This is the first part of a concise, if necessarily imprecise, history of Rokugan.

Prehistory

At the dawn of time, the nine children of the Sun and Moon fell to earth, becoming at that moment less than gods, but still far more than mortals. Eight of them fell together; the ninth, Fu Leng, fell some distance from the others. The first eight formed an empire, installing Hantei I as the Emperor. The other seven brothers and sisters gathered clans about themselves, naming them the Crab, the Crane, the Dragon, the Lion, the Phoenix, the Scorpion, and the Unicorn.

Suddenly Fu Leng reappeared at the border of the Empire leading a huge army of goblins, undead, and foul creatures from the Shadowlands, the dark place where he had fallen. Fu Leng's army attacked the fledgling Empire, defeating the clan armies again and again.

When complete defeat looked inevitable, a mortal man named Shinsei approached Emperor Hantei and asked for seven mortals, one from each clan, to follow him into the Shadowlands to defeat Fu Leng. These seven brave warriors became known as the Seven Thunders, and, together with Shinsei, they embarked upon their hopeless quest.

Fu Leng's forces continued to crush all opposition, but when they reached the gates of Otosan Uchi, Hantei's capital, they suddenly faltered. The Thunders had achieved their goal! The Shadowlands forces broke and fled back to their miserable home.

Of the Seven Thunders and Shinsei, only the Scorpion Thunder returned, near death and bearing twelve Black Scrolls. "Guard these carefully," he said as he died, "for they were the defeat of Fu Leng."

Scorpion Clan Coup (Scrolls 1-3)

The Emerald Empire of Rokugan had existed in relative peace for a thousand years since the defeat of Fu Leng. But the Scorpion Clan daimyo Bayushi Shoju came to believe that the ancient prophecies of Uikku indicated that the 38th Hantei Emperor would bring forth a consuming evil that would destroy Rokugan. Those days, people saw the imperial line as weak, and this helped Shoju to decide how to save the Empire from its doom.

In a daring coup, Shoju killed the Emperor and seiz, control of the imperial capital Otosan Uchi. For days h forces fended off the massed armies of the other clans He tried to explain his actions, but the clan emissaries would hear none of his "Scorpion lies'"

Shoju gambled that the Crab daimyo, Hida Kisada, would stand by his side. Kisada had openly scorned th Hantei Emperor, and the Crab respect strength. But in the end, due to a diplomatic error by Shoju, the Crab Clan supported the besieging forces and doomed the coup to failure. In the resulting battle, the Lion Clan daimyo, Akodo Toturi, killed Shoju in the throne roorr

Interlude

After the Scorpion Clan Coup, the son of the dead Emperor became the 39th Emperor of Rokugan. He was a vain and churlish man spared from the coup by the intervention of Phoenix magics and a healthy dash of good luck.

Enraged at the Scorpion for killing his father, he demanded a pogrom against the Scorpion Clan, seeking to destroy them utterly. As part of a series of vengeful actions, Hantei declared that he would take Bayushi Kachiko, the most beautiful woman in Rokugan and widow of the recently deceased Shoju, as his new bride ending the Bayushi line.

Akodo Toturi, having learned something of Shoju's motives before Shoju died, believed this course of action unwise, and he protested the Emperor's actions. Toturi's failure to protect the 38th Hantei Emperor, combined with Toturi's public rebuke of the new Son of Heaven, was too much for Hantei the 39th. Hantei ordered Toturi stripped of his family name, and he ordered all other Akodo to abandon their names as well. Further, Hantei refused Toturi the opportunity to commit seppuku and instead condemned him to the life of a ronin--the ultimate disgrace.

In hiding after the coup, the Scorpion shugenja Yogo Junzo received news of the new Emperor's actions. He betrayed his family's thousand-year oath to guard and protect the Black Scrolls and opened one of them, hoping to find a way to use its power to strike back athe Empire destroying his clan. When he opened the scroll, its malevolent powers consumed his spirit, and he became a puppet in the service of Fu Leng, who, though defeated, was far from powerless.

The opening of the Scroll also unleashed a deadly plague that began to spread through the Empire, killing thousands.

The plague reached Otosan Uchi and infected the young Emperor, who was as yet without an heir. Bayushi Kachiko sent word to all of the clans that the Emperor was dying and that he would name as his successor the clan noble who best exemplified the code of bushido and the command of the Tao of Shinsei.

Imperial Edition

The clans warred actively. The Crab, having seen how the Scorpion seized Otosan Uchi and watched the Empire begin to fragment, realized that they now had a chance to take the throne for themselves. After defending the Empire for a thousand years against the fearsome Shadowlands, they now entered into negotiations.

Kuni Yori induced the Crab Yakamo to lend his name to a fearsome oni, which manifested itself in the material world and commenced an extensive battle of wills with Yakamo for control of Yakamo's name.

For reasons not understood even by the Dragon generals, Togashi Yokuni, the Dragon daimyo, retained Toturi, the disgraced ronin, to lead their army at Beiden Pass. Among the Dragon troops was Mirumoto Hitomi, young scion of the Mirumoto family. Hitomi had many strong passions, and her greatest was a hatred for the hero of the Crab Clan, Hida Yakamo, who killed her beloved older brother years earlier in a duel of honor. She claimed Yakamo cheated, which he, of course, denied.

Hida Yakamo had already lost a hand in a duel with Hitomi. Kuni Yori, a powerful Crab Clan shugenja, grafted a hideous claw-like appendage to Yakamo to replace his missing hand, using a terrible ritual that neither would discuss.

Stepping out of the mists of legend and rumor, a strange group of humanoid serpent-creatures known as the Naga reappeared in Rokugan, though sightings of the creatures were few and far between. Toturi sent Mirumoto Daini to investigate these sightings.

Shadowlands

A series of battles were fought at the strategic crossroads of Beiden Pass. Hida Sukune, the youngest son of the Crab daimyo, failed to anticipate Toturi's battlefield tactics, and his forces were overwhelmed. Yakamo's forces arrived and, in payment for Sukune's failure, crucified Sukune on the Terrible Standard of Fu Leng. The Crab followed this hideous banner back into battle.

Yakamo located Hitomi in the fray and, empowered by his claw, crushed one of her hands-the one holding the sword of her brother-destroying it.

Nevertheless, the Crab failed to hold Beiden Pass, although it had now become clear to all that they had cut a deal with the Shadowlands.

The Naga sent an emissary, called Dashmar, to the Imperial Assembly to inform the Empire that the Naga had awakened from an ages-long slumber to fight the rising tide of evil they sensed in the Shadowlands. Concerned primarily with the Empire's civil war, most imperial courtiers took no serious heed of Dashmar's words. Rebuffed, he sought to locate those individuals who would hear the wisdom of the Naga and act accordingly.

In the libraries of the Phoenix Clan, the Elemental Masters detected the opening of the first Black Scroll--and perhaps more. They dispatched one of their number, Isawa Tadaka, to seek out and recover the Black Scrolls, so that the Phoenix might learn the scrolls' true nature.

The Scorpion Clan began to rebuild its forces in secret reoccupying many of its ruined castles and fortifications. Kachiko used her power as the Emperor's wife to end the Crane's purge of the Scorpion and to restore the Scorpion to some measure of safety. She also began to secretly poison the Emperor, seeking to torture him greatly before killing him as punishment for killing her husband. Acting with great decorum, Kachiko became, in some sense, the unofficial regent of the Empire, wrapping the bureaucracy around her finger.

Forbidden Knowledge

More Black Scrolls were recovered. Many shugenja now knew of their existence and of the awesome powers they could convey. Isawa. Tadaka and Isawa Uona became corrupted by the knowledge gained from the scrolls, but still the Phoenix Council of Five strove to understand their significance.

Battles large and small grew common. Land was taken, retaken, and lost over and over, churning the peasants' farmlands into huge fields of mud. The harvest was terrible. Famine, combined with the still-raging plague, exacted a tremendous toll on the Empire.

The barriers between the material world the nether regions of the underworld began to weaken. Immensely powerful Elemental Terrors-oni of heretofore unknown powers-emerged.

Kachiko tended Hitomi's injury, seeking to twist Hitomi's hatred for Yakamo into an all-out desire to destroy the Crab Clan in vengeance for refusing to support Shoju's coup. Kachiko provided an ancient and powerful artifact, the Obsidian Hand, for Hitomi's use, and it began to darken her soul.

Kachiko also managed to trap her lover, the Crane daimyo Doji Hoturi, in the imperial capital. She used another ancient artifact the Egg of Van Ku, to create a duplicate of Hoturi. This False Hoturi left the capital and returned to the lands of the Crane, where his boorish behavior and increasingly insulting remarks caused great disgrace. He recruited a mad army from the Shadowlands and began a wild campaign of terror.

Anvil of Despair

The chaos in the Empire led to a rise in banditry and criminal acts. The Unicorn Clan assumed a large role in trying to stop this tide of crime. The peasants gained a newfound respect for the Unicorn as the guardians of what little peace and security they retained.

Yogo Junzo, now a corrupt, undead minion of Fu Leng, reappeared in the Empire leading a vast army of goblins, oni, ogres, trolls, and other foul creatures. A portion of this force linked up with the False Hoturi, while the remainder began destroying the monasteries of the Brotherhood of Shinsei.

After months of combat Toturi's army of Dragon bushi and ronin had become a battle-hardened force of incredible discipline and loyalty. The man once reviled throughout the Empire as the ultimate disgrace, honorable again, now led one of the most powerful military forces in the Empire, supported in large part by selfless peasants' gifts of food and shelter. Instead of turning his attentions to the petty civil wars the rest of the clans fought Toturi set his sights clearly on the Shadowlands Horde, the true threat to Rokugan.

Mirumoto Hitomi engaged in an extensive, secret dialog with Togashi Yokuni. Afterward, Yokuni vanished from the Dragon lands and held a secret rendezvous with Kachiko. Kachiko knew a terrible, terrible secret: the Emperor had become possessed by a foul spirit and the power and evil of that spirit could only come from one person.

The Emperor of Rokugan, Son of Heaven, was now the vessel of the dark god Fu Leng.

Yokuni told Kachiko that the return of Fu Leng was long prophesied. The wards against him kept strong by the closed Black Scrolls had now become so weakened that Fu Leng could physically control a mortal body. Out of revenge for his original defeat, Fu Leng chose to possess the Emperor himself. Fu Leng, however, did not know that the Emperor's weakness was not caused by disease, but by the poisons Kachiko continued to administer. Unable to take a new host, Fu Leng was trapped in a body unable to stand, unable to walk, unable to do anything other than scream in anger.

But the power of Fu Leng continued to grow as each Black Scroll was opened and read. Soon he would overcome the infirmities of his host body, and then the Empire would know an eternity of darkness.

Yokuni instructed Kachiko that a great cycle was ending and the future was in the balance. She must return to the palace, despite her horror, and continue to poison the Emperor's body, keeping Fu Leng as we, as possible.

Yokuni also revealed that the lineal descendant of Shinsei himself walked the Empire as they spoke. Shinsei's descendant was aware of his place in the cosmic drama as well--the Seven Thunders of legend had been reborn to face their ancient foe, and Shinsei descendant would locate them, instruct them, and gather them together for the final confrontation.

While Kachiko was away from the palace, the guard at Otosan Uchi detected a massive fleet of ships sailing northward up the coast. Incredibly, the Crab Clan had constructed troop ships in secret and used them to move their army, unseen, north to attack the capital. Hot-headed but tactical genius Matsu Tsuko led the Lion Clan armies guarding Otosan Uchi against the Crab.

Before the battle began, a messenger appeared from the capitol. As Tsuko read the message, the blood drained from her face and she dropped to her knees, fists clenched. The message was simple: Tsuko, was to allow the battle to be fought without her direction. There was no rational reason for such a compromise of the capital's defense, but the chop on the order was the one mark she could not ignore, the one sigil that commanded obedience.

It was the signature of the Emperor himself.

The armies clashed. The Crab forces ultimately won for despite the ferocity of the Lion bushi, without direction they could not maintain an effective strategy across the entire battlefield. The triumphant Crab army led by Hida Kisada himself, strode to the great oaken doors of the palace and hewed them from their mounts.

Kisada, Yakamo, and a small detachment of bushi entered the palace to confront the Emperor. They fought their way past the remaining imperial guards, finally locating the Emperor's inner chambers.

There was a bitter fight within. Yakamo emerged carrying the unconscious body of Kisada, who had the ancestral sword of the Hantei firmly lodged in his gut The Crab army retreated as insane laughter echoed hollowly from within the imperial palace.

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