On Why The Harriers Had To Go

[Doji Kousei]

If we got the chance to get the barriers back I could foresee a second Crane civil war happpening, very quietly inside the clan with no one trying to let outsiders see, given that they may well split our playerbase down the middle.

I have to admit I love Crane as the clan of art and politics, with a side order of duelling to help us win arguments. The Daidoji are great and I would never want to lose them (or the Asahina), but they strike me as a lovely counterpoint to the main flavour of the clan. Defensive military specialists and tough enough to make even a Crab respect them.

I am certainly looking forward to seeing what our potential paths could be and reading some of the stories that have been talked about.

[Doji Satevis]

[Himoto]

Okay, can we please stop the whole "Uji's harrier legacy" thing?

Uji being a harrier was a retcon, plain and simple. The harriers did not exist until long after he was introduced, and I'm not even sure he was still alive when they were first mentioned (they seem to have first appeared in the miniature game, not sure when exactly ; he was dead by the time they appeared in the RPG (D20 Way of the Ninja book) and the CCG (Sometime around...Broken Blades or Fall of Otosan Uchi I believe).

As far as themes went, the Harriers took Uji's Way of the Crane write-up, flanderized it, and ran with it all the way off the bridge. Uji being fascinated with gaijin pepper (and other tactics) but forbidden to use it turned into EXPLODE ALL THE THINGS. The Daidoji being practical and willing to use sneaky tactics to even the odds in fights they couldn't take head on became DROP A DEAD POSSUM IN THE WELL ("Collateral...damage? Is that a new kind of shadowland critter?"), and sometime use underhanded tactics became DISHONOR DISHONOR DISHONOR.

The harriers weren't Uji's legacy. They were his caricature.

Uji's actual character concept was somewhere between the current scouts and harriers, and probably closer to the former than the later.

[Martino]

The harriers WERE an extrapolation from Uji. And AEG was who did it. They didn't give us an heir, they didn't give us any characters who clearly followed his actual style of being tough as nails and occasionally using explosives in dire situations. They have us the harriers that we had. That is what makes it Uji's legacy. AEG made it, and they made it as an extension of who Uji was. If they want to make a different, yet clear, extension of who Uji was, I'm willing to listen.

[Himoto]

When you take a character, take a handful of his most extreme traits, turn them out to eleven, and ignore the rest, that's not an extension or an extrapolation, it's a parody.

Yes, they were an AEG creation. So what? A lot of horrible things in the setting were created by AEG. Some were parodies of the clan they stood for, or of a specific individual turned into an entire school (See: Bitter Lies Technique - Tangen and Kwanchai were awesome, a whole school of them...is more headdesk territory). Others feel more like trying to do something novel and cool. That AEG came up with an idea doesn't make it any less of a parody.

(Most of those appears, from what I've seen, to have been ideas from outside the story team. I suspect many are a case of people, in design or in the fanbase, finding a one-off idea cool (and in most cases they were right!) and thinking it would be neat to escalate it into a theme that would be playable in the game. But that's the thing with extreme and outside the box ideas - what make them interesting and cool is that they're unique. Once you escalate them into a whole school or theme...they stop being unique and start being major aspects of an entire clan. And generally, extreme concepts don't work as major aspects of an entire clan.

[Doji Satevis]

I'm all for the notion elsewhere on the board that Kakita Ujirou is the (grand?)son of Daidoji Uji (either one -- the 1KYD Uji is more recent in the timeline); a nice subtle nod. The Harriers themselves are only "Uji's legacy" in a meta sense in any case; as of Imperial Histories, at the least, the Harriers were founded during the White Stag era, which is centuries before Uji's time.

It's perhaps also worth noting that said 1KYD Uji (as Daidoji Fumisato) was the advisor to Domotai who put her onto the path to investigate Giji Seido and thus uncover the Harriers.

[Asahina Shimato]

Just write the Harriers as you would the current scouts but call them Harriers again. It will end this debate.

[Kakita Onimaru]

[Martino]

[Doji Satevis]