The Empire of the Rising Sun (3.5e Campaign Setting)/About
What Do I Intend to do Here[edit]
Okay, so the following is very likely to be a rant about several different things, notably Oriental Adventures and Rokugan and stuff like that. Mainly I'm going to discuss what in the crap I'm trying to do with this campaign setting while lambasting OA and the ridiculous amounts of Rokugan books.
Let's start off simple: Oriental Adventures was awesome. Well, at least as far as flavor text goes. And most, if not all, of the spells are interesting and very well flavored for an Eastern campaign setting. Despite all this, it's still not that good of a sourcebook. Why? Well, it mostly comes down to two reasons: It uses 3e and thus is very outdated, and about a fourth of the book deals exclusively with setting up the Rokugan campaign setting for DnD.
This focus on Rokugan and Legend of the Five Rings is even more annoying when you look at it and figure out how obtuse it is. The main focus is on humans, who are divided up into clans. However, the clans basically separate groups into archetypes: you have a warrior clan, a mage clan, an aesthetic clan, a ninja clan, a pirate clan, a barbarian/cavalry clan, and a clan that smashes things. All are very clear archetypes that, while kind of cool, detract from one of the coolest parts of Dungeons and Dragons: unique, awesome characters.
As if that weren't enough, an entire book dedicated to a DnD Rokugan campaign setting was published, essentially overriding the end section of OA that introduced the Rokugan setting, but, you still need OA for spells, some prestige classes, feats, and monsters. Even worse, there are eight-teen books that spinoff of Rokugan (not counting OA, the Rokugan Campaign Setting, and an adventure). That's just ridiculous. And some of the information in the later books overrides stuff you learned about in the earlier ones, making it very annoying to switch from book to book (which you're going to have to do if you intend to play under the campaign setting).
As far as I see it, the Rokugan DnD setting was full of awesome ideas that failed in execution. Taint, ancestors, dojos, and katas were all interesting, original, but ultimately confusing due to being spread out across several books and adding unnecessary bookkeeping. It is my hope that with this campaign setting, I can rectify the bad parts and make something cool.
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