Earlier I shared with you my alternate time-line for L5R. Now I would like to talk a bit about how it is working out.
The players are all young samurai (courtier, shugenja and bushi) that for one reason or the other had been sent to the capital to serve in a military unit. The guntai consist of 20 samurai, a nikutai and a gunsho. I wanted to establish internal rivalry in the group so that the playing characters would all compete against each other for rank. So the guntai was split into five gumi, and the PC's are all in the same one. The rank among them was very tangible as each samurai was given duties inside the guntais head quarters according to their rank. From lowest to highest the duties are cleaning, supplies, armory, guard, and finally the gumi-cho (leader).
Did it work? Not at once. The first 5 session or so there was no changes in the hierarchy among the players, even though there were several changes in the other gumi. However, when it was time to make the first changes it bloomed. One of the other gumi had suffered some losses, and one of the playing characters decided that this was his opportunity to advance. At the moment he was on armory duty. He convinced his gumi-cho to promote the samurai one step above him (guard duty) to gumi-cho for a different gumi, hoping that he again would be promoted from armory to guard to fill the now vacant position. His effort was rewarded, and he got his promotion. Then the fun begun... The gumi-cho didn't promote the supply samurai to fill the armory, he instead promoted the lower cleaning ronin to that position. The samurai on supply duty that had been looking forward to moving up to armory was furious, especially when her servants had to perform the ronins cleaning duties.
Another thing I wanted to test was if I could run several sessions in close quarter. The first 4-6 session was almost entirely played out within the headquarter for the guntai. Which consisted of a small building with three stories. It made for very intense interaction between player and player, but also player and npc. It helped establish the people around the players very well. However it also became a bit slow paces, and it was difficult to spontaneously throw new things at the player if things moved along to slowly.
The setting is working out very nicely, however I miss the clans that I have made unavailable. It makes for less diversity both in the group and also among the NPC.
