First comment. Practically every monster, class, or race indicates it is either not present in Rokugon or unique to Rokugon. It makes me wonder why they bothered packing L5R into the Oriental Adventures book. Particularly irksome is the "everything you know is wrong" chapter that explains about the Shadow and monsters.
Second comment. Forgotten Realms is not Charlemagne's Europe. It's not Middle Earth, and it's not Lankhmar. So once they decided to publish the L5R setting as the house OA setting, why didn't they just call it Oriental Adventures? And what happened to the original OA setting?
Third comment. A samurai is just a fighter who can power up his katana and does not get Weapon Specialization. I'd rather have Weapon Specialization, since it's likely you can get a decent somewhere down the road anyway. Also, not all samurai are primarily swordsmen. Some are archers. Of the few female fighting samurai, many were reputed to use the naginata, a weapon wielded by house guards. The samurai seems remarkably pointless to me. Why didn't they create a Wielder of the Ancestral Sword PrC or something?
Fourth comment. Besides the two of everything else, OA gives you two new sets of spellcasters (L5R casters and the original OA casters), plus leaves Sorcerers in place. That's a lot of damn spell lists. It's pretty unwieldy.
So you've got this book here, that includes part of one un-D&D-like setting, some miscelaneous other setting material (without notes about the country or mythology that inspired it), and little in the way of advice for integrating it into a standard D&D campaign. The L5R setting is basically not compatible, give up, start on your homebrew no. The other stuff leaves unanswered problems, like why there are Celestial Dragons in one region and no ordinary dragons, and vice versa. It also leaves Gold Dragons stranded, since they effectively are Oriental dragons. You're left sorting through Unicorn Clan Feat trees and Eunach Warlocks trying to figure out what goes with what.
What happened, here? Has anyone had particularly good or bad experiences with this product?
I pretty much agree. I wanted a 3e book for doing oriental fantasy in the same way the core books do European fantasy.
Instead it's some weird mishmash of Lo5R and DnD. It's not nearly generic enough for my needs, and I think a degree of genericity is one of 3e's strengths.
I found it marginally useful, but I tend to play D&D Mulligan Stew... I prefer settings like Planescape and Dragonstar, for their cosmopolitan nature and the feeling that anything could be out there... so I generally use Oriental Adventures as a sourcebook for other D&D games.
Not to mention, the Shaman is a more interesting and more useful core spellcasting class than the Cleric is, since the Cleric feels painfully generic (as well as being the best damned class in the game).
I like the Mulligan Stew approach from time to time. However, when I started paging through this, I was hoping for a more "this is where Monks and Ogre Mages come from" book. Nyambe, a completely self-contained African setting, is much better for integration into a standard D&D game.
I loved OA. I used it (together with Avalanche's 'Jade & Steel') for my homebrew Chinese D&D game. I found that I could use most of the classes in there. Obviously Samurai were out, but Yakuza became Triad/Tongs, Singh Ragers were changed from Lion warriors to Tigers etc. Plus I just adore Monks so the extra prestige classes were welcome.
Pawsplay, I understand your comments about Samurai and weapons - we had a Tetsubo weilding Samurai in a recent Rokugan game - but if a Samurai doesn't power up his Katana will that hamper him/her severely? I doesn't seem like a big problem to me.
Overall I think OA is the best 3e book I own.
Last edited by Raised by Chickens; 06-06-2003 at 05:23 AM..
Originally posted by pawsplay Something went terribly wrong there.
First comment. Practically every monster, class, or race indicates it is either not present in Rokugon or unique to Rokugon. It makes me wonder why they bothered packing L5R into the Oriental Adventures book. Particularly irksome is the "everything you know is wrong" chapter that explains about the Shadow and monsters.
Personally, speaking as someone who was wholly ignorant of L5R and Rokugan before OA was published, I don't really mind it at all. It impressed me so much, in fact, that I even bought AEG's Rokugan supplements (Rokugan, Monsters of Rokugan, Magic of Rokugan, etc) after OA had whetted my appetite. So, from a wholly commercial point of view, I'd have to say that AEG and WotC made the right decision here.
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Second comment. Forgotten Realms is not Charlemagne's Europe. It's not Middle Earth, and it's not Lankhmar. So once they decided to publish the L5R setting as the house OA setting, why didn't they just call it Oriental Adventures? And what happened to the original OA setting?
Kara-Tur is still located in the Forgotten Realms. There's mention of it in the latest FR book, Unapproachable East (which deals with the eastern part of _Faerun_, namely Thay, Aglarond, Rashemen and surrounds, not Kara-Tur as such). There's nothing stopping you from using the classes in OA to populate Kara-Tur.
As for the L5R IP, I think that's a licensing issue between WotC and AEG.
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Third comment. A samurai is just a fighter who can power up his katana and does not get Weapon Specialization. I'd rather have Weapon Specialization, since it's likely you can get a decent somewhere down the road anyway. Also, not all samurai are primarily swordsmen. Some are archers. Of the few female fighting samurai, many were reputed to use the naginata, a weapon wielded by house guards. The samurai seems remarkably pointless to me. Why didn't they create a Wielder of the Ancestral Sword PrC or something?
From a purely mechanical point of view, the samurai has a good Will save, which is a tremendous benefit compared to a regular fighter. Hold and dominate spells are the bane of your typical fighting types.
From a representational point of view, and one that isn't tied to the Oriental genre as such, the samurai class allows for the knight-in-shining-armour archetype that's prominent in the folklore of cultures all over the globe. The stock 3E paladin fills this niche as well, but it's gained a lot of quasi-religious baggage over the years. These days, a lot of people view the paladin more as a religious crusader/zealot type, which is something quite different.
From an in-game point of view, having an ancestral daisho doesn't preclude you using other types of weapons, whether it's the samurai-ko's naginata, or the Crab clan's die tsuchi and tetsubo. The class description mentions about this specifically, in fact.
Do you NEED a separate samurai/knight class to run a decent campaign? No, not really; just as you don't NEED prestige classes either. However, if your campaign tends to feature a lot of fighter characters, then it makes sense to provide means of distinguishing between these characters in terms of their class abilities. And in a campaign setting like Rokugan, it does make sense to have samurai be a separate class.
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Fourth comment. Besides the two of everything else, OA gives you two new sets of spellcasters (L5R casters and the original OA casters), plus leaves Sorcerers in place. That's a lot of damn spell lists. It's pretty unwieldy.
The shugenja is pretty much unavoidable if you want to use the Rokugan setting, I think. Mind you, I think it's still a good class, especially if you use the AEG supplements to pick your spells.
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So you've got this book here, that includes part of one un-D&D-like setting, some miscelaneous other setting material (without notes about the country or mythology that inspired it), and little in the way of advice for integrating it into a standard D&D campaign. The L5R setting is basically not compatible, give up, start on your homebrew no. The other stuff leaves unanswered problems, like why there are Celestial Dragons in one region and no ordinary dragons, and vice versa. It also leaves Gold Dragons stranded, since they effectively are Oriental dragons. You're left sorting through Unicorn Clan Feat trees and Eunach Warlocks trying to figure out what goes with what.
What happened, here? Has anyone had particularly good or bad experiences with this product?
There is one guy who has actually merged Rokugan and Faerun into one setting, with samurai, shugenja, paladins, clerics, and whatnot all running around the same world. There's a story hour about it on EN World. From what I've seen, it looks like a pretty good game, and demonstrates how you can merge together all sorts of disparate settings to create your campaign.
I'm running a campaign set in the Britannia of the old Ultima CRPGs, using a lot of the OA material. Samurai become knights, shamans become druids. All I do is tweak the class abilities and bonus feats a bit (eg, instead of the shaman getting martial arts feats, they get metamagic and some homebrew ones instead). Britannia is not an "Oriental" setting as most people would imagine the term, but there are similarities. In any case, prestige classes like the Singh rager, bear warrior and battle maiden, as well as the clan-specific samurai PrCs, are quite generic, and easily transplanted into just about any setting.
Originally posted by Raised by Chickens
Pawsplay, I understand your comments about Samurai and weapons - we had a Tetsubo weilding Samurai in a recent Rokugan game - but if a Samurai doesn't power up his Katana will that hamper him/her severely? I doesn't seem like a big problem to me.
The ancestral daisho thing is really a marginal benefit in powergaming terms, since it costs exactly as much as if the samurai had just bought a magic sword instead. It's just a way of providing the class with extra flavour, without twinking it out completely.
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Overall I think OA is the best 3e book I own.
Yeah. Ironically enough, I think I like it _because_ it isn't as self-contained as, say, Nyambe. The material has somewhat of an Oriental flavour, but it's still generic enough that it can be used in settings that aren't Oriental at all.
I was thinking of getting it but I'm not so sure now. I needed information for Serecia (my hombrew Kara-Tur type setting) and was hoping there would be some Chinese stuff in it but it sounds largely Japanese/Rokugan based. Now I'd probably be including a fair bit of Japanese culture but if that's the only stuff there - and I defenitely have no interest in Rokugan itself - is it worth buying at all?
Originally posted by Ross N I was thinking of getting it but I'm not so sure now. I needed information for Serecia (my hombrew Kara-Tur type setting) and was hoping there would be some Chinese stuff in it but it sounds largely Japanese/Rokugan based. Now I'd probably be including a fair bit of Japanese culture but if that's the only stuff there - and I defenitely have no interest in Rokugan itself - is it worth buying at all?
Do chuid
Definitely.
There was a ton of stuff, particularly the new classes, that I thought were great for a Chinese game. The Blade Dancer is a Wuxia inspired class if ever there was one and like I said before, the new Monk stuff is great.
The Rokugan background section is 37 pages out of 243 but with a bit of tweaking you could probably use some of that too.
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