L5R to AW: The Seven Thunders

I ran the AW hack at DexCon last weekend, and so I put together seven characters. The way they work is that each character has a list of moves off an archetype, such as bushi, shugenja, courtier, or monk. In addition, each character also has some moves they can buy from their school of training, like Hida bushi or Bayushi courtier. The school moves must be bought in order, you can't skip over Rank 2 & 3 to buy the Rank 4 move.

The Seven Thunders are advanced characters, so I let the players take seven advances. This made for some pretty kick-ass characters, but that was appropriate for the game. I also strategically highlighted each characters' best ring, in hopes of getting some good advancement in play, which we seemed to get. Our scenario played out nicely, very much like the canon story, thanks to the input from one of our players who knew the L5R lore backwards and forwards.

Combined with the basic move sheets I've already posted, you can pretty much make an L5R character with the material that's up on the blog now. If you pick a school that doesn't have any moves yet, you'd have to make your own. You will also see the characters from our regular home game below, who have some other schools, including the merchant archetype if you want to play a Yasuki. If there is a move or item that is different between the Seven Thunders and the home characters, use the Seven Thunders version, those are the tweaked ones based on play experience. On of the bushi moves, the Mountain Fall Upon You, has changed, as has katana damage.

The last piece is the the honor and love moves, which are included with the Thunders below. The new list of basic & advanced moves includes these, now. There have been some minor tweaks to these, especially in the Battle of Words move, now the Negotiate at Court move.

A tip for running this: offering a loss of face as a hard choice worked great, and made the players think really hard about what they were going to do. It's a powerful arrow in the MC quiver for this hack.

I'd love to see other people's take on this hack, if you come up with school moves, please post in comments or send PDFs directly to me for posting.

• New Basic Moves Reference (incl. staff, harm, honor, love, face, equipment, and advanced moves)
• The Seven Thunders
• Home Campaign Characters