From the L5R Discord:
The Itsy Bitsy Spider - 11/14/2019
Around the end of Ivory editon, right before the game was sold to FFG there was a season where "the coming darkness" was going to sweep over the empire. Clans, if they won a kotei, were able to chose something Iconic in the empire and save or steal it in the madness that was about to happen.
The options were:
1) Save the icon for your clan
2) Save an icon of another clan for them to strengthen them
3) Save and icon of another clan antagonistically for themselves (essentially stealing it)
4) Spider only option of dooming an icon to be lost to the darkness entirely, flat out fucking it up
Now Iconic was not always physical, examples of Iconic could be say, The Kakita technique, the Carpenter Wall, Dragon's Tattoo art, The ideology of pacifism for the Phoenix, the Wall of the Crab, the stables of the Utaku... basically, ANYTHING that was iconic could be chosen.
This made the community nervous, as it felt like the defining things of their clans were at risk. So going into this most people were all about saving their shit.
So here's the deal, at the time the best clans in the game were Unicorn, Mantis, Scorpion, then everyone else, then spider but I'll get to them later.
So Unicorn was all about saving their shit, also saving some dragon stuff and so on. They were fine. Crab was desperate to get a win as the only Icon they REALLY needed to save was the WALL. Which they managed to do early and then were kinda fine, like a crab would be. The point was that the "kotei season was usually about two months with 2-4 events firing globally every week, so it was exciting to see what was saved and what wasn't each sunday.
The first week was clans saving their own stuff or helping other clans. Nice and wholesome.
Next week however... Mantis and Scorpion got into a spat, and it led to a Mantis winning a Kotei and choosing to STEAL the School of the Bitter Lies from the scorpion. The community suddenly exploded, they cant just do that right? AEG simply nodded their heads and jotted it down for the future. The reality that clans can just TAKE shit from other clans settled in, shit got serious. The scorpion next week responded in kind, declaring they would steal the secrets of the Wasp Clan's Longbow from the mantis.
NOW it was war.
Mantis was ready and fired back, winning an event and claiming that the Mantis will avenge Aramoro and reclaim his ashes by burning down the Traitor's Grove, with lots of talk of building a ship from the wood of Scorpion traitors. This was a grievous blow, that brought levels of salt unimaginable to the Scorpion.
A post was made the next week by a couple scorpion players who were detailing bounties of real world money to players of other clans to steal Mantis shit, targeting a bunch of Mantis' stuff, and a 750$ bounty of the Shrine of Yoritomo, a sacred statue, one of the Mantis' few truly sacred places and it was for a Spider to corrupt it.
Now... Spider was bad in the actual card game, like REALLY bad, like "hadn't won a Kotei in 2 years" bad. You think the Lion are bad, the Spider make them look like champions. Spider literally lost the game by playing their own cards
So no one expected Spider to win anything, and if they did win anything they would probably use it to save the one or two things they need to protect.
The impossible happened, Spider actually won a kotei. Now, at this point the Crab Kaiu Wall had been saved, the crab were smart to gun for it first. So with a smile on their face they announced that they would corrupt the statue of Yoritomo. Shit got HEAVY. But Mantis took their loss with pride, they understood the desire for payday, they would have done the same if they were in the situation.
Mantis then responded by both stealing the Ancestral Sword of the Hantei from the Spider antagonistically, but then saving the Spider discipline of Shourido to draw the clans together the same weekend, a kind of way to smooth the tension.
Since those were both the BIG things Spider players were worried about, they loved it. Who cares if Mantis stole the sword for the time being, at least its saved.
Then the impossible happened again, Spider won another TWO events, and since mantis was nice enough to save their shit for the time being... the Spider turned on the Scorpion and took a bounty from the mantis to corrupted the Shosuro ninja school, but also saved the City of the Rich Frog.
This was another moment the fanbase exploded. The loss of a statue was one thing, the corruption of one of Scorpion's most iconic aspects was another, but the saving of the Rich Frog seemed to settle any bad will (for now). At this point Crane saved the Spider's Susumu Courtier school, just to keep good tiding between them and the spider humorously. But for the most part the damage had been done.
So the final score was: Mantis stole the Bitter Lies, burned traitors grove and saved Shourido and the Hantei sword Scorpion stole the Wasp techniques, defiled the most sacred site of the Mantis and had the Rich Frog Saved Spider had the Sword, Shourido and the Susumu saved and Corrupted their rival ninja school , statue got fucking paid for it.
This led to some awesome fictions, where in a band of Scorpion Ninja sneak into the Wasp Castle, steal the secrets of their archery only to be attacked by the Bitterlies, who had been hired to defend the castle while the Wasp were out dealing with a matter. One scorpion ninja survives with the secrets, cursing their own clan mates among the bitterlies for slaughtering his comrades.
Then a fiction where in traitors grove burns, and a bitter scorpion pays a shadowlands monster to summon a tidal wave of skeletons to tear the statue of divine yoritomo to pieces.
Then a fiction of Daigotsu Kanpeki meeting with the Mantis, to decide how to punish them for stealing his sword and birthright, only to let them keep it when he sees that the Mantis are adopting the principals of Shourido, instead allowing the Mantis to hold the blade in return for Spider raising a generation of Mantis to be Shourido, not Bushido students. all of this happens in the City of the Rich frog, a city so fuled by ambition and selfishness that Kanpeki promises that, should he ever decide to destroy this empire, all would burn except this city, in honor of what it represents.
It was a hell of a ride and led to some awesome online banter and a bunch of salt. Mantis and Scorpion warred with one another while the Spider watched and fed into the conflict, profiting ultimately from both sides.
The Itsy Bitsy Spider - 01/11/2019
Then, about three months after that the announcement that the game was sold came out. So know that even till the bitter end the CCG was making drama and stories.