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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Velorien said:
Sealless techniques are extremely rare.
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I like this decision. Not because of any mechanical reason but...

...well...

I've always thought that ninjas doing handseals look pretty cool. :oops:

faflec said:
KILL ALL THE MOUNTAIN NIN
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Originally I was a bit miffed at Inoue. I mean really? Resorting to disproportionate amounts of physical violence again?

On further thought her response seems pretty appropriate. I mean, the last person who hurt Akane got most of his head splattered all over the forest floor in Iron. I'm not quite sure if Hazou would've been that merciful this time.

@eaglejarl Did Akane get Thousand Yard Stare points from this engagement?
 
How would she get Thousand Yard Stare points from this? The only face she learned was the "slack-jawed idiot" expression.
 
And hopefully we learned a lesson in future interactions with other people.

That is to say we BURN THEM TO THE GROUND.
 
faflec said:
How would she get Thousand Yard Stare points from this?
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It was a near death experience. Also, Keiko got one from killing a pig so I thought I'd ask.*

Jackercracks said:
She did however learn a valuable lesson about prolonging fights against unknown opponents.
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I think someone should tell Akane that the School of Hard Knocks is really just a turn of a phrase and should not be taken literally.

EDIT: *I admit that the pig was scarier than this guy (also prettier), but still.
 
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All right, we've gathered a few chapter's worth of data on the Village Hidden in the Mountain. The more correct knowledge we can determine from analyzing them, the more of a diplomatic edge we will have. Here's my gathering of what I think relevant data is. I've drawn some conclusions from this, but figured it'd probably be more helpful to gather the information first, then post my own conclusions later. Here's my bullet pointed list of relevant information we've found out in the past few chapters about this situation.

Added @Twofold's correction and addition, also Mari's analysis of their fighting ability.
Also apparently I can't read :p Fixed comment about Akio being the beast lord)

Data points:
  • Things Jiraiya's contact told us (chapter 33):
    • Akio (the Beast Lord's apprentice, likely summon scroll user) and the old blacksmith traveled through this pass to get to the city->village we shopped at
    • Akio's master Ui defeated an invading army of ninja and civilians, which dispersed and settled throughout Tea, without Akio joining in the fight
  • Things from visiting Tonaki (chapter 36)
    • The village used to be a city, mostly full of artisans, but has been slowly decaying after the main road to them broke down
    • The village had no records of note, and no rumors about Akio or ninja or summons
  • Things from initial contact with the ninja (chapter 36)
    • Have obedient Tapirs
    • Use bows
    • Didn't use ninjutsu
    • Excessively hostile
    • Relatively low combat ability
    • Thought medic-nin were a myth
    • Had vitamin deficiency and tape-worm
  • Things from chapter 37
    • They have one founder - singular (Hazou's deception check)
    • Aren't comfortable sharing origins of their village with us
    • The drugged ninja didn't react to Noburi saying Tonaki called them sacred guardians (though, he was drugged)
    • They are guarding a scroll
    • They've been working with the scroll for generations, but have had some kind of difficulty
    • Keiko confirmation on Tapirs as highly-trained
    • ~100 villagers, ~80% ninja
    • Hunters, not farmers
    • Regular close-range patrols
  • Things from chapter 38
    • The village keeps a watch on us ~2 dozen Tapirs and 8-12 ninja
    • The village allows Noburi to heal people
      • Their six year olds have combat training
    • The non-ninja members are loyal and helpful to the village, but wish they could be more so, sad at not having chakra
    • VHitM has seals (both explosive and storage)
      • All these seals look like they came from same source
    • Village is proud
    • Kouta is not well liked
    • Yoshida Tsukiko has authority and is used to being obeyed
      • Our escort left us
      • Kouta obeyed her
      • She tried to order our team around (to varying success)
  • Mari on their combat: excessively showy - likely haven't actually had to kill people for a while.
 
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That's a pretty long info-list. One thing you missed is that all of the ninjas that Noburi checked had vitamin deficiencies. A bit of a hint that there is not too much food to go around or at least that the variety is poor.

Radvic said:
Use crossbows
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I think they use normal bows.

Radvic said:
~100 villagers, ~80% ninja
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Hold on, how does this work again? I was under the impression that ninjas to civilians ratio was way more in the favor of civilians.

There must be some serious inbreeding going on in this village. Can you even have a healthy gene pool with 100 people? Especially if it already consists of families and is not optimized? I wonder where they get new blood from. Do they spirit away babies and steal wives from nearby villages?
 
Twofold said:
That's a pretty long info-list. One thing you missed is that all of the ninjas that Noburi checked had vitamin deficiencies. A bit of a hint that there is not too much food to go around or at least that the variety is poor.



I think they use normal bows.



Hold on, how does this work again? I was under the impression that ninjas to civilians ratio was way more in the favor of civilians.

There must be some serious inbreeding going on in this village. Can you even have a healthy gene pool with 100 people? Especially if it already consists of families and is not optimized? I wonder where they get new blood from. Do they spirit away babies and steal wives from nearby villages?
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Point on the bows and vitamin deficiencies. I've corrected the list.

On the ninja, this is what Keiko's report included in chapter 37. It's also worth noting, that it's not an almost 1-1 ninja split (I realized I may have ambiguously worded it), it's a 4-1 ninja-civilian ratio. Keiko told us there's around 100 villagers, and of those, 80 of them are ninja. This is some crazy distribution.

ETA: oh, also, I don't think any of their generation has actual combat experience.
 
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faflec said:
Jeez. Anyone else think Akio and the family got killed by missing-nin before ever reaching Tonaki?
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Hmm... I do not think that because that wouldn't explain why the town wants to guard the scroll, or why they have one founder, or why they are so isolationist, or why the road shut down excatly when Akio and the blacksmith went to travel on it. Maybe I should go back through and read more about how exactly the road broke down? We've wondered at Kagome poking around in the rocks. It's possible that between his paranoia and his geology he noticed that the road was not destroyed by normal means, but that someone purposefully destroyed it, almost as if they were afraid of someone following them, then ran off to form their own village.

ETA: and now the conspiracy theories start flowing
 
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eaglejarl said:
Akio took his trip about three hundred years ago. The road shut down about a hundred years later.
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Welp, that was a pretty bad misread on my part then. I'll need to change how my theory accounts for that. I suppose it's possible that they originally expanded their village for 100 years or so by taking people off the road, but then the road just happened to break down. Would explain how they've got some genetic diversity, and why it seems like they've been on the decline lately. Though if the village expanded via kidnappings, I'd expect that the village would not have lasted 300 years....

[joke]
Probably actually descended from Uchiha Madara's ghost before being co-opted by Orochimaru. Their seal they base everything off of is actually Orochimaru's cursed seal, they have a secret ritual which enslaves people to the will of the founder (Madara), Orochimaru has changed all their memories, and the road was destroyed by the Senju when they discovered that Madara had made his own village. They've been on a delaying tactic until all of the Akatsuki can come to recruit us. Kouta was disliked because he was abnormally resistent to their ritual, enough that he could try to seriously injure us to make us want to leave and save us from the village's fate. Yoshida is about to make us an offer we can't refuse because Akatsuki is ~2 hours away from reaching us. Yep. Clearly the only non-losing move is to immediately set fire to everything and hope Akatsuki is distracted by the loss of their sleeper cell that we can fake our deaths and escape in the chaos.
[/joke]
 
So, we know some about the village. Here's my conjectures presented in list form (evidence in the earlier data post).

Things I'm confident about
  • Akio was the founder of this village
  • They have the summon scroll (or part of it), which was Ui's treasure that he sent with Akio
  • Akio decided he needed to protect the summon scroll, eventually it became a religious thing
  • Akio had some ability with animals, either as a summoner or a beast tamer (hence the Tapirs)
  • Later generations developed sealing based on the summon scroll
  • At this point, there is significant division amoungst the village leaders
  • They do not have significant real-world life and death ninja-ninja combat experience
Things I'm mildly confident about:
  • The village grew initially, but has declined at least as much as Tonaki has --> the road breaking was bad for them long-term (however it happened)
  • Because Akio had only partially completed his ninja, and it waas just him and the blacksmith's family who founded it, there are several key ninja things they lack, specifically:
    • They don't have any ninjutsu
    • Their summons are incomplete or nonexistant
    • Their Taijutsu is not actually refined for real combat
  • The majority of their ninja do not want to engage us in battle
  • All of them have some sort of ninja ancestry
  • Our attempts at helping the village have somewhat split the village's leaders' opinions about us
Things I'm mostly guessing about:
  • Some of them would be appreciative if we rebuilt the road in an attempt to help their village and Tonaki grow
  • They have some kind of contact with Tonaki
 
Radvic said:
All right, we've gathered a few chapter's worth of data on the Village Hidden in the Mountain. The more correct knowledge we can determine from analyzing them, the more of a diplomatic edge we will have. Here's my gathering of what I think relevant data is. I've drawn some conclusions from this, but figured it'd probably be more helpful to gather the information first, then post my own conclusions later. Here's my bullet pointed list of relevant information we've found out in the past few chapters about this situation.

Added @Twofold's correction and addition, also Mari's analysis of their fighting ability.
Also apparently I can't read :p Fixed comment about Akio being the beast lord)

Data points:
  • Things Jiraiya's contact told us (chapter 33):
    • Akio (the Beast Lord'd apprentice, likely summon scroll user) and the old blacksmith traveled through this pass to get to the city->village we shopped at
    • Akio's master Ui defeated an invading army of ninja and civilians, which dispersed and settled throughout Tea, without Akio joining in the fight
  • Things from visiting Tonaki (chapter 36)
    • The village used to be a city, mostly full of artisans, but has been slowly decaying after the main road to them broke down
    • The village had no records of note, and no rumors about Akio or ninja or summons
  • Things from initial contact with the ninja (chapter 36)
    • Have obedient Tapirs
    • Use bows
    • Didn't use ninjutsu
    • Excessively hostile
    • Relatively low combat ability
    • Thought medic-nin were a myth
    • Had vitamin deficiency and tape-worm
  • Things from chapter 37
    • They have one founder - singular (Hazou's deception check)
    • Aren't comfortable sharing origins of their village with us
    • The drugged ninja didn't react to Noburi saying Tonaki called them sacred guardians (though, he was drugged)
    • They are guarding a scroll
    • They've been working with the scroll for generations, but have had some kind of difficulty
    • Keiko confirmation on Tapirs as highly-trained
    • ~100 villagers, ~80% ninja
    • Hunters, not farmers
    • Regular close-range patrols
  • Things from chapter 38
    • The village keeps a watch on us ~2 dozen Tapirs and 8-12 ninja
    • The village allows Noburi to heal people
      • Their six year olds have combat training
    • The non-ninja members are loyal and helpful to the village, but wish they could be more so, sad at not having chakra
    • VHitM has seals (both explosive and storage)
      • All these seals look like they came from same source
    • Village is proud
    • Kouta is not well liked
    • Yoshida Tsukiko has authority and is used to being obeyed
      • Our escort left us
      • Kouta obeyed her
      • She tried to order our team around (to varying success)
  • Mari on their combat: excessively showy - likely haven't actually had to kill people for a while.
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Click to shrink...

Would you be so kind as to put all of this on the player knowledge doc? It would be such a shame if it all got buried.
 
@eaglejarl @Velorien @Jackercracks
So now that we've had sealing style and variations mentioned can we get more info on whether its possible to fake a different style or obscure a seal so that it looks like someone else using a similar style? And if so what are the mechanics for detection and creation?
 
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