Noticias

This big guy was an unused piece by Heather Bruton. The only name we had was Matsu Guy, and a production number: #25449515. Now it seems we can recover a forgotten hero from the Four Winds Era, and give him back his name, back from the claws of the Lying Darkness!

As mentioned, this character never got a Personality card, AFAIK, but he did show up in at least a couple other cards: Lion Warcats (AOF, follower) and Now Face Me (FOU, action). And the follower has a quote by a Matsu Kikuno, who was never mentioned again (in the card game, at least. Maybe he showed at some point in the RPG, or in fiction). In any case, attributing this «guy» that name seems a fair assumption.

…but the Obake does. Speculating further, it makes sense that these three cards using the same character design must have been drawn around the same time. At the time (Gold Edition)  it was the first time L5R used the «Soul of X» mechanics, which allowed to use the stats and abilities of a character that had appeared previously in the story, but it couldn’t be used for whatever reason. The original characters, after decades in the world of Rokugan, were either dead, or had experienced, elderly versions of themselves filling a completely different role. For a storyline based game, It made little sense to have the very same characters hanging around: The «souls of» were a way around that. New characters that, mechanically were the equivalent of the original.  For whatever reason, AEG must have decided they didn’t need a Beastmaster character after all. What if this was a Soul of Matsu Imura who just didn’t make it for the final list of Gold Edition?