The Winter Gardens of the Kakita
Fan Fiction for the Legend of the Five Rings
Last week I wrote a bit about ways I understood honor to be an uncomfortable and unpleasant topic for members of the Asian diaspora to deal with, in games or other forms of popular media, as well as the dangers of orientalism in RPGs. Thank you to Terri Ann for referring me to other episodes of Asians Represent for some additional insights. Among the additional insights shared, the cast talk about how games often homogenize many different Asian cultures into one single culture, and also how honor mechanics can force players into stories they may not wish to tell. Both of these points are well deserved.
It is important to note that, even though I may not agree with a specific point shared, and I may not think that that point applies to L5R or at least to how I would run L5R at my table, that does not make the point invalid. Even if a critic gets some nuance of Japanese culture wrong doesn't make their criticism invalid. As critics, they are sharing their experience and their feelings, and the reasoning behind those. The feelings are valid...they don't need to be justified with an extensive education in Japanese history or encyclopedic knowledge of the game lore. There doesn't have to be a 'good reason' for the feelings. If they weren't shared, members outside that minority would never know them. I admit that it can hurt when something I care about gets harshly critiqued for reasons that I don't necessarily feel 100% apply. It is pretty human to feel defensive. But how an RPG is received is as or more important than the intent behind how the RPG is created, and it's good to know. I don't know if getting a sensitivity reader or only letting minority members of a culture write anything to do with that culture is a good solution, even if it is straight-forward. Not every project has the budget even to pay the primary creator. But we can all be more sensitive to the way works are created and received, and be as careful as we can. And part of being as careful as we can is listening to criticism, even if it's hard. I only hope those reading me are patient with me as I stumble my way through.
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In my posts about story axes, one of the ones I talked about was self verses community, and I explained that as being related to the stats for glory and honor in the Legend of the Five Rings RPG. Honor, and how it works in L5R, is a big deal for me, and related to a lot of things I want to talk about in this Blog, but before I do so, I better get the bad part out of the way.
Before I go on, I need to state clearly that I'm not the best person to talk about these sorts of topics. I will probably mess up, and certainly, I cannot have the same personal stake in the discussion and personal understanding as an Asian person would. However, this is my blog, and there aren't really many good discussions on this topic for L5R, and it's not fair to the Asian members of our community to endlessly have to explain things like this over and over again, so you, gentle reader, are stuck with me and my own poor offerings. If you wish to contest...I read comments gratefully and am happy to reassess. Anyway. If you watch the Asians Represents podcasts about L5R (here), the immediate response when the word 'Honor' was raised was a collective Ugh. Even though Honor has many interpretations even just in English, even though the group had not yet read anything about how Honor was interpreted in the L5R system. This response is very understandable. From my reading, Honor is problematic for many in the Asian community in two ways. The first is its association with Orientalism. Orientalism in this context is a form of racism that focuses on the exoticness of another culture, playing up the differences between that culture and European/North American culture to titillate or add excitement. Some consider it a way to praise the culture it is describing, but the net effect is to make members of that culture seem less human, alien, and unable to be understood and therefore subject to both gawking and fear...and treatment as other-than human. This othering is perpetuated in the media long after the original orientalist style is gone. This othering effect is compounded by a certain 'explorer' syndrome. Prior to the advent of cameras and modern anthropology, the understanding that was developed in the West of the cultures of faraway places was based on travel diaries and observations by those who had visited those cultures. Observations from these travel logs were publicized and shared and eventually committed as public knowledge. However, as stories written for publication and the excitement of the reader, experiences that were strange and alien to the writer were played up for excitement, and remembered the most by the readers, while mundane things that were the same were forgotten or not written about much. This emphasis caused something that may have been a very rare occurrence in the different culture to seem, to readers from the West, to be happening very frequently. This also increased Orientalism. These early perceptions are our descriptions of the past, and the history of Japan, lacking any other force to update them, has used these descriptions, and has lasted uncontested for hundreds of years. Honor, as a concept, or at least, terms that were translated into English as 'Honor', was often the emotional motivation for these actions that seemed remarkable to Western observers, and the term became a shortcut for what seemed like a completely alien way of thinking. The actual meaning of the term, as used in China and Japan, and the motivations behind such actions was lost in the simplicity of one word that can be interpreted in many ways. Honor is an incredibly difficult word to define even referring to what it is used for in English. Used to describe these "alien" actions, the term evolved, as such misunderstandings and exaggerations do, from concept, to catch-all, to caricature. It becomes a parody. And, for many in the Asian community now living in the West, a hurtful one. Honor has a second complication. The term really does have significance, and is linked to a variety of honor/shame family dynamics that are common in many Asian families. These family dynamics can have considerable psychological implications, some beneficial, some harmful. For those who have been harmed under such a family dynamic, honor, especially the caricature of honor, carries a different level of significance, and it can cause understandable pain to see it used trivially. All of this is a really long way, I suppose, of saying that it's completely understandable why some would have issues with using Honor in Legend of the Five Rings. But, using this concept of Honor can bring some really powerful storytelling to your game, and it can touch upon concepts deeper than you find in other games. Next week, I'll try to explain how I interpret Honor as used in L5R, and how it fits in with the culture of Rokugan. Again, I'm sorry I'm not the best person to talk about these topics, but I've tried to do my homework and want to share it so I have a chance of reducing harm in the way we play L5R. My kids are settling into a new RPG, and had their session zero today, where they got to select the Story Axes they wanted to play along, as I described in my previous article. I wanted to note the difference between a story axis and a story engine, since I will use both terms. A story axis, is an emotional line of tension within the story around which conflicts may unfold. They often mirror Real Life lines of tension, because such things have emotional resonance with us. A story engine is a mechanic or narrative element that creates new stories by just existing. For example, the Prosperity System is a mechanical system that spawns adventures as players must find ways of dealing with hazards and perils that have built up in their communities. The existence of a slowly rising Shadowlands threat, or the Elemental Imbalance, might be potentially considered narrative story engines, if they generate multiple adventures for the characters. They, in themselves, are not the emotional crux of play, but they make adventures around which the crux of play can be generated. In my next blog post, I will start a long effort to break down the most powerful, but also one of the most difficult, of L5R's story axes: Honor. 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. 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! It's been a while since I've updated these notes, but plenty of work has been occurring behind the scenes.
Recently, I've updated the section on The Empire of the Emerald Stars, with some game rules, history, and schools, etc, from Vincent Arnel's Empire of the Emerald Stars game, along with my fan fiction. More stories for Bearers of Jade and other 1st Edition fictions in the Academy Library. I don't like the Shadowlands stories...I find them pretty horrifying and edgy, but I am keeping them for historical purposes, although they are out of date and st Edition L5R is out of print. FFG is closing the forums on the FFG website, but there has been some valuable material there. Although my hope is that people migrate over to the CourtGames forums, but some I can save here, so I have here. There are also some notes from my own articles. More will be coming as usually. Some I might even mention here. :) Working on an NPC character abilities table, with Special Ability, Advantages, Disadvantages, and Weapons. My hope is to potentially evolve this to something to make it easier for you to make your own NPCs, but generating Rings and Skill set values to make Conflict Values for NPCs is really challenging. If you have a good rule of thumb for that, please let me know! It's not done yet, but I'm working on it. You can find that table here: NPCs Abilities Table
A little note about dealing with Shinobi from my podcast here: Dealing with Shinobi I'm trying to collect Court Games, but I haven't got it all together yet, so if you have suggestions, let me know. I forgot to mention! If you want to listen to my Podcast regarding Legend of the Five Rings 5th Edition, you can find it here at: Court Games On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2035IyUZAqYQQxmD233gMS On Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/court-games-rpg-legend-of-the-five-rings-news-and-discussion/id1455750389 On the Court Games website: https://courtgamespod.com/podcast/ I am also in an Actual Play Role-Playing Game podcast called... Fortune and Strife On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Is9EQwJ6838bIPz2a2Rct On Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fortune-and-strife/id1518313082 On the Court Games website: https://courtgamespod.com/podcast/ Both Podcasts are supported by the Court Games discord Patreon at The Patreon Website https://www.patreon.com/courtgames/ There you can find early episodes, bonus content, and Challenge/Focus/Strike adventures available for our Patreons. |
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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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