Emerald Chronicles Character Creation

Emerald Chronicles Character Creation Rules

A character for Emerald Chronicles should be made with the consideration that your character is an Emerald Magistrate, a samurai tasked to serve the Emperor’s interest throughout the whole of Rokugan. While you do not have to play as a perfectly honorable or kind samurai, you should be playing one that is capable of cooperating with PCs and NPCs of other clans than your own, and generally work to serve the good of the Empire.

The most important book for our players to own is the core Legend of the Five Rings 5th Edition Rulebook. The rules for playing samurai of the great clans and the majority of techniques and equipment are located in this book. You may also wish to use player options from Emerald Empire, Shadowlands, Courts of Stone, Path of Waves, and the upcoming Fields of Victory, in which case you should also look into purchasing those books. All books are available from Fantasy Flight Games’ official store or DriveThruRPG in PDF form.

Characters are created with the standard Game of Twenty Questions format explained in the Core Rulebook. Keep in mind the following however:

• When beginning working on your character, contact one of the GMs to build your character with, based on what storylines you are most interested in playing in.
• There are certain character options that require explicit permission from the TO to use for your character.
  • Playing a character from the Imperial Families is an option that is easy to abuse to attempt to push other players around. You’ll have to present a character concept to Larry before being approved to sit down with an Imperial player character.
  • Playing a character of gaijin origin can be somewhat difficult to manage all around due to the discrimination gaijin face in most of the Empire.  If you wish to play a gaijin, you should talk to Selene, as her storyline is most appropriate for gaijin characters.
  • Taking any of the Shadowlands Taint adversities is a very dangerous choice as a player character and should not be taken lightly. Being tainted has numerous narrative consequences we wish to discuss with players before they make such a choice. Frank and Larry are the people to talk to about this
  • Learning Mahō techniques is not something that is easily done nor recommended. Using Mahō is likely to cause your character to take on Shadowlands Taint, which can in turn lead to losing your character. Practicing Mahō is a crime punishable by death in Rokugan, one that nobody is exempt from. As such, these techniques can only be learned if a GM offers the opportunity to learn these techniques during play, and are otherwise off limits.
• Character’s receive a stipend of koku equivalent to their family’s starting koku at the beginning of each month of play.
• Characters receive a minimum of 5 XP per week, and can receive up to a maximum of 30 XP per month.