Although IIRC the ability scores (and skills?) were divided up amongst the elements based on how much coke they happened to have been doing, so you could increase your Water rating by getting smarter or something. Mostly I was delighted that you could be a Unicorn warrior woman from house Otaku.

"Hey have you seen the latest Kyou Karamao raws?"
"Shut up, Izumi!"

Living Rokugan was... well, the word "Living" was not terribly apt. I did amazingly well in the one convention, as over a couple of games I became Jade Emissary (for the region that was represented in Australia) and more importantly did not die, lose honour or gain taint. That was basically unheard of at that convention. In one scenario I didn't play, the "most honourable" award went to the team that lost the least honour.

I'm not sure whether I'm impressed or disappointed that you didn't go for the all-too-easy taint jokes.

Re: Burning Sands

I don't know anything about Burning Sands, but I've long been slightly surprised that Arabian themed settings don't take center stage a bit more often in RPGs. I've never been quite sure if it has more to do with general Islamophobia or simple redundancy--the West has cheerfully plundered the Near East for exotic material for so long now that you can assume that wizards dress like Gadaffi and that ghouls and genies will make the A-list even if your setting is bog standard vaguely European shit.

Historically, the fantasy of Orientalist literature like the 1,001 Arabian Nights and Vathek have always run hard into the reality of the region - the former are essentially fairy tales peppered with exotic locations, foreign words, and in the case of the Richard Burton translations copious footnotes on local sexual practices and a 10,000 word essay on pederasty. So it's not that people don't want to play in the world of Sinbad the Sailor or a magical Baghdad where Aladdin has a genie in a lamp; it's just that the settings tend to be rather flimsy - you'd as much ask why people don't play in fairy tales and run into Weyland Smith.

AD&D has borrowed copiously from the Arabian Nights, of course, and even managed to eke out Al Quasim for a while; Magic: the Gathering had the Arabian Nights set; GURPS Arabian Nights is a thing, and there are other high-fantasy and low-fantasy Arabian Nights-style settings here and there, but few of them stick...mostly because the other side of the coin, which is informed by real history and the grittier life that is in the Middle East. So you also have GURPS Crusades, for example, and Cairo by Night for Vampire (who actually did a small series of books for Vampire with an Islamic/Middle East flavor or slant, even Iberia by Night).

So on the one hand you have a kind of fantasy Islamic Golden Age that never happened (yes, there was a Golden Age of Islam, but the Arabian Nights isn't it), running headlong into the long and complicated real-world conflict that followed the expansion of Islam, right up through the Crusades and into the present day...and as far as I know no-one's made a lasting go at it except Al Quasim.

[/edit]Which isn't to say there isn't room for modern fantasy gaming in the Middle East - Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Tim Power's Declare are two different approaches to it.

fectin wrote:Also, L5R is the best game.

I once went 1:4 at a tournament, and still took home the best prize. For sportsmanship. Because that was what that scene was like.

Aw yeah, L5R tournaments. I won my country's Test of the Jade Champion; in the final game, my opponent gave me a fuck-you look and scooped up his cards in the middle of the game after running into my wall of Nope! three turns in a row. I also won Legacy of the Naga.

And for the next tournament, I showed up with Ratlings and met not one, but two Ninja players. I didn't even play those games.

Ancient History wrote: AD&D has borrowed copiously from the Arabian Nights, of course, and even managed to eke out Al Quasim for a while;

Most of the Al-Quadim scenarios are really good adventure stories too.

Creatures of Rokugan Continued:
Elemental Vortex to Mokumokuren


Many of these monsters are lifted directly from Japanese myths. The actual myths are considerably weirder and cooler than these, almost without exception.

Musical inspiration: The Theme from Princess Mononoke, which also has better monsters than the majority of this book.

I don't think we're going to cover every monster in here, because a lot of them are redundant or simply not that interesting. In any case, today we are starting with the Elemental Vortex. It's a swirling vortex of all the elements, which is a concept that is so obvious that it has been used many, many times in D&D. In addition to the Elemental Vortex in this book, there are also Storm Elementals and Omnielementals, which are conceptually the same thing.


The Monster Manual 3 version of the same concept.

But it's not just that this concept is not really all that interesting, it's that the execution of this is just bizarre. First of all, they are colossal, but only have 12 hit dice. Secondly, despite being made out of a vortex of all the elements, they are incorporeal and invisible. They are really not much of a swirling vortex of anything, they are just a disturbance in the force that very infrequently summons monsters for short periods of time and also randomly shoots evil energy bolts at people.

But the rules are terrible. First of all, this was very obviously converted in a very half-assed way from the roll-and-keep system rules. First of all, you get to see it if you have enough “void points.” Void points are not a thing that exists by default in Oriental Adventures. It's a L5R roll-and-keep system thing, which is kind of like action points or whatever. They tried to introduce them to the d20 rules in some of their split mechanics books, but the fact is that if you picked this book up as an expansion to the OA book that it is nominally an expansion to, you'd say “What in the what now?” Secondly, it has the ability to suppress “elemental magic.” That's not really a game term. Spells in this system might have the [Fire] tag or be on the Shugenja Earth Specialist List, but neither one of those things specifically gives them the “elemental” tag, and it's totally unclear to me if they are trying to talk about the first group of spells or the second group of spells or neither or both.

But really the bottom line is that this bad boy is supposedly CR 15. It does 6d8 damage per round to one target (save for half) and can defend itself with the proceeds of a single casting of summon monster VII. It has 81 hit points and an AC of 10. If you're playing with void points at all, there isn't a 15th level character on the planet who won't have more than five, and no character worth anything at that level won't be able to chop it in half in a single round. It probably doesn't even get to act. If it was 6 levels lower, it still probably wouldn't get to act.

The First Oni (CR 25) is supposed to be the Big Bad of the book; the oni summoned by Fu Leng and given his own name.


Rawr! Me want rice-cookie!

I mentioned the naming thing before, and I still don't want to go into it. It's a thematic thing in the setting which can be quite complicated but ultimately devolves into unexplained metaphysics that no-one cares about. If you're really interested here's the wiki page. Have fun.

Anyway, the thing about the First Oni is that he's supposed to be an Epic-level threat by CR, but the designers knew nothing of the Epic Level Handbook - which, at the time CoR was being made, was either out in stores already or off at the printers; it released in the same year, but I'm not sure which hit the streets first. Anyway, calling this thing CR 25 is a fucking joke; it's a 925 hp (51 HD) bruiser with regeneration and damage reduction out the ass, but no spell-like abilities or spellcasting abilities. If you get within reach (10') of it's claws you're in for a world of hurt...well, no, it's 2d4 + 15 claw damage (+ poison and disease). It's pretty much the definition of "hold it still and drop heavy shit on it until it dies." Honestly, the Tarrasque could eat this thing.

Fushiki no Oni is about as good a point as any to talk about a major shift in nomenclature that happened in L5R. See, originally, it was called “Oni no Fushiki.” in fact, all the onis were given a name in the format “Oni no XXX” where XXX was a badly translated Japanesque term.

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[/img]

The particle “no” in Japanese is the possessive marker. Like putting Latin words in the Dative Case or putting an apostrophe at the end of a word in English. But in this case it's an adjectival particle. That is to say that when sticking two nouns together with a “no” in between, the noun before the “no” becomes an adjective that modifies the second noun. Pretty much exactly like how in English if you say two nouns in a row the first one becomes an adjective that modifies the second. Like how “the (Fire Engine) (Red)” refers to a color while “the (Red) (Fire Engine)” refers to a truck. So at some point there was a grand conclave and they decided that all the Oni should be Oni as a noun rather than as an adjective. I'm sure this really mattered to someone, but it's basically like how people with dark skin in the United States are “African Americans” but people with the same color of skin in the United Kingdom are “British Africans.” I think the American way is better, but I also think that any benefit you might gain from making the BBC switch would be considerably over matched by the confusion it would cause.

Note that L5R insisted on calling Onis “Oni no XXX” or “XXX no Oni” even if the XXX in question was not in fact a noun, which is grammatically wrong but no one cares. In any case, “Fushiki” is basically just a name. So we're basically looking at a “Dave Oni,” which previous to the big nomenclatural shift had been known as “Oni Dave.” The actual Fushiki no Oni is just a fire elemental who happens to be evil, so I'm not really sure why that warrants a full writeup in the book or how it's different from an Elemental Terror. Mostly I just needed an excuse to do the Oni nomenclature tirade.

And, it bears mentioning, they sometimes avoid the "___ no oni" thing entirely and use a related term like "____ no kansen" (kansen is Japanese for minor spirits of evil - we might say imps - and also "infection" based on same). The important takeaway from this is that Rokugani oni basically fill the same RPG ecological niche as Horrors in Earthdawn: it's a handy label that can be applied to a wide variety of arbitrarily evil monsters from SupernaturalLand which allows you to give them any combination of powers, motivation, and characteristics without having to talk about their culture, mating habits, or what they eat. The only real difference is that Earthdawn didn't borrow shit from Japanese myth when making the Horrors. For example, there's a moetechi no kansen which is basically an evil candle flame that can spawn copies of itself, and merge with other moetechi no kansen, and when you get enough of them together they form a Taki-bo no oni, which is like an evil fire elemental with tits.


The actual art was worse than this.

Nominally, that means you've got 3-4 underpowered CR 3 monsters combining together Devastator-style into an underpowered CR 12 monster. According to its description this should take about 3 hours once the first moetechi no kansen gets started (you summon 1, in an hour you have 2, in two hours you have 4, 3 merge to form a Taki-bo no oni and the 4th starts the cycle again), so I have no idea why these guys haven't burned down the world yet.


No relation to Fushiki no Oni. Which looks like Cthulhu-on-Fire.

The reason that there are so many fucking Gaki is that there are a lot of Gaki legends to choose from. Gaki is the Japanese word for “hungry ghost” in the Buddhist sense of the term. As such, you get everything from what are essentially vampires or ghouls to things more like wraiths who are just really sad because they can't eat for whatever reason. It's about one step more specific than the word “monster.” Interestingly, its meaning as “Vampire” totally ended up creating a type of Japanese vampires for White Wolf. Not in Kindred of the East, but before that. They had the special power to dump themselves and eventually other stuff into the nightmare world inside the demon sword in Soul Eater. Yes, really. It was a weird time. Anyway, the point is that Gaki coming in tiny, medium, and large versions is totally folkloric, because there are a metric shit tonne of different monsters that are all called “Gaki” in various Japanese folk stories.

In D&D3, this means that "gaki" is catch-all for "Tainted undead," which is pretty close to a catch-all for "undead" but...not quite. Some of these are fun ideas ruined by terrible mechanics. For example, the Skull Tide Gaki are floating undead skulls that ride the Tainted seas chattering and trying to latch on to anybody that comes near, draining their constitution. Unfortunately, they don't have a Swim skill and despite the fact that they're supposed to appear in swarms, there aren't any rules for that (which is probably a good thing, because then they'd be unstoppable), so instead they're just really weak CR 1 monsters, presumably because the authors couldn't bring themselves to have them as less than 1.


Before you ask, they're not described as flying either. It says "float." These should really be more of an environmental hazard.

In Japanese myth, the "bakemono" are a class of Yokai, a class of monsters like faeries which are defined by their ability to shapeshift. In Oriental Adventures/Rokugan/L5R, it's a generic term for non-oni Shadowlands monsters.


I love this book. I just wanted to tell you.

The Garegosu no Bakemono is a giant octopus with a big mouth on the front.


Unlike the Baku/Drowzee, there is nothing particularly folkloric about this beast, and its resemblance to a pokemon is probably coincidence.

Again, Garegosu is basically just a name. So this is Gary Oak Bakemono. Bakemono is like a catch-all word for “monster.” All the Mujina, Kitsune, and Bakeneko (described earlier) are all “Bakemono.” So this thing here is a Bakemono whose name happens to be Gary Oak. You probably think that having a big octopus that is also evil in a Japanese themed game made by Gaijin Otakus would involve a tentacle rape joke.

Yes Gary, yes you do.

But for whatever reason, there isn't one. It's a tentacle monster with constrict and swallow whole, but no sex puns in its writeup. I genuinely thing this is a missed opportunity. It's CR 7 and it has a dazing gaze attack to go with its eight tentacle attacks and it all amounts to a dick's worth of damage if you are unwise enough to melee the fucking thing. As a CR 7 monster, it's actually pretty well designed. You could totally fight this thing and expect to win. It's also Huge, which is nice because most 3e monsters you could fight were disappointingly small.

Anyway, time for some shit no one cares about: In 3rd edition, monsters got feats slower than player characters. Most “monster hit dice” gave out just one feat every four hit dice, while advancing by character class gave you one every three. Even by that standard, the monsters in this book are woefully short on feats. The Garegosu no Bakemono has eight hit dice of Magical Beast and is thus owed 3 feats on that basis. Instead, it only has one. I don't know why, and I doubt anyone else does either.


Also not to be confused with the “Tako” from the OA core book. “Tako” means “Octopus.”

Goresei no Oni is designed to fuck with player characters from non-OA settings. It's a giant Shadowlands demon that should be an outsider but is listed as a monstrous humanoid, and it looks like the love-child of a minotaur and a thoqqua. It's entire purpose in life is to be a minotaur that sets shit on fire. You might even say it's...


...flaming.

The Great Sea Spider is a gargantuan fey which looks like a huge arachnid stepping over mountains. In fact, aside from a swim speed it has literally nothing to do with the ocean and I don't know why they don't just call it "The Giant Spider," or maybe "The Giant Spirit Spider." All you really need to know is that it's a shitty CR 16 Ungoliant rip-off that you could probably kill with a couple barrels of burning oil.

I genuinely don't know why the Greater Kansen is called that. There are not, to my knowledge, any stats anywhere for a Lesser or Normal Kansen. [AH note: some of the myriad Elemental Terrors were called "___ no kansen," as mentioned] This is odd to me because the “Greater” Kansen are only CR5. They are evil kami who teach people evil magic and give people the bad touch with their taint. The evil magic that they are in charge of distributing goes all the way up to 9th level spells,and even Epic shenanigans if you are in to that. The “kami” that they used to be ranges both in Shinto source material and L5R canon from minor advice spirit all the way up to god. So it really really seems like this is concept that could grow up to higher than 5th level. Nevertheless, we are told that these fifth level bozos are the “greater” versions. I believe this to have been an editing mistake, with these assholes having been written as the lesser version with the greater version left out entirely. The fact that the kansen is alphabetized under “G” would be another editing mistake.


This is the card art for a Kansen. The card allows you to destroy your enemy's mines and farms under specific circumstances. Apparently, when you are having the hot springs episode, these assholes will shit in the pool.


The “Greater” Kansen in the book doesn't look any more impressive, to be honest.

Guardian Statues are like weak golems; they're animated statues made to look like samurai. Unlike golems, they're sentient and can gain class levels. Which would seem like an interesting character concept if we were in an edition where playing a monster class didn't make the PCs piss blood.


I was going to post the cover of Savage Species and shake my fist ruefully, but honestly I ran across this and it's much cooler.

You've probably gotten the basic idea at this point that the world of Rokugan is divided up into different kinds of monstrous spirits and Shadowlands monsters of different stripes, and while the world is a bit larger than that...well, there's some truth to it. You don't have a lot of "generic" monsters not associated with the general cosmology hanging about. This can lead to some odd critters like the Hanemuri: it's a Shadowlands critter, but it's a tiny aberration - it's basically a reptilian bat that looks like something out of a cartoon from the Ghetto Age of American animation.


If you told me Thundarr, He-Man, or the Care Bears fought these things, I would believe you.


This is a Houou. Sorry, a Ho-Oh

The Houou is exactly a Pokemon. That is because the Pokemon Ho-Oh is relatively unique among Pokemon in that it doesn't even have a different name from the mythological creature it is based on. Japanese Phoenixes are called Houou, and that is what they are called in Pokemon and that is what they are called in the Creatures of Rokugan book as well. They are kind of a big deal in L5R, because one of the original clans was the “Phoenix Clan.” Now, one would think under the circumstances, that if you were going to use the English word for the creature in the clan name that you'd use the English word for the creature in the monster book, and that if you were going to use the Japanese word for the creature in the clan name that you'd use the Japanese word for the creature in the monster book. But no. Because fuck you. Despite having had an established and plot-important “Phoenix Clan” for many years, the writers of this book want to show you that they read a Japanese mythological creature book one time, and totally know the Japanese word for “Phoenix.”


Anyway, when it finally came time for D&D to make rules for Phoenixes, they famously made them far too ridiculously powerful. They were part of one of the stupider shapechange based infinite power loops. The Creatures of Rokugan book determines to be stupid in the opposite direction, and the Houou here is CR 1. Yes, they still have automatic self resurrection that doesn't cost a level, but it takes a whole day. I'm actually pretty sure that transforming corpses into piles of Houou ash is better and cheaper than true resurrection.

Hyakuei ("kuei" means "ghost" in Chinese) are undead samurai animated by the Dark Blood of Fu Leng blah-di-fucking-blah. I really don't understand why they just didn't have a list of critters from the monster manual that they could give Rokugani names to, because these are your bog-standard zombie warriors only with better armor and weapons. They really should just have rules for "Improved Zombie" in the monster manual to reflect raising warriors from the grave; maybe have the necromancer buy a specific ability that they get from a list or something. It irks me.

A little later we get the Ikiryo, which are basically spectral undead samurai.

The Kenku are one of the more mysterious entries into this book. The Kenku already have a monster entry in Oriental Adventures. They are listed under “Tengu,” but that is the same fucking word and those are the same fucking creatures.


Those creatures will train Keanu Reaves to say things other than “Whoa.”

The two writeups really honestly aren't that different. Sure, the OA version is a Monstrous Humanoid and the Creatures of Rokugan version is a Fey, but in both cases you're presented with a 2 hit die humanoid with a crow head. The version in Creatures of Rokugan is actually more like the version from the 1st edition AD&D Fiend Folio and less like Japanese folk tales. These days, Japanophiles really would rather that you used the transliteration “Tengu” than “Kenku.” It's not quite at the level of talking about “Peking” to Chinese people, but they'd still rather you didn't.


The Urusei Yatsura version of Tengu is not offered by either book, which is a shame.

The Jade Dragon is the only dragon in this book, which is weird on a couple levels. I mean, Oriental Dragons in D&D have always been weird, way more spirits than physical entities in the D&D sense, with shit like the Carp Dragon getting into the mix, and Rokugan pretty much follows suit except that their dragons are elemental spirits who eventually got tired of the gods and humans fucking shit up in the Celestial Realm and basically just barge in and take over.

So the CR 8 Jade Dragon is underwhelming; it's supposed to be a minor emissary of the true Jade Dragon, which is why they suck. But it's a bit like having angels in the Monster Manual, in that you can sort of understand why you want them in there to balance out the demons and shit, but you're never supposed to actually fight them. It has a breath weapon that only hurts Tainted/Shadowlands creatures and some pretty shitty spell-like abilities which the writer seems to think makes it a bad ass.


I was gonna go for the cutesy-jade dragon figure, but I kinda like the thought of Shego as a Jade Dragonfire Adept.

Each clan in L5R has a number of main families in it. The Crab get the Hida and the Kuni, the Phoenix get the Shiba and the Isawa, and so on. The big families of the Lion clan are Akodo, Matsu, and Kitsu. Anyway, one of the more obscure pieces of canon is that the Kitsu clan is magic because a long time ago they fucked a bunch of magic talking lions. Now, that isn't bestiality, because we are talking about talking lions, who therefore pass the “can you fuck it?” test. But it is pretty weird. It's the kind of setting backstory that I personally would seek to de-emphasize because it's actually kind of dumb.


I dress like David Bowie because one of my ancestors fucked a cat.

That's OK.

Anyway, the talking lions that the Kitsu clan married into get their own writeup here, despite the fact that all that bullshit happened a thousand years ago when people were marrying the Moon and crap (it's more common than you'd think). The talking spirit lions apparently still exist in tiny prides somewhere, and you can run into them in the spirit world or something. But really, what we have here is 4 hit die talking cats with a really weird back story. Also, they are also named “Kitsu,” which is exactly the same as the name of the family in the Lion clan because that won't be confusing at all.

By the way, this is not the only big cat of the Lion clan in this book. There are also Matsu Warcats, which have eight hit dice and are pretty bad ass. Those don't talk, but they do have an Int of 5, putting them into a big gray area as to whether you can fuck them or not. You could think of them as fiendishly clever cats, or as retarded people who happen to be cat shaped. Kinda messed up either way.


Creatures of Rokugan Kitsu has really racist facial hair. On a lion.

The kitsune is the bog-standard Japanese trickster-fox spirit, which you might recall from that Shadowrun video game or Corruption of Champions.

In CoR, the kitsune are presented as CR 1 chaotic good fey with oh my fuck how many spell-like abilities did they give these bastards? 1/day - animal friendship, dancing lights, entangle, ghost sound, pass without trace, silent image, speak with animals (canines only)...is that all really necessary? I mean, they already have the standard spirit immunities and Shapeshifting as an extraordinary ability, couldn't you just pump up their track and move silently and wilderness lore skills and call it a day?

Anyway, like the Kitsu above, the kitsune also fucked a couple mortals back in the olden days of myth and founded a family of magicians called the Kitsune, because that's not confusing at fucking all.


Yes, L5R has more than one clan that's technically furries. They all have animal names, it's not even weird at this point. But at least the Hare Clan never had any literal bunny girls or lagomorphs in its short and troubled history. Also, googling "lagomorph" is NSFW.

The Kusatte Iru is the most disappointing monster in this book. It is an Oni that is the size of a mountain. It is epic in every sense of the word. During its slumber, people literally built a city on its back. If it were to awaken, all of Rokugan might be destroyed. Except you know... not. Because it's just a CR 20 colossal monster with large but penetrable DR and 360 hit points. You can't kill it with damage because it has huge amounts of regeneration and specifically treats all damage as subdual – but any 20th level Samurai worth the name could smack it into unconsciousness in short order. It only does 28 points of damage with its slam, so it's actually really easy for a character of that level to just tank the fucker.


It's the Tarasque of the L5R setting. Both in terms of its position in the story and in terms of how fucking oversold this asshole is.

It's got a bunch of immunities and you're supposed to get ancient and powerful magic from the elemental dragons or some shit, but actually there are enough GTFO spells in the game that you can and should just find one that bypasses his immunity list and kill the fucker. It's seriously not even hard, there's like twenty spells on the Shugenja list in the basic book alone that will end this bitch's days of rampage.


The Lost are yet more undead samurai. They're different from the last bunch because their preferred class is berserker (barbarian), and the only reason they get a different write-up is because they had different cards in the CCG. Later on the game actually changed tactics a bit and the Lost weren't undead so much as tainted peasants and samurai that had lost their minds and souls to the Shadowlands. Even the game gets confused by the fine distinctions, and I personally probably would have rolled with the Lost just auto-rising as undead the minute they were killed, barely even noticing when they stop breathing. It would be more interesting than these "yet another type of zombie" critters (although for reasons that I don't understand, these CR4 undead have 8HD and 52 hit points. That's...not a lot, but on the high scale for CR4.)

This book has marsh trolls. Marsh trolls are green and have rubbery skin and bloated bellies. They are amphibious. They are therefor a lot like D&D aquatic trolls, but they are weaker – 4 hit dice and basically about the strength of an Ogre. Nothing really special here, and the backstory they give you is so phoned in that mostly it's just “The Kuni don't actually know shit about these guys, but if you stab them they'll die and they're total assholes so you'd best start doing that.”

But I think I want to use these guys to underline a point: L5R canon got weird. And cluttered. And cluttered full of weird shit. I mean, really weird. Take a look at this L5R Wiki Page. None of that shit is in this monster writeup. Five great races? Fire Element? Time before time full of elemental void? What the fuck is this? These are green skinned fat ogres that breathe water and waylay passersby. That is fucking it. That is as far as the rabbit hole fucking goes. But at some point, someone who got the chance to write L5R canon decided to clutter it up with some seriously weird shit.

Megada no oni is a poor man's Fomorian giant. Really poor. CR 2.


Those aren't wounds, those are eyes. Megada no oni cannot be flanked.

It's worth juxtaposing these guys against the "Minor Oni," which are basically the OA version of imps and quasits (i.e. infernal familiars) and has an entry on the same fucking page. The Minor Oni are also CR 2, but were obviously written by somebody else in absolute seclusion from the guy writing megada no oni. The stats were obviously calculated using the same basic formulas, as most of the mechanical differences can be attributed to different attribute values - however, the megada no oni don't explicitly possess the "Oni Qualities (Su)," but the minor oni do, as well as some small spell-like abilities and oh yes it casts spells as a 4th level shugenja. What the fuck? How is this thing CR 2? How could you put it next to another goddamn CR 2 oni and stand back and say "Yes, that looks balanced." What the fucking fuck, mang.

Well, is it really any more bastardized than what D&D did with European mythology?

Yeah, in many ways. You look at European mythology you're going to find things called orcs and goblins and trolls, but they're not going to look and act like orcs and goblins and trolls in D&D. Give it enough adaptation distillation and redefinition and a lot of D&D monsters that have roots in European mythology are very much their own thing - and that's without getting into any of the product identity stuff like Mindflayers and Beholders.

In Oriental Adventures on the other hand, you have in many ways a shorter path to the source; the original Japanese and Chinese and Korean mythologies never filtered through Tolkien and the '70s Sword & Sorcery explosion to anything like the same extant, and you don't have 30-40 years of monsters being defined and redefined into something distinct from their historical roots but identifiably "D&D." I mean, the most characteristic monsters from the original Oriental Adventures were the Oriental Dragons and fucking Yak-Men (and Ogre Magi, but those are sort of a spin-off of existing property).

Rokugan...doesn't even have the old-OA excuse. It's a setting based much more directly on the original myths, and even if they're under no obligation to "keep faithful" to yokai and kuei and all that, by the same token there's not much fucking excuse for not following it if the original mythology is better than the shit they've come up with. I mean, a kirin in Rokugan is pretty much a kirin in China. That's the point, people want a fantasy Asian empire to roleplay in. So some of the bastardization actually detracts from the setting and the game.

Ancient History wrote:"according to the flavor text I should be shitting my pants in terror, but it's CR 13."

Did you mean "and"? Guys who crush normal people like ants are supposed to be, in turn, crushed by CR 13 creatures in the same manner.

L5R has a lot of badly translated Japanese in it. I don't speak Japanese. I don't have a feel for the language, and I can't read any of their three different writing systems. But even just having spent years practicing Aikido and watching a lot of anime I can recognize lexical and syntactical errors aplenty. For people who actually speak that language, L5R must be like nails on a chalkboard.

For example: for no particular reason L5R decides to call the mortal world "Ningen-do." Now, from Aikido I know that that translates to "The way of human" and from Naruto I know that that translates to "The human path." But in either case, I know it sure as fuck doesn't translate to "the material world." It just fucking doesn't. If they wanted to say "Human World" they should have said "Ningen-yo," which is similar but only in the sense that people who are fucking up transliterating things from a language they don't understand might get them confused.

-Username17

It feels like, the setting would be better off if they just had one catch all term for monsters. I mean, I realize actual japanese myth, being in reality of a collection of separate mythologies that sprung up on the islands we now know as japan that got smashed together during the process of the unification of the land, does have several big catch all terms for magical creatures. But seriously guies just pick one. If you REALLY want I could see having Youkai and Kami be distinct things. Where Youkai would be more physical and Kami are more spiritual, or Youkai are more malignant while Kami are more benign.

But as it is how many big catch all names fore "monster" have we seen so far in this review. Four or five? I get that this is from a card game and in the card game they make their bank by coming up with more bullshit creature types to make cards out of. But if it wasn't possible to trim the fat down for this it would have at least been nice to see the monster types be more differentiated.

On the other hand, thinking about this mess of a write up has helped me with ideas for the setting of the RP based on eastern myth soup I'm in right now. So that's some good that came out of it anyway.

Anyway, time for some shit no one cares about:

Hey, I resemble that comment.

In 3rd edition, monsters got feats slower than player characters. Most “monster hit dice” gave out just one feat every four hit dice, while advancing by character class gave you one every three. Even by that standard, the monsters in this book are woefully short on feats. The Garegosu no Bakemono has eight hit dice of Magical Beast and is thus owed 3 feats on that basis. Instead, it only has one. I don't know why, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Pfft. Aside from Dragons and Outsiders, monsters in 3.0 get a feat for every four extra hit dice (except the other types who didn't get any, or only ever got one, ..., there's a big table for it). If you're large, you don't count the first 2 HD, only the "extra" ones beyond that. If you're Huge, it's the first 8 HD that don't count for feats. Then 16 and 32.

So a Huge thing with 8HD and one feat is exactly how many it's supposed to have. Feats were for PCs in those days, and the monsters only got them to show how they were just like PCs. Even though they totally weren't.

Foxwarrior wrote:

Ancient History wrote:"according to the flavor text I should be shitting my pants in terror, but it's CR 13."

Did you mean "and"? Guys who crush normal people like ants are supposed to be, in turn, crushed by CR 13 creatures in the same manner.

Yeah, but Balors go up to 20. The thing about oni is that most of them are big and scary from a setting perspective, but lose a lot in the game mechanics.

Creatures of Rokugan Continued:
Mountain Goblin to Shadow Beast


Goblins are an important monster in Japanese mythology, and an important clade of monsters in the L5R card game. These are already written up in the basic Oriental Adventures book as the “Bakemono.” But here we have them again, alphabetized under “M” for “go fuck yourself.”

Your music accompaniment will be the ending theme to Gasaraki.


The Naga.


Some less human looking than others.

The Naga are a non-human, non-evil race that dates from the first card set. They filled a niche, which was non-human stuff that you didn't actually lose honor for putting out. But since they weren't your faction, you didn't gain honor either, and they had this force multiplier thing where the heavier you went in on Naga the more bang you got for each Naga. It was interesting. But very importantly: the art was pretty much all over the place from the beginning. Each artist was basically told “Draw a snake man” and other than that were allowed to go nuts. And they did. But of course, as D&D learned so painfully with the Yuan-Ti, there are a lot of ways you can draw a dude with snake parts.

So there they were with the desire to make a roleplaying setting and a bunch of official cards with snake men who looked all kinds of different ways. Obviously, there are a number of things they could have done, up to and including just looking at people like they were stupid when they asked why those cards looked like drawings of radically different species. But what they actually decided to do was to come up with convoluted epicycles to explain why the differently drawn Naga cards looked like that. And exactly like when they came up with all that Oni naming bullshit to explain a misprint where two cards had the same name (seriously: that is the actual reason for all that convoluted canon AncientHistory was talking about in our last installment), this shit was overly complicated and didn't help in any way. But clearly someone thought they were being really clever. They were not.

What they came up with was that there are actually a metric fuck tonne of different bloodlines of Naga, who are based on different kinds of snake and look totally different and are even different sizes. Also, female Nagas can transform their snake tails into human legs so that you can fuck them they can be part of your world. That has to do with a specific card that happened to be a female Naga who could shapeshift into a humanoid to ride a horse, but since it was fuckable popular, the great writers of canon decided to make that a general case. Anyway, all of these bloodlines of Naga already have writeups in Oriental Adventures. These versions are slightly different, but not “better” in any way I can see. The authors of this book do not appear to have read the book they are nominally writing an expansion to. It's very strange.

It gets better, of course, because D&D already has nagas of various shapes and sizes.


'ssssup, bitchessss?

But of course, OA naga are different, and by "different" I mean they're monstrous humanoids instead of aberrations. They share a lot more thematic ground with Yuan-ti than other serpent people. The basic writeup here - all 2.25 pages of it - doesn't begin to give these guys justice due to their extensive backstory. See, L5R has gone back and forth on the mythic origins of their world a little; they like to start out with a sort of Asian-themed equivalent of Cronus eating his young...



...which ends with Fu Leng falling out of the heavens and smashing into the Earth, burning a hole straight through to Jigoku and creating the Shadowlands. It wasn't until quite a while later that humans (when they arrived on the scene) found out that there had been whole non-human empires like the Naga in place long before humanity...and that Fu Leng's fall happened to be right on top of the Nezumi Empire, sending them all back to the Stone Crystal Age.

The Nezumi have a little place in my heart. In the original card game, they weren't given a Japanese name, they were called “Ratlings.” They had a similar position as the Naga, in that they were non-evil, non-humans who had a self-buff thing going on. Only, instead of being “snake men” they were “rat men.” And while no one has ever been able to adequately explain how the knees of rat people are supposed to work, for the most part Japanese clothing styles come to the rescue and the Ratlings didn't have the fundamental character design / art direction problem that the Nagas were saddled with. The big canon change was that at some point they decided to start calling these creatures “Nezumi” instead of “Ratling.”


The original. Important because it can be put into play with a small farm, which allows the player to finesse their holdings in some surprisingly effective ways for early attacks.

Now, time for some self reflection. As XKCD pointed out, if you go back far enough in your old files you will discover that you wrote poetry. I used to write L5R fanfiction. Hell, I wrote songfics (The Frank Trollman listed there is me, a much younger and more embarrassing version of me). I'm not proud of it, but it is what it is. The internet means that no one can ever escape their private shame. Anyway, one of the things I did was write L5R fanfiction for their listserve, which the people running the listserve were pretty happy with and which they tried to get me to continue writing after they banned me from their rules listserve (I declined, and that was the end of my participation with L5R). In any case, there is a really very good chance that the canon storyline of the Crab/Nezumi alliance happened because of stories I wrote when I was a teenager. So the Nezumi have a place in my heart.

But what they don't have, is a place in this book. Because they are already written up both as a monster and as a player character race in the basic book. I know that the Monster Manual has a writeup for Halflings after the PHB has a writeup for Halflings, but this is like if the Monster Manual 2 came out and hard moar Halflings. Or if Monsters of Faerun had wasted a shit tonne of page space on Elves and Dwarves. Oh... right. Anyway, the book feels the need to give different writeups for Nezumi from different tribes. This named tribe shit is after my time, and doesn't really pass the smell test. I think it's fine that the Third Whisker Tribe has favored class of Sorcerer, but I genuinely don't think that requires an entire monster writeup.

Also, I can't find the picture online, but the picture here has kind of racist facial hair... on a rat. It's basically exactly the same deal as the Kitsu earlier. The artist sometimes feels the need to show that a furry is an Asian furry by putting stereotypical chinaman facial hair on an animal face. Someone should have told him to not do that. Seriously.


On a lighter note: here's the Nezumi Sorcerer picture from the Oriental Adventures corebook, which this book could have totally fucking deferred to instead of dumping this writeup in at all.

The Nezumi have a warm spot in my heart too, though for different reasons. They're the beloved underdogs of the setting. They're like the Chaotic Good version of the Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy, sometimes right down to the verbal tiks, and they have gotten the shit kicked out of them more than any other race in the setting except maybe the Mujina, and fuck the Mujina.


I'm even amenable to Asian facial hair, because then I get to use all the Splinter fanart I want in a game. Need a female nezumi? Rule 63.

Now, the Nezumi and the Naga wax and wane in the game. That's sort of to be expected; L5R has a weirdly baroque ongoing plotline with multiple editions and so you've got entire sides that have been retired from tournament/convention play. So for some storylines the Naga/Nezumi/etc. will be in the ascendant and practically able to field their own deck, at other times they're all comatose/hibernating. Neither of these mini-sections really does the Naga or Nezumi justice, but maybe they were afraid they wouldn't get another chance.

Vaguely related are the Ningyo, which are a mermaid-like race that live under the sea off the coast. They're taken pretty straight from Japanese folklore, except with some extra dealings with the Naga. Like the Naga, their artistic depiction tends to vary quite a bit.


Do you rishathra?

The Ninja Shapeshifter began life as one of those cards that seemed much better than it was and in long run broke the game in a lot of stupid ways. It was a card that was moderately expensive and had shitty stats but it got to copy a stat or ability off of another character each turn. In the original cardset it was generally speaking “not worth it” but it got played a fair amount because it was always guaranteed to be like the second best card in play, and that's not nothing. Anyway, obviously as more and more cards got printed there became more and more cards that had abilities that completely broke the game as soon as you could declare that you had an extra copy of that ability once per turn. Like, infinite loops and shit.



Now that the completely foreseeable portion of the story is concluded, here's where it gets stupid. Later in the storyline someone in charge of writing canon took a bunch of mescaline and watched a bunch of Ninja Scroll or something and decided to make Ninjas be a much bigger thing in the story. So they declared that Ninja was like a race, and that there were good ninjas and bad ninjas and a bunch of other shit that made no fucking sense. Anyway, there was a period in which a disgraced samurai became the secret ninja emperor of Japan Rokugan. Yes, really. Ninja fucking emperor.


That would have been better.

During all of this they decided to make Ninja Shapeshifters into avatars of the Lying Darkness, which was the big bad of the storyline for a while. Apparently, they got sick of people breaking the game with ninja shapeshifters because they kept writing cards without thinking of the fact that ninja fucking shapeshifters (and to a lesser extent: the Egg of Panku) existed, and decided to make ninja shapeshifters the big enemy for the whole setting. It was an entire foray essentially into how stupid you could make the plotline, which everyone could probably guess was where they were going as soon as they announced that they were going to write ninja based stories. Americans writing ninja stories involves cartoon furries eating pizza if you are lucky.

Now the primary objection to this direction of the story is that “it is fucking stupid and you should be ashamed of yourself for even suggesting something like that.” But the real nitty gritty of it is that the original Ninja Shapeshifter obviously isn't extremely evil. You lose no honor for bringing them to your side and they personally have a personal honor of 1. They aren't vile monsters, just dudes who can turn into other dudes and wear pajamas in public. Yet in the “lying darkness” plotline, they are written up as chaotic evil dudes with zero honor who shoot black bolts of taint at people. It's... extremely puzzling. You can't tell much about the backstory of the ninja shapeshifter from the card, but you can be damn certain it isn't that.

The Lying Darkness was one of L5R's regrettable efforts to make a second Big Bad after Fu Leng, because the Dark Kami and his minions kept getting their asses kicked and political shenanigans are perennial but kind of stale since the Koban (think Freemasonic-esque secret society of merchants) ceased to be a thing. It was supposed to be this intangible force of darkness from before creation blah di fucking blah; the main thing you need to know is that it made Scorpion clan ninjas who could disappear into shadows and shit, and because the game never throws anything away even after it was defeated those ninjas continued to exist. (You might ask, "Then why fucking mention it?" and it's because L5R fans love them some setting metaplot. Like, as much or more than Shadowrun fans. Probably more.)

The Obake are that dude from Ninja Scroll. The dude with the wasps in his back:


The Obake from Creatures of Rokugan.


Mushizo from Ninja Scroll.

The word “Obake” means “shapeshifter” and is apparently being used here because they needed a random Japanese monster name. Obake is a Japanese monster name, and it is random, so I'll call that a win. These guys aren't shapeshifters, they are the dude from Ninja Scroll with a hive of wasps in his back. His name is “Mushizo,” though I suspect they wanted to at least pretend that they weren't copying the character wholesale, although they obviously are. Really, this monster's main problem is that the rules for Swarms in 3rd edition D&D didn't come out until the Fiend Folio, which went to press two years after this book. So the rules in here are kind of clunky. Even clunkier than the Swarm rules from the Fiend Folio, if you can believe that.

Ogun was a magical Japanese demon-spirit which trained Kitty Pryde of the X-Men into a teenage mutant ninja, ostensibly to kill Wolverine but mostly because Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had a brief moment when their fetishes aligned.

This is Ogon no Oni in CoR. They're shapeshifting spirits of greed. I'm kinda guessing it was based on the Ogon Shrine, but you never know with L5R. Somehwere deep in the Shadowlands, we are informed is the Great Ogon - the first of the Ogon no Oni, with a treasure satchel the size of a castle which gives it tremendous power.

...I just wanted to point out that the Marvel Ogun is actually more interesting.

The Oni Lords have a couple of pages of ranting about them. This doesn't make sense on several levels. We will start with the fact that many of these Oni actually have writeups elsewhere in the book, so why the fuck do they have paragraphs of info dump here? AncientHistory already did a rant about the First Oni, but the book isn't done ranting about that subject. But really the thing that gets me is that all the basic oni from the first card set are apparently the grand Oni Lords. This is stupid fanboyism at its stupidest. Remember how Star Wars fans whined until canon announced that every single fucking thing in A New Hope was the bestest thing of its type in the whole galaxy for no fucking reason? Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that.

For fuck's sake, the original Oni no Shikibu has a fucking Force of Two. Oni no Tsuburu is the same. These are useful cards, and the onis involved are obviously very evil, but it's really hard to take them seriously as the grand champions of, well, anything. But just like the Millennium Falcon gradually got promoted from “a barely functional smuggling ship the heroes happen to not be able to get anything better than” to “the bestest ship that was ever bestest in the whole galaxy and everyone wants it because it's so awesome!” stupid fanboys managed to squee all over the onis from the first set and now we're supposed to take them seriously as the legion of fucking doom.

Okuri no Oni is what happens when fanfiction becomes canon. No, seriously. It's an Oni - a spirit of fucking evil - that was redeemed and decided to follow the path of bushido. For this, she was destroyed, but like all good Mary Sues death was not the end, and she got a sweet gig protecting the heavens, sending out her spawn to...uh...be honorable oni that players can have a misunderstanding battle with.


The puppy is L'cutest of Beagle.

The Orochi:


Orochi is a legendary Japanese Dragon with eight heads and eight tails. It's totally bad ass. Anyway, in L5R there was a card for the Orochi, which was a sea serpent that only had one head and was actually not that
cool. It cost too much and the big draw was that you could destroy your opponent's ports. But it was expensive enough that in most cases you should be trying to destroy whole provinces and your opponent probably didn't care all that much about individual ports. There were ways to Orochi lock a Crane player, but really it was kind of a waste of time. This book informs us that they are CR 15 sea serpents, which seems a bit high for their game stats. And I mean that both from the card (which is Force 5 and deploys like cavalry), and the D&D stat line (which has an AC of 29 and a +26 attack bonus and will probably be roflstomped by 15th level characters).

Legend of the Five Rings is very big into the Five Elements thing, and part of that is that each element had an Oracle - the Oracle of Fire, Oracle of Earth, etc. Their basic job was to be bad-ass and spout cryptic shit while communing with their element or whatever. Later on they would fuck all that up by introducing the Dark Oracles, because that worked out so fucking well for the Power Rangers, but in the meantime we get the Oracle of Blood.

Eh, close enough.

Because it made no sense whatsoever in the convoluted cosmology/metaphysics of L5R, this was retconned into not being an actual Oracle Oracle, but a piece of blood magic created by Iuchiban, who was sort of like Sauron to Fu Leng's Morgoth.

Plague Zombies were an important card because there was a whole deck you could make that involved moving tokens around and spreading plague and you damn well needed some plague carrying zombies to carry the plague over to your opponents. The whole plague deck really didn't function without those assholes. But is there any reason to make a monster entry for them? They aren't really different from regular zombies except for the fact that they also carry disease. This really goes to the heart of how table top RPGs are much more versatile than children's card games. The card game needs a separate card for zombies that do or do not carry the plague. But the table top RPG does not. It's a total waste of space, because you have a DM who can fucking put plague onto zombies dynamically.

There's an entry for "podlings," which are supposed to be "larval form of certain more powerful oni." I'm not sure how that works, because oni don't breed as such and we had minor oni already earlier in the book, but I guess if you need some CR 1 chaff that your default masterwork katana can't slice through because they have damage resistance 5/+1 (jade), they're here to ruin your day.

The Mujina are in L5R canon, little dickish trickster spirits. They originally appeared in the card game as being basically just like the Ratlings except the cards cost you honor to play and the Mujina were cavalry while the Ratlings were infantry. And the Crab Clan iron mines are shown in the card art being worked by Mujina, which was ironic because usually Mujina get fielded by Unicorn players. Where the Ratling cards were called “Ratling Pack” for the cheap version and “Ratling Bushi” for the more expensive version that buffed all your Ratling Packs, for the Mujina you just got “Lesser” and “Greater” varieties.



In actual Japanese myth, the “Mujina” are badger spirit-people, which has essentially “fuck all” to do with how they roll in L5R so we'll leave it at that.

For reasons that don't make any sense to me at the moment, at some point the L5R people decided that they were going to rename the Greater Mujina into “Porthungluin.” This is fascinating because Japanese famously does not actually distinguish liquids (the type of phonetic object that an “L” or “R” is in English), meaning that “Porthungluin” is just about the least Japanese sounding name you could possibly have come up with.

Anyway, they have wings, which I don't remember seeing on Mujina in L5R. Also they are incorporeal and playable as characters, making them one of the most broken things to ever be broken. I don't know if anyone ever successfully got their DM to let them play a Porthungluin, but I'm reasonably positive that if they did that the DM learned to regret that error almost immediately.

Mujina were supposed to have their own empire in the days before humans, and were tied to the element of Earth yadda yadda. In reality, they're enslaved in some mines to prove the Rokugani are just as much racist dicks as the next Asian stereotypes.

You can't tell me they couldn't go watch a couple anime and come back with a more interesting critter. I'd settle on the crying milk bear from Akira. That was terrifying.


I know I'm supposed to be a brave samurai, but this? Nope, fuck it. Call in the shugenja. Hell, call in the Crab engineers. I'll take the honor hit and pay the ninja. Just kill it with fire.

Ancient History still has his Hare Clan deck. The Hare clan were a minor clan and didn't get a lot of cards, so he didn't win any games, but he maxed out the clan/family cards and had fun pissing off Scorpion Clan players.

I'd definitely have made Orochi as one of those "boss fight for a level 20 party" monsters, Colossal size, proper stats and immunities and resistances and "always comes back to life unless you kill each head with its own specific weakness, then disintegrate the main body and encase the dust in a jade casket in a Consecrated area" stuff.

Along with minions, with a "1st level only" heritage feat, and Orochi would have the ability to put them in a no-save Frenzy. Because King of Fighters.

Incidentally, in the card game or RPG(s), do Scorpion Clan have Ninjas that have any of the iconic abilities of Mortal Kombat's Scorpion?

Some of them use rope. Relatively few of them have come back from the dead, for vengeance or otherwise.

Although fire-breathing skull heads would be awesome, if a little too specific perhaps, I'm happy with just the "GET OVER HERE!" ability.

Koumei wrote:I'd definitely have made Orochi as one of those "boss fight for a level 20 party" monsters, Colossal size, proper stats and immunities and resistances and "always comes back to life unless you kill each head with its own specific weakness, then disintegrate the main body and encase the dust in a jade casket in a Consecrated area" stuff.

Along with minions, with a "1st level only" heritage feat, and Orochi would have the ability to put them in a no-save Frenzy. Because King of Fighters.

Incidentally, in the card game or RPG(s), do Scorpion Clan have Ninjas that have any of the iconic abilities of Mortal Kombat's Scorpion?

You don't even need that feat because Blood of Midnight is totally a maho spell that drives anyone into a screaming blood frenzy. Cast it on honorable samurai, lol heartily.

Also, if you consider Mortal Kombat's Scorpion's abilities to be breathing fire and GET OVER HERE... no. However, it's not impossible for someone to invent a kyuketsu-shoge (grappling claw) that shoots out the sleeve and creative use of kerosene in the mouth plus hidden lighters could replicate flame breath... cosmetically. Only the Dragon Tattooed Men have an actual fire breathing power (shugenja might have one, there might be a kiho for one), but only the tattoo works off the top of my head.

Scorpion ninja are divided into two main types (distractions and disguise masters) and neither of them had overt supernatural powers beyond shadowbrands/shadow magic; and even then, those got purged during the Lying Darkness storyline.

it had a storyline that advanced between expansions,

Maybe I'm a dinosaur grognard but seriously, I hated the concept of storyline prizes. It seemed like asspull after asspull to cover unlikely odds and broken mechanics in the card game that enforced stupid metaplot changes in the RPG.

Maybe I'm a dinosaur grognard but seriously, I hated the concept of storyline prizes. It seemed like asspull after asspull to cover unlikely odds and broken mechanics in the card game that enforced stupid metaplot changes in the RPG.

The problem with those is that basically you were playing Apocalypse World. The Dragon Clan win the Beiden Pass tournament and in the storyline they win a battle, lose their clan sword, the pass itself goes to the Unicorn clan, and a bunch of their personalities leave the clan to go join a bunch of weak ass heroic fighters in the wilderness following a Mary Sue who is destined for greatness in the story despite having a shitty deck that never wins. The Crab clan comes in second in the same tournament and their "reward" is that a bunch of their people die and a bunch more of their people get corrupted to evil and have experienced versions where they suck donkey balls.

In short, people could lose by winning, because what you actually won wasn't determined until after you did it and there were no guidelines at all. The storyline tournaments got some people really excited because you were participating in the story, but you weren't really. The story was going to reference some cherry picked events from the tournament, but only to justify whatever the fuck it was that they wanted to do anyway.

-Username17

So only slightly less pointless than the 40k tournaments where you "alter the story" and what that apparently means is "And Chaos win this particular battle for Planet Whogivesafuckius IX, and the planet remains at war for ever!"

Is it actually possible for a company that runs tournament things to actually show some spine and go with whatever crazy results happen?