Design Diaries: Onyx Remastered:
Rani Sensei - Unicorn Death Priests
by Jeff Williamson
August 11, 2023
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Design Diaries: Onyx Remastered:
Welcome to Onyx Remastered Week, Day 4! We've re-templated and, in some cases, retooled nearly 1/4 of the original Onyx Edition cards as a result of playtest feedback and other considerations, as part of the Onyx Lives! project. This week, we will be discussing themes supported by sensei cards in Onyx itself, and how several of them have changed from their original forms over time. Today, it's Rokugan's own Goth kids, the Moto Death Priests.
Rani Sensei was designed for the Unicorn Death Priest theme which had been decided on for Onyx Edition back in 2015. The sensei itself has largely remained intact since its original form, but the theme has received a bit of an overhaul. First, the theme's Personality base was designed as Earth Shugenja, an odd choice considering the last round of Death Priests (Ivory Edition / Akikazu Sensei) was designed around Water Shugenja. This limited the amount of expansion pre-seeding the theme would receive, and meant we were sharing space with Wataru Sensei for Earth spells throughout Onyx. Given that the theme had had design and card selection baked in since 2015, we elected to roll with it. The Sensei itself offers guidance on the direction of the theme, turning your discarded Personalities into a dead pile, to trigger other abilities.
The original version of the theme used those dead Personalities as resources to fuel abilities or kickers. Feedback we received in current playtest, however, indicated that they had little means of winning battles reliably, which was a bad situation for a clearly military deck, and that the dead pile was a limited resource and the abilities were counterproductive to the Fear kicker on the sensei. While we were using dead Personalities as fuel, they did not necessarily need to be our own -- in fact, the Lords of Death do not discriminate -- so perhaps some of these abilities should work against the opponent as well.
Rani Sensei (Onyx Edition): most recent digital update
The design pivot came via that realization, and a card which started life in the Road to Ruin set as [Firmament Becomes Heaven] -- now The Relentless Earth. This was one of my first spell designs for L5R, and it was an intentional throwback to the popular Earth Becomes Sky, with an updated sensibility of "spells can grant Force" and a theme-based kicker for the action shutdown. We had been having a Design discussion around "convert souls to weaponry" in spell form, and the inspiration hit: what if the Earth element used by the Death Priests were centered around "Earth as weight/wounds/erosion"? Rather than temporary Force penalties, the longer you fought against the Death Priest deck, the more worn down you would become. The "souls to weaponry" spell became The Soul's Forge, which was featured in our RtR Unicorn post last month. We also designed a cornerstone card for the theme, Cracks Appear, featured in the same post.
The Personality base needed some tweaking, and we redesigned multiple cards in the pipeline to assist with the new focus. In the base set, the shugenja have a generic feel overall, but Moto Nergui, the theme unique, was a little off. She began with a "mutually assured destruction" action which looked good on paper, but in practice was clunky — Unicorn, paying the "Cavalry tax" on Personality costs, generally could not afford the mutual sacrifice as well as many other decks. Nergui's redesign is more passive, but can be a substantial accelerator for the deck's "erosion" sensibilities, with an ability which can encourage stacking penalties. Moto Maral (Rise of Jigoku, previously featured) and Moto Khedai (RoJ) both were retooled to support this, and to encourage more banishing from discard piles in general -- we had introduced a substantial amount of recursion in Onyx, including the (functionally useless for Death Priests) Duty keyword, and having some checks on that was a good thing.
Moto Ajinai (RtR) was a base-level Personality with a solid new keyword (Renew) and some built-in support, and the spell Earth's Yearning Clasp (RoJ) was also designed for theme -- like The Soul's Forge, it has a useful spell action with a banish effect, which gets better if you "use your own fuel".
The final form of the theme is changed considerably from its original, but the feedback since the changes has been largely positive. Ironically, this now means that both Unicorn themes are based around Force penalties, but hopefully in ways which feel thematically different and interesting to play.
PLEASE PARDON OUR DUST
This article originally appeared on Facebook as a work-in-progress description of changes made during our initial Onyx Lives! design phases. The information in it may be outdated, but it is presented here as part of an ongoing attempt to consolidate all of the various public writings we have made along the way.
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