Introducing the Print-and-Play Heroes of Legend for Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game is now available to download. Read on for more information on this exciting addition to the game from Game Designer Tyler Parrot. 

While the Under Fu Leng’s Shadow expansion serves as a capstone to Legend of the Five Rings: the Card Game, there are still a handful of cards that were designed for future inclusion in the game that we would like to share with the online community. To that end, nine unique characters, the Heroes of Legend, are now available for download as print-and-play cards.

Originally designed to be prize cards for the 2021 Kotei Series, these characters embrace L5R’s theme of players influencing the game by allowing players to customize the very cards that are included in their deck. Each character has four abilities available, only two of which can be used during play. However, each player may choose to use a different combination of abilities, resulting in characters who operate very differently when played by different players. While there are only nine characters among the Heroes of Legend, there are 54 different ways to customize them!

Before a player shuffles a Hero of Legend into their dynasty deck, they must check off (or fill in) two of the boxes in the card’s text box to indicate which two abilities they have selected for that hero. Once marked, the selections cannot be changed, and a card with more than or fewer than 2 boxes checked is invalid for play. Multiple copies of the same character in the same deck do not need to all share the same selected abilities. As with any other card, no more than 3 copies of a character can be included in a player’s deck by title. Additionally, Akodo Toturi and Toturi (the rōnin) cannot be included in the same deck—Toturi’s text preventing this is active regardless of which abilities are selected for his card.

These characters were chosen to be our final protagonists for the Scorpion Clan Coup storyline because their story arcs were most involved in both the LCG’s initial stories and because they were protagonists involved in the events related to the Coup. And after seeing how popular Katsuo the Peasant turned out to be in the Battle of Cherry Blossom Snow, it felt like he deserved to join the Heroes of Legend as the smallest of the bunch.

As a game designer for L5R, I wanted to explore design space that empowered players to customize their game further than ever. I hope you all enjoy playing with your favorite version of these prominent protagonists!

The free Print-and-Play Heroes of Legend cards are available now! Download under the Print-and-Play Cards in the Support Section here.