The Shadow Shinobi Village

The ninja who abandons their comrades is worse than scum. The ninja who abandons the mission is also scum. Find out which one you are when the moment comes.

In a continent where war has been the default condition for generations, the countries decided three centuries ago that they needed a new architecture for conflict: the shinobi. Warriors trained from childhood in the art of channeling chakra — the energy that fuses the physical body and the spiritual force of a living being — to perform feats that conventional armies cannot replicate. The great shinobi villages are states within states, with their own leaders called kage, their own ranks, their own codes of loyalty that sometimes contradict and sometimes reinforce those of the nations that host them. The Village of Shadows was founded by an alliance of clans that agreed to subordinate their ancestral rivalries to a common purpose: to survive as a unit where individually they would have fallen. That agreement holds, mostly, most of the time, which in the context of this continent is an impressive achievement. The clans with inherited powers — the Crimson Eye Clan that passes down its dojutsu from generation to generation, the Inner Beast Clan whose members forge contracts with creatures from other planes — are a source of pride, diplomatic tension, and the question no kage wants to answer aloud: when a clan's power surpasses that of the village, whom does that shinobi truly serve.