We honestly don't have anything super pressing so could get back to tracking the squirrel scroll down soon
I'm fine with this when we have Alt 50 Ath 49 Tai 49, and some more combat seals (RRBs) but Hazou literally almost died last time and was only saved by Akane. Who isn't going to be there to save him this time. So let's wait until his stats are no longer garbage.
 
We can ask Asuma if he has some new information regarding scrolls. Besides nothing he might tell us what another clans (or countries) are actually invested in the search.

Asking Mari how she would try to get one might also give us some new ideas. We also never tried to involve Ino.

@eaglejarl , @Velorien , @Paperclipped

Enma also walked through Raptor land on his Arachnid journey. Any information on this place?

If you ask him his route, Enma tells you that he went from Monkey to Pangolin to Leopard, and then south into Hornet. He couldn't get into Cat from Hornet, so he bent southwest into Crow, west through Raptor, then grabbed a boat to Squirrel before passing through Kangaroo and finally reaching Arachnid.
 
Wait a moment.

Hoo boy, do I have news for you, Taxiarchos. The Pangolin leadership is lying to the Pangolin society. They do, in fact, make claims to their citizens that the Condors are treacherous warmongers. Here's what Pandaa believes:

This is probably all bullshit. Which means:
  • More evidence of the Pangolin leadership being untrustworthy, to be presented to the Conclave. They're even lying to their own!
  • More ammunition for generating discontent within the Pangolin society. If they knew how much of the propaganda was a lie, they'd be both unhappy with Pantsaa and unhappy about the war itself.
I think we genuinely might leverage that (with my other ideas) into "topple the current Pangolin ruling class" specifically.
Hoo boy, do I have news for you, Noumero, if you think you can topple a society by showing that its leaders are liars! Especially when the population benefits from believing the lie.
 
Hoo boy, do I have news for you, Noumero, if you think you can topple a society by showing that its leaders are liars! Especially when the population benefits from believing the lie.
"Show the leaders to be liars" is not the generator of pressures that topple the ruling class, it's a control mechanism for aiming the pressures at the ruling class specifically. For making an "us vs. them" dynamic where "us" includes the Conclave clans plus Leaf summoners plus rank-and-file pangolins and "them" are Pantsaa's faction, instead of "non-pangolins" and "all pangolins" respectively.

To facilitate power transfer, you need to generate instability. To generate instability, you need pretext. This is the pretext.

This, plus also aiming the pressures such that they make it easier for specific non-Pantsaa powers within the Pangolin society to grab power away from him? That's how it works.
 
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To facilitate power transfer, you need to generate instability. To generate instability, you need pretext. This is the pretext
I do not agree. You do not topple dictators by showing them to be liars. Everyone already knows they are liars. In general you can topple dictators by:

1) Crushing their military and forcing them to get a new dictator via military power.

2) Convincing their keys to power that their best interest is to remove the dictator.

3) Waiting for the dictator to die.

1) is probably not happening without another Crusade or Team Uplift going full Itachi on his ass. 2) is not happening because Pantsaa has been busy conquering Condor and distributing that to his key supporters. 3) might happen, in the next three hundred years.
 
There's also the fact that Hazou wasn't read in on any of the progress reports concerning anti-EM measures. Makes me question how much the EM council really weighed into his decision vs Shikamaru.
"Show the leaders to be liars" is not the generator of pressures that topple the ruling class, it's a control mechanism for aiming the pressures at the ruling class specifically. For making an "us vs. them" dynamic where "us" includes the Conclave clans plus Leaf summoners plus rank-and-file pangolins and "them" are Pantsaa's faction, instead of "non-pangolins" and "all pangolins" respectively.

To facilitate power transfer, you need to generate instability. To generate instability, you need pretext. This is the pretext.

This, plus also aiming the pressures such that they make it easier for specific non-Pantsaa powers within the Pangolin society to grab power away from him? That's how it works.
"Show the leaders to be liars" is not the generator of pressures that topple the ruling class, it's a control mechanism for aiming the pressures at the ruling class specifically. For making an "us vs. them" dynamic where "us" includes the Conclave clans plus Leaf summoners plus rank-and-file pangolins and "them" are Pantsaa's faction, instead of "non-pangolins" and "all pangolins" respectively.

To facilitate power transfer, you need to generate instability. To generate instability, you need pretext. This is the pretext.

This, plus also aiming the pressures such that they make it easier for specific non-Pantsaa powers within the Pangolin society to grab power away from him? That's how it works.
Pangolin society is build on "victory, service and the glory of their empire" like many empires in history are. While you might get some very few dissidents that might follow using your approach, it probably wouldn't generate instability.

To do so, we must create defeats and problems that shake the fate of the citizens toward their empire. Defeats, famine , rebellion are usually pretty good motivators. Telling a bunch of indoctrinated citizens a bunch of truths isn't gonna do much, especially since they are currently glorious, victorious, and no doubt still strong

Telling them truth when the citizen are openly quasi indoctrinated is gonna be as useful as dispel is to the Itachi's tsukoyomi. This is simply too naive.
 
2) Convincing their keys to power that their best interest is to remove the dictator.
That's specifically what I'm aiming at. Create an international problem for the Pangolin Clan, make the solution to this problem the removal of Pantsaa, concoct a ready-made narrative which the keys-to-power can feed the Pangolin Society at large in order to justify the toppling of Pantsaa.

The one problem is that I'm not sure the Conclave Clans actually have the ability to apply enough pressure on the Pangolins to facilitate all this.

Edit: Oh, and another problem is that IIRC we don't actually know who Pantsaa's backers are, because Kei hasn't been very detailed on the internal structure of the Pangolin society, so we can't optimize the pressures in a way such that they deliberately aim at making Pantsaa's removal beneficial for them. But this is a solvable problem.
 
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I'm fine with this when we have Alt 50 Ath 49 Tai 49, and some more combat seals (RRBs) but Hazou literally almost died last time and was only saved by Akane. Who isn't going to be there to save him this time. So let's wait until his stats are no longer garbage.

Could I convince you to instead support going at ALT 50, effective Ath 42 & effective Tai 52? Do to having to build out our pyramid getting Ath to 40 doubles the time
 
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@Paperclipped

Now that Kagome has up to Minato seal 7, can we get more detailed explanations of what the seals (especially MS7, which is noted to have possible mednin uses) do and their exact limits?

Here's a list of questions:
  1. What did Minato mean by that note?
  2. Is it nature chakra that is being gathered or Human Path chakra?
  3. What are the ranges on the seals?
  4. When the seal sucks in ambient/environmental chakra, can Hazou or Kagome feel anything happen?
  5. Is it sucking in chakra from his chakra network or just chakra inside of air/dirt/objects? Is there a decrease in the amount of chakra nearby and therefore chakra regeneration rates?
  6. Do we know roughly how much chakra it actually gathers? (in CP amounts or relative to jutsu usage)
  7. Can the gathered chakra be interacted with?
  8. Can it be contained in a Wakahisa barrel?
  9. What do the displays actually show?
  10. Does Kagome have any better idea what MS9 and MS10 are about now that they're only one and two seals away respectively?
 
I do agree with my detractors that the plan I've proposed so far is painfully incomplete, and I think we don't actually have the information to generate any convincing plan given the extent of our knowledge about the Pangolin society.

Which is the problem our next Conclave plan should aim at solving, IMO. Loop in Ami and Mari, and ask Kei to outline their society's structure for us.
 
I do agree with my detractors that the plan I've proposed so far is painfully incomplete, and I think we don't actually have the information to generate any convincing plan given the extent of our knowledge about the Pangolin society.
I think that what you've outlined would probably be doable were (say) Mari the Pangolin Summoner, but I think that even with adequate knowledge of their society's structure, we don't have enough points of interaction to make this viable.

I'm all for exploring the idea but I think our real winner is a Condor exodus to Archeopteryx followed by incremental efforts on Kei's part that we can really turn up once she hits S-rank.
 
I do agree with my detractors that the plan I've proposed so far is painfully incomplete, and I think we don't actually have the information to generate any convincing plan given the extent of our knowledge about the Pangolin society.

Which is the problem our next Conclave plan should aim at solving, IMO. Loop in Ami and Mari, and ask Kei to outline their society's structure for us.
If you have a concrete list of questions that won't require much in-character back-and-forth, you can ask it as a list in thread.
 
I'm all for exploring the idea but I think our real winner is a Condor exodus to Archeopteryx followed by incremental efforts on Kei's part that we can really turn up once she hits S-rank.
I'm concerned that one of Kei's next interaction with Pantsaa is going to end with him executing her, because she's become more trouble than she's worth. He can at the very least revoke her unsummoning privileges and keep her hostage against Leaf, which he knows has sway with a lot of other Conclave Clans.

So my preferred timeline on solving the Pantsaa problem is short.
If you have a concrete list of questions that won't require much in-character back-and-forth, you can ask it as a list in thread.
Sure, give me a bit.
 
[X] [Conclave] Action Plan: Bracing for Impact
This plan is a bit rough, but it hits the important points. Thank you for writing it.
I'll try to make time this evening to refine / suggest improvements.
As promised!(eventually!)
@FaintlySorcerous sorry I haven't condensed/polished the writing. Doing so is pretty spoon/time expensive for me, and we're over 300 anyways. You're very welcome to rephrase any/everything.
Proposed changes are in Bold or Strikethrough.

[X] [Conclave] Action Plan: Bracing for Impact
Word count: <300
  • Meeting
    • Meet with Kei, Mari, Noburi, Snowflake, Haru(he's learning dealmaking and politics), Atmou(no real gain, but letting him learn more 7th path stuff dosen't hurt, and we need to get better about including our nominal family)
    • Include Ami if it isn't treason, Ma and Pa if possible, Ruri if Kei signs off, and Shikamaru if Kei thinks he'd be helpful.
    • Problem: summarize Kei's Pantsaa-related concerns.
      • What is the plausible worst-case outcome?
      • It seems unlikely that Pantsaa will execute Kei assuming he's convinced of the Dragon threat, but he may limit her access to the Seventh Path and/or contracts. Why assume this? How does stating this assumption help? We just asked the team for their takes, we don't need hazou to argue a viewpoint here.
    • Assets:
      • The Rats are friendly if not allies.and the Toads, Dogs, Spiders, Monkeys, ect. Don't be rude to Ma and Pa by mentioning Rats but not them.
      • Kei has previously discussed her potential status as an extra-legal agent and floated the idea of a Pangolin traitor.
      • Goketsu have seals, innovations, and gems to trade in.
      • Leaf controls much of the 7th path trade network. we could move it to another territory. also, killing Kei cuts them off from the trade network.
    • Approaches:
      • If we can contact Confute, we can debrief her, find out who tied her bonds, and claim she was allowed to 'escape' for offsite interrogation so the traitorous Pangolin who freed her couldn't get rid of the evidence. I really don't think this will hold up to skepticism, and definitely not long-term
        • Frame as: Confute was only allowed to escape to uncover a conspiracy.
        • We can lie if we can't find her.
      • If Conjura approves of taking Archeopteryx territory, Kei can mention that she's working on the complete expulsion of Condors from their ancestral territory.
        • Frees up pangolin territory for pangolins only, issue a bunch of new breeding licences and wait.
        • We're pretty happy to sell more skytowers, IFF given a promise that Pangolins will stop expanding(for a while, at least), and not let the seals leave their current borders.
          • you have a possibly unprecedented amount of land anyways, and your neighbors are getting nervous. you need to avoid to provoking a crusade. take a century to build up a newer and bigger all-pangolin empire, with skytowers for security, and a promise against further expansion to calm neighbours, and trade network and gems to grow rich and prosperous.
          • the Dragonwar won't be willing to pass up on Conjura, and her price will likely be condor freedom. instead of being forced into it, make the Condors agree to a long-term tax for a century to be allowed to leave. this will also win you points from the other clans that are freaked out by your treatment of the condors.
          • might be overly rewarding to a group we don't really approve of, but it would solve a lot of issues
      • How convinced are the Pangolins of the Dragon threat? Can we make Kei an indispensable part of the solution, and sell them on the Dragons' existence?
        • Can we borrow a Dragon part from Orochimaru?
    • The Conclave
      • Direct Noburi to talk to the Leopards
        • He can take whatever approach seems best to him, this is his time to shine.
      • (Offscreen?) Talk to the Capybara
        • Optimize with Mari/Kei
        • Get an idea of where they stand and what they think of the dragon threat
        • Bestow appropriate gifts
      • Ask Ruri if she can summon Convei and figure out why she isn't at the Conclave
      • Ask the Rats, and every non-pangolin have a summoner for(Dogs, Monkeys, Porcupines, Turtles ect) about the previous Polemarch and how Pantsaa came to power.
 
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Not a finalized list, QMs don't bother answering those, non-QMs please suggest more/better questions:
  1. What is the overall structure of the Pangolin government?
  2. Are there any meaningful factions? Do all of these factions claim to support Pantsaa?
  3. What are Pantsaa's "keys to power"? Who holds power in the Pangolin society?
  4. Failing explicit knowledge of (3), which groups are likely to hold power in the Pangolin society given its material constraints?
    1. That is, how do the Pangolins source food/jutsu/metal/training/knowledge/cultural narratives/other crucial stuff, and control over which of those seems likely to be centralized? What's the economy like?
    2. Who are the ten most important people?
  5. Are there any meaningful points of tension within the Pangolin society? The disaffected underclasses, the fringe cultural groups?
  6. What are the broad historical strokes? Which factions used to hold power in the Pangolin society, throughout history? What was the Pangolin society's structure across history?
  7. How are the gains form the Condor support seem to be split? Which factions/group are empowered (i. e., whom does Pantsaa want to appease)? Which seem preferentially and perhaps unnaturally disempowered (i. e., whom Pantsaa deliberately wants to keep down)?
  8. How powerful are the Bosses on their home turf? Drawing on known historical precedents...
    1. Are they impossible to oppose even if their entire Clan bands together against them? Or are they more like a Kage, such that several of their military elites may stand a chance against them?
    2. Can an invading Boss stand a chance against the Boss holding the territory, assuming no allies on either side? E. g., why did Conjura flee instead of slaughter all invaders?
    3. Are there metaphysical mechanisms for disempowering a Boss if the rest of the Clan becomes dissatisfied with them?
A couple of quotes that may be illuminating for figuring out which questions we need to ask:
"There's one more thing," Ruri said. "I have a message from Conjura—for you, and for the others with a stake in Condor liberation."

"What is it?"

"She says we should try to find out what happened to the previous Polemarch," Ruri said. "Conjura is in no position to make enquiries of the Pangolins, and she suspects it won't be safe for Lady Kei to ask. I doubt your western clans will know, but you have many connections, and who knows what kind of clue will turn out to be a weapon in the end?"
"All right," Noburi said. "So Shima and Fukasaku were really impressed with me for knowing the name 'Pasafutsu', which is kind of funny given I heard it from them to begin with. Apparently, only really old summons know that name, because he gave it up when he became the Pangolin Hierophant."

"What's one of those?"

"No idea," Noburi said. "Shima and Fukasaku were really vague, and then they argued about it for a while, and the upshot of it is that it's a weird Pangolin thing, and they only had one at a time, and Pasafutsu was the last of them.

"Here's the important part. A few hundred years ago— they didn't agree how many, so that's as good as it gets—the Pangolins had a massive population boom because of the Quarg, or possibly the Qworg, or maybe even the Quaag. I still don't quite get what one of those is, but apparently it's so culturally specific that the gestalt field just breaks down when it tries to translate it.

"Trouble is, you know how the Seventh Path gets chakra weather instead of chakra beasts? Actually, maybe you don't; I have no idea what it's like over in Dog lands. So the Seventh Path gets chakra weather, probably because they don't have a sun and the sky is crazy and pretty much every force that shapes Human Path weather is either missing or freaking weird, and it was worse back then than it is now. You can probably see where this is going. They had a weather disaster, and it completely screwed over their food supply because of mass insect extinction or whatever, and it's not like they could un-Quaag the Quaag when the pangopups were already running around. Nobody was going to trade them enough bugs to keep them from starving—most of the nearby clans didn't even eat bugs to begin with—so basically it was grab somebody else's land that hadn't been wrecked by the weather disaster or die.

"Oh, and nobody liked the Pangolins even then, because they were already all holier-than-thou, so obviously a couple of their neighbours decided to strike while the iron was hot. They didn't care that Pangolin territory was low on bugs. So all that kicked off the kind of massive war you rarely get on the Seventh Path unless stupid humans come along with their seals, and you had shifting alliances, and territory ownership bouncing back and forth, and legendary heroics and unforgivable atrocities and all that good stuff. Most of my afternoon was spent politely and diplomatically getting the two toads to shut up about it. Spoiler alert: the Pangolins survived, and also grabbed a big chunk of Hyena territory with help from their old allies the Condors because WTF, and that kept them going until things levelled out. At some point during all of that, the Hierophant vanished and the Pangolins got the Polemarch instead, but since neither of them had names, it's not clear if it was the same pangolin or not. Shima thinks yes and Fukasaku thinks no.

"Then after that—maybe a load of decades, maybe a couple of centuries; what the heck does 'a while' mean when you're older than the forest you live in?—there's a new Polemarch, and it's Pantsā of the Adamant Scales, who happens to be one of the great heroes from that war, and by that point the Pangolins are well on their way to being the clan of mini-Yaguras (or maybe mega-Yaguras, given how he wasn't that tall and some of them are ginormous) that we know and love.

"And if that sounds like messy storytelling with more gaps than the mouth of an elderly tiger with a chocolate addiction, then thank your lucky stars you're getting the edited Noburi version."

"So," Hazō concluded, "we still don't know what happened to the last Polemarch."

"No," Noburi said, "but we know more or less when it happened and we can kind of guess what triggered it. Getting a new leader with a new title in the middle of a war doesn't just happen by accident. The name thing is throwing me off, though, because now we don't know if the Hierophant just changed jobs or if there's an extra clan boss in the mix somewhere. I think we need to tap some non-Toad sources for this."
 
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I do agree with my detractors that the plan I've proposed so far is painfully incomplete, and I think we don't actually have the information to generate any convincing plan given the extent of our knowledge about the Pangolin society.

Which is the problem our next Conclave plan should aim at solving, IMO. Loop in Ami and Mari, and ask Kei to outline their society's structure for us.
Couldn't we try and undermine their economy using ES to undermine the leadership?
 
Can I get the link to our 7th path map?
Need to figure out who to discretely ask about pangolin lore.
Thirteenth Draft: With the generous help of various people, we have a bunch of sky colours to add to the map! This isn't just random colour-coding, from all indications this is genuinely the colours you'd see if you looked up at the sky in each territory. Naturally, any clan still in pure white has no known sky colour. The closest we have to pure-white skies is the eggshell white of Snake.

The Mara have stripes over them because all we know is that, if you're facing East from Rat, the coastal clans have skies of various shades of blue. This naturally includes Monkey but doesn't include Toad. Capybara may or may not have blue skies, but Mara is most likely some shade of blue. So it's penciled in, so to speak, until such time as we can pester Grandmaster F for deets.

In other news, a generous WoG says that Squirrel is horizontal rather than vertical, so here we are. We're also told that Cat's borders somehow look nice and not at all horrific on the original map, which means I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not gonna lose sleep over the inevitable accumulated errors of such imprecise mapping converging on Cat to make it look dumb.
Twelfth Draft: Crow and Raptor are officially connected to stuff now, and Cat continues to be the absolute rudest Clan I've ever seen. The stated placement of Crow being in the southwest heavily clashes with its relative positioning smack dab in the middle of the continent, so I figured maybe the whole Arachnid chunk was way up in the northwest instead. Now if you squint Crow's kinda sorta in the southwest.
Eleventh Draft: so apparently Cat is really tall. Like, 'spans the entire height of the continent' tall. Rude cats. But at least we have a lot clearer picture of the western half of the continent now!
Tenth Draft: The Archaeopteryx island is now shown, a couple new clans listed up top, and we're now tracking how many Dragons are left!
Ninth draft: Dragons! Also, Arachnid-Cat connection.
Eighth draft: Hares are on a northern peninsula, Bears have northern coast, Cats west of Bear. Possible upwards curve of Bear coast (heading straight west is apparently faster than following coastline). Expedition path being tracked.
edit: Seventh draft, after new information on the Dog coastline and existence of a great lake:
edit: Sixth draft, after EJ generously gave out some information on Porcupine/Hyena/Pangolin borders in discord.
edit: Fifth draft, including some tidbits EJ generously gave on discord and the location of the Squirrels that I scrounged up from the Enma chapter.
edit: fourth draft:
edit 2: third draft, now including a location for the Dogs and clip arts of the various clans.
(There weren't any Mara icons anywhere I could find, so I had to take a photo of one and trace it. Still turned out pretty okay)

edit: updated with a second draft after recent loredump.
Original text:
Alright, got a sketch done. Still not sure which side of the Otters the Condors are supposed to be, but with other statements about the Capybara and so it'd be very awkward if the Condors touched the Pangolins and Toads and were south of the Otters.
Still a good deal of guesswork on the details, but this is roughly how things fit together.

Also, the Pangolins border a heckton of other clans.
 
Adhoc vote count started by Paperclipped on Jun 15, 2023 at 3:32 PM, finished with 340 posts and 17 votes.


I believe this is the current status of the vote.
 
Edit: Oh, and another problem is that IIRC we don't actually know who Pantsaa's backers are, because Kei hasn't been very detailed on the internal structure of the Pangolin society, so we can't optimize the pressures in a way such that they deliberately aim at making Pantsaa's removal beneficial for them. But this is a solvable problem
I don't think Pantsaa needs backers. This is a perk of being a Clan Boss. He is basically a god on territory he has claimed. If he fought the entire Pangolin military on his own, he might win. He needs other people to fight offensively, but defensively he's basically untouchable.
Could I convince you to instead support going at ALT 50, effective Ath 42 & effective Tai 52? Do to having to build out our pyramid getting Ath to 40 doubles the time
No, unfortunately, since Hazou almost died to an AoE fire ninjutsu. Ath 49, is pretty much the bare minimum, and we should raise Sub to match.
 
I don't think Pantsaa needs backers. This is a perk of being a Clan Boss. He is basically a god on territory he has claimed. If he fought the entire Pangolin military on his own, he might win. He needs other people to fight offensively, but defensively he's basically untouchable.

No, unfortunately, since Hazou almost died to an AoE fire ninjutsu. Ath 49, is pretty much the bare minimum, and we should raise Sub to match.
Being a Clan Boss doesn't make you a God in your lands, only a match for a single Dragon as we've seen, but not for two, or else a Clan wouldn't be dead for it. That was a Clan Boss and all their elite fighters joining forces on their home turf, and they still lost. The Boss aside, a Clan is comparable in power to a major hidden village, and Pangolins are a particularly powerful and militaristic one.

If Pantsaa had to fight the entire Pangolin military in a white room cage fight, he would die, and trivially so. Being a Boss seems to be +/- a single Tier boost worth of power on home turf (so like a jounin to S-ranker, except Bosses are Essies in the first place, so to the tier above where Dragons dwell).

Now the right questions are what would force Pantsaa to stay and fight instead of just running away (nothing), and whether or not a Bosshood can be stripped away / if other clanmates can claim their own and usurp the land, and we know the answer to the latter is yes because of the Leopards splintering off the Feline clan and having their own Boss.
 
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