Rokugan Sourcebooks?

[Palanan]

Recently I picked up the Rokugan Campaign Setting, which I'd known virtually nothing about, and after browsing on Amazon it seems that AEG put out a whole line of 3.0 supplements, most of which seem fairly obscure.

I took a chance on Magic of Rokugan, and it's...intriguing, although I hadn't expected it to be so completely shugenjacentric. Now I'm interested in exploring some of the other books in the series--but most of them don't have reviews to amount to much, and I can't even find a complete list of titles.

So, can anyone tell me more about these books, and whether something like Fortunes and Winds would be worth looking at?

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[The Ravensong]

The "Secrets of the X" series has a lot of excellent fluff about the different clans and the shadowlands that detail the movers and shakers of the clans, giving you stats for them as well as their agendas. It also tells you about the different places in each of the clan's holdings.The books also have a sprinkling of extra feats and PRCs. If it wasn't in magic of rokugan, the Secrets series also introduces the dojo mechanic where you get different abilities for belonging to specific dojos such as +5 initiative for the first round of combat, +4 bonus on intimidate and -4 on other social interactions,
Way of the Samurai, Ninja, and Shugenja are other good books with even more PRCs as well as kata that you can pay feat tax and XP (once) to get additional combat benefits.
Also scattered throughout the books new tatoos for the tatooed monk

[dysprosium]

Fortunes and Winds adds to the Rokugan scene different spirit realms that you can visit and different spirit beings you can play. IIRC the spirit beings allow for some customization. I believe that there are also more monsters added and probably new spells.

(I haven't looked at my copy in a while so I'm going by memory here.)

[Skysaber]

So, can anyone tell me more about these books, and whether something like Fortunes and Winds would be worth looking at?

Although I hate to say it, if you've got Rokugan and Magic of Rokugan, you've got the meat of the game rules right there. Most of the rest of the books are 90% setting, 10% game rules - at MOST (which, if you are not planning to play the setting as the setting, is not very helpful).

Now there are some helpful nuggets spread through the rest. The dojo rules have been mentioned, as have katas. But it's very light and I'd be hesitant to spend the money on it (which hurts to say, because I've got most if not all and have loved combing through them. But would I do it again? Tough question, but probably not).

They needed to back down the setting-specific info to about 60% if they wanted to sell these to anyone not already deep into playing Five Rings. And if they couldn't reduce setting content, they needed to add pages so they could inflate the D20 rules sections to a usable amount. Because seriously, if they'd taken all D20 material from their "Secrets of..." books (one for every clan) and printed just that material in a single book, it would still feel a little light.

Fortunes and Winds in particular was one I felt disappointed about, as it had so little, if anything, available for a non-setting game. And I'm not talking setting as in "an oriental flavored game" but "the EXACT campaign world they describe in those books" setting. We ran a ninja campaign and got these books, and found them all but totally useless for us in a very oriental setup.

And the material is not easily ported, either. At least with the Forgotten Realms series they made sure to have material that could be easily ported to something similar, set elsewhere. Change some fluff text and you've got it.

Not so with the Oriental Adventures line. These sourcebooks read more like someone was trying to write a novel than a game accessory, and that, I am convinced, is why they failed.

[WhatBigTeeth]

Creatures of Rokugan isn't bad for a monster collection, and I think the way it fleshes out the shadowlands does more to flavor an OA campaign than all the other books' pages and pages of clan minutia.

[Frosty]

See, I love the Legends of the 5 rings setting, but if I'm going to play in the L5R setting, I might as well use the system *designed* for it, the L5R RPG system.

[Palanan]

Okay, thanks to everyone for the replies, and thanks especially to Skysaber for the detailed commentary. I had no idea there was so much Rokugan material out there...nor, apparently, how little of it is useful outside of Rokugan.

I'm still not completely clear on how Legend of Five Rings is related to Oriental Adventures from WotC, apart from sharing Rokugan as a setting--although I'm getting the sense that "not really" is the correct answer. I'm also not sure if any of the Rokugan supplements were officially 3.5, since they were (apparently) published between 2001 and 2004.

Just looking through Amazon, I've found about a dozen titles, half of them dealing with magic, creatures, etc. and the other half devoted to individual classes or archetypes:

Rokugan Campaign Setting

Complete Exotic Arms Guide
Creatures of Rokugan
Fortunes and Winds
Hidden Emperor
Magic of Rokugan

Way of the Daimyo
Way of the Ninja
Way of the Open Hand
Way of the Samurai
Way of the Shugenja
Way of the Thief

Are there any others I'm missing here? And, especially given Skysaber's comments, would any of the "Way" books be remotely useful in another setting?

[Vaz]

See, I love the Legends of the 5 rings setting, but if I'm going to play in the L5R setting, I might as well use the system *designed* for it, the L5R RPG system.

I couldn't get into the Roll and Keep system.

However, it is much more "balanced" than other games if you follow the setting rules. While that means less Batman Wizards, and Dragonfire Adepts and Warforged Clerics, etc, you get down to the nitty gritty humanity must prevail thought.

The Secrets of... books have some nice rules expansions in; I've played a Setting hopping campaign once, as a Gestalt; combining an Iaijutsu Master with a Crane Clan Courtier with Doji's Grace; essentially. HUGE damage.

[Skysaber]

Okay, thanks to everyone for the replies, and thanks especially to Skysaber for the detailed commentary.

You're welcome.

Now on to the list (I am opening each book to peruse and remind myself as I write this):

Rokugan Campaign Setting => a good to decent sourcebook no matter how one wishes to measure things. It's got some good feats, great spells, decent prestige classes (Mastermind specifically allows you to recruit followers who have the Leadership feat of their own, and their followers are then treated as your followers, while a Ratling Shaman can learn a person's True Name at a glance). But you will probably never have any reason whatsoever to turn to any page in the last half of the book. Still, the other stuff is good enough to make up for that.

Complete Exotic Arms Guide => this is wordy, bogged down by campaign specific details without any good reason for them. On the other hand, unlike most Rokugan books, this one is devoted to game details and manages to stick to that somewhat. Still, if you don't own it, you won't miss it. There are some useful game rules (like it specifically allows three shuriken to be thrown as one attack, each with different to-hit rolls. So if you've got five attacks, that's fifteen shuriken in the air in one round - devastating if you've got Sneak Attack).

Creatures of Rokugan => Nothing cuddly here. Best creatures you'll find therein are neutral. The rest are so disturbing you might want to unwind and relax by reading some Ravenloft material afterwards. On the other hand, it's pretty much solid game stats from cover to cover.

Fortunes and Winds => No, I didn't actually want to know all about death and afterlife in your campaign setting. Really.

Hidden Emperor => Basically a newsletter of "here is what's going on in our campaign world."

Magic of Rokugan => a truly excellent sourcebook, chock full of spells, has some interesting magic items, and the master smith prestige class is awesome once you think about it. Make +4 swords whose enhancement works even in antimagic fields? Why, yes! Thank you.

Way of the Daimyo => An attempt at setting up ground rules for how to run a city, a temple, a school, or a business. That's the good part. The bad part is the rules set up are so closely tied to station and honor that we never got them to work outside of the Five Rings setting.

Way of the Ninja => I'm torn. It's the usual 90% setting material layout, and yet some of that 10% game rules are so good it may even be worth it. A feat called "Untouchable, so long as you are not helpless, you are always considered to have total concealment vs ranged attacks" is easily the best of the lot, but this book has more gems than most of the "Way of..." lot. A spell called Darkness' Blessing that is basically a Wings of Cover comes to mind. But it is still an awful lot of garbage for those few gems.

Way of the Open Hand => martial arts styles for monks, costing between three and five feats each. And it would be high praise to call most of them 'marginal'. If you got them free out of DM fiat, they are so restrictive and situational that even should a circumstance where you might use one come up, I grant you better than even odds you'd have forgotten you had it by then. Now there are one or two amazing little gems hidden in there, a x4 crit multiplier on all unarmed attacks? As a single feat that would be awesome. It would even pass muster requiring two, as it also lets you crit that which cannot be critted (but only at x2, and only unarmed). But 5 feats is too much, and the other four are completely worthless.

Way of the Samurai => choked with prestige classes that, if the entire class were boiled down to a single feat instead of five levels, I'm not sure I'd take it. I'm not sure I could convince anyone to take it. Again it's like someone just got so excited by their setting they just decided to paint it with labels like 'prestige class', when... it's a GUARD! He stands still. He guards things!!

Way of the Shugenja => more than you ever wanted to know about the social significance of being a shugenja in each of the clans, their dress and mannerisms, as well as responsibilities of their station. Seriously, this is a hundred page book on spellcasters, and there may be ten spells in the whole book - and if your DM gave you a scroll for each of them, and promised to award you 100xp for each and every one you could find a good reason to cast instead of one of the good spells you've probably loaded by habit, you may never get one of those awards.

Way of the Thief => Waaay too setting specific. Oh, thank you so much for telling me all I'd never needed to know about the black lotus clan. Why couldn't you have set up rules for racketeering instead?

And you've forgotten one. Bloodspeakers, their villain sourcebook, actually has 15 pages of new spells (placing it ahead of Way of the Shugenja by at least ten of those pages).

Hope that is useful.

[Palanan]

Hoo hah! Thanks for the extensively annotated bibliography there. Extremely helpful and informative, plus downright hilarious in spots. :smallbiggrin:

It really sounds like I lucked out on my first choice of Rokugan books. It also sounds like they reeeeeeeeeaaaallly loved their setting. It's a little odd, since they went out of their way to make these books dual-system, that they didn't include material that's more broadly useful.

That said, Creatures of Rokugan sounds like the one other necessary item for "Rokugan core," if we can call it that. And Bloodspeakers might be a useful supplement for villain support. Disturbing creatures + creepy-villain vibe sounds like good times to me.

:smalltongue:

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