gang drip

porting Naruto to Blades in the Dark is looking more and more like "What if the movie the Warriors was set in Edo era Japan?"

These are some prompts to generate gang aesthetics (d12). Roll as many you want on each until you like it.

 

1. Tattoo/Mark (discrete)
2. Tattoo/Mark (showy) 
3. Bandana or scarf
4. Patterned robes
5. Elegant robes
6. Modest robes
7. Make up
8. Signature hat or hairstyle
9. Rings or bracelets
10. A necklace or hung ornament
11. A mask
12.  Vest or armor

Styles:

1. Spiritual (an animal? a demon?)
2. Flexing (flowers? feathers?)
3. Idealistic (a word/kanji?)
4. Baddie (skulls/spikes?)
5. Naive (fire or martial arts?)
6. Dreamy (Clouds or maritime?)
7. Tryhard (Monsters? Thunder?)
8. Ostentatious (gold or jewels?)
9. Humble (homemade? handknit?) 
10. Dyed (one distinctive color?)
11. Religious (icons? principles?)
12. Conceptual (abstract but recognizable logo? animal patterns?)

 

 EDIT: surprisingly, real life is always ahead. See from the Kabukimono entry on wikipedia:

 
Kabukimono (傾奇者) were gangs of samurai in feudal Japan, first appearing in 1573 -1603 as the turbulent Sengoku period drew to a close. Kabukimono were either rōnin, wandering samurai, or men who had once worked for samurai families who, during times of peace, formed street gangs. Some, however, were also members of more prominent clans—most notably Oda Nobunaga and Maeda Toshiie.

They would often dress in flamboyant clothing, disregarding traditional colours such as light yellow and dark blue, often accessorised by wearing haori jackets with lead weights in the hem, velvet lapels, wide obi belts and even women's clothing. Exoticism was characteristic and included items such as European clothing, Chinese hats, and jinbaori (surcoats) made from Persian carpet. Kabukimono also often had uncommon hairstyles and facial hair, either styled up in various fashions or left to grow long. Their katana would often have fancy hilts, large or square tsuba, red scabbards and were usually longer than normal length. Some kabukimono even used extremely long kiseru pipes as weapons. 

Kabukimono were known for their violent and unsociable behavior, such as not paying at restaurants or robbing townsfolk. Cases of the gang members cutting people down simply to test a new sword (tsujigiri), or larger-scale violent incidents were common in areas where kabukimono could be found (particularly in large cities such as Edo and Kyoto). Wrestling, loud singing and dancing in the streets were also common, as was fighting between gangs after dark. It is thought that the modern yakuza originated from either groups of kabukimono or bands of villagers gathered to fight their abusers, though other scholars believe that the yakuza origins are to be found in the machi yakko (町奴), a form of private police.

Izumo no Okuni, the actress that created the Kabuki theatre, dressed as a Kabukimono. Note the Christian cross and the gangster pose.

  

Virgin Naruto, Chad Sasuke, Retarded Itachi, Based Rock Lee

 

NARUTO:

-"I'm gonna bring Sasuke back, the girl I like told me so"

- Never mind that Sasuke doesn't want to come back. Ignore friend's desires and invalidate his decisions.

- Never offer your friend help with his revenge because that would be so evil (but go revenge Jiraiya)

 

 SASUKE:

- See brother kill all your family, be put in school and slowly see that nobody in your village gives a fuck about finding the responsible of the crime.

- Be called an emo for decades for wanting justice for an affront, both in konoha and IRL forums, get your anger downplayed by Kakashi and your peers. Be called a braggart when you decide to get strong to act yourself on it. 

-When you decide to train with Orochimaru everybody loses their minds.

 

 ITACHI:

- So in order to get possible peace for a time in this village I just have to genocide everybody I love including innocents, and some far cousins. What can go wrong?

- Fails to do the mission anyways by leaving his brother alive because after killing his parents you suddently discovers that he loves him a lot. Loves him so much that he decides to pile up psychological torture on him from now on to ensure his life is long and miserable, then tries to trick him into killing his best friend Naruto for the lols.

- Somehow remembered as a tragic, sacrificed figure and a super intelligent ninja. 

 

 ROCK LEE:

- "kerosene can't melt steel beams"

to play naruto (spoilers!)

Following this, I am thinking on how good it sounds to play a low level Naruto campaign...

But better so, inspired by naruto, but my own thing. The main reason is because the actual anime canon is too good to manipulate in a meaningful way, and I don't want to doublecheck information on the wiki about clans, dates and facts. 

I have actually some sketch of the rules. You start doing low level ranked missions at the start, as members of a ridiculously small clan, village or reassembled group. The main catch is that I want your character to be expendable, and to have the "ninja village" grow during the game, in the style of Blades in the Dark. Better ninja villages mean better starting characters, and the possibility to play during an overarching plot. I want parties to eventually include ninjas of different tiers: masters, students, legends alongside rookies, focusing more on deceit and tactics than in shonen powerups. I am rewatching the series and I really enjoy watching the Akatsuki (like the baddest ninjas you can find) being still cautious about an ambush in the woods, or being mindful about the money (both personally like Kakuzu or as a group like Pain). I loved when Jiraiya turned a giant frog into a bar called Frog Club in order to set a trap for two minions. And I love the overlapping bijuus, cursed seals, elemental techniques, mantles, special eyes and all. All those concepts are great and I want to use them, but, in relationship with the appropiate canvas (a tabletop RPG), there are some points that are so broken:

1 The Sharingan. A "just opened" eye with the sharingan can see chakra and genjutsus, physical movements at any speed and allows the user to copy them instantly. Also has the power to cast illusions and compel targets who look at it. And this is all the first level of the ladder of broken shit (mangekyu, rinnegan, etc). Like what the fuck, its really hard to manage this shit for a  GM. The greatest barrier to port Sharingan to a tabletop is, however, murderhobo players (I know some of them) that will put away any mission for searching an Uchiha and steal one of his eyes.

2. Genjustu battles. D&D fixes this as "you are stunned for 1d4 rounds" or similar. But in naruto, genjutsus are special, each one of them and ask to be played in. Sometimes, at least. They allow the user to draw information from the victim, or to speak to them apart. There are whole battles in mindscapes. But finding out you are in a genjutsu is also part of the concept, and that becomes harder to do, mostly when they target one member of the party and you are narrating to all of them. 

3. Shadow clones. They are easy on the surface: create X clones, say what they do. You wait until an enemy strikes you to reveal that he attacked a clone and that the real you is attacking him... just to see that he was a clone too, and the real one is behind you. Repeat. Something inside me thinks that it would be better to play that in reverse: Do not care about cloning yourself before the battle: just spend something to reveal it was a clone all the time. Same for the NPCs. The whole anime seems to work on retroactive logic, actually. 

4. Battles sometimes become kaiju fights alongside person fights. More rarely, a person fights a kaiju. Maybe is not as hard to portray as it seems, and its just giving those crazy abilities and tons of HP, but still. Summons, however, are broken on another sense: they allow instant communication by autodispelling from a danger zone, and being summoned by a receiver. This is easily fixed by allowing summons, but not unsummons: every animal must find the way to their home by physically travelling or any other.

5. The most broken shit, hands down, is those scrolls. Fuinjutsu: the ability to seal any kind of shit, of any size or nature, inside a piece of paper (technically, sealing spirits or monsters is also possible if sealed into persons or other living matter). Stealing a 50x50x50 meters statue from a musemum is easy if you take some time to draw some seals, unfold a parchment and cast some jutsu (it will make an audible "poof"). This makes characters able to carry virtually anything they can come up with: a canoe, endless shuriken, 10 tons of water, a house; make a legendary object dissapear by sealing it into a roll and tossing it down the toilet... In the series, there is no limits on how much they can hold. The chakra is spent sealing the objects, but not releasing them, so you can use them all in the same battle, providing you spent downtime preparing them. And if downtime is in practice infinite on the inside, so are the potential scrolls.

6. All of those are probably usable somehow, but the ability of making real operating clones is not available to PJs on any case. That is like mtg's Memory Jar of the moves, broken as fuck for a thousand reasons once you move it away from a controlled medium like an anime, to a chaotic like a game. 

 Am I being too much a pussy? Am I too scared of it? Maybe. What do you think?

 

 

Naruto + Pokemon

 

 

The little black dot in the head of the frog that is in the head of the other frog, its a human.

 

My untested greatest rpg project of all time is to replace the whole magic system of my D&D clone with something parallel to pokemons: Wizards catching and collecting monsters that cast or are the spells, but at the same time create a bond with them. But at the same time, having the fighter class a viable and interesting choice.

After beating Koga, the ninja trainer at Fuchsia City Gym at Pokemon: Team Rocket, he says something like he had used techniques that were 400 year old. That got me thinking on how the relationship with pokemon was back then, in a feudal japan type world. Which is very close to my thing. 

 

 

Then I realized that Naruto could have become this very easily. In a different world, the Naruto anime went mostly the same until the Chuunin exams, and then derived fully into its "mon" facet: Kakashi's dogs, Jiraiya's toads; everybody's hawks, snakes, monkeys, etc. 

But I would have taken it further: Making every ninjutsu & genjutsu technique (that means: every technique that is not purely martial) some kind of summon; and that includes rasengans, illusions and shadow replications, personified with a little monster that actually does the thing for its master. Sharingans and Rinnegans could be reframed as family "spirits" that serve a clan or maybe keep them as genetic privileges, why not. You even have the bijuus working like that already, filling the setting's slot for legendary pokemon, with the steel type pokemon being the ninjas themselves; filling the slot that pokemon never tackles: Is there space for human fighters in a pokemon game?

I mean; I love Naruto. Gaara and Orochimaru are probably my favs. But how much better would be the series with 80% less Pain and Great ninja wars, and replacing it with mon catching and training, to be the very best like no one ever was? The pokemon entries on this blog are probably not over. Stay in tune.

 

 EDITED: I've been thinking on how to allow pokemon to ninjas while still having "non-magical" fighters in the world, be it as players or as NPCs if their gameplay is not interesting enough.

1. Pokemon are very hard to find for the common person. They are not physical animals, but more spiritual entities from another plane. If you start with one, it means that is has a some kind of contract with your clan (this casually also puts emphasis on the clan aspect of the ninjas). This pokemon is rolled at random from a list of starters.

2. When you level up as a ninja, you have the choice of, instead of raising speed, strenght or whatever attributes you have, studying your village's pokemon scrolls. This will give you access to a new pokemon at random that you can pick if you like it, or level up the one you already have. 

3. Certain NPCs will introduce you to new pokemons if they like you. Old ninjas might want to tell you about their own, or a mystical girl of the mountains may talk good about you to the local Kami. When you roll to pick a random pokemon, you can choose the random one or any of those introduced to you through the adventure. Normally, ninjas will only reveal pokemon to other ninjas of their own or allied villages. Sometimes, Pokemon will appear in your way by themselves, even searching for you if they want to "get XP" through being used by a worthy caster.

4.  Pokemon are summoned through hand seals, because it is aesthetic and fitting. Pokemon may be physically present as "animals" but most of the time, only some of their aspects will be visible (feathers, fire, snow, etc). Sometimes they will be channelled through the body of the caster.  If the hand-seal thing is a upgradeable skill, it is only natural that more martial characters such as samurai don't invest on it. 

5. Staves as magical tools can work as a symbol of status before pokemon, just like a king's scepter. They only work after a downtime period of attunement, and are useful mostly for powering up spells that are "shot". It makes normal for ninjas that use spells on target:self to forfeit wants altogether, even more so if they difficult things such as climbing trees or keeping stealth. 

 

 

gaara and his sandshrew