Will we get Second City ?

[Ni Fang 265]

Hey folks!

I wonder honestly if we will get a 5th edition of Second City for L5R, Personally I enjoyed the book, reading and adapting things from it for example is time consuming, yet the results are amazing. One of the gaming sessions I was in had it used for some informative bits related to the game that our GM felt was lacking in his campaign. So it made me wonder. will we get Second City for 5th edition ?

Not that I mind having to adapt old 4th edition info to the new edition. thats still fun yes. But I'm just curious

[Ultimatecalibur 597]

Not for the foreseeable future as Second City was very late into the old timeline, but hopefully FFG will do it's own City Box sometime in the future.

[nameless ronin 706]

Second City is the capital of the colonies, in what used to be the Ivory Kingdoms. I expect FFG to focus on the Emeral Empire first, get most (if not all) of their topical sourcebooks out, before investing resources in products about locations outside the Empire's borders.

[NFKD 102]

They'd have to write a significant amount of new lore to make it work well. Previously the whole business of having the Second City was derived in part as fallout from the metaplot, since the setting swung wildly from changes in the CCG tournaments/Winter Courts/etc. FFG doesn't seem like they're going to repeat that soon, since hoo boy did we get some messes before like what happened to the Lying Darkness/Fu Leng coming back to life and then dying again/the entire Mary Sue mess that was Daigetsu/someone throwing a major decision after being bribed >$1000 to fix their car. Additionally they would need to get around the problem of inserting colonialism into the setting as the single biggest point of interaction with the outside world. 😒 It was thankfully less odious (eg, Japanese-controlled Manchukuo) and instead more naive, but it was still something that warrants a lot of examination before it shows up again in this day and age.

If it did show up, the ideal way to do it would instead be to present various foreign locations as independent from the Emerald Empire itself. Not only would it get around the minefield of colonialism, but it would also allow for more description of the wider world in brief that campaigns could use for short adventures. Making an entire campaign setting in microcosm would be a bit much, though. The whole point of this game is dealing with samurai drama, and it's almost impossible to do that entirely outside the empire without dealing with colonialism. At best you'd probably want the PCs to be a group of merchants/diplomats who have an excuse to travel all over.

Edited March 28, 2019 by NFK

[Tonbo Karasu 2,606]

There's a couple of cities that I'd like to see a box for because of the way they are in the new setting

1: Khanbulak - the tease of a Moto-run city which literally sits on the border of the Empire and lets gaijin visit during the day that was featured in the latest bit of fiction.

2: Kaeru Toshi - I just want to see the city where a third of it is run by the Dragonfly.

[Nheko 205]

4 hours ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

There's a couple of cities that I'd like to see a box for because of the way they are in the new setting

1: Khanbulak - the tease of a Moto-run city which literally sits on the border of the Empire and lets gaijin visit during the day that was featured in the latest bit of fiction.

2: Kaeru Toshi - I just want to see the city where a third of it is run by the Dragonfly.

This.

I think Khanbulak has a lot of potential. Will love to run at least an adventure there.

[narukagami 118]

You gotta keep in mind that 4th edition was the tail end of 20-ish IRL years of plot, which FFG reset back to day 1. You're not going to be seeing much of anything from it for a very long time, if at all seeing as how FFG doesn't seem to be afraid to take things in different directions.

Edited March 28, 2019 by narukagami

[Kaiju 129]

I ll say that while the box set as a product was quite nice, the background lore and reasoning behind this was horrendously bad, and a large contributor to the decline of L5R brand in general, ending up with it being bought out by FFG for, probably, not a whole lot.

The core concept of L5R is a "frozen in time" culture, supposedly few if any changes happened in hundreds of years of history, and the rest of the world didnt advance either. Messing with that is going to disappoint more than you ll ever make happy.

[llamaman88 430]

Really expecting a City of Lies box with all the Imperial/1st edition nostalgia

[Alisair Longreach 221]

The City of Lies will likely be covered in greater depth in the Scorpion Clan book sometime next year.

[Ni Fang 265]

7 hours ago, narukagami said:

You gotta keep in mind that 4th edition was the tail end of 20-ish IRL years of plot, which FFG reset back to day 1. You're not going to be seeing much of anything from it for a very long time, if at all seeing as how FFG doesn't seem to be afraid to take things in different directions.

From what I recall, 5th edition is starting out at 1123 the year that the time of the Scorpion Coup takes place which leads into the first Clan War of 4th edition {according to Emerald Empire for 5th edition the year is currently 1123 but the coup hasnt happened yet} So the plot isnt entirely reset by FFG as far as I can tell

[nameless ronin 706]

23 minutes ago, Ni Fang said:

From what I recall, 5th edition is starting out at 1123 the year that the time of the Scorpion Coup takes place which leads into the first Clan War of 4th edition {according to Emerald Empire for 5th edition the year is currently 1123 but the coup hasnt happened yet} So the plot isnt entirely reset by FFG as far as I can tell

It's a reset (with some minor changes, mostly to a few characters) to the setting from 1st edition L5R. It's about as far back as a reset can go without going to a point in the timeline that was always "history".

[Ni Fang 265]

Then why is it the fierst 1000 years are listed in Emerald Empire ? this basically places the game at year 1123 ? *insert confused Lothcat noises* Either way my nepherw and I adapted the LCG to Second City, it was fun coming up with the rules for it too

[narukagami 118]

2 hours ago, Ni Fang said:

Then why is it the fierst 1000 years are listed in Emerald Empire ? this basically places the game at year 1123 ? *insert confused Lothcat noises* Either way my nepherw and I adapted the LCG to Second City, it was fun coming up with the rules for it too

No, as in 5e is reset back to the first "current day" of the metaplot, not the first day of the backstory lore. And since that first "current day" of metaplot began in 1995 all events after it were shaped by 24 IRL years of CCG tournaments, contests, and events, and 4 and a half (plus one we don't speak of) editions of roleplaying games, FFG reset the game back to that first story in 1995, so you're not going to be seeing anything related to 4th edition era lore for a loooooooooooong time.

Edited March 29, 2019 by narukagami

[Ni Fang 265]

So going by the established timeline {which is almost identical in Emerald Empire as 4th edition} is wrong ?

[Kaiju 129]

2 minutes ago, Ni Fang said:

So going by the established timeline {which is almost identical in Emerald Empire as 4th edition} is wrong ?

Well, nothing keeps you from using that. But for canon 5th edition, anything after the year 1123 is, as of right now, not come to pass. It also looks like FFG is at least partially changing the story in relevant elements, and may eliminate developments of the old lore entirely (formation of the spider clan looks unlikely, scorpion coup certainly wont happen as it did, multiple other story branches that never existed in 4th will play a role, not to mention we are already past the dates that these events happened in the old lore).

 

[narukagami 118]

9 minutes ago, Ni Fang said:

So going by the established timeline {which is almost identical in Emerald Empire as 4th edition} is wrong ?

No, again, the game didn't start at year 0 of the timeline, it started in 1120-something as well, everything before that is "backstory" not "the story."

[DGLaderoute 897]

When the original game was launched in 1995 by AEG, the story started in the year 1123. When AEG effectively shut down the game setting and sold the game to FFG in 2015, the in-game year was about 1202 or so...very shortly after 1200, anyway. So, during that time, a total of about 80 in-game years passed, and all of the story that's now referred to as "old lore" or "old L5R" occurred during those 80-ish years.

In 2017, FFG relaunched the game and its setting. When they did, they returned the story back to 1123 and "rebooted" the story. There are some similarities between the new story and the old one in terms of the year 1123, but also many differences, as FFG takes the story in their own direction.

So...all of that old lore is fine unto itself, but it's like an alternate timeline now. A new timeline has been started, telling its own story; the old lore really doesn't apply to it anymore.

That said, anything in the story that was "history" in 1123 is the same in both timelines (unless specifically stated otherwise); it's in that year that the divergence happens between old and new lore.

[Suzume Chikahisa 313]

13 hours ago, Kaiju said:

I ll say that while the box set as a product was quite nice, the background lore and reasoning behind this was horrendously bad, and a large contributor to the decline of L5R brand in general, ending up with it being bought out by FFG for, probably, not a whole lot.

The core concept of L5R is a "frozen in time" culture, supposedly few if any changes happened in hundreds of years of history, and the rest of the world didnt advance either. Messing with that is going to disappoint more than you ll ever make happy.

This. Wiping out the Ivory Kingdoms off-screen to get Imperialist expansionist Rokugan to camouflage the moral issues with Colonial Imperialism... Yeah, that storyline was unimpressive at multiple levels.

Mind you, I don't like medieval stasis either, but it does seem Rokugan is less isolated this time around and there are already multiple mentions of foreign nations, so if we treat this setting as a focused snapshot in time it works better.

 

[Ni Fang 265]

OK after reading the posts you guys just said it now makes sense. The current year is 1120-1123 so the clan war has yet to happen, the Unicorn are back, and the Scorpion Coup hasnt happened yet either.

So that said, For all we know, the Unicorn could have a city out there they had established somewhere beyond the Shadowlands. Hence Second City wonderings I guess. But, thankfully each game outside of established canon can go along side it. Every choice characters make for example effects and ripples out, say for example, they make a different choice rather then the one they had made, things could go in a different direction right ? So Second City is a possiblity later down the road ?

Personally I'm more fcocused on the Scorpion Coup and the Clan Wars {1123-1125} time period. All the games I have been in so far take place in that time period. And we normally end up with Toturi II as Empress. But I guess that is just my games I've been in