So, keeping up with my tradition of reviews dividing by chapter. First of all, I would just like to congratulate FFG on keeping up with the AEG tradition of releasing misleadings splatbooks. You thought this book would be all abourt court but it's actually mostly about shinobi. Anyway, let's do a play by play of chapters. Chapter 1 begins with why people built and lived in castles and goes through what is like to live in a castle for samurai. Then it expands on the Winter Court tradition, some of the castles for all the Great Clans and then we get a more in-depth description of the Crane Clan and its lands. They do have a map of the Crane lands and I can't tell if the physical book has a better printing, but the one in this PDF is incredibly blurry. 4/5 because of the blurry map.

Chapter 2: we get to the meat of this book, we ge presented to the novel Deer Clan, whose shinobi and shugenja are apparently all that exist between a stable empire and the Ruinous Powers, nope, wait, wrong setting. Anyway, that is my personal opinion of the Deer, they could have been a nice addition as another source of famous Matchmakers outside of the Crane Clan and thus having some niche role in the Empire with Clans who want to find spouses without the need to owe a favor to a Crane, but we get that and also secret ninja who make sure the right people live or die so balance can be kept. We get yet another 10 schools, being an early sign that school bloating was indeed going to become a thing halfway through this edition lifetime

• Bayushi Deathdealer: we finally get a bushi school for the Scorpion, bonus points for having the most metal name of all the classes. Its school ability is sort of on the weaker side of the spectrum, but if you have the opportunity (pun intended) to find out someone's advantage or disadvantage, it might eventually pay off. Neutral school.
• Daidoji Spymaster: it's the kind of school that I find hard to justify, I mean, you are basically playing M instead of 007 and I am sure that there will be people who will find this interesting, but this could have been a title instead of a full fledged school. Its school ability is also on the weaker side. Weak school.
• Doji Bureaucrat gets double prize of unnecessary school for being yet a second school for the same clan on a splat book and for being yet another Doji Courtier school when we already have one in the CRB. Its school ability is actually quite strong (and even possibly broken just before or during a duel) but it kind of feels like the evil twin for the Doji Diplomat. Strong school anyway, even if somewhat redundant.
• Ikoma Shadow School: it had the potential to be a great school and kind of is if your campaign was able to reach rank 5 and you finally got your hands on Silent Elimination (which is a rank 3 technique that you can only get at rank 5 anyway) and it has one of the weakest school abilities of this book. Weak school.
• Mercenary Ninja is a school not associated with any clan and supposed to be taken by characters whose background is a ronin or a heimin. It gets access to all Ninjutsu permanently with the trade off of not having free access to shuji except the ones in its curriculum. Nothing that a good title can't solve. Its school ability is not that good but not that bad either. Good school.
• Shiba Artist: yay, the Shiba get an artisan school. The problem? Their school ability has the prize of being the worst of the book and that's saying a lot. They could have followed with the previous Shadowlands book and introduced yet some new patterns (even patterns for stuff that is not armors or weapons) but they chose not to and the Shiba Artist is only good enough to reenact the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore scene of Ghost. Weak school.
• Shika Matchmaker: remember what I said above about the Deer? Here it is. It's does have a somewhat powerful school ability for the Ritual that they start with, the problem being, it only works with this Ritual. Neutral school.
• Shika Speardancer is actually a really strong school with a strong school ability. They kind of get on my nerves because of how the Deer get handled in the book but I have to admit this school is solid. Good school.
• Togashi Chronicler is keeping the tradition of schools that really shouldn't be here but we need one from every single Great Clan and this was they best they came up with. I find the school reasoning sort of weak and their school ability is kind of hard to pin down how good it is considering how very few kiho we have at the moment. I will put as a weak school because of that.
• Yasuki Yojimbo this I had previously put as a good school but people who tested it said it doesn't work too well because of the dice mechanics. Weak school.

We get some more advantages and disadvantages, a new heritage table oriented for the Crane, some new weapons and armors for shinobi. Remember when I said this book was a stealth book about ninja instead of courtiers? We get 9 brand new ninjutsu and 10 shuji. Considering how ninjutsu are extremely hard to be accessed, it kind of feels like overkill that many, but hey, that explains why we got the Mercenary Ninja. On the one hand, this book didn't have a Unicorn school, so it's going in the right direction of avoiding school bloat, but then it just adds 2 schools for the Crane (and 2 extremely redundant ones, at that) 1/5.

Chapter 3 provides a way of setting up your own winter court or normal court games involving the players as well as tips on how to keep the shinobi character(s) involved with the rest of the party. We get 9 new titles, most of them extremely overpriced. We even get a title (Covert Agent) that pretty much functions as the excuse to have "enemy clan" characters working together if the need arises. We get yet another table for opportunities to be spent in courtly scenes. We get a new mechanic called Bonds. They are nice if you invest the XP on them, the problem is, any XP invested in them does not advance school rank (not even by half) this is something that I would personally house rule anyway. Unfortunately, this book, while being Crane centered, does not have a template for Crane Clan NPCs nor new demeanors. 1/5