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The Birth of
From the L5R Discord:
The Itsy Bitsy Spider - 02/20/2019
Long story short: the Nothing (where evil ninja come from) was attempting to destroy reality, armies of the past and present marched against the Nothing's forces and a tournament would determine which clan had a member of their faction save the day and deal the final blow to the Nothing.
Phoenix won, that's not the interesting part though, HOW phoenix won was the interesting part. See, Phoenix had a stronghold at the time that was from a previous story arc where they were corrupted, so the stronghold allowed them to basically reduce the cost of a shugenja they play, but it comes into play with the "Shadowlands" keyword.
In the finals of the tournament, the phoenix player was fighting the Nothing player, tensions were high, and won the event on the last turn by buying the Air Dragon. Now the Air Dragon is a divine being, but ALSO had the shugenja keyword so it could perform spells. The Dragon was incredibly expensive so the player had to use the stronghold to give the Air Dragon Shadowlands, corrupting it, but its presence was detrimental to the victory over the Nothing.
When the story was written, the story involved the Air Dragon carrying a Phoenix Shugenja into the heart of the Nothing to defeat it, protecting the shugenja's ritual with its own life and as the nothing was being defeated, corrupted the Air Dragon itself, turning it into the Shadow dragon, one of the game's more iconic villains. It was entirely made by the actions caused by the players. It was printed onto The Deciding Moment, a card that has had some of L5R's most iconic moments attached.
The following text is taken from the Kolat Informer (the website itself claimed to have "taken" the report from Dr. Zen Faulkes' Steel and Iron website). It claims to be a report from Justin Walsh, the Phoenix player. The tournament takes place during the "Battle at Oblivion's Gate".
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Round 5 vs Vu, Spawning Pits PD
I went first. The first card I turned over was Hochiu. Fair enough. Next the Air Dragon. Not good. Next Taeruko. Much better. Then Inheritance. I looked up at my opponent, praying that I didn’t hear the word ‘Avoid’, but he waved me to play on. I Hantei’d him for Portents. In response, he named Kitsuki Kaagi’s Journal. Both people up, up to ten honour.
Taeruko fetched in his turn, which was a disaster for him, as he only got 4gc onis and a Shadowlands Marsh, and then the big decision. I had two portents in my hand. I could bring up a dark Dragon. But that went against the manner I had played in up till now. However, it would certainly turn the game, potentially preventing a Shadowlands victory in Jigoku, and saving the Empire’s armies there.
I turned to my second, and asked him ‘Is it honourable to corrupt a Dragon in order to destroy the Shadowlands?’ He pondered for a few seconds, then said ‘Yes’.
I fetched with Taeruko, brought up a caravan. Then I brought the Dragon in corrupt. His turn yielded nothing but gold. Vu was upset, and understandably so. He brought up his stuff, and gave me the table. The rest of the game went quickly.
The Dragon took two provinces with Portents, only to be killed by a second Kolat Assassin, the first having murdered Raigen. I got the sword onto one of the three Hochius I had brought out, one other having died to kill The Nameless One, whose soul now resembled the twisted shell in which it resided.
The third Hochiu ambushed Jama Suru the turn after the Water Dragon had hit the table, removing his only defender by bowing him in a duel, resulting in mutual death. Vu dishonoured the Water Dragon with Dark Lords Favor. I assigned to battle, rehonoured the Dragon and destroyed the final Horde Province. The final had been a real anti-climax, having been horribly one-sided. But such is fickle luck. :(
There has been a lot of controversy over whether this deck is corrupt or not. Having taken a look at a lot of the posts on the subject, the argument, I think, seems to come down very much to the spirit of corruption against the definition of corruption. If you wish to choose the definition of corruption, then the deck is not corrupt, as it features no Shadowlands or Ninja cards. However, as the more interesting and contested area is the spirit of corruption, that’s the area I’ll concentrate on.
First up: the Kolat. Kolats are bad, as we all know. They all have dash honour requirements, their actions cause honour losses, and Toturi the first doesn’t like them at all. On the other hand, the Kolat have been fighting an underground war against the Shadow for centuries, and are at the very least indirectly responsible for averting the Shadow from a complete victory.
So how do you weigh up the relative merits (and demerits) of Kolat cards? Kolat Master is considered a ‘bad’ card: it causes an honour loss. However, Isawa Osugi, a Kolat agent and author of the False Tao gets you four honour when brought in for full. Both are parts of the Kolat, yet produce radically different effects in the game, practically opposite effects. Admittedly, Osugi does not have the Kolat trait for game mechanics, but as that area of argument yields a non-corrupt deck by those rules, it is not an area that is really relevant. In the milieu of the story, both are as heroic, or reprehensible, as each other, depending on which side of the fence you are on. Similarly, there is Shiba Gensui. A Kolat Agent, but one who has fought the Shadow well. So how do you judge how honourable an individual or an action is?
Honour
Honour, from what I have gathered and pondered about, is an approach to life dictating that the means justify the end. The rules are everything, without them there is nothing. This contrasts with the outlook of other groups within the Empire, that being, unsurprisingly, that the end justifies the means. This is the case with the Kolat, certainly the case with the Crab Clan, and I would also hazard that it is the fundamental approach of the Phoenix Clan as well. As much, if not more in certain ways, the Phoenix are as pragmatic as the Crab. When Fu Leng returned, the Phoenix took it upon themselves to locate the Black Scrolls to divine as much as possible from them about the enemies the Empire faced, full knowing the price their clan might pay. What good is honour if there is no Empire to bear it? This is certainly my take on the philosophy of the Phoenix, and it is the philosophy that guides my deckbuilding for storyline tournaments.
I realize, of course, that this may not run concurrently with other people’s idea of the Phoenix. In particular, I refer to the oft quoted ‘Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil’ from the Shiba War Banner. With my Shiba hat on, so to speak, this holds absolutely true to the family’s ideals. As an Isawa, I can find little more preposterous. Evil is a relative term used to describe the things that hurt us, and while notions of good and evil are strong socializing forces, ultimately, there is only power. Notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘honour’ and ‘corruption’ can only exist and grow, essentially as luxuries, in an established area of power, the Empire. There are times when ‘honour’ and ‘good’ are weaknesses that can kill, and in this storyline, I wanted, and needed, from a more practical point of view, to represent that ambiguity, an ambiguity which, for me, defines what it is I love most about the Phoenix (and the Crab).
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The following text is from the L5R Wiki:
At the Battle of Oblivion's Gate in 1133, the Dragon of Air allowed itself to become corrupted so that Master of Fire Isawa Hochiu could reach the Master of Darkness, Goju Adorai. Yet as the dragon entered the Volturnum inner city, the Dragon's eternal light began to fade, drifting into nothingness as the Taint took its toll. When it passed through the archway of a coliseum where the Oblivion's Gate was, a dragon, no longer of air, but of ash and shadow appeared; only the emerald eyes were unchanged. ...
When Hitomi named the Lying Darkness and destroyed it, the Dragon of Air was dying, severed from the Heavens by its direct intervention in human troubles, badly injured by its passage through Volturnum, [3] and corrupted by the Shadowlands Taint. Twisted by the touch of Fu Leng, the Air Dragon became a thing of darkness, spite and Shadow. ...
Though greatly diminished by the powers of Lady Moon and the death of his mortal form slain by Hochiu, Goju Adorai, the original Goju, still commanded a scrap of the Lying Darkness' power. The Air Dragon saw a small sliver of Nothing escaping, which in time would lead in the return of the Lying Darkness entity. The Dragon swallowed it and became the heir to the Lying Darkness, the Shadow Dragon, wielding the power of the Taint and Nothing. So long as it survived the Lying Darkness could never truly return. The Shadow Dragon became the new Master of Darkness, the avatar of Nothing in the Spirit Realms. Every action it took was slanted, directly or indirectly, toward the eventual destruction of creation. The Dragon itself might not realize this, and its unstoppable process of corruption might take centuries. However, someday, the Nothing would prevail and consume the Shadow Dragon completely.
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