What is Choosing a Clan all about anyway? We get asked this question a lot, via email, at conventions, and on the phone. Usually it is in regards to joining the Imperial Assembly, but often it is a question from a new player trying to find a niche in the L5R world.

In the short term, it is about finding a group that you "identify" with, and want to be a part of, often in the story-line sense. This will most likely show itself in the decks that you choose to play in tournaments, the L5R related shirts you wear, and will affect the clan letter you receive. In the case of new players, we try to give them a brief flavor of what each clan is like, to help guide them in making a decision. We try to keep our personal biases out of those descriptions, so that they have a good overview of what is available, and can make a choice based on their own preferences, not ours.

In addition to "belonging" to a group within the L5R community, your clan choice shows up in other ways when you are part of the Imperial Assembly:

1. Your membership card will have that clan printed upon it.

2. The Clan Letter you receive with each issue will be for the clan you have chosen.

3. Player rankings are kept by clan. In this case, the rankings are actually kept by clans you've played, not just clan you are aligned with. In the future, we may use that data for "special" tournament rankings (ie-playing your registered clan might be worth more in certain instances).

We can use the data on what clans are played regularly to keep track of which clans may be getting too powerful, or which ones may be too weak. This can be a very useful tool for our designers. We also use data on what clans are played and how well they do, to determine the direction that the story will be taking in the card game. There will be three worldwide story-line affecting tournaments in 2000 that players will be able to participate in for this purpose.

Currently you may only register for the Imperial Assembly using the following clan designations:

Brotherhood (or Monk), Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Naga, Phoenix, Scorpion, Shadowlands, Toturi's Army, Unicorn, Yoritomo's Alliance

These are also the only clan designations that you should be noting when you are playing in a tournament, so that the data house can input the tournament results correctly.

Ninja affiliation is restricted to only players who have won a sanctioned tournament of 16+ players while playing a Ninja deck.

Badger, Wasp, Turtle, Monkey, etc are not valid clans to select for the Assembly or for tournaments as they are not "major" clans.

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