New Fiction Available:
"A Better Fate"

One such glimpse was born when our Design Team was reviewing the list of unresolved prizes, and we came across a Stronghold Store event from Philadelphia held in early 2015. The winner got to choose a flavor keyword to be put onto a card, and the winner, David Lapp, chose "Tanuki Clan Champion". The reaction from Jeremy (Sumerlin) was "what is the Tanuki Clan's deal?", and I explained that it was the fellowship of Philadelphia-area L5R players who called themselves that in solidarity, and held annual tournaments ("TanukiFest") with associated social gathering. A fan group, in other words, looking to obtain some screen time.

We also had an unusual Stronghold Store win from Paris asking for a character to be created with ties to "Shiro Tanuki". The nature of the character made for some unusual juxtaposition, but the more we talked about it behind the scenes, the more we acknowledged there were solid story hooks there we could weave into something interesting.

The first hint of what we were crafting was flavor text we slipped onto a Follower card in Rise of Otosan Uchi, Band of Survivors. The "Tanuki Clan" would not be a true clan, Great, Minor, or even forgotten; instead, it would be a group within Kanpeki's Rokugan, a resistance against the new regime, with members from any or all clans.

The breakthrough for us was electing to make David Lapp's "Tanuki Clan Champion" as "Bayushi Waietto". His proxy personality in the game was the card Bayushi Jinn-Ja, and he and his wife Christine had just recently had their first child, Wyatt. We created Waietto specifically as the son of Jinn-ja, who would lead the "Tanuki Clan" out of his dead father's lands. When we approached David with this concept, he loved the idea, and gave us what would be our first art contribution to our project: a piece commissioned from L5R artist Troy Graham, which was originally supposed to be of Jinn-ja.

We name-drop a couple of others in the new fiction linked in this post, the second installment in our "Scenes from the Shattered Empire" vignettes which tie into Gates of Tengoku. Also mentioned is the other storyline prize, who appears in multiple new cards' artwork as seen in our post about Nathan Arches last week. We ultimately elected to implement this character as a Sensei card, to represent mechanically the coalition concept behind the Tanuki.