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 a Nezumi player, who is unnamed.
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The Battle at the Tomb
“Several months ago, brave samurai set out with the Emerald Champion to ride to the aid of the Emperor, deep within the Shadowlands. Now Nezumi return with word that the contingent is pinned down at the legendary Tomb of the Seven Thunders. Oni and other vile creatures of the Shadowlands move against them while they struggle valiantly to defend the Emperor, who is still in seclusion within the Tomb. Worse yet, the Nezumi report a mass of Oni moving towards the area of the Tomb, and their force is strong enough to overcome the defenders. The Clans must react for the good of their Emperor.
“At the 2006 World Championships, the armies of the Clans arrive to do battle with the Oni, protecting their Emperor and allowing him to find the resolution of his quest. Will he find the Enlightenment he seeks, or will his quest end in failure as it did for his brothers? And what of the Lost, whose side will they take in this decisive battle? During the long battle, ten noble souls (each Top of Clan player) will be allowed entry into the Tomb. The Tomb will be physically represented at the World Championships, and within are artifacts of great power and mystery. Each player must privately choose the item they adopt for their Clan. While the proper choice can bring great power and glory, an improper choice may bring great peril. Will you choose to gain power for your Clan or deny another Clan their destiny? Seek the pieces of the map for guidance.”
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So I’m the frikkin’ World Champion!!! Squeeeek!
I almost cry at this time, but luckily I’m too tired and dehydrated to find the fluids to do so.
I get my arms thrown full of prizes by Colson and Salman and lots of people get pictures. (I need to see some of them!) Then they round people up to head over to the Tomb.
I got to enter it first, with my chosen second George. Pretty sweet deals to have a couple Nezumi enter a tomb full of loot first… The Tomb was this little room in the cellar of the bar, which they had nicely decorated with curtains and candles.
We are told to try and pick the item that we think belongs to our clan, as picking the wrong one spells disaster for the clan that takes it. Many items there are hella nice and shiny, but we both agree the Hourglass must be the one for us. Nezumi are always racing tomorrow, their concept of Death, and an hourglass represents time running out. I will make certain the sand in that glass will never stop flowing, I have constructed a tumbler that tumbles the glass when the weight shifts too much from top to bottom. I’ll post a picture as soon as I own a digicam.
After having had a good look at all the items there, we get out and the Crane enters. After everybody has had a peek, I enter alone to make my pick. As a semi serious joke, I pretend to be spitting in the Urn (which I thought contained Matsu’s ashes) but I don’t think anybody noticed. This is probably for the best, as Lion aren’t the kind that can take a little jest without doing a full on genocide a few centuries after the fact…
I pick the Hourglass and the event card that goes with it (again, pictures will be posted when the tools are found) and Shawn asks me if the Nezumi should stand at Destiny, or flee from it. I decide the Nezumi, while maybe not always courageous; have enough spirit to face whatever Destiny has in store for them. I just hope that event card (picture showing a very bright Dawn) means a good thing, and doesn’t spell such ominous things as the Hourglass…
After we show the items to the waiting crowd, we sit back and see the other clans either not showing their items (oh the suspense, it is killing me!) or having CLEARLY picked the wrong one (except Lion. Just hope they didn’t notice the imaginary spit…). I think the future of Rokugan might be full of swapping ancient artifacts by all sorts of ways
Either way, I am forced to say a swift goodbye to everybody and then leave, as the boys from my car are sick and tired of the fact I always make them wait until the finals are over.
I didn’t get to say goodbye to everyone I had liked to say goodbye to, so I’ll have to give those who I didn’t see one here: Until next time party people! ?
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The following text is from the L5R Wiki:
Artifacts of the Tomb of the Seven Thunders
The Nezumi Oh-krch found an hourglass. Oh'krch brought the hourglass back to a nearby warren where it was presented to the Chief of Chiefs Kan'ok'ticheck and the shaman Atch-zin. The two nezumi examined the hourglass, which caused a tingling sensation when touched. Atch-zin conluded that it was Tomorrow, and the hourglass was therefore called Tomorrow's Hourglass. Kan'ok'ticheck and Atch-zin both had a disturbing experience with the hourglass but would not tell what it was. The Magic of the Hourglass was used by the shaman Mak'irtch to allow almost the entire Nezumi race enter the realm of dreams and aid the Transcendents fight against Tomorrow. While they were successful in beating Tomorrow they were unable to return to their bodies, leaving no more than fifty Nezumi left alive in the world.
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From the L5R Discord:
Spookyelectric, 1/19/2024:
The short version is:
The Ratling faction caused a lot of headaches for CCG design team and for story prizes, since they had to be designed with a completely different philosophy than the other factions. So they sought to remove them as a faction from the setting entirely.
They got one last story prize to determine their ultimate fate as a consolation for the playerbase.
Basically that story prize determined how the final battle against Tomorrow went.
It occurs to me that some folks here might appreciate an extrapolation on why Ratlings were a design conundrum, and how the card game often drove the storyline and lore in unexpected ways.
So here I go:
So the backbone of the old card game was the so-called “Holding Economy.” Basically, every faction began the game with a Stronghold card that produced “gold,” your resource for buying stuff (later editions would also have players begin with 1-2 holdings in play). More often than not, the Stronghold produced 4 gold - for Lion it was 3, for Unicorn it was 5. Most holdings, which were your primary resource producers, would cost 2 gold and would produce 2 gold, with holdings costing more or less based on what they did. Often you had to decide if a holding would make you gold, or do a thing that advanced your goals. Importantly: gold did not go into a single “pool” — you could not split up what a single gold source paid for between multiple costs. This meant you were often “wasting” gold, as you were producing them in units of 2, and many things had odd-number costs.
The inherent inefficiency of the resources was, in fact, a purposeful design decision. Players would have to manage inefficient holdings and be willing to “waste” gold in the short term to get ahead later. Building some kind of economy engine within these limits, and making wise choices on what to spend your gold on, was an important skill being tested by the game.
Follow so far? Okay, here’s where things get weird. You could buy a Personality within your faction with a discount of 2 - so a Crane character with a cost of 7 was actually only 5 gold if you were playing out of a Crane Clan stronghold. Characters that could be bought ONLY with your stronghold were very efficient, but often at the cost that they didn’t do as much as high-costed personalities, and their stats weren’t as good. Most characters were designed to be bought with just their faction’s stronghold plus one holding, with the acceptance of a wasted gold. Characters would be costed more if they did more. That was the general cost philosophy.
Except for two factions: Shadowlands and Ratling.
Shadowlands was a huge problem because they weren’t actually a faction, and that alone really messed stuff up. But maybe I’ll talk about that later…
Ratling design was basically to be a swarm of low-costed characters that could all be bought from the stronghold alone. Their strongholds generally made 3 gold, but I recall there was a late stronghold that made 4. Their stronghold was also designed weird; they had less provinces for cards to come from, but made up for it by being almost double the province strength of the other factions, and also their strongholds literally made a free personality a turn.
In playtest, design missed a crucial flaw to this approach: you really didn’t need to run holdings. Thus where other decks had to find a balance between personalities and holdings, and could stall and get clogged with a bad shuffle, the Ratling’s entire deck could be just personalities. This, plus a few problem personalities, made the Ratlings *super efficient*. After a few sets, Ratling decks accounted for up to 1/3rd of all competitive decks in the environment. There were more ratling players in tournaments, and they were all winning the events.
Which meant they were winning all the story prizes.
This also meant that Ratlings had to be shoehorned into every story where they won a prize. A story about samurai slowly became a story about Ratlings. They had to get their own storylines, totally separate from the greater story, in order to keep from ripping the spotlight from the game being marketed. But they still had to be featured, because that was only fair - Ratlings was a faction allowed in tournaments, and it’s not the players’ fault that they don’t fit into the story! But this ultimately meant a huge headache for Story Team - we had 55 fictions a year, and we had to tell TWO storylines concurrently - one for Ratlings and one for samurai - without slighting either side. That’s why stories from that era are glutted with Ratling stories that don’t ultimately matter for the metaplot - which, frankly, isn’t fair to anyone.
So this, plus the problem they created for Design (Design never did get a handle on how to solve the problem without just making them a Great Clan faction, which they weren’t really willing to do for flavor reasons), meant they had to be axed. Squeak squeak.
…And thank you for coming to my TED talk.