After The Topaz Championship

We just got done playing through the Starter Box set for Legend of the Five Rings. I love the idea of Starter Boxes; the Numenera box really helped sell that game for me. The Star Trek starter box helped make a game I found unwieldy temporarily manageable and the Pathfinder box was a good high-end iteration of the idea.

This Starter Box for L5R did a great job of presenting an entertaining story, showcasing the art and introducing the rules at a measured pace. I think for the first time with a starter box, players decided to keep the pregenerated characters, which suggests that the pregens were engaging, with the correct amount of flavour. Unlike other starter sets the smaller version of the rulebook is actually pretty generous. You could run quite a bit just with the stuff in the box.

The quality of the art – including an amazing map and character pogs, which are really pretty extra – really helps sell the setting and characters. But the story, full of encounters that are more brief sketches than fully explored scenes, keeps the story on the rails that it needs and keeps it moving. Even the story on rails feels full of player agency because players have so many choices to make when they roll the dice: players are told to test a Skill, but must pair that skill with an elemental approach of their choice and then the roll-and-keep mechanic and opportunity spends let them make even more choices. In essence: the player is told that they walk into a room and are told to make a skill check, yet they have three levels of choice to make, all of which can help embellish or direct the story.

So, The Topaz Championship has now been completed, with Hida Sugi coming out on top and Togashi Yoshi taking the second prize. They successfully did the bidding of a ghost and no fewer that three of their fellow contestants came close to death during the competition, but they all made it to the end of the gempukku ceremony and received their blades of office.

Due to their good performance, Yoshi, Sugi, Akodo Masako and Shinjo Takuya were offered prestigious yoriki posts under the tutelage of Ruby Champion Agasha Sumiko, arguably within the Emerald Empire’s top ten important people as she is standing in for her old boss – Doji Satsume, the Grinning Crane, late of …corporeal existence. Yoshi chose to return to his life of contemplation at the High House of Light; while Masako returned to the Lion, her responsibilities there to accept. For Hida Sugi and Shinjo Takuya, however, this is a prestigious office that they’re not just going to let go.

Good news though, because Sumiko brought new friends: Doji Koji, a Crane Clan courtier trained by the Kitsuki, and two Matsu Bushi: Tezuka and Ono. These new chums will soon be heading off to the Palace of the Emerald Champion to see to their training before being set loose upon an unsuspecting world.

And so we have our group for the next adventure and the following sort-of campaign that I think I can make out of the published material. The Palace of the Emerald Champion is still part of the beginner box – one of the excellent downloadable extras for all their published modules – and so continues to introduce the rules at a measured, but less restrictive pace. I hope I can keep up. This isn’t a super crunchy system by any means, but there are a lot of parts to get to work with each other.

There are things happening in the rest of Rokugan; BIG things that really start kicking off with the death of Doji Satsume. The rest of the year (1123) will see various clans at each other’s throats in a couple of different configurations, some scandals and some pivotal decisions to be made and the players will be at the center of at least one three major decisions. Will they make those decisions for their clan, their conscience, or for the good of the Empire? Will they even survive that long? The answer may surprise you!

Best I can figure out here are the pronunciations of the character names:

• DOH-jee KOH-jee (thanks for making that easy, Matt)
• MAH-tsu te-ZOO-ka
• MAH-tsu OH-no
• HEE-dah SOO-jee
• SHIN-joh TAH-koo-ya

Next week – to the Palace of the Emerald Champion!