Bag of Fish: Success

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to be hosting a Bag of Fish day in preparation for my upcoming L5R campaign.

That day was the 23rd.

The focus of the day was the player meet-and-greet with samurai movies in the background and a few players needed to fight through character generation. I'd been thinking that one player hadn't met the others, but she knew one other player.

One player still needed to do his heritage draw.  Remember that I'm not just allowing players to make characters - they needed to draw tokens to determine their family lineage, too.

Out of six players, five of them drew at least one Dragon die.  That makes part of the game easier: Assembling the party.  When there are that many folks whose heritage ties back to such a small clan, it's not unreasonable for them to be related.

And the sixth player is a Unicorn. Unicorn lands border Dragon lands, so it's not unreasonable for them to know one another. And her heritage roll (from the Great Clans book) gave me another perfectly acceptable story hook to drag her into interacting with Dragons.

The actual draws:
Dragon/Ronin
Dragon/Dragon
Minor Clans/Dragon
Scorpion/Dragon
Dragon/Crane
Unicorn/Crab

In all six cases, the clan they chose to play is the first one on the list.

I don't want to just run a Magistrates Game. Because - realistically - that's overdone.

"So what," one player asked me, "is the core conflict driving the game?"

An excellent question. Honor. Glory. Establishing a legacy. Survival.

The initial survey I had them take indicated to me that my characters are interested in some of the metaphysical underpinnings of the setting, too.

In that survey, I also asked them to rank the seven tenets of bushido in order of importance. I had a broad base of results, but Duty was the most important and Courtesy the least. The order was:

1. Duty
2. Honesty
2. Honor
4. Courage
4. Sincerity
6. Compassion
7. Courtesy

Note that Honesty and Honor tied one another, as did Courage and Sincerity.

I'm not doing a Magistrate game, but they will be working as part of the retinue for a high-ranking NPC. The fact that we have a Scorpion in the party opens a few doors. The Unicorn's heritage roll opened a few interesting doors ...

Steph and I ordered teriyaki from Happy Teriyaki, where I have been a satisfied customer for more than twenty years.  They have a couple of party platters available, and we ordered one of those. We had more leftovers than I'd expected, but we still didn't have a lot.

The next step is to schedule that first session, so the players can meet their host for the winter - Mirumoto Shohi-en.