I’ve played a few 3.5 Campaigns (mostly just comedy ones drinking with buddies) but I was really into L5R for its lore and mechanics for a while. There’s a whole unique system called “honor” where if you don’t behave yourself properly you end up basically pissing off or at least being deemed untrustworthy in social settings. Not only that but there’s also a complicated faction system involving the Great Clans and even the Clans in those families and a generous DM May let you play as a Minor Clan member or even as a member of the Imperial Families, but any campaign involving players from various clans, even if you were called together on Imperial Business would result in getting weird looks from your clan mates and losing honor points. If you weren’t playing a human character? You’d better either be able to shapeshift or stay the fuck out of civilization and even then our DM used to say to all of us when someone decided to make a Naga, Nezumi, or a Kenku that our responses to whatever explanation the non human player gave wasn’t realistic of the lore and we instead all just do battle unless like someone had a background learning magic from a Naga or trained as a Swordsman under a Kenku and could pass a persuade AND Honor check and even then fights were likely. Nezumi are respected in Crab Clan and in their own lands but discouraged from ever entering anywhere else. The locals don’t see them as guides and mystics, they’re no different than any other abomination carrying the Taint.
This is why Chris in Sonichu form and thinking he’s a Goddess is just so amusing to me. First of all there’s not even a mythic precedent for his race, it just shows up. It’s not familiar to anyone in society so by default it has a -3 honor (which means any interaction other than combat gets a -3 to all throws). Clerics don’t exist in L5R; Cleric, Wizard, and Sorcerer are all kind of lumped into the “Shugenja” and “Shaman” classes depending on your race, family, and culture (barbarians like Yobanjin for example use Shaman.)
In essence I could see all the characters meeting after a giant raid from the Shadowlands has slaughtered a caravan with the PCs and perhaps a couple of NPCs being the only survivors. Talking about what they’re going to do next, plotting a course of action, trying to figure out the best way to get back to civilization and then this crazy Hedgehog monster who worships itself shows up and starts rambling in a weird accent and an incomprehensible language. Everyone immediately can’t understand it, doesn’t trust it and starts trying to kill it thinking it must be some new abomination created by Fu Leng or Daigotsu. For the sake of leveling and fair play he’s a level 3 Shaman/1 Ranger. It turns into basically an introductory boss fight. Rather than killing him outright though they wound him, the first quest of the game is to take him to the Imperial City to present him to the Emperor and he spends the rest of the game basically being experimented on while alive by various Shugenja and Doctors while the rest of the party are made Magistrates to find out where in the fuck this thing even came from.
Then they have a normal campaign while Chris is basically tortured for the rest of the game until he decides to make a normal character. Knowing our DM back in the day, he’s let Chris make a character about the same level as the party was at the time, and knowing Chris he’d either join the Moshi family of the Mantis Clan (formerly the ruling family of the Centipede Clan - Feminist Shugenja with some Lesbians), the Kitsu family of the Lion Clan (Descended from anthropomorphic Lions and have access to the Spirit realm), or someone from the Unicorn Clan because MLP despite that clan being the most patriarchal and rigid of all the clans despite its name.
