Fred: Samurai normally have direct access to their lords and their underlings. That makes it a little bit harder to be totally, "I'm going to do what I want!" In the Ivory Kingdoms, because the chain of authority is longer, in terms of communication time, you have characters who are able to say, "No, you know what? I think this is the right way to do it. My boss isn't available. I'm going to decide, as the highest ranking person here, what goes and have that stick. And that's a big difference from traditional L5R because those clan lines are much tighter together.

Fred: No. Honor isn't fluid. It's how you how apply honor to a given set of facts that’s more fluid. You have to guess or estimate what your boss or lord would want you to do right now--but they’re not available.

That can create problems where you might get a good outcome for your clan, but not what your superior wanted, and you’re like, "How do I fix this while still maintaining the good outcome, without offending someone new?"

Steve: Without cutting myself three times and dying.

Fred: Without having to commit seppuku when it’s all said and done.

Fred: A lot. Actually, I did work on City of Lies a little bit. Players responded very well to City of Lies. We all knew this. It was a matter of author time because writing and coordinating it and doing the layout for another boxed set takes a long time. The right market time because a boxed set's not cheap. And having enough content to justify a boxed set. The capital of the colonies, as it were, there's enough there to justify a new boxed set entirely.

We didn't want something where we had to push to put in new content that was filler.

Fred: It's not that we're precluding it, but it's unlikely because what do people know about that place? The sake is the best. OK, so the entire boxed set is about how the sake is the best.

Fred: Actually, I was one of them. I'm big into economics and how that affects people, and those first few pages of Merchant's Guide--I'm a nerd--actually were interesting to me. Now, don't get me wrong, the Kolat stuff is pretty cool too, but doing a Merchant's Guide that legitimately is a merchant's guide to Rokugan? Yeah, that'd be pretty cool.

Steve: I can answer that one. The biggest reason is because it's one of the very few, if not the only one, that accurately depicts the lethality of samurai culture. People die all the time because for them, honor is more important than life. As opposed to most roleplaying games where they understand you’re going to value your character and want to keep your character, so they increase character survivability so that you don't lose your character all the time and have to start over, L5R is not like that. It is an accurate representation of the fact that in samurai culture, you will die if you do not do things exactly right. And if you do things exactly right, your hope for death is a good death.

Fred: And that’s a cultural thing rather than a combat mechanic thing.

Steve: Right.

Fred: Right. That's one aspect. Another is, as a GM, you have seventeen or eighteen years of backstory, of setting, that you can draw on, but you don't have to. So if you’re not sure how you want to display or portray a character or clan, just go back to our fictions and you can have lots of examples of characters of that clan in that full range of, not only emotions, but, you know, there are certain guys in that clan who are jerks. You'll have that because there’s so much there.

I think we're one of the oldest running continuous games. That means there's a plethora of material from which you can draw. Even if it's as simple as "I want to resurface an old thread for my current campaign."

Steve: Another reason is because since it's tied to a card game--and, actually, a very popular card game--in the same setting, if you're looking for players, you're far more likely to find extra players for it than a lesser known setting because you can talk to the local card group and a few of them are going to be like, "Heck yeah, we'll play some L5R roleplaying with you." So it's much easier to find a group of people to play in an average game store if there are L5R players anywhere around.

Fred: I actually don't think it's necessarily pejorative. It's when someone describes a bad metaplot that you know, it's--Yeah, it's fair.

Fred: Sure. I'd be happy to answer any more questions, but I know you wanted to talk to Shawn. l'll snag Shawn for you.

Shawn: In the campaign that comes in the boxed set, they're ushered into obligation pretty quickly. At least in the draft that I read before it went into design, they were quickly given a battlefield promotion to help assist a magistrate with something that's going on, and then the magistrate promptly dies and they're left kind of holding the bag, and their investigation leads them to the Second City fairly quickly. They, of course, have no idea what they're doing, so it gives you a lot of opportunity to introduce them to it.

As for what's something that would suck them right in if you bring them to the Second City independently, I think that we tried to capture a very unique flavor for each of the districts inside the city. My personal favorite is in the Imperial District, we have the closest thing the Rokugani have ever had to an actual skyscraper. It's like the tallest building anyone has ever constructed. All the samurai are completely horrified by it.

The people who live there are used to it and think it's convenient because if you don't have money to purchase your own private estate, you can temporarily stay there as long as you give the host appropriate gifts and such. The pillow book that comes with it, Nancy [Sauer] did an amazing job with the point of view of a young Unicorn samurai-ko who comes in and is given an estate in the tower and she's absolutely terrified she's going to die at any given moment because there's no way the thing can stand up that long.

Every one of her journal entries for the first week of her presence in the Second City is, "Well, I'm not dead yet," you know? It was fantastic.

Samurai are so traditionalist and resistant to change, that if you place them in a situation where there are elements that they’re familiar with, but there’s also a lot they're not familiar with, how does that interfere with their obligations and their duty? I think it presents a lot of opportunity for role-playing, and I think people will be pleased with what they get out of the box.

Because it's vastly awesomer.

I think with 4th Edition, you can arguably say, mechanically, it's balanced, I hope. I'm sure there are speed bumps here and there, but it's extremely balanced. We've made it very easy to enter into it with as little as possible.

The production values for the game are absolutely the best you’re going to get for your money. You're going to have a gorgeous game you can actually use to entice other people to play it with you. Which is always my thing: I'll buy a new game and I can’t get anyone to play it with me. We've had tremendous success with people just showing off their core book and enticing other people to play it.

There are other, very good samurai RPGs out there, but I think that with 4th Edition we have really elevated our game to the point where we're certainly the best choice if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Thank you!