Crane
in CharactersThe Crane are the Left Hand of the Emperor, in service as the political aides to the throne. It’s traditional for the Hantei to choose a samurai from the Doji family as their spouse, more Emerald Champions have been Kakita than any other family, and the samurai of the Daidoji family serve as some of the finest shock troops in the Emerald Empire. Yet the Crane make their greatest contributions in culture: many of the finest poets and craftspeople hail from their academies, and their duelists have few rivals. The Crane are the masters of court, with the wealth and status to prove it. At the dawn of the Empire, after the Kami had fallen from the Celestial Heavens, they found themselves plunged into a mortal world rife with cruelty and war. The Kami Doji—sister of Hantei, the first Emperor— resolved to bring order to this savage realm. The embodiment of elegance and grace, Doji walked among the earthly peoples, calming them in the way fair weather calms a storm-tossed sea. Any Crane will gladly speak of how from her, humans learned writing so they could record their achievements, politics to govern their affairs, economics and commerce to manage their wealth, and art and culture to lift them from their lives of misery. Those she touched the most became her devoted followers, the first samurai of the Crane Clan. Since that time, the Crane have become both the poets and the poetry of the Empire, at once the swordsmiths and the duelists wielding the smiths’ blades. In every aspect of their lives, the Crane strive for mastery in all things, an ideal that the other clans can only hope to emulate. The Crane Clan represents the pinnacle of refinement in Rokugan, and its members are known for their elegance, grace, and mastery of social customs. People expect them to be well-spoken, subtle in the extreme, and unfailingly polite.