Gates of Tengoku Previews: Conclaves of Light and Dark

One of the first groups of tournament wins we ever started discussing for what would become the Gates of Tengoku expansion were the Light and Dark Oracles. A series of tournaments in the autumn of 2014 were held at locations worldwide for the winners to determine which characters from their clans would take on the mantle of their event's named Oracle (or Dark Oracle). All of this led originally to the Maxime Lemaire/C. Thomas Hand fiction sharing a title with this article, where the individual choices made would affect how the Empire received and responded to the prophecies in the lead-up to the events of the Onyx timeline.

When creating these as cards, we took several things into consideration: first, that these would be Holding cards, such as most of the previous Oracle iterations. Second, that those Holding cards would still reflect the named Personality choices of the winners. This was easy enough to accomplish with the subtitle keyword text which had become more commonplace in Ivory Edition and onwards. Third, that they should have a unified and unique appearance.

To that end, we modeled the look of these cards after the Gold Edition versions of the Oracles, which had a striking framing unique to those cards in particular. Each frame had a smaller, portrait-style art piece for the character, flanked on the left by an element icon representing the Oracle. Such frames did not exist in the modern L5R assets we had at our disposal, so we needed to make them ourselves with the assets we had on hand.

The result for the light Oracles is the clean, parchment-style field on which a bright version of the element icon is positioned, as seen below. Note also the other Brent Morgan art piece promised in yesterday's previews, for our Oracle of Fire, Kakita Ibara.

Additionally, the Dark Oracles should follow similar templating, though where the Gold-era versions used a very flat black icon and made subtle coloration changes to the element bordering on the frame , we wanted something a little more. Here, you see the darkening parchment and the tarnished elemental icon, representing the stain of corruption they bring. Within the Dark Oracles, we have another new art piece by Jonny Hinkle, for our Dark Oracle of Earth, The Broken Man. Those of you who have been following the Onyx fictions may recognize our Dark Oracle of Water from his appearance in the story "Stealing Thunder", though he is never formally named.

As always, any of these without new art is open for community contribution, though we do have a piece pending for the Dark Oracle of Air.

Finally, the designs. Our primary goal for each of these would be that having the Oracle in play would ostensibly make it easier to play its corresponding Ring. The Oracle of Air, for example, gives you access to an additional Favor action you can use on the same turn, while the Dark Oracle of Fire lets you destroy your own Personality for its effect, getting you halfway to the play condition for the corresponding Ring. While not making their Rings auto-plays, they would help the Enlightenment (or Endarkenment) victory conditions along in their own way.

We hope that with the final designs, you are tempted to include some of these in decks, depending on your play style. The Gold-era Oracle suite, unfortunately, suffered from high costs and no Gold production, and were hardly considered at all during their time.

With this set of eight cards, the Holdings for GoT are now fully revealed -- you may understand why we avoided adding any others, with fifteen(!) new Uniques in this set. Please look forward to even more previews to come.