> It was, I am told, an artifact of the design team -- they wanted to
> dwell on the clans/famillies and not on religion. AEG's products are
> often very dry in these areas, shying away from topics that
> could give
> them trouble with fans/parents...
Yeah, true - although one could stretch the point and claim that all the Clans are mini-theocracies, in that they all venerate the laws and strictures handed down by their founding kami.
However, the shugenja are abysmal. No offence and all to anyone who had anything to do with it, I fully understand how they ended up where they did - magicians and priests are definately of the spell-slinging variety, and the rest of religion is more or less ignored. I find it both amusing an annoying to find in the middle of some tangentially related text a paragraph dealing with, say, how shugenja can purify those polluted by dead flesh. That, to me, is much more important to know than the game mechanical trappings of Jade Strike, or whatever. Reading spell lists always gives me AD&D flasbacks <shudder>.
I have been reading a bit of taoism to gain some insight, although of course the situation is complicated by the parallel existance of Shinseism (which appears to be a kind of Confucianism), kami-no-michi (IIRC - kami worship, the ancestral religion) and Taoism (as represented in the elemental breakdown - although of course LOT5R deliberately conflates Shinsei and the Tao).
On the other hand, my readings on China have on several occassions bumped across remarks to the effect that religious conflicts of the Jihad/Crusade variety are pretty rare in Chinese history. This is a complicated topic to address because the influences that could have lead to this are so many and varied, but I think an important factor was the nature of those religions themselves. Kami worship was rapidly relegated to a commoners religion after the concept of the celestial order was established. Confucianism is basically a bunch of lessons on citizenship and moral behaviour with little real call on supernatural elements; Taoism and its concentration on physical elements gets darn close to turning itself into the scientific method. None of these primary strands of thought lend themselves much to "kill the heretic"-type behaviour.
... in which case the role of actual gods may not map directly from HW to Rokugan. But the role of clan or family ancestors is roughly equivalent.
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