ZOP in the Faraway Sea

 Settlement Building After Disaster

Colonization narratives are kind of inimical to a good time right now, so how do you address that? Well, honestly, one of the most appropriate ways might be resettlement or a return to a traditional home. Setting aside the complexity of who gets to decide that for now, let's ensure we have been displaced by someone we can collectively agreed had no right to do it - and thus avoid some of these issues. In any case.

What Came Before

Having just played a game with my friends it feels natural to take the output of that experience and use it as the basis for this one. It can form a sort of bridge into the setting and it also naturally lines up with the interest in settlement building and community. Let us imagine an island community - a nation really. Powerful in its region and with a long history it runs up against a power far greater than itself which claims a divine right to its lands. The people of the islands are killed, displaced, and in some cases kidnapped or indoctrinated by these new people. 

However, unlike our world, these invaders are fundamentally not settling. They are themselves nomadic. Arriving, wrecking societies and ecosystems, enforcing their laws and extracting what they desire before departing for their next destination. Most leave. Perhaps some have decided to stay behind and preach the "good word" of their faith. But the damaged land, the homeland of the displaced people, is now available to them again. Their lost relics are out there and it is possible to re-establish and rebuild and prepare for when that wandering empire decides to once more turn its eye in their direction. 

The culture of the island nation was hierarchical, spiritual, based around families. It remains those, albeit warped by their time away. They have become more patriarchal in reaction to the perceived matriarchal laws of their displacers. Their spirituality has been cast into question because it failed to protect the people against the invaders. Families have been broken and remade¹. 

What Is Now

The Islanders return from their places of refuge after decades gone. The player characters know the Islands through stories rather than experience. But they know some number of their distant kin hid in the jungles and hills of the Islands. The remaining and remade families settle on the coast and begin to rebuild, sending the most able and young into the wilderness on their behalf and ultimately to recover the hidden relics of the spirits that were secreted away from the invaders. This is more than a right of passage, it is an endeavor that is both holy and costly. Not everyone agrees that the young and able bodied men (and women) should be sent out on dangerous missions when there is work to be done in the settlement proper. 

There is any number of ways to organize the families but for reasons of a kind of symmetry let us say that there are ten (currently). We'll organize those families under the heading of what they are known to be best at and then problematize that as we go. Smiths, Builders, Raiders, Scouts, Fisherfolk, Mystics, Farmers, Sailors, Traders and Storytellers are all plenty evocative starting points. We'll give these names and problematize them in a future post or in play but these will have mechanical effects. Each one will provide an increase to appropriate skills and a choice of rings, as well as set the characters starting social status within the community as a whole.

Family Role	Ring	Skills	Status
Builders	Earth or Fire	Labor, Design	30
Farmers	Earth or Water	Labor, Survival	30
Fisherfolk	Water or Self	Seafaring, Survival	30
Mystics	Fire or Self	Theology, Meditation	35
Raiders	Water or Fire	Fitness, Tactics	20
Sailors	Water or Air	Seafaring, Fitness	30
Scouts	Air or Self	Fitness, Skulduggery	25
Smiths	Fire or Air	Aesthetics, Smithing	30
Storytellers	Earth or Self	Culture, Performance	35
Traders	Earth or Air	Culture, Commerce	25

Before we proceed to the step of taking these families and coloring them in a bit, I'm going to pause and put it to my potential players - how does this set of ten strike you for starting? 

A Note on Rings

L5R uses five elemental rings. The four you might expect (and that align with 7PP) and the additional ring of Void. Void being kind of a setting specific thing we are going to rename it. For now it's Self - in keeping with some prior work I've done. But that doesn't really explain what the rings represent. In short they represent your facility and inclination towards a certain approach to solving problems. The Air Ring represents a graceful, cunning, and precise approach. The Earth Ring represents your aptitude for taking a steady, thorough, and grounded approach to problems. The Fire Ring on the other hand is a ferocious, direct, and inventive approach. The Water Ring leans on adaptability and observation. And lastly Self represents a centered and spiritual approach - often tied to wisdom and introspection. 

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1 Ultimately the choice of family affiliation can change through adoption or marriage but the family characters are part of at the start of the game will define both their social position and some of their character creation options.^↩