The Dragon Clan
Descended from the enigmatic Kami Togashi — the prophet who is said to have seen the future and, by that sight, excused himself from the Tournament of the Kami — the Dragon are the most inscrutable of the Great Clans. They keep to their high mountains, value insight over conquest, and are known to tolerate, even to prize, the kind of criticism that other clans would name insubordination. To a Dragon, unquestioning loyalty is not loyalty at all. Their families each hold a corner of that character: the Mirumoto duellists and administrators, the Agasha alchemists and shugenja, the Kitsuki investigators, and the strange, tattooed Togashi.
The Togashi Tattooed Order
The monks of the Togashi are ascetics and mystics who bear mystical tattoos — living marks that empower their kihō, the disciplines of body and ki. Through the Order's teaching of Blood of the Kami, a monk carries a tattoo of a natural motif that lends its power to a chosen technique, and gains more such marks as their understanding deepens. Occasionally the Kami Togashi himself is said to visit his descendants in a flash of vision or a sudden, inexplicable insight — a gift, or a burden, the Order's scholars still debate.
The Elemental Imbalance
Something has gone wrong with the five elements. Across Rokugan the kami are being displaced — fleeing shrines that have fallen into disrepair, or been offended, or crowded out by encroaching spirits — and where they go, the land grows strange. In the Dragon lands the sign has been the silence of a mountain that should not be silent, and winters grown harsher than any in living memory. Some scholars, quietly, have begun to wonder whether the cause is nothing supernatural at all, but generations of thoughtless human use wearing the balance thin. It is the kind of theory that, if believed, would unmake the Empire's whole way of life — which is why it is not yet spoken aloud.
Bushidō
The code of the samurai names the virtues by which a life is measured — among them Sincerity, Duty and Loyalty, Compassion, Courage, Courtesy, Honor, and Righteousness. Few can hold all of them perfectly at once; a samurai's character is often written in which tenet they hold paramount and which they hold least. Norikage places Sincerity above all and Duty lowest — an ordering that has cost him nothing, because he has never yet been asked to lie.
The Celestial Order
Heaven, Earth, and the mortal realm are bound in a single order, watched over by Lord Sun and Lady Moon and the countless Fortunes and kami between. Portents and omens are read as the language of that order — a silent mountain, a mark upon a newborn, a shrine gone cold — and those who can read them, the theologians and shugenja and monks, are the Empire's interpreters of Heaven's will. It is in this art that Norikage is most at home.
Drawn from the published lore of Rokugan; expanded here in this chronicle's own words. For the Master's working notes, see Behind the Veil.