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Yawgmoth posted:Rank 5 seems pretty weak to me, at least for a rank 5. If you're going for a yojimbo theme, I'd make it something that would let you flat-out force enemies to attack you instead, or maybe lets you make a free attack against anything that attacks the designated person. Free attack should resolve first.
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Apr 13, 2016 20:24
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MonsieurChoc posted:Edit: And don't get me started about how terrible most of the Ronin Paths past Rank 1. There are some good ronin 2s, master of games into scales of the carp you can easily get 10k7 tempation with only 3 skill in tempations, kenburo's way is awesome as hell. some are just bad yes but its a mixed bag. Sun tao advance is pretty cool. Worse thing about minor clans is kata restrictions, and badger not getting heavy weapons. also have suzume 3 work like tamagoto's legion.
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May 15, 2016 18:46
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wargames posted:There are some good ronin 2s, master of games into scales of the carp you can easily get 10k7 tempation with only 3 skill in tempations, kenburo's way is awesome as hell. some are just bad yes but its a mixed bag. Sun tao advance is pretty cool. Worse thing about minor clans is kata restrictions, and badger not getting heavy weapons. Master of Games is my favorite ronin path since it was introduced back during 3E. It's good, but suffers from mechanically having nothing to do with it's fluff.
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May 15, 2016 19:11
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Someone make a L5R game so I can learn the system. It looks hella neat and I am a badlord that is currently on a hardcore  kick*. HELP* to my credit, I just got back from a vacation to Japan and it owned. wtb sweet-rear end rail system in USA
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May 29, 2016 23:56
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Dick Burglar posted:Someone make a L5R game so I can learn the system. It looks hella neat and I am a badlord that is currently on a hardcore The longer I live in Japan the more cringe-worthy a lot of L5R is as "Fantasy Asia imagined by Westerners". I do love the setting, or maybe the idea of the setting, and I played it quite a lot as a kid in the late 90s. But being a little more aware of the orientalism or straight out John Wick fetishism has tempered my enthusiasm for it.
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May 30, 2016 02:20
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Yeah, I know, it's turbo-weeaboo as hell. But I already miss Japan and god damnit what else am I supposed to do?  Fake edit: if you say "go teach English there" I will punch you in the dick.
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May 30, 2016 03:34
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Dick Burglar posted:Yeah, I know, it's turbo-weeaboo as hell. But I already miss Japan and god damnit what else am I supposed to do? Well you can teach there till the next FRO is ready in 3-4 months.
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May 30, 2016 06:09
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I am bringing this thread back just to say that I have heard of some of the changes that were going to happen in L5R before the FFG buyout and they are all absolutely batshit insane. Yoritomo gets sealed in a black scroll and his entire family is almost completely wiped out because a CCG player was paid $1500 in real life to pay for his car repairs
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Jun 25, 2016 02:42
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Wait, what? Like, they wanted to dump Yoritomo because the player violated some kind of rules, and he repped Yoritomo or something? I know that they let players affect the storyline of the setting, I'm just not sure how this all fits into that.
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Jun 25, 2016 02:50
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I think what they mean is that the Yoritomo player basically threw a tournament in exchange for $1500 because he needed money for car repairs.
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Jun 25, 2016 02:52
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Oh, he did better then throw it. The tournament was basically "who gets this new Black Scroll?" There was a bounty of irl money on who to use it on. Mantis player won the tournament, took the Black Scroll, then took the cash and used on Yoritomo himself. This happened before the AEG announcement so he had no idea that was gonna happen. In the ~*~metaplot~*~, Kanpeki apparently wins and succeds at taking the Rokugan throne as emperor, the Yoritomo family are almost entirely wiped out when they're invaded by seagoing Shadowlands forces, and the Mantis are no longer a functional Great Clan. The gently caress?
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Jun 25, 2016 03:02
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They should've never given players plot input.
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Jun 25, 2016 03:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:Oh, he did better then throw it. Where does the $1500 come in? He only used it on Yoritomo because somebody paid him to?
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Jun 25, 2016 04:12
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Swagger Dagger posted:They should've never given players plot input.
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Jun 25, 2016 04:21
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Swagger Dagger posted:They should've never given players plot input. Letting the players choose plot points was the reason the card game stuck around way longer than it had any right too. The problem was having to have a choice for every single faction and tournament. Ah, that magical year where every story was Clan Dude (likely Unicorn) did A THING, secretly helped by the Ratlings because they were hyper dominant. Also RIP Toturi Naseru. . You and some pals went to the Shadowlands and died (for literally no reason).
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Jun 25, 2016 04:31
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The problem was that the relationship between play and story never seemed terribly consistent. Sometimes players were allowed to have an immense effect, other times it just felt like a bait and switch: "You get the ancestral sword of the hantei!... in your champion's spine! Thanks for winning the tournament!" I don't know if they ever developed a system behind it but early on it always felt really arbitrary. I remember playing Phoenix during Hidden Emperor where the meta started swinging to Phoenix to where the clan was winning tournaments hand over fist, but in the story the Mantis ended up rolling over the Phoenix, marching up to the capital's castle and kicking in the doors before finally being repulsed. At the same time Lions has a notable but vocal minority running Shadowlands decks and they get an whole over-the-top summon-an-oni-and-redeem-it plotline. It felt like a lot of it had to do (at least when I played) with how much you were able to show off in front of the story team. Ultimately the biggest issue I had with the metaplot is that it rarely had time to breathe, and it became formulaic: There's some trouble between the clans, somebody wants to take over the empire and is repulsed, then it turns out some big monster is behind it all and everybody teams up to stab them. Naturally, because of its nature, no major clan can ever truly be villainous, be diminished, or face lasting consequences, because they all have players you don't want to alienate. Obviously, there was the big faction cull after Hidden Emperor, but that boiled down to hard practical reasons (having 13-14 factions was just too much to publish). But, for all the appeal of its characters, the stories often boiled down to some big metaphysical threat and any personal stories tended to be drowned out of the face that blood is raining down from the sky, that flaming men are running through your town, or that a rather questionable interpretation of Kali is making tea out of peasant innards.
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Jun 25, 2016 05:01
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It would have been awesome to write a metaplot without being directed by Marketing to "put a mad dragon in it" or whatever big bad they thought would sell cards. But then it would have also been nice to know what the story prizes for tournaments were going to be before they announced them... I always thought that we should have lowered the number of story prizes, but made each prize more meaningful. Like, if the Emerald Champion doesn't have a planned and significant role in the upcoming story, then he doesn't matter to the narrative, and therefore who he is shouldn't be a story prize. If a story prize is to select a character, then that character should become a main cast member, and whatever clan he or she is from should significantly alter the story. Maybe that means players don't get to choose characters as often, and maybe that means every Kotei doesn't get an individual story prize, but at least chosen prizes would have more impact than a paragraph in a short fiction and then never mentioned again. And maybe then we wouldn't have a huge bank of hundreds of micro-fictions as a perceived barrier-to-entry. One of my least favorite moments as a Story Team member was writing 600 words for a Kotei story prize, where X samurai found Y item, trying to make it interesting and worthy while knowing full well that this thread would never get used for anything and would have zero impact on the overall story. I kept thinking, if I was a player who worked super hard to win a tournament and made this story choice, and this is all that came of it, I probably wouldn't ever care about the story again. But with only 52 fictions a year and events assigning literally hundreds of unique story prizes during kotei seasons, it's no wonder how quickly things became a mess. If the story had a general semi-planned skeletal story arc with specific branching paths based on story prizes, and player choices were fewer and manageable but able to snowball from each-other (so they didn't feel pointless), and we had a limited recurring cast selected by cues from the community (so we could actually develop characters instead of writing about a new guy each time), then I think the resulting narrative and the IP in general would be stronger. But then that would mean events team couldn't just fall back on their "Chosen Personality Gets MacGuffin" formula whenever designing story prizes for tournaments. I realize this makes me sound more bitter about it than I really am, but I have to say I really didn't know just how little Story Team's role was in the L5R story process until I joined the team.
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Jun 25, 2016 05:24
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Is there a readable archive of all the microfiction? I know it's not a must-read, but I love the setting and have a lot of spare time, but I've never managed to run across any significant amount of the fiction.
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Jun 25, 2016 10:51
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Spookyelectric posted:It would have been awesome to write a metaplot without being directed by Marketing to "put a mad dragon in it" or whatever big bad they thought would sell cards. Yeah, I admit I mainly only know some of the behind-the-scenes stuff for the very early metaplot, not so much what came after I bowed out of the CCG. I'm pretty sure I've talked about it before, so I won't go deep into it, but I remember getting to talk with John Wick around the time of Scorpion Clan Coup about his frustrations with marketing dictating story elements. And honestly, I'd have to agree with him it hurt the story in the long run - yes, agreeing with John Wick, I know, I know - but Clan War's ending was a bad sign of things to come. Certainly, Hidden Emperor's absolutely bonkers plot helped drive me out of the CCG permanently, with only a token effort to get back in around the time of Lotus Edition that never really panned out. I think things got a fair deal better after I left, but stuff like the Ratling focus didn't do much to disabuse me regarding my choice to walk.
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Jun 25, 2016 11:15
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Sir Mopalot posted:Is there a readable archive of all the microfiction? I know it's not a must-read, but I love the setting and have a lot of spare time, but I've never managed to run across any significant amount of the fiction. The best place is Kaze No Shiro, which archives all/most story stuff, including flavor text, rulebook fictions, and of course the weekly fictions as well. There are some minor formatting issues, but it's mostly readable. It's also divided by edition so you can skip the eras you hate! And I kept an ongoing list of all my fictions (such as they were...) on my website, so anyone can see my contributions there. Please forgive the weeabo aesthetic. It's only missing the last L5R fiction I wrote for Halloween. I don't think any other Story Team members kept online records of what they wrote. Partway through Ivory they moved all of the fictions off the main site and onto The Imperial Assembly, so there are also fictions still up there. There are fictions on the L5R site too, but they're hidden now. But Kaze no Shiro should have them all.
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Jun 25, 2016 12:47
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Dick Burglar posted:Where does the $1500 come in? He only used it on Yoritomo because somebody paid him to? Yes. He could've used the scroll on a vague number of targets; he was literally bribed in real life to use it on his own clan kami. Would've loved to be the fly on the wall to see the story writer try to figure out how to make that one work sensibly!
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Jun 25, 2016 13:45
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ProfessorCirno posted:Would've loved to be the fly on the wall to see the story writer try to figure out how to make that one work sensibly! It took six of us and I'm not confident any of us were really happy with the result. That was... Um... Yeah. Quite the story prize. Yeah. There were players warning us ahead of time. It was kinda infamous.
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Jun 25, 2016 14:44
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I just love the image of someone saying "hey I'll fix your car if you gently caress this card game's story right the hell up!" because that is the biggest no-brainer ever IMO.
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Jun 25, 2016 15:08
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That whole scenario is like the end of an 80's movie.
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Jun 25, 2016 15:39
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Actually, now that I think about it, I think he apologized to us as he reported his choice... I don't blame him. I wouldn't have walked away from $1500. Hell, if they'd handed me the $1500 I'd have written whatever they wanted! :p
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Jun 25, 2016 16:10
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kinda hilarious that the prize for winning a card game is way more narrative control over the setting than a PC is supposed to ever get.
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Jun 30, 2016 08:14
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Tunicate posted:kinda hilarious that the prize for winning a card game is way more narrative control over the setting than a PC is supposed to ever get. Only if your PCs aren't completely awesome. Had 7 PCs in my last game, which covered the war against the lying darkness and the second day of thunder beerslammed into a single massive event. At the end of the game, three PCs were gods, and every PC got to make a single change to the universe, based on the scope they were then operating at. Shinjo Raniya, the new Lady Sun, issued the Decree of Impermanence. No afterlife is eternal, everything leads to reincarnation, even yomi, jigoku, gaki-do, and toshigoku. Hida Juzo, the new Lord Moon, did an Akodo on the ratlings, who mostly ended up as a new Crab family. Isawa Nozomi, the completed Last Wish, became the guardian of ningen-do and separated old maho from new maho, making the original, untainted maho the default. Ikoma Iwane, now Iwane the First, established the Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first real university, and its rather less honorable counterpart, the Hidden Academy. Bayushi Katsu, the new Emerald Champion, changed the structure and focus of the Emerald Magistrates, assigning every magistrate a set of yoriki chosen from the imperial academy and the imperial legions, and focusing more on preemptive police action and forensic accounting. Doji Akikaze eventually succeeded in the creation of a counterpart to the ritual that created the Kuni Wastes, requiring the sacrifice of the life of a Clan Champ to return life to sections of the Kuni Wastes. The Naota, a Dragon accidentally turned Naga and creator of the sword that can kill anything forever, forged a new set of weapons to replace the clan swords, and has moved the Naga in a direction similar to the Tengu. Of course, maybe all of this is not me playing L5R the way it was 'meant' to be played, but if that's true, then gently caress whoever said that.
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Jun 30, 2016 11:38
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The right way to play the L5R RPG is the way you and your players want to play it.
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Jun 30, 2016 15:07
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, that's it. The main problem is that roll-and-keep obfuscates the odds. The other problem is that every bet is all-or-nothing, which makes the price of gambling high. Both of these discourage raising unless you've got a very good understanding of the odds, a big die pool, or a specific goal that requires raises. But in a setting where even failing a social roll can be literally suicide, players should have some idea of their chance of success on a giving roll, and if taking a raise is suicide. And of course, this obfuscation hurts the GM, too. The second problem would be some of the 90s style stupid character options, like "For 5 points you can own a pair of scissors or handicap yourself by fighting with a lousy weapon." I don't use the magic system enough to have any opinion on it.
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Jun 30, 2016 15:33
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Shugenja can be extremely powerful. Even though there are things set up to stop them from just throwing down their most powerful spells immediately, their level 1 spells alone can get pretty absurd, and there's really nothing stopping them from taking up a katana and fighting with the bushi after that (the Tamori even supposedly specialize in it). They've long suffered from being one thing in the fluff (mostly pacifist priests who's duty is to be the link between humanity and the kami) and being an entirely different thing mechanically (D&D wizards).
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Jun 30, 2016 16:10
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Is there anything that stops a shugenja from wearing armor? I know they need a free hand for their scroll case, but hey good news, you can mechanically wield a katana one-handed no problem.
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Jun 30, 2016 20:04
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Dick Burglar posted:Is there anything that stops a shugenja from wearing armor? I know they need a free hand for their scroll case, but hey good news, you can mechanically wield a katana one-handed no problem. Only custom. This was semi-enforced in HoR3 mass combat in that anybody wearing armor is assumed to be a bushi and is killed, while shugenja not wearing armor would get captured instead. There may also have been an honor hit for breach of etiquette, I wasn't playing a shugenja.
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Jun 30, 2016 20:19
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Dick Burglar posted:Is there anything that stops a shugenja from wearing armor? I know they need a free hand for their scroll case, but hey good news, you can mechanically wield a katana one-handed no problem. I think Kuni sometimes wear light armor being practical Crab boys, but otherwise wearing armor just isn't done for social reasons. Not focusing on the strict social elements always seemed to be missing a lot of the point of L5R. I mean, if you want to just do D&D with samurai there are way better mechanical systems.
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Jul 1, 2016 05:00
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I think it's more that shugenja should have more social aspects, like, period. Honestly if I had a problem with L5R4 it's that the pidgonholing was pretty severe. Bushi for the most part got and only got upgrades to killing dudes in a skirmish (which is why Monkey is honestly my favorite bushi), shugenja didn't have anything to actually push their religious aspect, like, at all, and courtier abilities could end up being pretty esoteric and not always all that useful or relevant. Because of how skill masteries worked, you really weren't encouraged to have more then 1 in most skills; almost everyone probably wanted 3 courtier and 3 etiquette, but that was about it; from there on, it was all about traits.
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Jul 1, 2016 05:12
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Bear in mind I don't believe 4e ever explains what a shugenja is, or if it does, it never really goes into much detail. I can only guess new players work out what they are through implication rather than definition. And insight is a pretty bad legacy mechanic in my opinion. It was originally designed (as far as I can tell) to incentivize elements of character creation - mainly, having a broad base of skills and balanced rings. However, the math behind it was never that great, so they kludged in skill masteries in 3e to try and fix that issue (rather than, say, fixing insight) and then pulled out even that fix in 4e, returning us to a what's now nearly a 20-year old mechanic that heavily rewards system and math mastery and renders most starting characters amongst experienced players relatively homogenous. If I were to run L5R right now I'd definitely do things differently.
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Jul 1, 2016 09:15
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Honestly if I were to rework insight I'd just do it much like Legends of the Wulin: when you have spent Nxp, you advance to rank X. Bam, no more worrying about thrice-derived stats and trying to spreadsheet out your insight:stats:xp ratios.
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Jul 2, 2016 21:08
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Seems there is a sale on a good number of PDFs until the 29th: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/6/Fantasy-Flight-Games?filters=0_0_10109_0_0
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Jul 24, 2016 05:42
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KO Derf posted:Seems there is a sale on a good number of PDFs until the 29th: I guess now is as good a time as any to get the few 4th edition pdfs I don't already have. I really hate that Atlas of Rokugon was the book I wanted for years that I may never get.
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Jul 24, 2016 06:45
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Also the whole of The Blackest Storm card set got posted in the L5R facebook page if you want to see Mantis get wrecked + some other stuff
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Jul 24, 2016 13:15
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PrinnySquadron posted:Also the whole of The Blackest Storm card set got posted in the L5R facebook page if you want to see Mantis get wrecked + some other stuff Not seeing it. Link?
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Jul 24, 2016 17:52
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