L5R Roleplaying: Second City Boxed Set

I finished off my fourth session of my Legend of the Five Rings campaign earlier this week, and so far it’s going pretty well.  Since my players are a mix of people who know Rokugan very well and those who are brand new to it, I’ve tried to build an initial storyline that takes them through a lot of aspects of the setting – court intrigue, duels, skirmishes, and now a full-on battle.

In my work getting the campaign off the ground, I finally convinced myself I should pick up the newest L5R book – the Second City.  I initially decided against it at GenCon since I would be running the game in the pre-Scorpion Clan Coup timeline.  But after playing the game for a while, I decided I should go ahead and pick up the new boxed set.

I have the old first edition boxed sets of City of Lies (Ryoko Owari) and the Otosan Uchi.  Both were great purchases and I’ve enjoyed reading through them.  Second City feels similar to both of them in some parts.  It has been divided into three book, one for the City, one for the Campaign, and one for the Characters.  Mixed within those books are some new rules, but by and large they’re all fluff.  Which is good by me.

After the books, they had a map of the city (which is largely useless since it’s pretty generic).  I was hoping they’d provide a map of the area around the Second City.  They talk a lot in the fluff about Journey’s End Fortress to the north of the city, and they talk about the area surrounding it, but there’s no map to show what is out there.  I guess since a large part of the feel of this campaign setting is the exploration and discovery, they didn’t want to hammer things down like that, but I was more curious about the surrounding area than how the city itself looked.

They also have two small journals written from various NPCs.  They had similar things in the City of Lies boxed set, and they were fun as props for the campaign.  Beyond using them for that, though, I can’t see ever needing the journals.  They’ll make good reading, but that’s about it since I won’t be playing in the setting itself.

There’s a GM screen provided.  I don’t generally use GM screens, but usually because I don’t like to spend money on them separately.  I’ll be taking advantage of this one since I have been struggling to find someplace to put my notes that others can’t see while I’m running.

A fair portion of the boxed set came with character sheets.  Lots of character sheets.  An entire pad filled with empty character sheets.  I was not expecting these at all.  Usually I just print sheets off from the printer, so that’s not a huge deal, but if my playgroup decides to stick with L5R for a while, it might come in handy.  Or if I start killing off characters more often.  L5R is a bit more gritty than other games.

Also, there were six “deluxe” character sheets.  More like character books.  There are about 8 pages of different things you can write down for your character, taking notes about his progress and the like.  They used to sell small books that could be used as character sheets back in the first edition, and I bought a couple for the characters I used most often.  Not sure what I’m going to do with these ones yet.  They may sit looking pretty, or I may pass them out to my players if they want to take advantage of the bigger book-version of their character.  Some may, others may not.

Finally, there was a set of dice with the Otomo flower on one of the pips, and then four decks of cards that give the abilities associated with each rank of each school.  Honestly, I could have done without either of these.  I don’t know that I’d ever use the cards – they’re just not very convenient, and the dice… I just bought a couple sets at GenCon to use for L5R.  But they’re part of the boxed set, so that’s that.

Overall, it was a pretty hefty price-tag (almost $80).  The actual book-part of the boxed set could have fit in a single hardcover book and been a third the price.  The extras that went along with it were hit-or-miss for me.  A lot of them I’ll go ahead and use since I now own them, but if they had been sold separately, I wouldn’t have picked them up.

My verdict: a lot of random stuff packed in the box to bump up the price.  The story and fluff all are worth it and I can’t wait to read through the campaign.  I could have done without the map, journals and cards.  The dice, character sheets and GMs screen, while I probably would not have chosen to get them given the opportunity, will all get used.  And the books are the same high quality as the other 4E books.