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Reviews
Reviews of L5R RPG releases.Legend of the Five Rings
RPG (6/27/97)
Reviewed by Kenneth Hite, Roleplaying Columnist, MANIA! (www.mania.com/mania)
Meanwhile, Back In Rokugan
Five Rings' incestuous twin, Alderac Entertainment Group, has
released the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, only slightly delayed from
its original timetable of April 1997. The $30 hardback is on game store
shelves as we speak, and has the usual nifty art (by card artist Brian
Snoddy), wide margins, scene-setting fiction, and indifferent editing
that mark a product as "cutting edge" nowadays. However, it shows every
sign of being a well-designed game system with a d10 feat-resolution
system somewhat akin to Shadowrun or Ars Magica with a few pokes and
tucks to mitigate the gross mathematical inadequacies. Basically, you
roll a given number of dice, and keep the highest few, rerolling and
adding on 10s. In other words, pretty clean, pretty grainy; better for
"storytelling" than tactics or strategy.
There's also plenty of background detail on Rokugan, the "I can't
believe it's not Nihon" faux-Japan where the various L5R games are set.
The RPG has five sections (one for each Ring, get it?): Earth (history
and culture, with two pages of rules at the end), Water (character
generation), Fire (the actual game rules), Air (magic), and Void (the GM
background section, with NPCs, maps, hints, and the gem of an
introductory adventure). The RPG is set before the Clan War where the
CCG is set, so there's still a Scorpion Clan, for instance. This means
that it should be popular with the CCG players who just want more
information on their game's setting than you can get in the bottom of a
2x3 playing card. If it's supported well (AEG mentions seven upcoming
supplements in the core rules) it will certainly have a chance to
flourish in the coming miniboom of samurai 'n' shuriken RPGs like Gold
Rush Games' Sengoku and others (see my May 30 "Out of the Box" column
for more gory details). |
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