Swashbuckling swordsmen and over-the-top action heroes offer inspiration to many role-playing campaigns. Standard L5R’s realistic style and emphasis on the moral complexities of Rokugani society is not really conducive to this sort of game, however. In the past, AEG published another game, 7th Sea, which portrayed swashbuckling action in a world reminiscent of 17th century Europe. However, one does not have to take inspiration solely from Western stories or Western-style RPGs to create a heroic swashbuckling game. Asian kung-fu and magical swordsmen fi lms, for example, embrace a very similar aesthetic, with heroes who display superhuman skills while protecting the weak and defeating foul enemies.

A cinematic L5R game will typically place a stronger emphasis on action rather than on courtly intrigue or other social challenges. It will also tend to have a much starker and simpler moral compass, depicting a world in which Honor and Bushido represent unquestioned good. Characters of a more dubious moral nature, such as Scorpion or Spider, are unlikely to fi t into a cinematic game very well unless the players and GM are willing to depict them as “noble rogues” or as characters who redeem themselves from a dark past (both very common cinematic archetypes).

Mechanically, a cinematic game emphasizes dramatic over the top action, performed by heroes who shrug off the direst of injuries as a “flesh wound.” Much like with anime-style play, it is strongly recommended that a cinematic-style game use one of the higher level Wound systems (as depicted in the Book of Earth) such as Earth x3 or even Earth x4 for character Wounds.

A good way to simulate the heroics of cinema is to take a page out of 7th Sea and allow the characters the ability to spend a Void Point after they roll as well as before. Thus, a character who barely missed his foe can spend a Void Point to try to get that last little bit needed to strike home. Of course, this means that much as in an anime-style game, a cinematic game will tend to burn through the PCs’ Void Points quickly. 7th Sea used a similar mechanic called “Drama Dice,” and its solution to this problem was for the GM to award additional Drama Dice to the players whenever they did something memorably heroic or cool. This mechanic can be used in L5R as well, although the GM will need to be careful to award such extra Void Points impartially – it is very easy for accusations of favoritism to arise in such cases.