The Enchanted Wood

Rokugan’s most legendary forest is the Shinomen, the hidden refuge of spirits and cradle of civilizations since before the dawn of humanity. While the samurai of the Great Clans set about ordering their domains, carving up the land into farms and villages, the Shinomen has remained a wild and dangerous place for mortals, resisting all efforts to be settled or understood. It is the home of gods and elementals and ancient peoples, a place where the trees themselves have become awakened, having endured for centuries or longer.

Some of the trunks of these primeval trees are wider than Rokugani bridges are long, their branches stretching higher than the tallest castle. In places, the trees grow so densely as to shroud the forest floor in darkness. In these depths, one might find the lost cities of the serpentine naga, the underground warrens of the ratlike nezumi, or the shadowed swamps of forgotten evils. Read on to learn more about the Shinomen Forest and the beings who dwell there.

Forbidding Glades

The sheer size of the Shinomen rivals that of the largest holdings of the Great Clans. The forest is bordered by the Unicorn Clan’s provinces to the north, while the Scorpion Clan’s domains stop short of the Shinomen’s eastern boundary. The dreamwalkers of the Moth Clan make their home between the forest’s edge and Scorpion territory. The River of the Sky courses through the length of the Shinomen, mysteriously disappearing for leagues at a time as it wends its way underground. The Crab Clan’s holdings, the Castle of the Hare, and Cherry Blossom Snow Lake line the Shinomen’s southern border, while the Twilight Mountains and the valley of the Falcon Clan rise above the wood’s westernmost reaches. Not far from the Castle of the Falcon lie the Shadowlands Marshes, a swath of cursed swamps haunted by evil spirits where even the trees are twisted by lingering corruption.

Mishap and tragedy have taught the Great Clans that the Shinomen Forest cannot be tamed. Only the wild Forest Killer bandits call the forest home, but they have reached only a tenuous truce with the woods, rather than having conquered them. Rokugani samurai and peasants alike have learned to treat the forest with respect and a healthy amount of fear, for the trees seem to have a will of their own. Those who carelessly traverse the forest paths can become hopelessly lost, sometimes emerging years before or after they originally set out. Those who do return come bearing tales of wise animal spirits grown to thrice their normal size, and cunning tricksters who seek to torment mortals for their own amusement.

The Forest’s Defenders

Though the forest is treacherous for humankind, older civilizations have found shelter beneath the forest’s boughs: the naga and the nezumi.

The snakelike naga are an aquatic people whose civilization reached its height over a millennium ago. In the woodlands they called the Shishomen, the naga raised great stone cities, the ruins of which can still be found today. The different bloodlines of the naga devoted themselves to serving specialized roles within society: the Asp warriors, the Cobra jakla, the Chameleon scouts, the Constrictor sages, and the Greensnake emissaries. Connecting these disparate bloodlines is the Unity, a spiritual force that connects all naga to each other and their ancestral wisdom, allowing them to commune and fight as one. After achieving a great victory against their enemy, “the Foul,” the naga entered a centuries-long supernatural slumber known as the Great Sleep, from which they are only now beginning to awaken. The naga are mythical creatures to the Rokugani, recognizable only from the serpentine stone statues glimpsed through the Shinomen’s foliage.

While the naga exist only in legend, the ratlike nezumi occasionally ally with the Rokugani. Rising only four feet tall when standing on two feet, the nezumi are nevertheless fierce warriors and fleet-footed scavengers. Most of their ilk dwell in the Shadowlands, close to where their ancestral city once stood. Yet the Tattered Ear Tribe lives in >m-atikf ’chtr-foo, their “Great Home” deep in the Shinomen Forest. Its members dwell in a sprawling warren of tunnels and burrows dug among the roots of the massive camphor tree that serves as the settlement’s heart. Here, the tribe’s Remembers pass on their traditions and heritage, having gnawed into the tree’s bark the memory of the tribe’s founding and legacy. Despite living in a deadly forest, or perhaps because of it, the Tattered Ear nezumi are known for being quite hospitable to outsiders, if voraciously curious about the outside world.

Further Reading

Much more lore about the Shinomen exists than is covered here. For more information about the primordial forest, check out Chapter 6 of Emerald Empire and Chapter 1 of Writ of the Wilds from Edge Studio’s Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying game line. The naga and nezumi are playable species in both Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying and Adventures in Rokugan, and the heroes of the naga and nezumi can be selected as playable champions in Monolith’s upcoming board game, Champions of Rokugan.

The Shinomen also features in several works of fiction. The story of the naga’s awakening begins in Coiled Fates, a free online serial available here on LegendoftheFiveRings.com as well as on the Aconyte Fiction Podcast. The Shinomen Forest and the nezumi play a major role in D.G. Laderoute’s novella Trail of Shadows, available in the Great Clans of Rokugan Volume 2 anthology. Finally, a dreamwalker of the Moth Clan features in the novel The Game of 100 Candles by Marie Brennan as well as in the short story “Banquet of Starving Ghosts” by Robert Denton III.

For all that has been written about it, the Shinomen Forest remains an enigma to most of Rokugan’s samurai—and that is how the spirits and yōkai who call the forest home prefer it.