Champions of Kamigawa Player's Guide

Of course the top-down-ness of this set had to be sold in every way possible, so here we have the booklet that came with the Champions fatpack. Those usually contain just a quick introduction to the world or the story before moving on to talking about the coolest cards in the set and how the new mechanics work. Those introduction rarely have anything that isn’t also featured in online articles, so don’t expect me to review them for every single set going forward. But a few of them do contain interesting information, and the Kamigawa ones are certainly among that group. For those interested in checking them out, the lore related pages have been scanned and posted here.

The introductory article makes it clear the Reito Massacre was the official start of the Kami War, although a few attacks had happened before. It also makes explicit that Eiganjo was safe from Kami attacks during the war, making the attack in Outlaw all the more shocking. The booklet also makes much more of the Kamataki falls being a gateway between the two worlds than the novel did. This isn’t a contradiction though, the booklet is just a nice expansion of the world we see in the novels.

There is some interesting timeline stuff here, although none of it is very useful for when we get to put this on the larger timeline. 

• It states the people had been worshiping kami for “many hundreds of years”, suggesting there was a time before when they didn’t. I will come back to this in a couple of weeks for some very minor and silly speculation.
• Shizo, Death’s Storehouse was created 100 years before Konda rose to power, when 800 samurai died in dishonorable battle. Their blood is said to have turned a neighboring bamboo forest into the Takenuma Swamp.
• Shinka is said to be a 1000 years old during the Kami War, and full of ogres, a depiction which will be contradicted in the novels.
• The great oak Boseiju 2000 years. Okina was the oldest shrine in Jukai, but after the start of the war only a few remain to defend it.
• The list of characters tells us that Konda (first name Takeshi) changed a year before the Reito Massacre, meaning that there was a year between the prologue of Outlaw and the start of the war proper.

There are also some blurbs for a handful of legends, which is exactly what I was asking for last time, so… yay! Although putting them in an obscure pace like a supplemental booklet is a bit unfortunate. They’re too short to summarize here, so just go read them. But here are some things that caught my eyes:

• Marrow-Gnawer had over 600 kids!
• Ben-Ben’s story is quite tragic. It makes sense that the akki send him to Hidetsugu then, if he’s useful but not well liked…
• The blurb on Tozawa, the Unspeakable, says it has been released into the world? The story sounds very similar to his vignette, but with crucial differences, like that actual release. So perhaps this is a summary of that third Azami story I wanted? Guess her plan to lure students into gaining the Unspeakable’s knowledge backfired!
• But having gotten this hint towards the ending of the Azami story I was wishing for, I now really wish Tatsumasa had won that competition for the last vignette, as its description here ends on a cliffhanger!

Finally, it has the same Kamigawa glossary as was shared online.

Which wraps up our look at this booklet, and our coverage of Champions of Kamigawa as a whole. Next week, the Betrayers Vignettes!