Rob Hobart

Download the Book of Earth PDF

Download the Book of Fire PDF

Download the Book of Water PDF

So what is it you will find on this page?

As you probably already know (especially if you’ve read the other “Homebrew” sections of this website), in 2013-2015 I worked on a 5th Edition design of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG; this was originally planned for a 2015 release but then was pushed back to 2016 with the intention of funding via Kickstarter. (At the time, the most successful RPG Kickstarter was Call of Cthulhu 7 th Edition at $1 million, and AEG wanted to break that record.) The project went through two rounds of playtesting and the planned “Core Book” was about 90% complete by summer 2015… whereupon AEG’s CEO John Zinser abruptly sold the entire L5R IP to Fantasy Flight Games (and by extension, Asmodee).

I initially had some hope FFG might take me on and publish my design – it was nearly finished, after all, and represented a sharp enough divergence from previous editions that they could justly claim to be offering a new take on Rokugan. But of course they chose to make a (IMO not very good) game in-house that would let them sell expensive specialty dice, in accordance with what had become their standard RPG model. By the time I knew that was happening, I had already embarked on writing my novels, a labor that would consume the bulk of my creative energies for the next five years. (I did briefly do some modest freelancing on FFG’s early products – you’ll find my name in the list of authors for the GM Screen and their remake of Emerald Empire – but quickly decided I disliked both their game design and their modifications of the setting too much to want to commit any more time.)

It was as I was finishing up my novels that I started to think maybe I should go back to my 5th Edition design and resume it, with the intention of posting the completed work as a free download for others to use and enjoy as they might wish. The launch of the “Onyx Lives” CCG project, continuing the old L5R card game using the leaked playtest PDFs as a starting point, was a notable inspiration to me. I knew my own playtest documents had gotten leaked at some point in early 2016, though not widely. FFG clearly didn’t care – they had moved on to their own game -- and my NDA with AEG was… no longer relevant. (The penalty for breaking an AEG NDA was not being able to work for AEG anymore. Oh well!) From a creative viewpoint, I wanted to not just finish a design I’d been forced to abandon but also to incorporate the ideas and inspirations I’d had about the L5R RPG system in the years since 2015. Most notable in this regard, as you’ll know if you’ve read the other “Homebrew” notes, is a re-thinking of the TN/Raise sub-system. Plus I wanted to see if I could find a better way than FFG of approaching the concept of Stress. (Stress was IMO the one good idea FFG’s design team had, but they executed it extremely poorly, in large part due to the requirement to tie the mechanic to their specialty dice.) So… after a couple years of off-and-on work, here it is.

At its root, this is still the design I was forced to abandon in 2015. My goal with that game was to finally do what we were supposed to do (but failed) with L5R 4 th Edition: tear the whole game down to bedrock and re-think everything. To that end, I always viewed my design as a sequel to 1st Edition rather than a follow-on to the (IMO quite flawed) 2nd -3rd -4th sequence. After all, it was 1st Edition which had captivated me and made me an L5R fanatic. I wanted to look deeply at what 1st Edition had aspired to be, what elements in its design had worked and what hadn’t, and how the original design goals could be better- attained by utilizing the advances in “story-driven” RPG design in the years since its publication in 1997. Thus, most of this finished game’s key divergences from the former “standard” of AEG’s L5R – Rings and Skills cut back to maximum-5, Schools no longer all going to 5 Ranks, combat as Contested Rolls, simple and somewhat abstract movement and range rules, Wounds as discrete things rather than being rolled like hit-points, spells divided between Common and Secret, enemies classed as Thugs or Characters, etc – were developed and tested in that original design, though I’ve tweaked and adjusted everything a great deal. The main mechanical changes I’ve made with this rewrite are the Raise system and the incorporation of Stress as “mental Wounds.”

The biggest change from 2015 is not to the design itself but to the amount of content. Since this is a homebrew that I’m posting for free, rather than the “core book” of a commercial product line, I’ve added a large amount of additional material with the goal of a more-or-less complete game. So we’ve got a full range of Great Clan Schools, we’ve got Paths and Minor Clans, we’ve got a much larger list of Creatures, and so forth. The intention is that you can play an actual L5R RPG campaign using just these three PDFs. The stuff I left out – Imperials, Monks, Naga, and Ratlings – are the “niche” elements that have always been questionable additions to any L5R game. Will I do anything with those someday? Maybe. The Imperials are probably the most likely to get my attention.

A note on the game’s timeline/setting: My goal for 5th Edition was genuine timeline neutrality (as opposed to 4th Edition where we had talked about it but still defaulted the core rules to the then-current CCG era). If 5th Edition had been published by AEG, I would have been required me to incorporate mechanics referring to all the later CCG events like the Race for the Throne and the Colonies, but since this project is my personal homebrew, I decided to halt my timeline-specific references at the beginning of the Four Winds era (Gold Edition in the CCG). In my opinion, that was the point where the CCG storyline started to go completely off the rails.

Related: I haven’t posted the two “flavor” chapters, Air (setting) and Void (GM guidance), since those were never written back in 2015. If L5R hadn’t been sold, those chapters would have been created over the winter of 2015-16, but honestly they would have just been modest revisions and tweaks of the same chapters from 4 th Edition. The biggest change I would have made would have been dumping Jim Pinto’s “32 Dramatic Situations” stuff. So including those chapters here wasn’t a high priority – after all, this is a homebrew project aimed at people who already know and love the L5R setting. Who knows, though… since this is supposed to be my final, definitive statement on L5R role-playing, maybe I’ll do my own versions of the Chapter of Air and the Chapter of Void someday.

In conclusion: I hope you enjoy this. I did it purely as a labor of love, to finally get a completed version of this design out there for people to use. If you like it, use it. If you like some parts and not others, change it as you wish. And if you don’t like it, you’ve still got all the different “real” versions out there to choose between. Banzai!