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- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K What is "Multi-Level Marketing" and how did it die? Discuss the future of spam in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________ Search barnesandnoble.com for
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_______________________C a r d__b a r d s __________Legend of the Five Rings isn't just a card game. It's a whole new kind of storytelling. ___________________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY ROBERT ROSSNEY | Soon after I began playing the card game called Legend of the Five Rings, I found myself, losing badly as usual, in a game with three experienced players. This time I had an ace up my sleeve: The Egg of P'an Ku, a card with a special power -- it can act as a copy of any other card in play. I tossed it down and announced that I was giving myself a copy of my opponent's Hida O-Ushi, the Crab Clan Bully. "You can't play the Egg," my opponents all said at once. "The False Hoturi is in play." So it was, there in front of the Scorpion player: a card featuring a dark illustration of the Crane Clan Champion Doji Hoturi with weird, glowing eyes. And they were right: The False Hoturi says, right on the card, that the Egg can't be played while it's on the table. I was a little put out. The Egg had been my last hope. Why, I demanded, couldn't I play it? The Egg of P'an Ku, they told me, was a magical item that belonged to the Scorpion Clan seductress Bayushi Kachiko, consort of the 38th Hantei emperor. (She's the one who administered slow poison to the emperor in revenge for the death of her husband Bayushi Shoju -- creating the power vacuum that unleashed the Clan War in the first place, and making it possible for the evil god Fu Leng to possess the Emperor's body.) Though Kachiko was a bitter enemy of the Crane Clan, she wanted a warrior of Hoturi's stature on her side, so she used her Egg to make a copy of him. That was the False Hoturi. As my opponents explained, "You can't play the Egg while the False Hoturi is in play because the Egg is the False Hoturi." Months later, as I was explaining to a novice player that he had to pick up the Egg he had just played and put it back into his hand ("Because the Egg is the False Hoturi," I said), I realized that I was doing more than just playing a card game: I was participating in a tradition of oral folklore. In our age of television and the Internet, it's rare to find any folk tales more involved than the story about the woman who dried her Chihuahua in the microwave. The creators of Legend of the Five Rings have made a card game into a new kind of narrative vehicle: one that turns its audience into storytellers. And at special, high-stakes "story-line tournaments," the designers of Legend of the Five Rings hand over to the players the ultimate responsibility for what happens next in the game's universe. The largest ever such event, the Storming of Morikage Castle, is unfolding this weekend at more than 200 locations around the world. "Interactive storytelling" was supposed to happen in some high-tech format -- in movie theaters rigged with pistol-grips or via lavishly produced CD-ROMs. Instead, the most successful example yet of interactive fiction runs on cardboard. N E X T_ P A G E .|. How can a humble card game tell an enthralling story? |
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