No, that's not how it's meant to work, and this is precisely what I meant when I said I was probably overlooking things. Though you don't lose characters in that sense, you just wouldn't be able to recruit more.
Of course, there is a natural counter-balance in the way that your Clan's families will naturally agitate for more territories - the Isawa especially, since they actually rule the Clan even if the Shiba handle most day-to-day business.
Still, if people have suggestions for other ways this could work, I'd be happy to hear them.
Something like...
- First, make sure that the family stats and province stats actually line up. It looks more or less like there's a correspondence, but you should make it more explicit. Also, if Shugenja are supposed to be the knowledge-based character type, and that's based on Void, but Void seems to map to Piety, while Learning is the tech stat
-- Possibly make everyone have loremasters? Obviously, the Phoenix would be best at it, but the increasing importance of tech could certainly have made loremasters more of a Thing. Alternately, make Shugenja the Learning character, and slap Monks in at Void (or vice versa? Maybe Monks are the ones pushing the tech trees?).
- Second, have family stats be based on the family seat. If your family seat takes a hit then, yeah, you're suffering, but what's going on out in the churn of provinces doesn't really matter as much. Secondary provinces turn into places that you go for resources and extra legions, while your core provinces are the real jewels. Seems pretty thematic to me.
- Possible third: different secondary provinces give different amounts of stuff. There's provinces that have almost nothing - barely developed balls of ice and rock in the middle of nowhere. They don't give legions, characters, or meaningful resources. Throw in enough shugenja support to make the place livable, add enough farmers that it can support a reasonable population, and it can start providing a legion (though the stats of that legion, dependent on the province stats, still wont' be all that impressive). Put some effort investing in the place - identifying and exploiting certain valuable local resources - and you can start getting some trade goods and income out of it (which will help with the equipment of the troops). Grow it enough to support a reasonable number of samurai-caste (adding dojos, universities, monasteries, or whatever to match) and it can support a single hero.
-- province legion stats are based directly on province base stats, and update at the year mark. If you lose the province, then you lose the legion at the update mark as well.
-- province character slot type is likewise limited by stats, and requires that you build an appropriate training ground. Characters that don't have a slot supporting them tend to wander off, choose to die gloriously against the enemy, commit seppuku, or otherwise vanish.
