October Update: Set Restoration, Errata, and CRIII Information

Hello, all! It's been a minute, I know. But we've been working on several things here, and I wanted to take a little bit to share some of those with you now. First, let's talk about Set Restoration, and what that actually means. When I say that, I'm referring to Rise of Jigoku, Road to Ruin, Rise of Otosan Uchi, Gathering Storms and Chaos Reigns Part 1. When our project decided to forego using AI art programs, these sets lost most, if not all of their art. While this was ultimately a necessary step, it's no secret these sets suffered a bit from this. While we haven't been able to fully put art onto these sets, it's been a long running project of mine in the background to try and get SOME of the more commonly used cards in these sets restored with some kind of art for our community. 

It's a long process, between spending hours searching publicly available stock art or 'creatively' trimming existing L5R art, making sure the best we can anything we use that can be attributed is, and that it's not from an AI program (an incredibly difficult task, as AI art has completely flooded and now dominates almost all stock art sources online). Nevertheless, we're making progress, and I hope to be able to update the Oracle with many of these soon. Chaos Reigns Part I we expect to be fully "art-ed" soon. 

If any artists wish to contribute or submit pieces from cards from these sets, we would be more than happy to discuss it with you, just reach out to us on our Discord channel.

In addition to restoring art, I don't mind saying we've learned a bit about the templating quirks of the program we use to make these cards, and we're also taking the opportunity to fix some of the more egregious 'text compression' issues with certain cards where we can, to make them more legible and generally more pleasant looking.

We are also making some minute tweaks to a few underperforming cards. This is technically errata, though in most cases it's 'should have been like this from the start' changes, such as giving Daidoji Akeha 'yojimbo' or making a slight PH adjustment to a card. A detailed list of these adjustment will be forthcoming when they are rolled out, but they will be relatively few in number and minor.

We do, however, have one ACTUAL mechanical errata, and that's to a card we feel is simply too much 'bang for its buck', so to speak, and has become too ubiquitous in an environment in which Favor control is such a prevalent element. While we debated on several potential changes, ultimately it was decided that making it Singular was the least intrusive adjustment that resolved the largest issues we had with this card's outsized impact on the environment. A database update will be forthcoming in the next week or so that implements this change.

Moving on to happier news, we are entering the tail end of playtest on Chaos Reigns, Part III and on track to release it hopefully towards the end of November, though I won't put an exact date on it just yet. It's a set full of things, both mechanically and story-wise, we hope the community will be excited about.

While we're not quite at the finalized state, I did want to leave you today with a trio of previews from CRIII, as well as one of the set's two promo cards. Thank you all for your continued support!