Konnichiwa, Samurai.

    Slicing through hordes of zombies, his armor tattered and torn and hanging by the loosest strands, katana high overhead, face contorted in an exultant rage—this image of the samurai on the cover of the first Legend of the Five Rings book remains engraved in my memory.
    Damn, that looks fun.
    Somewhere along the way, though, as I played both the card game and the roleplaying game, the adventure became stale. Part of it was the increasing complexity of the RPG system, as it seemed to get as much wrong as it did right, and every time a subsequent edition fixed one gripe of mine, a new one was introduced. I kept fixing and tweaking the system to my satisfaction, my players eventually ending up with hundreds of pages of revamps and reinterpretations of all the schools, skills, etc.
    The other issue was the world itself. Not only did Rokugan have to account for sometimes bizarre card tournament victories, but the foundations underlying the clan and family structures didn't really work upon reflection, and even more importantly the mental gymnastics required to explain why these samurai from such disparate origins remained together instead of slaying each other on sight was more than occasionally maddening. Sure, you could use the old Emerald Magistrate convention, but the game wasn't really designed for it. The mechanics didn't actually support this assumption, and simply declaring everyone part of a magistrate's entourage becomes a lazy technique instead of an innovation far too quickly.
    So even as I monkeyed with the rules, I slowly began moving away from the Rokugan canon. I was doing “L5R Your Way” long before it became a slogan; of course, no doubt all L5R players were. I have yet to hear of a game that didn't diverge from canon once the specifics of “Who do I serve? How do these clans really interact? Who's really in charge?” started to be seriously questioned, or of a character that didn't have to break the mold extraordinarily just to take a school or advantage they really wanted without disturbing the unity of the group. And it wasn't just because the rules were punishing you for being different, or punishing you for standing out; in Rokugan, that would be a mechanic that actually would support the culture. It was punishing you for just creating a character, and telling you that conflict was good for a game while mechanically punishing you for actually creating characters that could be in conflict.
    I wanted a setting more internally consistent, something the players could engage as complex from the beginning, instead of focusing so much on shorthand stereotypes and mechanics domination by faction. If you wanted to be a great duelist, you came from the Crane Clan because they had the best dueling school. If you wanted to be from some other clan and take that school, it required taking advantages or disadvantages. It cost you. This is a punishment. Whenever you have to pay points to purse a course that someone else doesn't have to pay for, that's a punishment. If it's a punishment that is designed as a mechanic to encourage or discourage certain things, that's one thing. But it's absurd to think that other clans wouldn't want a great duelist, and wouldn't either develop their own, or better yet figure out a way to receive that training. If you were the daimyo of the clan and didn't figure out how to provide channels for the talented duelists, or for that matter cavaliers, heavy infantry, sneaky bastards, etc., within your authority to fulfill their potential for the good of the clan, you deserve to be deposed.
    This, then, is an attempt to present a Legend of the Five Rings setting and system that remain consistent with each other, and works in both theory (setting) and reality (mechanics). An attempt to negotiate the space between. 
    And you're invited. I'm essentially crowdsourcing the editing of a document that is strictly for fun, strictly as an exercise in rediscovering the best RPG I ever played, the one that gave me and my friends more years of continuous play and fun than any other.  I want you to follow along as a different view of Legend of the Five Rings grows, to comment and refine the mechanics and world as it redevelops itself.
    And to keep me working. My goal is to post something, a mechanic, an NPC, a piece of the setting, some musing on what this L5R needs next... Chide me when I don't. Take whatever ideas you want to apply to your own game, and leave a few for me or someone else to incorporate. After, Legend of the Five Rings isn't mine. Or even, really, AEG's. No game truly is. So let's have some fun.