Hello everyone, I'm a GM new to running L5R, the Fantasy Flight edition. I have no experience with the world of Legend of the Five Rings whatsoever. I'm relatively experienced running other games and I tend to run homebrew adventures in my own homebrew settings. As such, I'm a little new to taking in a whole world and using it as a base.

In the setting guide "Emerald Empire" the timeline ends at 1123 IC, but I've noticed that a lot of various lore doesn't necessarily stop around that time, and that especially published adventures seem to follow a canon storyline, which seems to be the same as the LCG published stories' storyline. The fandom wikia is also kind of messy for a newcomer, and the books, while beautiful and most of the time perfectly convenient, don't really have lists of NPCs and important political figures. So far, it's been a lot of guesswork and inferring who is who.

Do you have any tips and tricks on how to get started? Preferably I would just pick a date and build my own canon from there on out as my players influence Rokugan, but my biggest trouble is finding out what the exact status quo is at 1123 IC, what events are likely to go down in the near future, which NPCs to watch out for, etc.

Any help would be appreciated! I have a lot of respect for the world and story built so far.