The History of L5R among RPGs

 So...come to the table, young ones...and I shall tell you a tale...

​Dungeons and Dragons was introduced in 1974, drawing on the history of tin-soldier wargames combined with fantasy storytelling to create the first tabletop RPG.  A significant number of roleplaying games were made in the subsequent decade, but they weren't broadly available the way RPGs are today.  The idea of a game store was extremely rare, limited to certain urban centers in the Midwest.  There was no internet to put gamers in contact with each other or to let new pockets of gamers learn about new RPGs. Before around 1981, you needed to already know about roleplaying games to begin with in order to learn more or purchase them, and the great gorilla in the room was Dungeons and Dragons.   In 1981, the Dungeons and Dragons animated series on Saturday Morning took off, along with a marketing push that put Dungeons and Dragons magenta/red box in toy stores, a push that accelerated the popularity between 1981 and 1985.  At that point, "satanic panic", which had been building since 1983, caused a decrease in popularity for Dungeons and Dragons, and it was removed from the shelves of toy stores and bookstores until the 1990s.  Little games could not afford advertising outside industry-specific magazines, and even Dungeons and Dragons advertising was limited.  This focus of games being sold in specific gaming shops, the rarity of those shops,  and the reliance of RPGs on word-of-mouth advertising, meant that exposure to games other than Dungeons and Dragons was extremely limited across the country.  The print runs for many systems were in the hundreds.  That meant the market for purchasers and therefore the creators of such games were extremely un-diverse, concentrated around the communities where the game stores arose: affluent, small, white college towns and suburbs. 

Gaming was also, without question, predominantly male. There were women module designers, but they were associated with some of these small gaming clusters, and their works were considered very transgressive, getting pulled from the shelves. For myself, I first learned about role-playing games in 1982. At that time,  in much of the country, it was unthinkable in the general public that girls should play D&D, even though I loved the idea and would "pretend to play" with my friends without ever being allowed to have access to the rules or knowing how. My brother received the box set in 1984, and I stole it, memorizing the rules, photocopying pages at the library.  I got my first chance to play when a classmate who was running needed more players to make a group and allowed me to come as long as my brother came too. I was on top of the world for a few months of irregular weekly games of a few hours apiece.  But then, as tends to happen with boys that age, the presence of girls became unwelcome.  They  shifted to playing at overnight sleepovers so I couldn't go.  My attempts to start a gaming group of my own were met with ridicule...RPGs were for boys.  No more books were available in any local stores, and so there were no more games until college when I could meet a broader range of players, including my future-husband. He had been introduced to D&D by his mother, who was determined to help her pre-teen son learn how to play this new game she got him at the toy store.  He did live near a  game store, and, due to the way he was introduced, didn't have the same prejudices about gaming most people had.  He GMed for mixed and all-female groups while he was in high school.  He's gone on to become an excellent game developer in his own right and has many game writing credits. 

He was rare, though. Most RPGs were made by and for white guys.  This was because most different kinds of RPGs were played in Midwest towns with game stores, by white guys who were affluent enough to buy game systems and spend time gaming but poor enough not to have other, more popular things to do .  

Legend of the Five Rings was not the first attempt at an Asian-inspired game.  Bushido was released in 1979 (broadly in 1980), and it was the game for Asian RP for most of the `80s and early `90s.  Its rules were quite complex and it didn't take off compared to the behemoth that was Dungeons and Dragons, of course...in that environment, nothing could.  It came in an era with Pendragon, where you were trying to be very realistic in your RPGs. Bushido was created with the intention of being a very simulationist game set in samurai-era  (Sengoku/Edo) Japan-type world called Nippon.  Bushido was rigid, with characters who rolled a social caste randomly and were locked into that social caste. It had a 'historical' depiction of the role of women, and very much intended to be 'just like Japan' with no other Asian influence.  But it didn't appeal to me at all.  There is much to admire about Japan...it's a beautiful country, with a fascinating history and a complex and unique approach to life and art that has developed out over centuries that I have come to admire. I've loved Japanese folklore and storytelling for ages.  But its history, like the history of pretty much every nation on earth, is replete with incredible sexism, oppression, and brutality.  I had no desire to play in a Japan-esque world that was 'realistic' to Japan in that fashion.  The real world is bad enough.  I would challenge anyone who thinks L5R should be more like historical Japan to research some of the really bad parts of Japanese history and decide if they want to reassess.

Land of the Rising Sun was another small RPG released in 1980, this one set in 'actual' Japan, but it, again, was focused on a realistic depiction of Japan.  This one did not last as long as Bushido, and  was quite obscure.

Oriental Adventures came out in 1985, at the height of D&D's original wave of popularity, and was broadly released in book and toy stores.  It was not realistic at all.  It was never really intended to be, in my opinion, a stand-alone world...the Dungeons and Dragons games I'd played in hardly did "worlds" at all.  An individual game master would make up a game area big enough to suit their adventure,  but the only parts filled in were the parts you needed for your adventure.  There was no attempt to create or simulate a whole society.  Oriental Adventures was created mostly to let you play Asian characters in traditional D&D groups.  I thought this was quite silly.  That character I played briefly in the 1980s was Asian, and was a perfectly fine, "normal" magic-user. She came from a distant land, she bowed to greet people, and had some other customs, but did not need a whole different set of schools and equipment in order to be Asian.  But D&D was trying to expand rapidly, it was in its heyday, and it was trying to sell books.  And to sell new player books,  the thinking went, you needed to add new player schools.  And to have an excuse to sell more schools, TSR made a "country" to go along with these Asian-inspired schools.  It was slapdash, developed simultaneously with the much better Unearthed Arcana (and using a lot of Unearthed's mechanics,  which also had a bunch of new European-inspired schools).  Oriental Adventures was never meant to be a serious book talking about, or created to tell, stories from any Asian country, in my opinion.  It was to play an 'exotic' Asian person in a Western/D&D-style world.  I didn't like that from the very start.

There really weren't more big Asian-inspired RPGs in the crash that followed D&D being taken from stores until Legend of the Five Rings came out.

Independent game stores began to become more common in the late 1980s and early 1990s as satanic panic died down and RPGs became more popular. Teens like me who'd encountered gaming during the early `80s hit college and were able to interact with other gamers more broadly, forming new groups. With rise of the Internet in colleges, message boards carried word of new and independent RPGs farther than ever.    RPGs came back to mainstream bookstores in 1991/1992 with Vampire the Masquerade. Magic the Gathering card game was also beginning to get a lot of mainstream attention, and both properties accelerated the movement of RPGs into mainstream college culture. 

This was all really fueled by the early internet.  Message boards allowed word of new games, events, etc., to spread in ways they never had before.  MUDs and MUSHs, online text-specific shared storytelling worlds, allowed people who never had had the opportunity to experience role-playing universes to enter an immersive shared fantasy experience that helped get a more diverse group of players to the table,  including more women.   

Many little independent game companies, looking to capitalize on the success of Magic the Gathering, created new kinds of card games to try to interest audiences, and it was natural that someone would try to make an Asian-style game to distinguish itself from other card games.  Legend of the Five Rings was formed as a card game in 1995.

Without the internet, a game like L5R could not exist.  The internet of 1995-2000, though, was not at all the same as the internet today.  Universities were beginning to get fiberoptic/high speed internet, and gamers were able to communicate with each other through message boards or email, or through IRC Chat and MUSHs.  But it was small.   I remember what a huge revelation it was that I was in a chat with a person who was living in Israel at the time.  The idea that you could be typing in a discord-like environment with someone from another country was incredible.  Message boards contained information on many subjects, and were very centralized, so you could find, if you knew how, the places where people were posting story results or about new card sets.  But Yahoo (founded in 1994) and Google (founded 1998) didn't really have the ability to help you find such information easily, and there was no Wikipedia (founded 2001) to store and serve a vast amount of human knowledge.  There was no YouTube (founded 2005) to collect video and introduce people different than you, or to share all those great anime or Asian media sources that we now have available.  And countries like Japan and China were later adopters to those services when they did become available.

When the creators of L5R wanted to create an Asian-style card game, and subsequently a Roleplaying Game based on that card game, which was released in 1997, they could not look up information about Japan, or Asia in general, as easily as people can today.   And there was not a wealth of game designers out there of diverse Asian backgrounds they could look to to assist...gaming was still very non-diverse for the reasons I've given above.  The designers were relying on four main sources of information: non-gamer primary source information from people from Japan and China that they personally knew, historical Japanese works such as books of Japanese folktales, The Tale of Genji, The Pillowbook of Sei Shonogan, The Book of Five Rings, and the Hagakure,  depictions of Japan that were present in popular media that they were trying to emulate, such as the Kurosawa movies that were quite popular at the time, and books.   

They used all four.  Much of the combat system and commentary about swordplay in first edition came from their own martial arts instructors, for example.  There was no concept of a cultural consultant at that time, but the work was read by Asian-Americans.  References to Japanese works are visible throughout the system, from the Heian-era Tale of Genji-style courts to the Five Rings themselves.  The popular media references used for L5R, unlike Oriental Adventures, were definitely focused on the more 'serious' works of  Kurosawa,  rather than the really, really cheesy action pulp that was popular at the time.  And the research was serious...for example, you can see the veins of research into Chinese and Japanese religion I've discussed in previous blog articles.

Some of the designers on the L5R Team were active academic researchers on the history and literature of Japan: Ree Soesbee, designer of the Crane Clan, and a far more influential member of the design group for L5R than she is ever given credit for, was getting her PhD in Edo literature at the time, for example. But even the best book research was limited.  In the early 1990s, there were some excellent books on Chinese religion available; the Jesuits had been studying Chinese religion for centuries and it had become an area of in-depth scholarship. But there no books about Shinto or the development of Japanese religion available in English, even for professors who specialized in the field. The subject was rarely addressed in other textbooks on Eastern Religions.  The focus of Japanese scholarship following WWII was on the post-Meiji cult religions that helped fuel Japan's actions in WWII, and little attention was spared for very early Japanese religion, and none at all for the religion in the Sengoku.  At the time, given the predominance of Buddhism, it was assumed that there were few differences between pre-Meiji Japanese religion and Chinese religion, so scholars of Japanese religion and philosophy focused on more modern differences.  Many of the sources I've relied on for explaining the development of honor and Bushido were published in 1997 and 1999, for example.  

Considering that L5R was created to capitalize on the Card Game moment,  a lot of work and research went into the system.  The flaws, with hindsight, may be painfully obvious, now we have access to a greater volume of information and a much more diverse perspective on gaming.   But seeing where L5R fits with other role-playing games,  and how it has developed, I truly respect what the designers were trying to do.  It was a labor of love.

This has been kind of rambling, I know so I'll wrap it up here.  Hope it gives at least an interesting snapshot as to what the gaming industry was and something about the environment L5R was produced in.