The Opening Act

As a disclaimer, with this Friday being New Years there will again be no post. Also, as I'm writing this on no sleep, this post may be short. I apologize.

Even without New Years I'd be excited for this Friday. See, on Friday I'm taking over the GMing seat again for one of our groups and we'll be kicking off the 4th generation of my L5R game. Perhaps a bit oddly, for the 4th generation of a 4th ed L5R game, I'm hoping to make a lot of call backs to first edition.

In short, I want the spiritual side of Rokugan to shine through more, and while it is still present in the newer editions it isn't as prevalent as it once was. I don't plan on drowning my players in the supernatural and supernatural events, but the spirits, kami, and fortunes will be around - as will gaki and various other supernatural creatures.

My players are all but fully ready, and each of them seems to have dug extra deep into their bag of tricks for a character that is special and awesome for this generation. Most of them are so far along, I doubt we'll need long at all on Friday for character creation. So what will we do with the rest of the time? Well, that's where my job as the GM comes in.

See, I'm running L5R different from how I normally do, and that means that I need to introduce them to the world. How do I do that? A simple adventure to get things started. One that will give them a chance to learn their character's mechanics (i.e. combat). More importantly though, the intro needs to establish the rules for the world and what the PCs can expect to face off.

Fortunately, we have a lot of L5R books in the house - including a full set of the old first ed books - and those are full of adventure ideas. I'm pillaging those, along with several other sources. Hopefully it'll work out well. If not? Well, we'll see what kind of Rokugan I do manage to introduce.

Have a Happy New Year's folks. I am pretty sure I will.