This is probably one of the best resources on this site. Thank you so much for this!

There's a lot in the interview that left a bad taste in my mouth, but overall - I appreciate Katrina greatly for tapering my expectations with 5e. I better understand the direction her and the team thought to go and it made it clearer to me as to how they got there with some of the stranger (IMO) decisions. I look forward to more interviews with the rest of the design team popping up. and would highly recommend anyone on the fence about 5th edition check out the interview.

It sounds like the only changes to character creation (to answer @bsmith23's question) then would be: Is that correct? I feel like the beta rules would get you most of the way there, then. Just have to change void point totals, drop the passions/adversities section and change the starting status on all characters.

A lot of people have said that it is basically the same rules as the beta rules with a few changes. I'm not sure what the differences are, but if you go from the beta rules, you won't be far off.

The game has never limited duels, in my understanding. It's not that illegal duels don't happen (or shouldn't happen), it's that they are illegal and have consequences for having them. Players should be fine with having duels, and the GM should be fine with changing the direction of the story slightly when they do happen. That framework can also be used to protect a player from a silly decision they made (i.e.: Their daimyo schedules the fight for a year from now, giving the player the ability to continue on without having to fight a duel they would lose; their daimyo considers the ask moot because of the consequence they will mete out - sending them to the Colonies, etc.). You are welcome to have as many duels in your game as you see fit, and then steer the story in the direction you want based on the consequences of the duel (if you even cared to stay in line with RAW and setting canon - which is optional!).

I feel like there are a lot of checkboxes that still haven't seen any completion, so I would be surprised to see it come out this year. If it hasn't hit shores by November, I just don't see how they intend to get copies in the hands of retailers and pre-orders with all the holidays packed into the end of the year. That said, does anyone know why only the folios that aren't in the beginner's box (Crab, Scorpion, Unicorn) are the only ones downloadable from the website? I'd prefer to have a PDF of all 7, so I don't have to mark up the character folios in the box. Anyone see anything that suggests why they haven't made the others available?

I find Kaze no Shiro to do the reader a disservice by not contextualizing the stories and content. Plus, there seems to be a lot of useless information like the text of the advertisements instead of the story itself. I appreciate their end goal, though.