The land of Rokugan is under siege from all sides. Intrigue lurks around every corner as the seven Great Clans compete for superiority. Danger threatens the land from natural calamities and celestial inteference both. Caught between all of this is you, an honorable samurai of the Emerald Empire. The first steps into adventure are yours to take—but what awaits you in the mystical land of Rokugan? Adventure? Horror? Romance? All this and more arrive in the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game.

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Beta is available now, and can be downloaded here!

Adventure Awaits

The Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game is a game of samurai drama, drawing inspiration from real world literature and history and taking place in the fictional land of Rokugan. Characters are torn between their personal desires and their sworn duties, and must often contend with cunning court intrigues, deadly armed conflicts, and dangerous supernatural creatures.

In the game, each player takes on the role of an individual samurai whose honor and loyalty will be put to the test through adventures featuring suspense, romance, action, and more. All the while, you must grapple with your human emotions and choose between following your heart’s desire or doing what society—and the code of Bushidō—demands of you. These personal stories of triumph and tragedy will reverberate across the Emerald Empire and shape the very future of Rokugan.

The Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game provides players and Game Masters with the tools to tell stories of samurai drama within the Emerald Empire. The game contains rules for creating characters sworn to one of the seven Great Clans and running game sessions filled with intrigue and conflict. A wide variety of skills, techniques, passions, flaws, and more allow players to customize their character mechanically and narratively. And the fantastical feudal setting of Rokugan provides a rich tapestry of majesty and wonder where these stories can unfold.

The Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game employs custom dice, but it uses a system completely unique from the Narrative Dice System employed by Genesys and the Star Wars™ Roleplaying Games. The Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game revolves around a concept from previous editions called roll and keep, now using unique custom dice. When attempting to have their character resolve a task in the story, a player rolls a number of dice and then chooses and keeps a number of these dice. This activity (rolling and keeping dice to see the consequences of a character’s effort) is called a check. Only kept dice are resolved, which gives the player the strategic opportunity to decide which symbols will make for the best story. Many die faces contain both positive and negative outcomes together, and a player must decide if the benefits of keeping that die outweigh the costs—greater success may cost more than you are willing to bear.

A Warrior's Weapon

The dice used for the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game are unique in nature, using custom symbols. While the beta contains a conversion chart that allows you to use standard six-sided and twelve-sided dice for checks, Fantasy Flight Games has also created a dice app which can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play! The app features a standard set of dice as well as the custom dice featured in the game, inviting you to perform checks with just the click of a few buttons!

The Legend of the Five Ring Roleplaying Game Beta gives players everything they need to start running adventures in the world of Rokugan. Though it does not contain the full contents and character options of the future release, it has more than enough for you to begin roleplaying in Rokugan. You can download the beta here, and sign up for our mailing list here! After providing an email address for our mailing list, the Legend of the Five Rings development team will send out surveys every other week for players to provide feedback and distill their experiences in the world of Rokugan. This feedback will be read and taken into account when creating the final product, giving you a chance to influence what roleplaying in Rokugan looks like!

The First Steps

If you want more information on Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game, be sure to sign up for our mailing list located here. The emails you receive will feature information on Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game development and updates on how the beta is progressing.