Raen Shinobi: New to FF RP and Looking for Backstory Help

[Toragana Daisho]

Hi there! I'm new to the forum and new to FF RP. I play an Au Ra on Mateus named Toragana Daisho (she introduces herself as Daisho no Toragana), and I'm having a heck of a time nailing her background down. Specifically when it comes to birth place, customs, and culture. For reference, I'm including her WIP backstory so far and will ask questions from there. (And I have a lot questions. Oh boy.)

 

Also, it's a bit cliche but it's a start:

 

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Toragana was born in Kugane to poor silk-worm farmers who lived and worked under a Raen daimyo who made much of his legitimate fortune off of selling silk. While her parents were Doman, they found their humble life satisfactory. The Lord was not terribly cruel to his vassals, but of course he was no saint. As such, he found it easier to take from his vassals their children, choosing one household a year, to bring in a child to not only serve in his house as a servant but to use as his personal guard. It beat paying or using Sekiseigumi, and with trusted and skilled teachers in the art of ninjutsu, the Lord could wage political intrigue easier. For Tora, she served under the Lady as a maidservant and began learning the Daisho family mudra, later attaining genin rank which enabled her to take on somewhat tougher tasks. She followed the Master-Servant mindset and was very loyal, so loyal that her daimyo's image in her mind was near god-like. She was not the best, nor his number one favorite, but he did favor her with a silk fan and found her to be an obedient lap dog as a shinobi. When the Lord was on his deathbed, Tora cried the hardest and it was to her that he revealed his darkest shame. He and his wife had a son who was sent away, but he had not been faithful and fathered a child with a Xaela maidservant. This woman and child were sent away; the bastard son grew up with his half-brother as a sort of whipping boy/servant, without ever knowing his young master was his older brother. That older brother grew to be a monster. When the daimyo passed, Tora was hurt and angry and set out to eradicate this shameful abomination because it was too hard to believe. This was just the first crack in the porcelain for her as the type of man he was in life finally became visible to her. It took some time and lots of dead ends, but she wandered until she followed a rumor of an Au Ra with golden limbal rings who fought like an animal to the amusement of Garleans. Watching him fight soon curbed her appetite for vengeance, for he was a man broken by circumstance. She might have left him to his fate but he had no choice in the path life lead him, so set about freeing him and vowed to protect him as she had once done for his family. She had a mask made for him to help blind him to his animalistic rage and together they travelled. He, a wounded animal with no idea who was and where he came from; she, the soft-spoken guardian of her master's shame. That is...until she lost him. It took following rumors once more and curious Miqo'te street urchin, but she found the masked Au Ra in Shirogane offering his services to a Free Company, though she does not know why or how he came to be there. Now, she has come to offer her own so that she may continue to honor her vow so that one day, the Au Ra now called Genesis would know who he is and where he came from.

 

1. Would Kugane be the place for a person of her class/caste living under a liege lord? Would this be on Koshu? Is Shirogane part of Kugane?
2. Would Doman people be in this part of the East? Should she just be Hingan?
3. Is daimyo (daimya for the Lady) the correct term? The lord would be more a prominent merchant, maybe a lesser far distant relative of some house/lord claiming the title of bugyo, than anyone of true noble birth.
4. What would be the proper term for his vassals? Plebs? His people?
5. In regards to language: She speaks Doman fluently (it's her preferred language), knows Hingan, and muddles her way through Eorzean. However, are Hingan and Eorzean the same common language?
6. I do not plan on dumping paragraphs of Japanese in her speech, but would it be acceptable to use simple words/phrases like "Hai," "Domo" (or "Arigato gozaimasu" for formal instances), or "Gomen'nasai" (or "Domo sumimasen" for formal instances) sprinkled as needed?
7. Her classes are NIN, SAM, and ARC. I main NIN and assume she uses tanto blades as weapon of choice. She's not unskilled with katana, but is weak with a bow. Does it make sense she might be trained in the other two (not as a SAM per se, but at least for weapon proficiency)? 

 

I may have more questions, but they're more related to personality building rather than backstory building. I role-played her for the first time last night as part of the interview to get into the FC and I'm still trying to get to know her.

 

Thank you for taking the time! And for sticking around until the end! XD

 

[Kieron Lohengrin]

1. Kugane is specifically the nation's district for trade and diplomacy with foreigners. Shirogane is adjacent and provides housing for foreigners. They are analogous to real-world Dejima during Japan's Edo period, which was the sole open port for trade with the outside world, just as the East Aldenard Trading Company is an analogue for the real-world Dutch East India Company. Kugane has specifically been called out for being relatively more progressive than other places in Hingashi thanks to adventurer culture, to the point where peasants will move there to escape the rigidity of the nation's caste system.

 

2. Yes, it's entirely possible for Domans to still be there, as the reconstruction of their homeland is fairly recent.

 

3. Hingashi is ruled by the bakufu, with (presumably) a shogun being the overall chief leader. Daimyo might be a bit too high up the totem pole, but bugyo (used at the magistrate level) is probably fine for clan politics.

 

4. Terms like vassals, smallfolk, and peasant workers are probably safest.

 

5. Hingan script and language are distinctly different from Eorzean script and language. It uses archaic Japanese terms sprinkled in every now and again.

 

6. It would be fine for flavor.

 

7. Yes, NIN, SAM, and ARC are commonly seen as regular enemy mobs in dungeons. They're not restricted jobs/classes like DRG/BLM/WHM. How much training your character has in various weapon arts is up to you.

[Valence]

When you say it beats paying the Sekiseigumi, keep in mind that the Sekiseigumi is a very peculiar group that serves as a police force specifically in Kugane and its port district, under the authority of the Buhen clan. The Sam quests also imply that anybody with enough skill, determination and honor can pretend to one day become part of it, no matter their origins, which puts the samurai serving under the Sekiseigumi as lesser samurai due to their rather weird non noble caste status (Samurai are like historical Japan, the ruling warrior caste, at the service of their lieges). This also seems to be the case in Doma, where the samurai caste serves the Rijin clan (the ruling clan), and the people are asked therefore to trust in the Samurai.

 

1. To add to what Kieron said: Hingashi is ruled by the bakufu (entrusted to the Mitsurugi family, which symbol is also the Mon of Hingashi). The emperor Reigen however, is the legitimate autority, much like it was during Edo and whatnot). Kugane is located on the smaller islands of the two, Shishu (Koshu being the biggest with the capital, Bukyo).

 

2. I'm sure doman people can be found in Hingashi, especially around Kugane. You just have to keep in mind that Hingashi is very reclusive and mostly closed to outsiders everywhere else than in the port district of Kugane, so it's hard to tell ultimately if domans immigrated there easily. If they did somewhere in the past, especially when the whole Island was still going through the Age of Blood (RL equivalent: the Tengoku period), it's hard to tell. Either way, becoming a Bugyo, or even a Daimyo, as a non native sounds hard to believe to me. 

 

5. Language is hard to say. Some think it's mostly a common hyuran tongue mixed in with archaism from Hingashi, but ultimately it's very hard to tell, especially since the game to us is translated from japanese (where eorzean also appears japanese), to english (where hingan and doman also appears english, with some archaic hingan terms like ijin, bugyo, geiko, etc). 

 

6. The english translation doesn't use those and I believe it to be a fault of taste to use them. The translation uses plenty of made up japanese-ish words as said above, but not common untranslated phrasing like arigato, and especially suffixes like -san, -dono and -sama and whatnot to my knowledge. They just translate that by bowing a lot and using all kind of far eastern manners, or translated honorifics (your honor, my lord, etc). The most important rule though, is doing what you like, what fits your style, and what fits the people you play with.

 

7. I don't see why not. Ninjutsu in lore mostly revolves around the art of well... doing ninja things, being sneaky, assassinating or whatever else. But most of all, it's the art of summoning through pentagrams and lengthy incantations. The mudra techniques drastically reduce the process to a few hand signs, but also reduce the panel to what shinobi can actually do by using those shortcuts (you can see some summoning from ninja mobs in the Kugane castle instance for example). The weapons used in my opinion, are way less important, and if shinobi are anything close to their RL counterpart, then weapons, unlike katanas, are considered as tools first and foremost. 

Edited March 15, 2019 by Valence