Re: OOC: twelfth night
Well, as Swift Fox said, there were originally Lorecircles in the gamebooks, and they did indeed offer bonuses to those who did collect one of the whole sets. However, as you can see from Swift Fox's explanation, they were really unbalanced:
Fire and Light were very small, with two disciplines each; this made them "easy access" options. However, their bonuses are different - in the LW system, 1 point of CS is worth a lot more than 1 point of END (as I'm sure you can tell by now), and the original system didn't have WP, that was an addition.
Also, due to Huntmastery being in two Lorecircles, completing Fire and Solaris would take four disciplines, while Spirit would take four different ones on its own. However, to compensate for this, the Spirit bonus is much better - it is, in fact, superior to that of Fire and Solaris combined.
In practice, what this did in the gamebooks was make some choices much superior to others, and the Lorecircle of Light in particular was so inferior that a player choosing the disciplines within it was essentially handicapping themselves in their playthrought.
So, to avoid this, when I considered the idea of starting a game of my own, restructuring the Lorecircles so that they were balanced with each other was something that was necessary. It's one of the reason why your fellow players probably weren't much surprised I reworked them the way they did - moreso because I imported disciplines (Kai-Alchemy, Herbmastery, Battle Magic and Craftsmanship) which were introduced in later LW books, ones where the Lorecircles idea had been abandoned.
However, I already was interested in how the idea of the Lorecircles contributed to the worldbuilding, and had been thinkering with the in-setting reason for their existence for some time. This lead to me actually putting a lot of thought into how I wanted them structured for the game, and how they related to the NPCs; I used the themes I had decided gave the Lorecircles their meaning - what I choose as the in-setting justification for their existence - and used those as my guidelines on who'd have what when assigning it to characters.
Mechanically, I also tried to mirror the way the Lorecircles were normally selected by players, so Fire and Spirit are the ones which are picked up first by in-setting NPCs, and I specifically let them one Discipline shorter to make them easier to gain. The lorecircle of Moon follows a similar idea in that the disciplines that makes it up are those considered more useful in the later LW books. On the other hand, the Lorecircle of Light is now the largest one, with the disciplines making it up being handpicked so that one would be needing to go for it specifically to get them all - that suddenly justifies people not picking it up frequently. And it also works very well with the meaning I decided that Lorecircle to have.
So, everything has a reason, which I worked hard to intertwine with the NPCs' personalities and with the plot. And the questions I have now is, does that comes through? But I don't have the answer - the only way to get it is to ask you all what you think, and see if your ideas and thoughts on the matter match what I think.
Thus, the question: what do you think? Try to get into the setting for a moment, look things from the point of view of your characters, and ask yourself: why are the powers of the Kai suddivided in this manner? And what does mastering a Lorecircle means, why is it different from simply having four or five disciplines picked at random? I hope that some good conversation can come out of this (which hopefully would be fun for you players to have), and it's also the only way for me to get your ideas. I love analysis, so analyze, and tell me (and each other!) your results! ^_^