47 Ronin by Mike Richardson Stan Sakai

Dark Horse comics publishes a lot of non-superhero comics that I enjoy. Last year during the old 'Black Friday' bit, they have their annual half-off sale. I picked up the 47 Ronin in digital comic format. Written by Mike Richardson and illustrated by Stan Sakai, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

Mind you, that's not true in the art department. I've written about Stan Sakai and his long eared wandering ronin Usagi Yojimbo many times before. But Mike RIchardson wasn't as familiar to me. Still, it's a fairly well known historical tale, and Dark Horse's website is generally nice in that they often have a multiple page preview for all the digital comics they sell. Looking through those previews, I felt pretty secure that it would be a 'safe buy'.

And it was.

47 Ronin provides a much more grounded and historical version of events that Keanu Reeves recently brought back to theaters in a semi-fantasy, semi-westernized style.

Here there is no magic needed for the assault. Here there is no need for a half-breed of magical nature to assist in the taking of vengeance. Here there is no love story. Or at least no love story between a princess and her servant.

Instead we see 47 loyal ronin, loyal beyond all sense of the word, who are determined to avenge what they see as a wrongdoing to their lord regardless of the personal cost. This cost comes in many forms ranging from their personal honor, to their status that they could have had even as ronin. As they know this is a death sentence, it also costs those who decided to have families that opportunity to live outside their lord.

It's well told and takes its time. We see the general plan and the specifics that each character goes through. We see the fall from grace, we see the rise of a force capable of laying siege to a powerful merchant. We see the end result which is almost universally the same.

Mike Richardson did a fantastic job in the telling of 47 Ronin and I'll be keeping an eye out for anything else he does of this nature even as I wait for the next graphic novel of Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai, which according to Amazon, is a while in coming and is title, Usagi Yojimbo Volume 28: Red Scorpion.

All good and well said, but what does that have to do with role playing?

1. Lead by Example: One of the things I unfortunately see often as both a player and a GM, is that the GM has expectation X and the players have expectation Y. Sometimes this happens even after they talk about the concepts of the game. This generally happens a lot with superhero settings. Older readers often think that the games are going to reflect the comics where characters are generally law-abiding heroes who don't kill. Younger ones who grew up with Image in the 90's, or heck, even with movies, don't necessarily see anything wrong with massive property damage, lose of civilian life, or killing your enemies en mass. By providng material, either in movies or in other media, such as comics, the players and game master can have a clearer understanding of what they are expecting the game to actually play as. If someone said, "I want to play 47 Ronin" and meant the latest movie as opposed to someone who read the historical based comic, there would be some issues.

2. Lawful Villains have allies: Sometimes you just want to take your katana and strike a merchant dog down in the presence of the shogun. Well, that's not necessarily a good idea because that villain has a son married into a very powerful family and hey, even if he deserved to be struck down from behind like a dog, those other people aren't going to have their name, and their honor dragged through the mud. Their not going ot take the chance that someone will be sympathetic to the poor good guy's tale of woe and suffering. No, their going to buy that guy with every force at their disposal as quickly and inhumanely as possible. When designing your villains, don't forget their network.

This network may not even be one that they sought out. For example, a rogue elf may have a half elf son who feels determined to protect his father regardless of the cost and that half elf is married into a very powerful merchant family who can hire the most dangerous defenders and mercenaries in the land. In a fantasy RPG, that might even include assassins to hunt the players down before they get their bearings.

At that point, what would characters do? The source of their enemy's power isn't actually the enemy, but perhaps a non-evil individual who simply doesn't want to see his relative killed.

3. Suicide Mission: Sometimes you have to take one for the team. Sometimes the team has to take one for the boss. If there is absolutely no chance of winning, or at least living and winning, this should be something that is clear to the players at the start of the campaign. If the GM has poisoned the characters and they only have X amount of hours to live, a popular plot device, or that if the players going on with their course of action because that's what they're meant to do, such as say Rosach from the Watchmen, they should know ahead of time that it's death to do so.

This doesn't mean a bad role playing session though. It might be best for a one shot or a limited campaign, but there can be powerful action scenes, there can be allies gained and lost, there can be vast treasures gambled and earned. It's just your going to die.

Knowing that ahead of time may make some players bold. It may give them role playing opportunities that they've never engaged in before.

47 Ronin by Mike Richardson and Stan Sakai has a lot going for it and is well worth a read.

47 Ronin is available at Dark Horse over here in electronic format with the individual issues running about $3.99 each, each one with a preview, and is available from Amazon.com over here in hardcover format for $14.99, a $5.00 savings form the cover price.

For those who've read the Dark Horse comic, do you have a particular scene that stands out? A particular bit that you'd like to bring to your RPG?

For those who've read other accounts of the 47 Ronin, is there a particular version you'd recommend? I picked up two of them immediately after seeing the movie in kindle format, and have an old hardcover with other stories in it, as well an Osprey book I want to get to.

The 47 Ronin is a tale with a lot of elements to it that historically bears retelling in one form or another.

First Game of 2014: L5R

I may have mentioned that I don't play RPG's as much as I would like to and that one of my goals in 2014 was to play more.

I spoke with my buddies a few weeks ago and they were talking Iron Kingdoms. I was like well, I know the setting from the old d20 books and the table top game, but don't have any of the new stuff. No problem, come on by early and we'll hash something out.

Talked to them before coming over and bam! It'd be changed to Legend of the Five Rings by AEG .

This is what I'm talking about when I mention the inspiration part of movies, books, and comics. The fact that a group of these guys went to see the movie and were so entranced by it, by the sound track, the visuals, the scenery, the background, and themes, that they said, "You know, that game of Iron Kingdoms we were going to play? That we discussed? That the GM has been prepping for months? Yeah, screw that game. It's time to get my Samurai on!"

For me it was good because I've also been getting a samurai fix form Tim's Miniature Wargaming Blog where he's been posting about playing games of Ronin, a skirmish level miniature game by Osprey.

And man, I have the PDF. It's a huge thing being over 400 pages. And it's a gorgeous book. I really need to break down one day and buy the hardcover because while my Toshiba Thrive is still working, either I'm getting old and that 10.1 screen isn't doing it anymore, or more likely, like 99.9% of PDF's, it's the book with no regard given to being read in any other format than the print version.

Because it's so graphic heavy and so tight in text, it's not necessarily a pleasant experience reading it in standard format so you can increase the size of the text and make it easier on the eyes, but then it's not a page per 'sheet' or screen view if you will. That could just be me being crazy and suffering some OCD or something though.

Anyway, one of my friends did a Crane, another one a Dragon, another a Crab, and I picked Scorpion. We all picked Samurai, no courtiers or monks or ninjas or other weirdness.

Character creation wasn't bad. The whole five rings with four of them broken into two traits per ring and then the skills and schools and advantages and potential disadvantages took me less than an hour.

Speaking of disadvantages, in Legend of the Five Rings, how many people max those out? I didn't know if we were going to be playing again or what type of campaign it was going to be so didn't even bother with them and buffed up a few skills and picked a few advantages.

The GM ran something where we ran into the children of the emperor in a tavern full of semi-shady characters. There were some great interactions there with some notable NPC's and some people falling into the disadvantages like lechery or devoted to the spirits right away.

We followed along with the Emperor's children on a pilgrimage and well, long story short, two of the three were apparently killed, as were two of the players, in this case myself and +Sergio Rivera at the hands of +Tom Wright. I say apparently because the other players didn't stick around to see what happened, and while we were definitely outclassed, Legend of the Five Rings, at least story wise, has a long history of "No, that didn't actually happen see.", much like the old dime movies back in the day.

I've got a little less than a week to make my next character and I'm thinking of either another Scorpion or perhaps a ronin. The thing about ronin though, us unlike other game systems, unless it's changed dramatically, which it may, L5R is all about the clans so if you go ronin, you're really screwed at a character level.

Anyone have any Legend of the Five Rings advice out there? Any good sites I should be noting down and looking at? Help a poor man out here!

47 Ronin (Movie 2014 version)

So 2014 has started off pretty good for me. I finished a good book, knocked out a couple of miniatures, and even took my mom to see 47 Ronin with Keanu Reeves among others.

It was not what I thought it was. This may be because the advertising did the movie wrong. For example, if you look at the poster I've got up here, we've got some freaky looking dude with awesome tattoos. Yeah, he's in the movie for like five minutes at most. The ads that I saw for the movie, were heavy on the supernatural action. There is that, but it is well spaced, almost secondary to the whole gist of the movie, which is the based on the tale of the 47 Ronin. Which by the way is an amazon kindle book for like $2.99 in a few varieties.

For me, the movie has more than enough to make it enjoyable. The costumes are fantastic, the landscape is lush and inspiring, the soundtrack is great, the visuals are stunning. The fight scenes are well done with numerous pieces of action that could fit into several genres. The story or at least the themes and elements that make the story so well loved, are close enough to the original that Keanu's role for me at least, wasn't a major distraction.

I'll be discussing specific spoilers below so if you'd rather have none, read no further.

1. The Outcast. Keanu Reeves is the outcast character Kai, a 'half' breed who was left to die and taken in by Tengu and escaped them and served the Lord Asano.  Now that in and of itself may make some people groan that 'Kai' has too much spotlight but interestingly enough, the key things that COULD have made Keanu too overbearing, at least for me, are absent. For example, he is a loner, but that's because he is a social piranha. He has a specialized set of skills and knowledge, but for much of the film, those things are useless. He's a great fighter, but he gets stomped on by the champion of the enemy, who appears to be a giant suit of animated armor as we never see the actual person under it.

But outcasts are fun. Games are filled with them. It's been a while since I've played Legend of the Five Rings, but that was one of the few games I remember, at the time at least, that being a Ronin sucked. There wer mechanics built into the game that made it hard to keep up with the clan samurai if you weren't one of them.

And Kai is outcast in that way too. He is not samurai. HIs social status is low and while a retainer for the lord, and having the love of the lord's daughter, and even some friendship among the samurai, he is treated poorly by most of them and yet knows his social standing and what role his future will take if he stays there.

2. Good planning is rewarded. One of the things that surprised me a bit was that the plan of the Samurai, for the most part, goes fantastic until it comes time for the very end game itself at which point something goes wrong, but it goes right for so long I was like, "Man, are they going to just pull the whole thing off without a hitch?" The planning works well and if your players have great plans and ideas, those should be rewarded.

3. Mini-Quests: When the 47 Ronin lose their master, they disband save for Kai who for some reason, instead of being killed, is just sold into slavery. One of the first things the Ronin do when getting back together, is seek Kai for his help in dealing with the witch of the enemy. Kai is a slave on a dutch island filled with all sorts of crazy characters and is fighting for his life in a gladiator arena when first spotted against what might as well be an ogre. The escape from slavery is short but well acted with lots of swordplay and a dash of fire to give the pursuers something else to think about. But men with no masters have no right to say, bear arms, especially katanas, the soul of a samurai.

Kai however, raised by Tengu, has the solution in something he calls, if I'm not remembering wrong, the Forest of Swords where the Tengu will give the samurai a gift of katanas if they can pass a test. It's a quick jaunt and showcases some very interesting visuals on the Tengu here who do not appear to be the traditional versions I've seen, and it has something for both the 'mundanes' and for Keanu himself to do.

Heck, part of the problem some may have had is there is too much in the time frame and that there needed to be more bits and elements given here. If this had done well, perhaps we'd have seen a movie showcasing what Kai was doing in the dutch island as a slave, perhaps we'd get to see some more of the giant warrior or the pirate with all the tattoos. A lot of potential in all those great sets and costumes.

4. Rivals: Spider Man, Bat Man, and other super heroes, have their very own rogue's gallery. Many super heroes do. Many characters in Manga, like Goku do. They have that one enemy that keeps coming back and who keeps increasing their own power in order to either beat the other character or simply to be the best at what they do. I thought for sure that after Kai was curb stompped by the big armored samurai that there would be a rematch but nope, that sucker gets blown up by explosives. It's a great scene and reminds me at least, that not everything has to come to one on one combat.

47 Ronin may not fit everyone's bill. It veers a bit from the historical version. It's heavily advertised with fantasy elements but doesn't have a LOT of them in there but at the end, I enjoyed it.