Listen to the Rain

Over a year ago, I first wrote about my idea to run a Legend of the Five Rings game inspired by Game of Thrones. It seems like a perfect match--L5R players often talk about how the game is more about questions of loyalty and honor and conflicts between families than about finding more treasure and looting the bodies of your enemies, and from what little I know about L5R's history, going back in the timeline and rewriting the Scorpion Clan Coup a little bit--casting the Hantei as the Targaryens and Bayushi Shoju as Robert Baratheon--would allow me to keep a lot of the thematics intact. I mean, L5R even has the Wall. I want to use Shadowrun mechanics, because while SR4 has its problems, success-counting is simple and SR4's melee combat mechanics actually fit L5R dueling really well. Use adept powers as kiho, fit L5R's spells into SR4's magic mechanics with drain, etc. It could work.

But I haven't done any work on it at all, because I've been looking for the right theme song for the last year. Well, also because of Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom, but after seeing the draw of the Game of Thrones theme, I wanted something just as powerful and catching. And now, I think I've found it:

Watch on YouTube

It only went up on Youtube less than a month ago, which I guess is why I had so much trouble finding a theme song before. I'd been looking for a cover of the Game of Thrones theme on koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi, the way that Famikoto does video game music using traditional Japanese instruments. And while this isn't quite that, I don't care. It has the perfect sound I've been looking for. Maybe I should get working on the mechanics now?

Or, uh, maybe I should actually read those L5R books I bought?