Remove ads

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Reader mode
faflec said:
You know...if we went to Tea and investigated clues for who exactly stole the Capybara contract...I wouldn't vote against the idea. Said contract would IMO be the safest one to go after, given that from the others we know about one is Cloud-aligned, one is (most likely) Mist-aligned, and the other is Uchiha Itachi.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I mean we know that the Condor summoner stoke it and was heading to rice. I would much prefer looking around the Hinnago Medical Facility
 
Kiba said:
We don't need merchants to become dangerous undercover spies. IF all they do is report on economic conditions, then it's good to me.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That is good for me as well. But even if all we get is economic conditions, it is still the start of a spy network. We can, for example, ask those merchants "hey, what do you think of Duke Fancypants," and use that as a basis for further research.

MMKII said:
Obligatory reminder: The general Merchant Class may very well be rich jackasses, just as the Noble Class surely is, and the general ruling Ninja Class absolutely is.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Definitely true. We are still Ninja royalty, so every merchant is helpless before us, even the richest of jackasses. Even the head of the Yakuza in Mist can't touch us, because if we get hurt the most powerful ninja in Leaf will destroy him.

It is possible that we will find merchants who are such jackasses that we feel no guilt at all threatening them. In that case, I'm fine excluding them from the network of mutual gain. But coerced employees make for sub par and even dangerous employees.

EDIT: Corrected Leaf Yakuza->Mist Yakuza
 
Last edited:
I still think we can get away with just handing out some writs of patronage.

MERCHANT: I can come to Leaf?

HAZOU: Here is a writ of patronage signed by Jiraiya saying you can.

MERCHANT: Why?

HAZOU: Because I like salt and my dad's the Hokage and I feel like it?

MERCHANT: This is entirely in line with my expectations of why ninja do things. I'll see you in two weeks.
 
Last edited:
Roomba said:
So, let's think constructively on how we might achieve some of these ambitious goals. I'll take the merchant spy network. Questions I can think of, that we're going to need to answer in order to make this work:
  • Recruitment and vetting. How do we find the right people and how do we ensure they can be trusted (and how much)?
  • Incentives. What reason do they have to work for us? Are we paying in ryo? Favors and contacts? Ideological satisfaction?
  • Levels of involvement and trust. Are we looking for full-time dedicated agents? Or just normal merchants willing to keep an ear out and sell information? Something in between?
  • Structure and infosec practices. Solo operatives or cells? Do we want regional coordinators? How do we make them not single points of failure?
  • How big of a central organization in Leaf are we envisioning? Do we plan for Hazou do just run it on his own like Jiraiya did? If not, who is going to do it and how do we convince them to do so?
  • How do we build out? We currently have nothing, what are the steps to get from this state to the organization we're envisioning?
Anyone want to do something similar for scrolls? We have some leads there, so a good question to answer would be, say, how to find Grandmaster F and what to offer them for their scroll.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

  • Recruitment and vetting. I would propose to recruit traveling merchants so that we have a flow of civilians. Each of them would receive a list of things we're interested in and send reports on them. The reports shouldn't contain anything secret per se, thus if message is intercepted we just loose a piece of information.
  • Incentives. Its a small enterpreneurship with low risks. They get goods to trade and keep most of the money they receive for selling them giving us back perhaps 15% (that's a wild guess, we will need to actually calculate this one)
  • Levels of involvement and trust. Something in between. Normal merchants that send us scheduled reports on non-secret stuff like prices and demand for goods in different areas.
  • Structure and infosec practices. This depends on how easy it is to send letters from different countries to Leaf/Mountain (wherever we decide our center of operation would be). If it is easy enough than each merchant just send reports with mail; if not we need regional people to collect reports and some ninjas to grab them once in a while (like mission we did for Jiraiya, but on a regular basis). These reports are basically useless to anyone who does not posses an analytical division which is our main advantage here. More on structure is in this post.
  • How do we build out. I think its @Oneiros cue to tell. She got this covered
Surely, its all debateable, but thats what I would set for.
 
Oneiros said:
I mean we know that the Condor summoner stoke it and was heading to rice. I would much prefer looking around the Hinnago Medical Facility
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Kiba said:
She did?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
IIRC some Third Party stole it and planned to sell it to the Condor Summoner at the Hinago Medical Facility.

And yes, @Oneiros, I do think said facility would also be another place to look for clues, but I feel that since the Third Party didn't have to overtly reveal themselves at said facility (think of how Joutarou didn't have to reveal himself at the Hot Springs inn) we might get more information investigating in Tea. IMO we'd get a better picture of who our enemies are and what their capabilities are, as well as a general idea of their affiliation which could give us another point to investigate.
 
faflec said:
IIRC some Third Party stole it and planned to sell it to the Condor Summoner at the Hinago Medical Facility.

And yes, @Oneiros, I do think said facility would also be another place to look for clues, but I feel that since the Third Party didn't have to overtly reveal themselves at said facility (think of how Joutarou didn't have to reveal himself at the Hot Springs inn) we might get more information investigating in Tea. IMO we'd get a better picture of who our enemies are and what their capabilities are, as well as a general idea of their affiliation which could give us another point to investigate.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Really good points. Though TBH it's been long enough that there probably aren't any good leads in Tea or in Rice. Much more likely to find stuff from the summon realm. But I'd he down for trying in rice or tea
 
Oneiros said:
Really good points. Though TBH it's been long enough that there probably aren't any good leads in Tea or in Rice. Much more likely to find stuff from the summon realm. But I'd he down for trying in rice or tea
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Will this scouting mission be done in-person by us?

Are we going to scout it from the sky?

What about a telescope?
 
Oneiros said:
Really good points. Though TBH it's been long enough that there probably aren't any good leads in Tea or in Rice. Much more likely to find stuff from the summon realm. But I'd he down for trying in rice or tea
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
What I was thinking of (in Tea, at least) was getting intel through the clan that had the Capybara Summoning Scroll, and then proceeded to have it stolen. I dunno how they manage to function as the ruling class of a massive block of presumably-fertile land as a single clan, but there're probably civilians aplenty for us to question. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out the massive city where they're based and start from there.

Note that the same thing could be done at the Hinago Medical Facility, and if we do end up going there I'd advocate the same policy. But a concern with going to said facility (as opposed to going to Tea) is that the facility's in Rice, and Rice civilians (and ninjas) apparently hate all foreigners. And other relatively minor issues exist, like our existence being known to Sarubetsu's mayor who may or may not have leaked our names and faces after Mari never showed back up to help that one innkeeper.

Yes, Pangolin intel might be more valuable here, but I'd argue that us acting more in the Human Path could help us achieve our other goals in the meantime (e.g., salt empire, spy contacts) by taking a longer mission to Tea and doing investigating as we do our Tower-sanctioned mission. Still, nothing stops us from doing both :p
 
Okay, so here's the ironic thing:

If we want to construct a merchant spy network, the number one thing we have to be at this very moment and in the near future is accessible to merchants. This is because the way agents are usually created is not through blackmail, but through some combination of "money, ideology, ingratiation, disgruntlement, fantasy, self-importance/ego, and kinship", as a non-exhaustive list.

Remember how we made the big "mistake" of preaching about giving a single flying fuck about civilians a couple chapters back? Remember how we are the scions of the Land of Fire's Hokage? Remember how the implication is no other villages give a single flying fuck about civilians?

Without even trying, we've managed to hit six out of the seven conditions to any-wannabe spymaster of great import who will help out their friends.

Now what we need to do is give them an opportunity to sell themselves out, and we'll be able to rake in hilarious amounts of intel; much without paying a single cent.

To this end, I'd actually advocate a bigger victory tour, one that just so happens to take us near the merchant trading hubs near the borders of Fire and one whose destinations have been consistently leaked (because we're supposedly hitting every last one) and which has about a billion different itineraries, so that we'll also tie up chunin to ANBU level resources for a literal month as every single other nation races to keep us out.
 
That sounds great @huhYeahGoodPoint, but we need to work out how to keep ourselves safe amidst all this -- if they know where we're going, it only takes one jounin to get lucky and take us down.
 
Cariyaga said:
That sounds great @huhYeahGoodPoint, but we need to work out how to keep ourselves safe amidst all this -- if they know where we're going, it only takes one jounin to get lucky and take us down.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's the extra beautiful thing: because I think we intend to use skywalkers for getting between Trading Hub A and B, the only places where we need to be concerned about safety is the individual points, and because every other village knows where we're going, we also know that they're going to be there; in short, we can launch our own counterespionage against the people trying to kill us at each individual point there, and we'll sell it to Jiraiya this way too.
 
huhYeahGoodPoint said:
That's the extra beautiful thing: because I think we intend to use skywalkers for getting between Trading Hub A and B, the only places where we need to be concerned about safety is the individual points, and because every other village knows where we're going, we also know that they're going to be there; in short, we can launch our own counterespionage against the people trying to kill us at each individual point there, and we'll sell it to Jiraiya this way too.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
@Roomba's variation of this tour-plan involves us taking a bunch of Genin/Chunin with us, so I'm not sure if skywalkers is bueno in that instance of it.
 
On another note, I very much do not expect us to be appropriately challenged by Jounin. This isn't a narrative system being ran here. They will murder us, by sheer dint of better numbers and better-leveled supplementary techniques. A +3 from macerators won't make a difference.
 
TarzanNn said:
  • Recruitment and vetting. I would propose to recruit traveling merchants so that we have a flow of civilians. Each of them would receive a list of things we're interested in and send reports on them. The reports shouldn't contain anything secret per se, thus if message is intercepted we just loose a piece of information.
  • Incentives. Its a small enterpreneurship with low risks. They get goods to trade and keep most of the money they receive for selling them giving us back perhaps 15% (that's a wild guess, we will need to actually calculate this one)
  • Levels of involvement and trust. Something in between. Normal merchants that send us scheduled reports on non-secret stuff like prices and demand for goods in different areas.
  • Structure and infosec practices. This depends on how easy it is to send letters from different countries to Leaf/Mountain (wherever we decide our center of operation would be). If it is easy enough than each merchant just send reports with mail; if not we need regional people to collect reports and some ninjas to grab them once in a while (like mission we did for Jiraiya, but on a regular basis). These reports are basically useless to anyone who does not posses an analytical division which is our main advantage here. More on structure is in this post.
  • How do we build out. I think its @Oneiros cue to tell. She got this covered
Surely, its all debateable, but thats what I would set for.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Thanks for this post. One of the benefits of talking about details is that it resolves misunderstandings. I was under the impression that we wanted to build a full-blown spy network, but what you're describing is more of an information gathering and analysis operation. This makes the whole venture a lot simpler and safer, because our worst case scenarios are other parties learning what we're interested in and maybe feeding us misinformation by subverting an agent.

It sounds like the major unresolved problems include how to communicate effectively, and how to build the analysis division. I suspect the latter is going to be a lot more work than anyone here expects, but these are both a lot more tractable than all the difficult problems involved in handling actual secrets.
 
No no, building the analysis division will be easy. How?

We just have Hazou read them on-screen. Then we can do the analysis.
 
Don't worry QMs. We can just figure out the hivemind's collective stats and you can roll that to analyze the data rather than having to actually put it on screen.
 
Cariyaga said:
No no, building the analysis division will be easy. How?

We just have Hazou read them on-screen. Then we can do the analysis.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yes please. I'm very sceptical of the idea of building a spy network (both regarding its viability and potential usefulness), but if it'll give us hundreds of reports to cross-analyse, I'm fully on board, let's open voting polls and start the conspiracies. I love it.
 
Roomba said:
Thanks for this post. One of the benefits of talking about details is that it resolves misunderstandings. I was under the impression that we wanted to build a full-blown spy network, but what you're describing is more of an information gathering and analysis operation. This makes the whole venture a lot simpler and safer, because our worst case scenarios are other parties learning what we're interested in and maybe feeding us misinformation by subverting an agent.

It sounds like the major unresolved problems include how to communicate effectively, and how to build the analysis division. I suspect the latter is going to be a lot more work than anyone here expects, but these are both a lot more tractable than all the difficult problems involved in handling actual secrets.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah I was expecting a pretty low key organization for a long while


For the communication problem I want to use the merchants we use to sell salt to travel and pick up reports
 
Last edited:
Oneiros said:
For the communication problem I want to use the merchants we use to sell salt to travel and pick up reports
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We could conceivably Pony Express their schedules together somehow for faster messaging but that would for sure require Keiko's help on the logistics to keep it consistent.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top