Five Rings Publishing Group

Five Rings Publishing Group was a card game publisher licensed to revive the Rage CCG for White Wolf. They published several sets of Rage cards in 1998 and 1999.

Overview
Five Rings was originally spun off from Alderac Entertainment to manage its popular Legend of the Five Rings CCG. In 1997 they were acquired by Wizards of the Coast but continued to exist as a unit within the company until late 1998.

White Wolf licensed Five Rings to revive Rage, which had gone out of print in 1996 due to anemic sales. After a lengthy delay, Five Rings began releasing small card sets on a monthly basis as part of their "Rolling Thunder" program, which proved unpopular with retailers. The cards were also largely incompatible with existing Rage cards produced by White Wolf in 1995 and 1996. There were general complaints of poor customer service, badly-handled tournaments and other managerial failures, as Five Rings and Wizards of the Coast were ungoing extensive restructuring at the time.

In 1999, Hasbro bought WTC, and chose to cancel small CCGs like Rage and Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. The licenses for these games reverted back to White Wolf, and Hasbro destroyed most of the unsold stock. Unlike White Wolf, Hasbro has not supported fan-made expansions for the Five Rings version of Rage or the use of online gaming engines like Lackey CCG.

Naming
Azrael Productions, which attempted to acquire the Rage license in the early 2000s, began the practice of referring to the Five Rings versions of the game as Rage: Tribal War, in contrast to the WW-produced Rage: Apocalypse. Fans also sometimes refer to these cards as Rage Across Las Vegas, the title of the storyline for the seven released card sets.