Enter the world of outcasts in Path of Waves, the third sourcebook for the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game! This 256-page setting guide takes you to the forgotten heart of the Emerald Empire where masterless rōnin, foreign gaijin, and others who don’t fit neatly into the grand design of the divine hierarchy struggle in tales of camaraderie, redemption, and revenge.

Path of the Waves details the difficult lives of those living on the fringes of society, including a new set of The Game of Twenty Questions that adds myriad new options to create rōnin, peasant, and gaijin characters, as well as Adventure seeds, NPC profiles, and two fully-realized settings to bring the world of Rokugan to life. Are you ready to step off the well-known path and forge your own destiny?



Eijiro sighed. “We can’t go into Lion lands.”

“How much is your head?”
“What? No, Junko, I don’t have a bounty.”
“Oh. Did you anger someone terribly, then?”
“Er, yes...” Eijiro thought of his father, his mother, and his aunt. The arguments. Stealing away at night with a bundle of koku, his katana, and his now long-lost silk kimono. “Yes, a lot of angry people.”
“Then we can just kill them. It’s what we’re good at, after all.”

Welcome to the fringes of Rokugan. Here, masterless samurai known as rōnin wander in the tumultuous places between castes. While they are higher than peasants in the Celestial Order, they do not truly belong in either world, and neither samurai nor peasants readily accept them. Yet tales of wandering heroes are some of the most daring and exciting in Rokugan, inspiring some ambitious commoners to take up the blade. And then there are those who do not fit into the Celestial Order at all—gaijin who hail from strange lands and practice alien customs. The lives of these outcasts are difficult, but they are among the most exciting that any adventurer can ask for.