Okay, we had sort-of-a-vote, and the winner is...
Option 4: The War that Shattered the World III, What the heck, man?
A brave new world, with EXTRA MYSTERY and HEXES to explore.
I'm just going to need a few one-liners describing some of your ninja colleagues.
But since Option 3 was really pretty close, there's a nonzero chance you'll find yourselves to play with Sufficiently Advanced Ninjutsu.
I'm mulling over two options here, and I wouldn't mind some feedback on them. Option 1, which is the one I started with, goes as such:
The War that Shattered the World
Or, as others call it, the 4th Shinobi World War - even if it doesn't have nearly the same bite... or accurate descriptiveness.
Ninjas from all the Great Nations united to fight an otherworldly, terrifying threat: the matter of which Epics are made of - except you have no idea how it actually ended.
In the early phases of the war, the villages arranged several hiding spots for the non-combatants among them: young children still in academy years, aged shinobi without techniques that let them cheat their true age, some specialists in non-murderous trades and finally the wounded and lame: too weak to be dependably useful in a full-scale war, but still strong enough to die defending the gaggle of noncombatants.
Your group in particular was composed of people from multiple villages stuffed in a small cavern complex in the land of fire, entrance partially hidden by a waterfall.
There might, or might not (this mainly depends on anyone wanting to play as one) even have been a small group of samurai in training in your midst.
Anyway, at some point meteors stopped falling from the sky, and the first explorers poked their noses out... to find entirely unfamiliar constellations - and was that a second moon in the sky?
In handy bullet points:
Option 1 is about a group of ninjas stranded in a foreign land, exploring, adapting and forging new ties.
The upsides are:
- Less hacking at the official worldbuilding: you can assume things more or less went as official until the war, and then we cut cleanly to start a new story.
- More room for original characters: you'd be involved in the creation of the notable personalities in your 'village', and this includes those high up in the leadership positions.
- Greater ease at introducing non-Naruto elements - the world is new, unknown and full of wonders, which basically means we can as kitchen sink as we care.
- A built-in excuse for character of usually region-locked bloodlines to hang together: you're allowed and encouraged to go with whatever character concept you fancy.
While the downsides are:
- No familiar characters to hang on to: I can see how part of the charm of playing a game called 'Naruto d20' might be interacting with your favourite characters (although, for full disclosure, I'm - as everyone is - more confident in writing my own than in picking Kishimoto's characters and keeping them in characters for long swathes of time). This game would have very little of that. At least until you discover you've been slammed in an alternate timeline, and everyone is around.
- More effort required: both from me, to come up with larger swathes of the world and from those of you who're gonna help come up with places and personalities.
Option 2 is significantly safer:
Another Legend
We'll simply be rewinding time back to around the beginning of the Naruto storyline (Or at the beginning of Boruto, it will be open to voting - it would, however, require a bit extra research on my end).
You'd be able to choose your village (I'd say with a vote and everyone gets in that one, but I'm not entirely unopposed to starting everyone in solo threads and only having you all meet at the Chuunin exam).
In handy bullet points:
Option 1 is about a group of ninjas stranded in a foreign land, exploring, adapting and forging new ties.
The upsides are:
- All the premade characters! Enough premade characters you can't throw a rock without hitting one. This changes a lot by geographic location, but there'll be familiar faces everywhere across the world to help hammer that Naruto feeling at home.
- Premade geography. Map making will be significantly easier for me and less absolutely ridiculous for you (I never said I was good at maps)
- A familiar arc. This might be good or bad, but we've all seen the student-to-ninja-to-hero story, and we'll mostly follow it.
- Characters starting with more knowledge of each other, and hopefully more or less friendly relations - you'd have been living in the same village for years and training together, after all.
While the downsides are:
- The potential feeling of being extras in your own story. You will be kept separated from Naruto himself and you will have your own story, but he will be there. This should stop being a problem the more we change our own storyline, but the sheer fact that he's the 9-tailed Jinchuuriki will make him a black hole of plot. Changing his personality enough for him to be less relevant would basically be character assassination while straight-up shanking him would probably ruin the reason to start in canon times in the first place. It's just something to think about, it probably won't be a BIG problem.</small>
- More chances of me ruining that one part of the setting you like: either due to ignorance (I'll double-check most things, but I'm not omniscient) or just to simply having decided that something has to go (either because I don't think it fits, or to replace it with something else) I WILL change elements from the setting - I'll start with a light touch, but sooner or later we'll get to Mecha Warfare and the touch will be anything but light. As the storylines diverge, the chances of me ruining something you like will increase exponentially. Just something to keep in mind.
Either option would have you starting as academy-level students, just about to graduate. There will be one last bit of training culminating in a Genin exam and assignment to a team. In both cases, teams will be more fluid than in Naruto to account for the possibility of players poofing.
Option 1 would then have you take part in the efforts to explore and settle around - first missions would involve setting up diplomatic contact with your neighbors to sell them on the idea of hiring well-trained child soldiers, finding missing cats and stumbling upon trouble you're not supposed to have to deal with yet. Most importantly, you won't be assigned a Jounin - there simply aren't enough of those to go around, so you'll have to either fly solo (for the easiest missions) or be accompanied by a Chuunin, or even simply a more experienced Genin.
You'll have to carve your own niche in a world where warfare has evolved differently and find out just how to best incorporate or counter the new tricks you'll find (hey - I DID mention anime-kitchen-sink shenanigans!) and deal with your fair share of potentially apocalyptic events.
A thing I'd personally like to explore later on is the kind of effort needed to forge entirely new summoning contracts from scratch.
Option 2 would follow a similar arc: lessons, Genin exam and D-rank missions. Here you will get paired with a Jounin as standard and the type of missions will mostly vary according to your village.
By the Chuunin exam I expect the world to have undergone sufficient changes to be barely recognizable.
In either case I'd like to mix a significant bit of timeskips: you'll be starting at around 12 and I'd like you on a fast track to about 17-18.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:50, Sat 06 June 2020.
