Legend of the Five Rings [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The 3rd edition of the book is wonderful. It's high quality both in the hard cover it has and in the page quality. AEG did a great job there. Also, you won't see such wonderful art in many other RPG books. The art, in many areas, is magnificent and really aids providing you a look and feel for the game.

Now...to get out the minor negative stuff that resides in the 3rd ed. before I rave amount the many very good aspects of the game: the book seems rushed out, in terms of content. A good GM will need to read most of the book to know the rules of the game. The problem is that the book suffers from some organizational issues. Certain key rules are buried in what one might consider more minor/detail oriented sections rather than in an all-inclusive general rules section. There are numerous typography and grammatical/spelling errors (all very minor though and nothing that actually deters one from understanding how something should actually read). My group of gamers as also found some ways to break the game, at least while all the characters are all minor level (the "breaking" is lessened as characters level up) or inflate Insight (insight is used to determine ranks). To that end, we've adjusted some rules to make more logical sense for such skills as Lore, etc., which was ridiculously broken up into multiple skills. We've also banned or lessened certain school skill effects, etc that made a rare few early level characters powerful well beyond their rank/skill level. Also, the book failed to list rules for one or two skills, like expolsives (which will be corrected/added in the Lotus edition, or so rumor has it).

However, any decent GM (gamemaster) can help to easily smooth over any holes (and reading the book is actually very fun, even for a non-GM, non-hardcore\casual RPG'er like me.)

If you're looking for a unique and orginal game, you'll be hard pressed to find a more complete and awesome game with a very well done universe. The setting and rules are very Asian/Eastern in origin and feel. The history is amazing, the community seems awesome, you have the benefits and unique gameplay a D10 system provides over D&D's D20, and the actions a character must take to do well are very different from most RPG games with western influence. Plus, the shear amount of inspiration the book can provide to any gamer is wonderful.

Despite the few holes in gameplay and rules, this sucker get's five stars. All the great aspects of Legend of the Five Rings 3rd ed. truly help to negate the few errors and make it by far one of the best RPG's I've played, well over Star Wars or Dungeon and Dargons.

PS. A note to buyers, to my understanding the Lotus edition is only an expansion, not an all inclusive book for the rules and hisotry (ie. AEG is not fixing an spelling or organizational errors in the 3rd ed. book by releasing Lotus as a new, all inclusiver rule book). Double check me on that though, as I may be wrong.

I think the best critique I can give is to say that this is the first game product I've purchased since I last saw my AEG buddies... GenCon of 2002. Probably 1/3 of the folks named on the front page of the book are known to me personally, though I dropped out of "the gaming scene" about 3 years ago. (OK, I'm a game junkie, and the itch finally came back.)

That being said, the book is beautiful. And I am THRILLED with the return to the original "roll & keep" system. (I hate d20 in all it's incarnations.) I have only 2 comments on the "con" side.

Like other reviewers, I have to say that this book suffers from an incredible lack of editing and proofing. Whole sections are missing, and I found places where proofing notes were made, and ADDED to the printed text. Additionally, you have to read the whole book... the book has 5 sections and 5 writers, and at times, it does read like they didn't talk to each other.

The other issue is the inclusion of "kata". At a glance, it's painfully unbalanced. I cringe at the thought of the actual play experience. I do not mean that kata are unbalancing, but rather, that they are not balanced amongst themselves. IE, no Crane player that wants to live should ever waste the points to purchase a Crane kata, and no Lion player should ever be without the kata available to the Lion.

Basic combat remains the same as it was in 1st edition, and the game adds a fair amount of complexity to character skills in this version. The most significant changes are in dueling and magic. The changes in dueling mean that the Kakita school is no longer the dueling juggernaut that they were previously, but this is probably a good thing. The only down side I see to it is that the Kakita bushi were not given a corresponding improvement in their skirmish combat, leaving the school diminished overall.

In the magic system, there's a notable shift. A lot of spells have changed, mostly to be reduced in power. This is off-set by the increase of 3 additional ranks in all shugenja schools. What this means is that shugenja are much weaker in the early levels than they were previously, but around 4th Rank, it balanaces out and shifts the other way. The only sad part is the loss of versatility, as most spells are now VERY restricted on the number of raises (a game mechanic for bettering your outcome) they may apply to a spell. Gone are the days of The Cresting Wave (one of the greatest feats of magic in the game world, which is now impossible to duplicate).

It is neither good nor bad, but there are a great deal of interesting choices for included information, vs. excluded information. In many cases, I hear that excluded info is scheduled for later releases; but quite often, the choices make me go "hmmm."

One of the things that I'm truly estatic about, however, is the information on Shadowlands Taint and Maho. These topics are vastly improved since 1st Edition, and are mostly laided out in an organized manner. And in the long-run, I think the history overviews will be a godsend. I've certainly gotten enough game ideas to torment my local players for years to come.

Playing and loving L5R for almost a year now, I did have some expectations from the 3rd edition. The new version of the game is a mixed package so the review will be 2 sections: the good and the bad (no ugly =).

good: the book is gorgeous!! The art is classy and well done. The production value for this book is very high and at about 30 bucks it should be. Moving on, the content is dense and every page is filled with some sort of more or less useful or colorfull information about Rokugan(setting, the Empire) and its inhabitants. One of the highs (later a low) of this book is just how much of jam-packed info this tome contains, since you technically do not need any other book to start the adventures. Also a good index is definetely a plus as well as all the extra info on Rokugani life which make the game seem very colorful and deep.

bad: Actually some of the goods of this edition are also its own spoils (at least for me.) For example the art is indeed very good, however it feels exaggerated by showing the L5R world in a D&D-esque "super-fantasy" style. What makes L5R so captivating and engrossing is its vivid sence of realism, its griddy and very human life. The earlier edition had superb art in that respect which although being black and white showed very human samurai, and many times even delivered a mild culture shock as it had a very distinct oriental feel. That was the 1992's 1st edition though, and the 3rd version seems to have taken the fantasy, exaggerated pose, comic book feel approach to its art. Same goes for the rules however. After a careful study the book shows signs of catering to the bored-powergamer community. That is to say that gone is the focus on roleplaying and welcome is the emphasis on all those nifty, different, annoying and basicly the same ways to achieve some extraordinary combat result or "super-succeeding" in another way, instead of getting into your character or the story. The combat is somewhat prolonged as a result with more little tricks and quirks you can do which in my opinion just bog down the action and put your mind into the paper instead of the action. Also just as the amount of text is a plus it is also a minus as the player or the GM must weed through all the text just to find what they need (the poor organization of the chapters do not help either.)

So should one buy this book? Well, hard to say. If you like fantasy flare to your oriental RPG's and enjoy a combat and character system with loads of extras and peripherals, colorful art and somewhat spacy design, then by all mean the 3rd ed. is for you! If you are focused on a more realistic and story engrossing oriental RPG, with a simple combat and magic system, which puts the flexibility into your lap intead of into longer rules, the try the 1st edition L5R, "Legend of the Five Rings, Roleplaying in the Emerald Empire" (1992.) Its only 3-6 bucks right here on Amazon!!

Either way, L5R is a great rpg no matter what though so 1st or 3rd should just be a matter of preference. Too bad d20 has got the market on lockdown, there are a lot of whilting great rpgs out there...