An easy way to do this would be giving these characters more political power. Ai could've let us have a bunch of commoners we could potentially recruit into the Wu clan and then later train in qi to have an army in the second book (or even just a small army we could use in the inevitable clash of the rogues vs the empire in this book).
Tigress could let us get into the good graces of the more isolated clans in the empire and could give us more bonuses with the tattoos (I THINK thats their thing right?).
And Xiwen could have given us a spy network to use against some of our enemies so we'd know where everyone stands both power-wise, what allies/enemies they have and potentially sabotage them on a smaller scale (stealing their weapons or resources for example).
Nicky wants to make the ROs relevant but he dosent know how to do it outside of the pure power aspect, while the settings he created can offer so much in terms of relevancy to the characters.
