How the HW books could be done

From: danny bourne <d.bourne_at_dial.pipex.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 20:04:19 +0100

I picked up one of the L5R RPG clan books a couple of days ago. The way it's presented gives a good template for the way the Orlanthi, Lunar, Pamaltela et all books could be done. For those of you who've not looked at one the Unicorn clan book is as follows.

1. Starts off with a short story.
2. Letters written by people outside the clan about what the Unicorn clan are like.
3. Past/Present history (could be subsumed into mythology/since time began)
4. Unicorn unique skills & templates to add to the core character generation system and sample NPCs for each family within the clan.
5. Potted histories & stats of the major clan characters.
6. Piece on stragety/tactics (dubious, I'd say).
7. Clan treasures - unique & nifty magic stuff.
8. Odds & sods.

This would, I feel, be quite a good way of going about things. In the mythology history section you put mythology/since time AS THE (insert culture here) SEE IT. This way you have a monomyth only for each culture and the astute could notice the same events being told differently in the culture sections of different books. There'd be a half dozen pages of the important dudes already detailed and sample typical NPC's. You can then put in the culture specific rules tweaks/basic abilities depending on their keywords etc and finally fun magic/nifty stuff that each culture's got. (Wouldn't worry too much about strategy/tactics, although a political thing along the lines of WHAT WE THINK ABOUT THE (insert culture here).

That way it's simple, complete, will cost about a tenner (16 or so US), you can buy the ones you want for the cultures your interested in & skip the ones you're not (Malkionism, just say now), and if you make all the bindings nifty, they'll look good on a shelf, too.

---