As the fall has approached, bringing with it the releases of Oriental Adventures and Rokugan, my mailbox has begun to fill up with questions about these products, the future of Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) as a role-playing game, and even the disposition of the intellectual property of "L5R." With Oriental Adventures now on game-store shelves, it’s about time to bring everybody up to date.

Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), in partnership with Isomedia, first designed and published the L5R collectible card game in 1995. Eventually, it became obvious that L5R would greatly benefit from the sort of promotion, marketing, and production that costs a lot of money. Some of the original AEG and Isomedia folks found interested investors and formed the Five Rings Publishing Group (FRPG), which purchased the intellectual property (IP) that is L5R.

FRPG took over production and marketing, while AEG continued to design the game. In 1997, AEG licensed the role-playing publication rights for L5R from FRPG, and published the first edition of the L5R RPG. The fans liked it enough to vote it the Best RPG of 1997 at the Origins Awards, and the core book went through four printings while spawning two dozen sourcebooks and add-on products.

Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast purchased FRPG and brought TSR into their corporate fold. All of the old deals stayed in place. AEG was still designing the L5R collectible card game, and still designing and publishing the RPG under the terms of the existing license.

Over the next couple of years, the revitalized TSR division of Wizards brought out the Third Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Under the leadership of Ryan Dancey – one of the original Isomedia owners, an FRPG partner, and at that point the person running TSR – Third Edition D&D was not only a major redesign, but also made its "d20" scaffolding available to all. Taking a page from the Open Source Software movement, Third Edition allowed anybody to publish games using the base Third Edition rules, a move which resulted in a flood of d20 RPG sourcebooks and games.

In December of 2000, Wizards – now itself a division of a larger company, Hasbro – announced that it was looking for someone to buy the L5R IP. Just at that time, AEG released its Second Edition of the L5R RPG. Even though Hasbro had gained ownership of the L5R IP when it bought Wizards, the existing RPG licensing agreement stayed in effect. Speculation abounded: what would happen to AEG’s RPG license should a third party end up with L5R? The answer was "Nothing until 2002, when the existing license runs out," but people still worried.

It turned out to be a moot point. In May 2001, AEG won the bidding war for L5R. Production immediately began on the Gold Edition basic set of the L5R CCG, and AEG’s L5R RPG continued to release books.

One of the conditions of the IP transaction was that Wizards would be allowed to finish producing the L5R products that it already had in the pipe. One of these was a series of L5R novels; another was the D&D Third Edition version of the immensely popular Oriental Adventures supplement. The original supplement had its own fantasy Asian world of Kara-Tur… but the Third Edition version was set largely in the L5R world of Rokugan. The manuscript was already done, or close to it, when the sale went through, and the book was targeted for an October 2001 release.

That’s most of the stuff that’s public record. Now for the part of the essay where you need to take my word on a few things.

AEG knew about Oriental Adventures (OA) and its conversion to the world of L5R during the IP negotiations. The question was, what to do about it? We decided to work with Wizards rather than against them, and brokered a deal. They would produce OA, and we would go on to put out the support books. This was largely a business decision – AEG being, after all, a business – and the reasoning went more or less as follows. Oriental Adventures isn’t going after the tens of thousands of L5R RPG players: it’s going after the millions of Third Edition D&D players. If we produce support material for those fans, we can increase the L5R RPG fanbase by a huge margin, even if only 1% of those D&D fans buy our books.

Accordingly, the 2001 schedule had a book scheduled to release in October or November, with the working title "L5R d20 System Companion." This is the book that eventually became Rokugan, which will be releasing in November. It will be followed by Creatures of Rokugan and Magic of Rokugan, a pair of d20-system books about Rokugan’s nonhuman denizens and its magic.

Since Wizards has a much longer production cycle than we do, we were able to get their OA manuscript back in May. This gave us a solid base of information when we were putting together Rokugan. After all, you can’t produce a good companion volume without seeing the original. The same writing team which has been working on the L5R RPG for the last year or so – Rich Wulf & Shawn Carman, and Seth Mason – took the OA manuscript and filled in the gaps. After all, we’ve produced a couple linear shelf-feet of L5R RPG material: it’s impossible to think that it could all squeeze down into one 256-page book, or even two of them.

As I write this, Rokugan is a day or so from going to press. It’s much longer than anything other single book we’ve published, at nearly 200,000 words. It’s 224 pages (a final page count, after interim projections at 128, 144, 192, and 208 pages) , full color throughout, hardbound, and gorgeous. The writing team is busily working on the Creatures and Magic books while this one moves through production. Readers of the Imperial Herald will see a sneak preview from it: the Ninja class. Other sneak peeks will be arriving on the alderac.com website over the next few weeks: one of them is quite likely to be the appendix that gives rules for converting characters back and forth between the L5R RPG system and the d20 system, so watch for it.

"Well and good," some longtime L5R RPG fans may be asking, "but where are Awakened and Winds & Fortunes, which you’d scheduled for late 2001?" They’re on hold. Rokugan became such a massive undertaking that it doubled in size, and we can only have the writers working on one project at a time. With Rokugan, we’re attempting to strike while the OA/d20 iron is hot, and having made that decision other projects get, unavoidably, temporarily shunted aside.

2002’s schedule, then, is of some interest to the fans. What L5R roleplaying products will Wizards produce? Where the heck are the Secrets of the Clans books that were supposed to be coming out in 2001? Will AEG ditch the classic L5R RPG system in favor of d20? Now that AEG has the L5R IP, will we ever see a Legend of the Burning Sands book? I have some answers, and some speculation. I hedge occasionally in the following answers – keep an eye on the L5RRPGINFO mailing list for updates.

Wizards L5R roleplaying products: They’re doing OA, and it’s likely to be in print for a good long time because the first one was massively popular. But they haven’t announced any other books in the line.

The Secrets books: Planned for 2002, although we haven’t yet announced in what order. Here’s the current (late 2001) theory. They are going to be like the Way of the Clans books; each clan gets one. They’ll bring the clans up to the Gold Edition era, which is where OA and Rokugan are set. There will be hybrid mechanics, so that both L5R RPG players and d20 Rokugan players can use them.

AEG ditching the "classic" L5R RPG system: Probably not. We’re going to see how people like the d20 books, and what their reaction is to the hybridized books. Honestly, though, if the d20 books or the hybridized books sell ten times as many copies as the all-classic books, don’t expect to see many all-classic books.

Burning Sands: This is a possibility. The IP contains LBS, since it was a spinoff of L5R – much in the same way that Three’s Company begat The Ropers. Still, we’re not being deluged with cards and letters demanding the book, and if we were to produce it, it wouldn’t be out before 2003. It probably would have to wait in line behind the Secrets series, and there are at least eight and probably nine books in that series.

I hope this has cleared up any lingering confusion about L5R roleplaying, Wizards of the Coast’s Oriental Adventures, and the upcoming books. If you have any further questions, tune into the L5RRPGINFO mailing list, where I’ve been known to post semi-regular updates when I surface from working on a book.