Voting is open for the next 1 day, 8 hours
I posted 4 plans, if you are interested in taking a look at any of them.
Sure, I'll go through them and offer some remarks.

Give Iron ore to the Tower to help with the iron shortage.
I don't know exactly how much ore Hazō can produce in a given amount of time, or how acute the shortage is, but this doesn't seem like a compelling use of Hazō's very valuable time. I could be convinced otherwise if we had more concrete information about how bad the shortage is, how long it would take Hazō, and how much the chakra would cost.

Master Blacksmith
  • Ask him to try ES-iron ore and give feedback. Make it clear we can get him more.
  • Commission a new spear from him, for Yuuma.
    • (Meta-Goal: A spear so good that it has invokable Aspects related to its craftsmanship)
This I like in principle, but I don't know enough about the rules to say if a spear with invokable aspects would actually be realistic.

You're an experienced ninja. Draft up a list of top five items every ninja should have in the field, get it approved by Mari, and then work with Mio about incorporating care packages containing those items into the Akane Seal Bank
I think that if these items were affordable, ninja would already be buying them, and if not that's another large expense for us, and the supply chains for those items may not even exist yet. I'm also not sure what these hypothetical items would be, if not seals or weapons (see: iron shortage).

  • What are the first impressions about the Akane Seal Bank?
  • In your opinion, as an experienced jonin, how can we leverage our money to improve the survivability of our (Gōketsu in particular and Leaf more generally)?
This seems like a decent thing to talk to Mari about in the abstract, but I suspect that (unless they've already thought about the answers to these questions) the result is that the QMs have to come up with some specifics that would otherwise be abstracted away. And I think the QMs have said they aren't interested in that kind of thing, so I'd rather it stayed abstracted away.
 
  • In peacetime, economic power lets us order more ninja to do till and fills. How do we turn this into prosperity?
  • Finish the road quickly using Noburi, lots of chunin and mobile force walls to level MARI roads after casting?
  • Use the fertility jutsu on all the farms near the road?
I expect the problem with this is that there are a limited number of ninja and the Tower requires most of them for military tasks. If we aren't already hiring about as many ninja-hours as the Tower is willing to spare for till n' fills, I would support spending more money to do that.

Setup storage seal banks that rotate their contents regularly between cities (cargo and mail)?
This requires ninja semipermanently stationed in other cities to operate the seals. I'm not sure what the Tower would think of that.

Hire crafts/business people/KEI ninja to work with TH people to make jutsu for peaceful applications?
New jutsu aren't very useful unless we have the ninja to use them (see above). I suspect the reason Mari hasn't already done this is that building walls is the most effective thing the Ministry can do with its ninja-hours, and they haven't finished that yet.

Start our own large scale propaganda efforts to get people onboard with Uplift?
The trouble with propaganda is that it requires some skill to be effective, and can backfire if you aren't careful. I don't think we have anyone competent to handle this (the only people I would trust are Mari and Ami, but it's possible we could find someone else) who can be spared. Are there civilian propaganda specialists? Would it be possible to train someone to head this without consuming too much of Mari's time? I doubt it.

Should we hire sealing masters and start a sealing school for seal smiths that focuses on safety?
Do we actually know if Kagome's teachings have resulted in notably better safety results among the Gōketsu compared to other Leaf sealsmiths? Because our safety record certainly isn't perfect. And if it were an improvement, I think it wouldn't be trivial to train more people to effectively teach the Kagome safety procedures. Sealmasters who have been doing things their way for years aren't suddenly going to whole-heartedly adopt a new safety mindset and effectively teach it to students. I'd like to have a proper sealing academy eventually, but first we need to train the faculty, which is exactly what we're doing right now.

Scene: A Hazo shadow clone to goes fishing with a Naruto shadow clone and they talk about loss.
I have zero interest in this.
 
Could we make an uplift festival with prizes for civilian and ninja contributions to common good?
Are you thinking of something like the Tower's contest? I'd like to do something like that eventually, but I think we'd need to offer hefty prizes to get the good stuff.

Is there something we could do with the Nara printing presses?
"Yes, Hazō, you can use them to print things. Do you have something you want to print?"

Is the church of Youth successful enough/aligned enough to be helpful to work with?
I think the main reason we haven't done this is the political implications. But personally I'd be down for it anyways, I think it would be hilarious.

Could we successfully influence other villages in an uplift direction?
Influencing other villages is like influencing Leaf, but much harder since it's at a distance. I actually think Ami could pull it off, given enough time, but she's busy with AMITY and A-day. Once we've either formed an alliance with Pein (as Ami wants) or developed several S-rankers, killed Akatsuki, and taken over AMITY ourselves, then I think Ami would be less busy and relish the challenge of creating sweeping worldwide cultural change. But it seems doomed to failure until then.

Burning sand macerators are as deadly as directional explosives, but they can be used over a hundred times. Could this make civilian trappers actually useful for chakra beast reduction efforts if we scaled up supply?
I think the constraint is still scribing enough seals to make a dent in the problem. If I'm not mistaken, there are more then enough weak genin to use a macerator against a chakra beast.

It's possible the trigger could be used to make civilian usable explosive seals. Should we be worried about civilian sucide bombers if we make civilian usable seals?
This is an interesting question, and I think it would be cool to hear what Kei thinks of it, but I suspect the answer is that it doesn't make much of a difference because seals are still expensive.
 
Scene: Dog summons/Gōketsu get to know each other
This seems potentially interesting? Really depends on how much the QMs want to write it and what they do with it. I'd vote for it if a QM wanted to write it and thought they could come up with something interesting.

A competition is held, with prizes for the dogs and people with the best ideas for how the Gōketsu clan could help the dogs and how the dogs could help the humans.
I expect the answer to this is that dogs want various things, some of which Hazō is able to get for them, and that dogs doing much more on the human path requires Hazō to spend chakra and probably isn't worth it. The dogs trade with Hazō specifically, but I don't think they can profitably trade with random other Gōketsu.

How can we make this better?
  • Are there any jutsu that the Dogs would be willing to share that might help fight these monsters?
More justu probably isn't going to make much of a dent in the chakra beast problem. I don't think there's much Cannai can do about it in general. Maybe the dogs have some jutsu that would be really useful to us if properly exploited (wouldn't be the first time Hazō has turned the ordinary into the extraordinary) but that requires either that the QMs come up with a bunch of dog jutsu and then we find the exploitable ones (out of the question) or that they decide by fiat that the dogs have a really good jutsu, and I don't know if they'd be willing to give us free shinies like that.

If we can get food, we can have people live together behind walls. Is there any clan that we could trade with for food?
I'm curious about how much food the 7th path produces and how much of it we could import, but I suspect the answer is not enough to make a huge difference. I doubt the 7th path's agricultural productivity is so much higher (and it seems like some clans, like the dogs, don't do much agriculture at all).
 
I'd like to invent red-coloured flash bombs.
Hazou has experience making seal-light of different colours (did it with HOWSS, implied it was pretty trivial)
"take a standard flash-bomb ans make it red" seem plausibly like Genin-level sealwork.

Making sapphire glasses and inculding red flash-bombs in the team MARS loadout sounds really effective. Our opening mass-debuff could blind *and* deafen, and give so many tags.

And it seems like we could do this in a day, plausibly much less.

Is there any reason not to include this in plans?
 
You would like to know what drives them. What is at the core of what they do? And what does someone who has everything desire?
This would be useful to know, but I'm not sure they'd be receptive to such a direct line of questioning. They seem like they prefer to stay somewhat mysterious. I'd be interested to hear what Noburi thinks about how they'd respond to this.

Do they have any advice on how we can make our world better?
I'd be kinda surprised if they had much useful advice, especially given the inferential gap caused by not living in the human path. Also, with all due respect to our esteemed QMs, Ma and Pa, no matter how wise and insightful they are meant to be narratively, will never be any more wise and insightful in practice than the QMs writing them, so I don't think they'd give us better advice than what we get from Mari and Kei. IIRC the Mori Voice has been called the 'voice of the QMs' so, in terms of offering advice based on publicly known information, I don't think we can do much better than Kei and Ami. Of course, we the players are capable of being cleverer than them from time to time...
 
I'd like to invent red-coloured flash bombs.
Hazou has experience making seal-light of different colours (did it with HOWSS, implied it was pretty trivial)
"take a standard flash-bomb ans make it red" seem plausibly like Genin-level sealwork.

Making sapphire glasses and inculding red flash-bombs in the team MARS loadout sounds really effective. Our opening mass-debuff could blind *and* deafen, and give so many tags.

And it seems like we could do this in a day, plausibly much less.

Is there any reason not to include this in plans?
Oh that's actually quite clever, I do like that.

e: Though, as for why not to include it in plans, our current research is pretty busy.
 
I'm curious about how much food the 7th path produces and how much of it we could import, but I suspect the answer is not enough to make a huge difference. I doubt the 7th path's agricultural productivity is so much higher (and it seems like some clans, like the dogs, don't do much agriculture at all).

Dog territory houses bison (?) herds that have hundreds of thousands of bison in them. I think Cannai was willing to let us take enough meat to make a sizable dent in Leaf's food shortages a while back, while also saying that it's sustainable for them. I think there's quite a lot of food we can import if we really try, but we'd need a shit ton of storage seals to carry them all and ninja to oversee logistics.

Also hey guys I finally created an account. I'm usually more active on the discord server though.
 
Wait for headache to pass
What's the reason for doing this? Are we expecting social combat at the party? Otherwise I'd say full steam ahead.
RB is confirmed jounin, yes
The Hyūga have the reputation, by far. Whether or not they actually are the richest, HDK
Has Hazou been to their estate? Is is very opulent?
(constrained either by money, amount of Earth Element ninja, or people's willingness to do till-n-fills)
Do we know which one of these it is? We could feasibly shift the incentives with subsidies like paying people to learn Earth Element or matching mission pay for till-n-fills.
Making sapphire glasses and inculding red flash-bombs in the team MARS loadout sounds really effective. Our opening mass-debuff could blind *and* deafen, and give so many tags.

And it seems like we could do this in a day, plausibly much less.

Is there any reason not to include this in plans?
It's a good idea and I'm down to research this. We have a considerable Sealing backlog and I'll advocate for a prep day to investigate the difficulty of this seal.

The way the Sealing mechanics work, however, means that (off the cuff) I'd estimate this is probably 1-2 weeks of Sealing time. Basically, the only seals that can be completed in a day are utterly trivial.
 
If you change this to "special-jonin", I'll vote for this.
i dont think its typical to make the specjonin stop first though tbh, and in many ways is treated interchangeably with jonin

What about "jonin/special-jonin"? i presume sanity checks/hazou knowing norms more than us etc would handle it from there

What's the reason for doing this? Are we expecting social combat at the party?
Honestly, being surrounded by Clan Heads, we can't really rule it out
 
Walling up settlements and building roads are two separate initiatives. As walling up settlements is the Ministry's primary mission, it's safe to assume that's been continuing at speed (constrained either by money, amount of Earth Element ninja, or people's willingness to do till-n-fills).
Hazō nodded thoughtfully, chewing through the implications. An average chūnin could do 250 yards and would then need a day to rebuild their chakra reserves before doing it again. It was...what, 50 miles to Otafuku Gai? A mile was almost 2,000 yards, so 50 miles was roughly 100,000 yards. That meant about 400 days to get there with a single-thickness wall. That was roughly a year. Multiply by 3 to get the necessary width...
"Except Asuma won't let you... Oh. Two or three dozen Earth-aspect chūnin, and me," Noburi said, realization visibly hitting him. "You want me to drain genin in order to supply the chūnin road crews."

"I want to talk to you about it," Hazō corrected. "Noburi, you've always been resentful of being valued only as a chakra source. I hope you realize that we—the Gōketsu Clan in general and Team Uplift especially—don't see you like that."

"Yah, I know," he said, waving the statement away as he sat, lips pursed in thought. "Have you thought about the actual costs? Three genin to resupply a chūnin if you don't want to leave the genin too low. How many genin does Leaf have?"

"Conveniently, about three times as many genin as chūnin."

"Asuma won't let you monopolize thirty ninja for months on what is basically a massive till'n'fill. Plus, you'll need to convince the chūnin in question to learn this jutsu that isn't useful in combat and then set aside all their training and be chakra exhausted every day for months. Say you can put six chūnin on the problem; between them they can do the whole thing in seven or eight months without resupply. Add another eighteen genin drained per day in order to effectively double the road crew's chakra supply. That makes it three to four months to build one road that only goes to the nearest city."
@Inferno Vulpix Do you have a rough guess how many miles of wall the Ministry could have put up? Good chunk? Drop in the ocean?
 
Sure, I'll go through them and offer some remarks.


I don't know exactly how much ore Hazō can produce in a given amount of time, or how acute the shortage is, but this doesn't seem like a compelling use of Hazō's very valuable time. I could be convinced otherwise if we had more concrete information about how bad the shortage is, how long it would take Hazō, and how much the chakra would cost.


This I like in principle, but I don't know enough about the rules to say if a spear with invokable aspects would actually be realistic.


I think that if these items were affordable, ninja would already be buying them, and if not that's another large expense for us, and the supply chains for those items may not even exist yet. I'm also not sure what these hypothetical items would be, if not seals or weapons (see: iron shortage).


This seems like a decent thing to talk to Mari about in the abstract, but I suspect that (unless they've already thought about the answers to these questions) the result is that the QMs have to come up with some specifics that would otherwise be abstracted away. And I think the QMs have said they aren't interested in that kind of thing, so I'd rather it stayed abstracted away.
This one was mostly based on RandomOTP's comments regarding my economic war council plan. The impression that I got is we can make a ton of iron ore really fast. Separating one thing from another seemed to be pretty quick and we can make granite out of thin air. I believe we could make more than our current industrial base is going to use in the next several years in a day or two. And the ore quality will be way better.

I think we have enough money coming in that the supply thing would be a pretty minor expense. But I don't know what the things are or how useful it would be, so I honestly don't know how helpful this would be.

I do think it would be good to see if we can buy stuff that would make our people die less (trade for jutsu, get tutors, have TH people make a sucide jutsu for the FOOMers, etc).

I expect the problem with this is that there are a limited number of ninja and the Tower requires most of them for military tasks. If we aren't already hiring about as many ninja-hours as the Tower is willing to spare for till n' fills, I would support spending more money to do that.


This requires ninja semipermanently stationed in other cities to operate the seals. I'm not sure what the Tower would think of that.


New jutsu aren't very useful unless we have the ninja to use them (see above). I suspect the reason Mari hasn't already done this is that building walls is the most effective thing the Ministry can do with its ninja-hours, and they haven't finished that yet.


The trouble with propaganda is that it requires some skill to be effective, and can backfire if you aren't careful. I don't think we have anyone competent to handle this (the only people I would trust are Mari and Ami, but it's possible we could find someone else) who can be spared. Are there civilian propaganda specialists? Would it be possible to train someone to head this without consuming too much of Mari's time? I doubt it.


Do we actually know if Kagome's teachings have resulted in notably better safety results among the Gōketsu compared to other Leaf sealsmiths? Because our safety record certainly isn't perfect. And if it were an improvement, I think it wouldn't be trivial to train more people to effectively teach the Kagome safety procedures. Sealmasters who have been doing things their way for years aren't suddenly going to whole-heartedly adopt a new safety mindset and effectively teach it to students. I'd like to have a proper sealing academy eventually, but first we need to train the faculty, which is exactly what we're doing right now.


I have zero interest in this.
We collect taxes from these places and they don't exactly have to be able bodied to work a seal bank. There's only two cities of note near leaf, so I am pretty sure we can get two (or put a rotation). If we collect taxes from these places, we have to be stopping by reasonably regularly and a week long "work the seal bank" mission for a single genin that goes along with the "collect the taxes" team seems pretty darn doable.

I'm trying to build a case for a genin track for "support ninja" which aren't expected to be combat capable. Since everyone with chakra is drafted, it seems pretty likely that a bunch of people that aren't suited for combat are pushed in to it and die in the first few encounters. I think it would be useful to have an option for people who are terrible at fighting to serve honorably instead of just dying. More useful support ninja jutsu would help with that.

If our enemies can hire theater troupes to do plays about how terrible they are, why can't we hire theatre troups and writers that have ninja heros that treat civilians like people and villains that (among other things) publicly abuse their power over allied civillians. Make mistreating civillians become the "kick the puppy troupe". It doesn't have to be a religion. Just a narrative that shows up more often.

Regarding Kagome safety, there's the taggable "And the dances" aspect that can be used to do sealing research slowly but safely. I think that is sufficient evidence that there is something there.

Yes. Like the tower contest but with civilians contributing too. Money is useful for making good prizes :)

American culture has a habit of escaping it's borders. I was thinking we might do this intentionally with uplift themed cultural stuff (books, songs, etc).

The big reason why burning macerators could be useful is that you can use it in a trap 100+ times. That means something like a 100x improvement in chakra beast killing throughput compared to a disposable trap. And I think that might be enough to make it worth using with civilians setting them.

The dog plan has two major strategic goals. "humanize" the humans to the dogs so that they might be onboard with sharing jutsu with the Humans and identify trade goods that dogs would value. Prior updates have indicated that dogs have more or less unlimited meat that they can get reasonably easily. We have 99 people working to make food for the 1 that is not. So more food would allow a lot more work on not food stuff. Dogs can also work storage seals, so it shouldn't be hard for them to load it up... if they want to. PCJ would help our genin not die a ton if we could share it. Dogs might have something as good which we could ask Sasuke to adapt to human use (all day super smell so you never get surprised, etc).

The 7th path doesn't have chakra beasts but all of them have chakra. We know food is cheap to dogs. It might be the case for other clans too.

The chat invented a way to make roads be able to move forward basically as fast as chakra allows (don't smooth the ground, then cut it smooth with force knives). Ma and Pa have massive chakra pools and a trick that is likely to let them recharge their pools super fast. They would be phenomenal at making roads and walls, if only they cared to. We need to figure out how to make them care. Also, they are apparently S rank TH people? Would be great if they were actually motivated to put effort into helping us, either from trade or compassion.

However, they are super prideful so the plan tries to walk them into either caring more or offering to help.
 
Can the party plans at least ask Mari offscreen if it would be practical to not smooth the ground, put the road in and then cut it smooth with force blades?
 
[X] Action Plan: A Cause for Competition
Word count: <300
  • Sanity check with Mari/Kei
  • Wait for headache to pass.
  • Hey, we're a spec jonin! Let's celebrate.
    • Get a few folks together and host a party on the Goketsu estate.
      • Run the guest list by Mari to make sure we aren't snubbing anyone unintentionally. Goal is to showcase Goketsu pride, but not snooty opulence.
      • Invite the Goketsu, Kei, Snowflake, and Ami, if she's in Leaf. Additionally, invite Clan Heads that are Hazou's age, and their teammates from when they were genin. Neji, Lee, and Tenten as well. Summoner peers Ruri and Aika are welcome too. Harumitsu can come if he wants.
    • In good fun (IE, with minimal arrogance), discuss with same-age peers who they think is making jonin/special-jonin next. Make some lighthearted interclan bets on the future careers of peers.
    • And if any of them need to hire a jonin-grade sealmaster for something they know who to contact.
  • Seal research once healed:
    • Prime does next Minato seals. Follow Hazou's intuition.
    • Shadow clone does Directional explosives. Follow Hazou's intuition.
  • Offscreen
    • Have MARI administration evaluate feasibility of constructing roads first and leveling top afterwards with force walls versus leveling the ground to cast MaRI on
 
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