Ninja Adventures (CNH)

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For ninja characters, the DM will want to create ninja missions. Here, we'll talk about what sorts of adventures those are.
Most of these types of adventures are appropriate to campaigns where all PCs are ninja (or solo ninja campaigns). Some of them are more difficult to implement for a mixed team of ninja and non-ninja. In such campaigns, the ninja's task is to convince his fellows that carrying out this mission is the best way to accomplish an existing goal of theirs, or to persuade them to a related task that will allow him to accomplish his mission. Subtlety, persuasiveness, and discretion thus become important weapons in the arsenal of the ninja.
==Intelligence Gathering==
The most common sort of task given a ninja is to find out information that somebody would prefer not be known.
Such tasks include:
* Scouting out the position of an enemy army,
* Discovering why a lowly farm girl is being kept locked away in the daimyo's castle,
* Determining which lords a specific daimyo is conspiring with,
* Finding out a shogun's weaknesses of character so they can be exploited, • Determining a minister's schedule so he can be ambushed and kidnapped.
There are many different ways to acquire this sort of information. Scouting the location of an army might call for one ninja running around in the forest for a night. A more involved mission might call for setting up a false identity and befriending an NPC until the ninja can ferret out the character's secrets.
==Theft and Covert Deliver==
Ninja are sometimes called on to steal an important object from its current owner. The object could be an artifact, a book or scroll containing important information, enough money to perform another mission, evidence one person is using to blackmail another, papers confirming a lord's ownership of a piece of land or of the contract of a concubine, a letter proposing an alliance, etc.
Just as crucial to some long-range ninja plans are missions where the ninja plants an object rather than taking it. The steps of the mission are the same, but the ninja leaves something behind instead of taking it away. The ninja might have to:
* Leave a duplicate of some priceless object already stolen,
* Return a stolen object before its loss is discovered,
* Plant a piece of evidence incriminating a minister,
* Get a message to a deep-cover agent who is already suspected, and so on.
A theft could be as simple as slipping a paper off a table when no one is looking. A more standard theft could involve putting on the night-suit and creeping through secure areas after dark. The most difficult sorts of theft adventures might call for a multistage plan: The ninja would have to set up an identity giving him access to the castle, spend enough time there to map it out thoroughly and time its guard patterns, assemble a team to accompany him, assign specialists to take care of specific tasks, insert his entire team into the castle, deal with guards, open a sealed vault, and escape through some route the castle owner has not covered.
==Elimination==
Sometimes the ninja clan objective cannot be achieved while a particular NPC remains at liberty. In such cases, the ninja is assigned a mission of elimination: He must kill or kidnap the obstructing NPC.
This mission is like a theft mission, with the difference that the character must attack a target instead of stealing an object.
Historically, ninja performed some missions of assassination, but this is inappropriate to a heroic fantasy campaign. AD&D game ninja, who cannot reveal their skill to the people around them, often choose to do so when facing a target of elimination. Instead of assassinating a helpless or unsuspecting target, the campaign ninja will penetrate all defenses to get to him and then challenge him to personal combat. The ninja may stack the deck by depriving his target of bodyguards, magical weapons, and the like, but there should be some element of fairness to the attack.
Some missions of elimination are kidnappings. These are even more dangerous for the ninja, who must acquire the target without killing him or her (this sometimes requires the ninja to do things not in his immediate self-interest, such as defend his target from accidental damage) and then get the target from to a safe place (often doubling the danger the ninja faces). Kidnap victims can be ransomed back to their families for handsome rewards; just as often, they are kidnapped to keep them from doing things the ninja clan wishes them not to do, and may be released once the critical point is past.
==Protection==
Ninja sometimes find themselves acting as bodyguards for less-adept members of their clans (such as consort ninja who are more experienced at manipulation than at combat) or for people the clan wants to protect from assassins or kidnappers.
A ninja is not as good at personal protection as a samurai; he is not as good a fighter as a samurai of equal level. But a ninja is better at site security and at predicting the types of attacks that might occur. A ninja protecting a target might spend time figuring out how to break into the target's home or through his defenses and then set up additional, more secretive defenses along those routes.
==Sabotage==
Ninja are especially adept at sabotage. Such missions can involve setting fire to castles, sinking ships, ruining defenses, damaging siege engines, and causing other sorts of confusion.
Minor forms of sabotage can be used for diversionary effects. For example, sabotaging a daimyo's coach so he must spend some time beside the road while repairs are made might be a mission of sabotage setting up a mission of elimination.
==Sowing Dissent==
Often the best way to defeat an enemy is to allow it to defeat itself.
Ninja are sometimes ordered to infiltrate combined armed forces and then cause friction between their discrete elements. This causes petty lords to quarrel and reduces the effectiveness of a fighting force.
A ninja might ingratiate himself with a daimyo and then demonstrate, through convincing logic and carefully arranged situations, how that lord's good friend of many years is betraying him to another lord. The most skillful of ninja can make the daimyo believe all these conclusions are the lord's own.
==Smoking Out Traitors==
The clan lord might ask a PC ninja to help him discover who in his own clan might be a traitor.
One technique used for this purpose is "putting dye in the water." The clan lord gives each of his confidants a variation of the same supposedly important information. The PC ninja would then have to infiltrate the household of an enemy to find out which variation of the information was reaching the enemy, thus pointing to the traitor in the ninja clan.
Another, more difficult, technique involves situations where the clan lord is certain that one of his confidants plots to kill him. The trick is to figure out the circumstances under which the traitor will choose to kill the lord, to convince the suspects that those circumstances have come about, and to keep the clan lord from being killed when the assassination attempt results.
==Testing Ninja==
A clan lord might send his ninja on a mission that serves as a screen for the lord's true intention, to determine whether the PC is loyal to the clan. Other tests brought about by the clan lord include trials for outsiders wishing to be adopted by the clan and "graduation" tests for new ninja. Here are some ways these scenarios can be played out.
===The Uncounted Box of Gold===
The clan lord discovers the ninja PC's secret desires and then presents him with the opportunity to satisfy some of them at the clan's expense.
For example, if the PC is exhibiting an untoward affection for money, the clan lord might tell him this story:
"The samurai Takuji is a secret miser. He has acquired quite a considerable horde of gold from presents he has accepted—400 koku in value. Find his horde and deliver it to me. Make sure not one coin is lost, for I need just that amount for another operation. He cannot report the theft, for then he would have to admit that he accumulated that much gold, which his daimyo will frown upon."
The samurai Takuji could be just what he appears to be, or could actually be a ninja from another branch of the clan, one whom the PC does not know. Either way, the ninja clan already knows exactly where the gold is and how much there is.
When the PC acquires the horde of gold, he is obliged to count it—his lord did say that he needed a precise amount, and if the horde does not contain that much, the ninja will need to report it or make up the difference. But the ninja finds that Takuji's horde is a quarter again as big as reported. He knows that Takuji cannot report the theft, so there is no way for the ninja clan lord to know if the PC decides to keep the extra... or so he thinks.
The ninja who steals from his clan will soon be either dead or a Lone Wolf ninja.
Naturally, a PC ninja could be on the other side of such a test, helping the clan lord test the loyalty of a ninja under suspicion.
===The Lover With a Secret===
The PC ninja, in the course of his adventures, finds love with an NPC. (Remember that the medieval Japanese considered love to be an unlucky emotion, a cause for affairs and tragedies but certainly not the basis for marriage. This didn't stop the medieval Japanese from falling in love, of course.)
At some time after the NPC is well established in the campaign, he or she tells the PC a secret:
"My family is not native to this area. We originally came from a small farm near the village of [name of the main village of the PC's ninja clan]. Several years ago, my uncle Kenji went to the village and returned that same day, frightened nearly to death. He said that he had discovered something awful about our daimyo [actually the head of the ninja family] and that we all must flee. Uncle Kenji gathered up his wife and children, and persuaded my father to do the same. We left the village that night, under cover of darkness. When we arrived here, we took false names and tried to begin life anew. I don't know what terrible secret Uncle Kenji discovered. All he will say about the daimyo is, "'He is lord of more than we ever realized.'"
It should be obvious to the ninja that Uncle Kenji somehow discovered that his daimyo was the head of a ninja clan. Possession of this knowledge is very bad for the NPC family. But the ninja should also know that his lover is devoted to Uncle Kenji and would be crushed by his death. This puts the ninja in a bad position. The ninja must either kill his lover's beloved uncle (for it seems obvious that the knowledge this person acquired has not spread), or tell the clan lord (which will just as swiftly result in the uncle's death). Or, the ninja can keep the lover's secret.
The first two choices are the correct ones. Through them the ninja demonstrates loyalty to the clan over loyalty to a lover. The ninja who chooses to keep the secret places a lover's feelings above the protection of the clan.
The truth is that the NPC lover is a distant member of the ninja clan, or possibly an actor hired by the clan lord. The same is true of the lover's entire family. The lover has been instructed to tell this story at a specific time, and "Uncle Kenji" is now being watched over by a very skilled ninja of the clan.
The PC ninja who does not quickly move to eliminate this threat to the clan is fated to be given a dangerous mission of apology and redemption—or a sentence of death.
The important thing to remember when setting up this situation is to be patient and to establish the scenario over a long period of time. The PC should find the lover in the course of other adventures. Their meeting and the flowering of their affection must appear completely natural. (The NPC lover may be torn by divided loyalties as well, but this character knows a test is in progress and will probably remain loyal to the ninja clan.)
===The Lover Shoved Aside===
A simple, if cruel, test for a ninja's loyalty is for the ninja lord to wait until the character has fallen in love and decided to marry. Before the ninja can ask the lord's permission to wed, the lord chooses a marriage partner for the ninja.
===Bright Young Ninja===
A type of test that doesn't involve determining loyalty is the graduation. If the DM wishes, he can put every ninja PC through one or several graduation tasks.
The standard graduation mission takes place when the ninja is first created. It celebrates and confirms the ninja becoming 1st level. This is a relatively simple test in which the ninja must cross an area of forest that is extensively trapped. At the end of the path, he must scale a wall or assail some other difficult obstacle in order to retrieve a token that signifies completion of the mission. The DM can spice up the graduation test by making the traps devious and interesting and by adding encounters with ninja armed with bamboo and padded weapons that do no real damage. The PC ninja should be similarly equipped.
The DM can add additional graduations at level 6 and level 10, the points at which the ninja achieves the ranks of chunin and jonin. These tests should be much more difficult, involving traps that damage as well as entangle and lower-level ninja opponents armed with live steel instead of bamboo.
The objective of these tests is to challenge the PC ninja and determine the level of his skill, not to kill him. But it should be possible for a test to kill the character who behaves stupidly. This is a way of weeding out unsuitable ninja before they can become weak links in the chain of the ninja clan.
===Adoptees===
In the rare event that a non-ninja/non-shinobi PC discovers the clan's existence and wants to join, the ninja clan lord (if he wishes to consider the possibility at all) will conduct a series of tests to determine the applicant's skills and loyalty.
The skills portion of the test will be at least equivalent in danger and difficulty to the chunin graduation test.
The loyalty portion of the test will be especially devious. The clan lord will come up with one test that is, on its completion, obviously a loyalty test, but that's the easy part.
If the applicant passes all the preliminary tests satisfactorily, he is accepted as a provisional member of the clan. Later, perhaps during the new clan member's third or fourth mission, the clan leader will conduct a further test of the character's loyalty. This test will involve the character's background and former loyalties, and should be both compelling and undetectable as a clan test. Each such test will have to be custom-tooled to the character in question, so there's no point in presenting a set of generic tests here.