The Winter Gardens of the Kakita
Fan Fiction for the Legend of the Five Rings
In my previous blog post, I talked about how anti-LGBTQ discrimination was not a story axis built into Legend of the Five Rings, while Classism was a a story axis. And I defined a story axis for an RPG as ' a line along which story conflicts are intended by a game system to take place. ' I think it is important for players to know what story axes a game they are getting into is going to cover, so I thought I'd list out common story axes for L5R, and common optional ones, with maybe a few notes. Built-In These story axes are baked into L5R and its mechanics. A GM can choose to avoid them, but they have significant system support.
Supported These story axes have mechanics in L5R should they be used, but they are easily avoided if this is not a story axis chosen by the party. Usually these mechanics come in the form of advantages or disadvantages that are chosen by a character at character creation. If one of these advantages or disadvantages is chosen, the GM and the players should definitely discuss if they truly want this story axis to be used and how they want to tackle it. A GM should not assume that if a certain advantage or disadvantages was selected, that requires a supported story axis to be part of the game. A player may select a certain advantage or disadvantage for other reasons.
Not Supported
There are other story axes or conflicts around which story can be generated. They do not need to have game backing. However, none of these are required just because a game is set in a Japan-like world. NONE of the conflicts of historic or modern Japan need to be included in your game just because they were sources of injustice or social tension historically. The phrase "Rokugan is not Japan" is often used as an excuse by players who want to make Rokugan more extreme, more dark, more "other" than historical Japan. This is misuse, because it's not respectful to the society that inspired it or people from those cultures. Depictions that exaggerate or emphasize the negative features of a group, a society, or an individual become caricature. Even if that caricature has some basis in the complexity of real life. But a depiction can portray a fair representation without highlighting every wrinkle, and a depiction of a game society does not need to drill in and make negative aspects of a fictional society a story axis, or even a story trace, in order to make a fantasy world. A D&D campaign does not require witch burnings. A D&D campaign focused on witch burnings starts to shift over into caricature. And it is caricature that must be avoided. At least that is my thoughts.
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Last Entry this Week...The Good Stuff
So, one of the things that inspired me to start this blog was yet another round of recurring conflicts in discussion groups around same sex marriage in Rokugan. The basic argument goes like this: FFG has explicitly stated in its books that there is same sex marriage in Rokguan. However, there are those who feel that having same sex marriage in a fantasy 'Japan-like' setting stretches their suspension of disbelief too greatly and do not like this. When they state that, this tends to hurt LGBT members of the community who find fantasy Rokugan and its embrace of same sex marriage a welcome respite from the difficulties faced with marriage inequality and other forms of discrimination in the real world, and indeed find some of these comments homophobic. And so the battles go on. I want to break this argument apart in a couple of ways, specifically addressing those struggling to see how same sex marriage can work in a fantasy 'Japan-like' setting. First of all, from a historical perspective, there was significantly less of a problem with same sex relationships in historical Japan than in Western culture. These relationships were routine, and there was no prohibition against them until the late 1800's. More importantly, however, Rokugan is not Japan. Instead, it is inspired by many elements of Japan, but we get to choose which elements we pull in. If we fully embrace what was in Japan during the Sengoku period or earlier for our Rokugan in terms of relationships, then we are forced to accept rampant pedophilia and other atrocious behaviors in our fantasy world. I don't think any of us care to do that, so clearly, we can pick and choose what we embrace or do not embrace for our fantasy world. This leads to the idea of 'story axes'. A story axis is a line along which story conflicts are intended by a game system to take place. For example, Dungeons and Dragons has a story axis of celestial good vs celestial evil. The whole game system is configured to create and play out conflicts along this game axis, and uses things like alignments and aligned gods and clerics, as well as certain spells, etc., to play out that conflict. It is not, however, configured to play out games along a class axis, in general: there is no significant social class distinctions between PCs of different types or NPCs. There are different social classes in the worlds (knights, farmers, etc.), but the game system itself is not constructed to explore class divisions. L5R does not intentionally have a gender-based or LGBT conflict story axis. Early editions are pretty clumsy about its handling of gender, but, unlike other versions of Japanese-style RPGs early on, there is no requirement that women must play non-combatants or play a subservient role to men, and there is no mechanic for gender inequality. It's not about those kinds of stories. However, it does have a social class story axis, with a status mechanic and everything. Differences in social class are intended to be a driver for stories, for good or for ill; they are a source of conflict with which the PCs must contend, just like Celestial Good and Evil in D&D. It is possible for a GM for L5R to reduce or remove this story axis by removing the burkumin as a separate caste and adding more social mobility, or just never play a plot where this is relevant. It is also possible for a GM to /add/ a gender conflict story axis, by, say, making an individual daimyo who has prejudice against the role of women in his family that plays out as conflict, but those are intentionally added by a GM. The question, then is, if you are a GM, why would you end up adding a homophobia story axis where one is clearly not present in the RPG, and if you do, certainly why would you feel compelled to insist on its presence to other players. For the well-intentioned, I think it comes down to not quite figuring out how marriage is supposed to work in Rokugan. In feudal societies, the production of heirs is considered very important. That bastards not 'infiltrate' the family line is paramount, and arranged marriages are common, if not much more common than romantic marriages. These conflicts are very prevalent in feudal literature and a source of many stories. In L5R, there are mechanics about happy and unhappy marriages, and clans and families and heirs, things that supplement the Class Conflict story axis well. So the question is how do we resolve these conflicts with the idea of same sex marriage, where the production of heirs and whose primary motivator in our experience, is love. Why would a same sex marriage be arranged? Why would a marriage be unhappy? My way to resolve this is to think about it this way. Rokugan is a land where sex is not approached as exclusively as it is in the Western world traditionally. It is approached more casually. Ideally it is done with someone you love. However, it can be done with someone you like, or even someone you are somewhat indifferent to, and it would be considered fine and normal for all parties assuming that it is done with consent, respect, and mutual desire. It does not carry the same weight. Marriages in Rokugan are not exclusively, or even primarily, to produce heirs. They could be done to seal a negotiation, providing a hostage and a person whose job is to ensure that the promises are kept. These treaties may be created even before the one to be married is even born. They are also done to bring people into a community that provide a needed resource into that community. A community needing a stronger economic foundation, for example, might marry in a person who has skills in that area to serve the community. You can find a gamified version of this in the Prosperity System rules. Matchmakers in Rokugan have the job of finding people to fill these needed roles. They have access to supernatural abilities, prophecies, and preternatural insight in order to insure that the couple is compatible. They would be able to tell if a match is attracted to the same or the opposite sex, for example, and the general personality they would be attracted to. And, in general, it would be more beneficial to the harmony of society if such matches were not disruptive, but instead were, at the very least, tolerable to the parties involved. Given this, for most marriages arranged in Rokugan, matches, then, would be generally compatible. They do not presuppose love, but they would generally be something that both parties could live with. At that point, a sense of social obligation could encourage the partners to produce heirs if able to do so, either directly, or through adoption for same-sex marriages. This social obligation does not require social stigma for not producing children. It does not even require social stigma for not sleeping together at all. The greatest social stigma could just be a disappointed would-be grandmother. Not every arranged marriage would be happy, same sex or opposite sex. Maybe the marriage was arranged with strongly definite terms before the child was able to argue. Maybe the relationship between the two changed during the betrothal period. Maybe one party fell strongly in love with someone else. These unhappy relationships can be the source of all the bitter betrothals and story arcs you want, without the overall society requiring unhappy marriages and without same sex marriage being disallowed. What is true for this family and this lord applies only to this family. I'll end up talking about story axes more in later blog posts, but I hope that give some people having problems with how same sex marriage would work in Rokugan some ideas to see how it can apply and still give them story engines they desire. Quick Note: I'm going to play a little catchup and do multiple articles in one day, but my goal is to post in this blog once a week.
Who am I? I've always struggled with the idea of blogging because I never could figure out why anyone would bother to listen to what boils down to essentially my personal opinion on various issues. However, I've been involved with Legend of the Five Rings for many years now and people seem to want to know, so I best start this blog for real with an explanation of who I am and how I relate to the community. My name in real life is Jeanne Kalvar. Professionally, I'm a computer software designer and business systems analyst, though my background is in Geology, with an MS in Geology and twin BAs in Geology and English. I'm a mother of three teenagers. My husband, Shannon, is a Business Consultant, but he spent many years a Role Playing Game designer working for Mongoose and Fantasy Flight games. I first encountered Legend of the Five Rings in graduate school in 1995/1996, introduced by Brent Keith (Shosho, the Mujina Wrangler) who would go on to become Lead Designer for the CCG for a number of years. I was adjacent to them until 1998, when I started a long term RPG, and then got involved with the community, writing a fan fiction, Makoto, that ended up creating quite a stir in the L5R community. At a tournament in Toronto, the lead story writer, Ree Soesbee, granted me the title of Kenshinzen for winning the Honor award at a tournament, and I've been involved with L5R ever since, arranging community events, writing fan fictions, and basically trying to help out. I took along break from about 2006 to 2012, but came back at the end of the CCG era to watch as it was ushered over to FFG, and been with the game since then. I hope to see it move forward into whatever comes next. Recent Revisions: I have updated the Opportunity tables for Celestial Realms and Fields of Victory, so they should be up to date for the FFG RPG.
A New Beginning A variety of controversial subjects, and subjects weighting heavily towards opinion, rather than raw facts, have come up in various forums for Legend of the Five Rings. My thoughts on these subjects are longer and more in depth than something that really fits into a Discord discussion or Facebook post. So I am going to start blogging here and sharing longer form thoughts on topics that come up. These will be pretty random. All of this will be pretty random and variable. I hope you find enjoyment, or at least some insight, on these topics. Thanks for reading! |
Author
Kakita Kaori, also known as Jeanne Kalvar, has played the Legend of the Five Rings Role-playing game since 1st Edition. If you want to read her thoughts on things other than gaming, you can find them here:
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