Ninja (role)
- This article is about the role that appears in SLASHTHEM. For other uses, see Ninja (disambiguation).
The Ninja is a role that appears in SlashTHEM. The role draws on two earlier Ninja roles - one is a defunct feature in NetHack which was eventually replaced by the Rogue, and the other originated from NetHack-- 3.0.10, an ancestor of SLASH'EM. Female Ninja are referred to as Kunoichi by the game.
In NetHack, "Ninja" and "Kunoichi" are the male and female rank titles of a Samurai from experience levels 6 to 9. In SlashTHEM, the equivalent rank title is "Kumigashira" (which translates roughly to "squad leader").
Ninja are always chaotic and can be a doppelgänger, human, incantifier, elf, vampire, kobold, or orc.
Contents
Skills
NetHack-- 3.0.10 was based on NetHack 3.0.10, which predated the skill system, so Ninja could use any weapons.
SLASHTHEM gives the Ninja a skill set reminiscent of both the Rogue and Samurai:
| Ninja skills | |
|---|---|
| Max | Skills |
| Basic |
|
| Skilled | |
| Expert |
|
| Master |
|
The Ninja's special spell is enchant weapon. Spell success is determined by intelligence.
- SLASHTHEM u_init.c line 2081 in v. 0.8
Techniques
Ninja gain these techniques in SLASHTHEM:
- XL 1: Vanish
- XL 1: Critical strike
- XL 10: Cutthroat
SLASHTHEM tech.c 152
Intrinsics
SLASHTHEM attrib.c line 71
Starting equipment
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"rn1(9,6) shuriken"
- A +0 wakizashi (short sword)
- 9 shuriken
- An uncursed potion of sickness
- A blessed potion of invisibility
- A osaku (lock pick)
- a leather cloak
- a pair of low boots
- A +0 kaginawa (grappling hook)
The Ninja starts with a pet little dog.
The SlashTHEM Ninja will know the starting shuriken as "hira-shuriken" (flat shuriken), as part of an expanded list of Japanese item names. This reflects the fact that the term "shuriken" was historically also used to refer to other thrown (and sometimes wielded) weapons, not only the star-shaped projectiles associated with the term in Western culture. Darts are known as "bo-shuriken" (stick shuriken).
Item names
Like the Samurai, the Ninja has alternate names for items that follow a Japanese theme.
Rank titles
SLASHTHEM has a different set of rank titles:
- XL 1-2: Kukkyu
- XL 3-5: Hakkyu
- XL 6-9: Nanakyu
- XL 10-13: Rokkyu
- XL 14-17: Gokyu
- XL 18-21: Yonkyu
- XL 22-25: Sankyu
- XL 26-29: Nikyu
- XL 30: Ikkyu
SlashTHEM role.c line 1005
Quest
| & Jaquio File:Jaquio.png | |
|---|---|
| Attacks |
Weapon 8d4, Gaze 4d6 random breath weapon, mage spell, clerical spell |
| Base level | 36
|
| Speed | 12 |
| Base AC | -6 |
| Base MR | 90 |
| Alignment | -20 (chaotic) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | unique (not normally generated) |
| Genocidable | no |
| Weight | 1450 |
| Nutritional value | 400 |
| Size | Large |
| Resistances | fire, poison, stoning, drain, death
|
|
Jaquio:
| |
| Reference | monst.c, line 6900 |
The quest sees the Ninja fighting Jaquio for Fuma-itto no Ken, a chaotic ninja-to (broadsword) which adds +8 to-hit and +8 to damage, grants drain resistance while carried, and can be invoked to create a stack of hira-shuriken. This weapon was adapted from an artifact of the same name from dNetHack. The maps are cloned from the Samurai quest.
- SLASHTHEM 0.9.7 artilist.h, line 663
Gods
The SlashTHEM pantheon is taken from the tale of Jiraiya Goketsu Monogatari:
- Lawful: Jiraiya
- Neutral: Tsunade
- Chaotic: Orochimaru
History
The Ninja of vanilla NetHack was a role that existed from NetHack 1.3d to NetHack 2.3e, and was replaced in NetHack 3.0.0 by the Rogue, making it a defunct feature; this Ninja had a much simpler starting inventory in comparison to the Rogue, consisting of a katana, +1 leather armor, and up to 25 shuriken.[1]
NetHack-- 3.0.10, a variant of NetHack 3.0.10 and precursor of SLASH'EM, included a revived Ninja role alongside the Rogue as one of nine new roles - the discussion thread in which the authors first announced the variant suggests that some of the new roles were taken from a list proposing a role for every letter of the alphabet.[2] After the release of NetHack 3.1.3 in 1993, NetHack-- was updated to NetHack-- 3.1.3 by porting some of the changes from NetHack-- 3.0.10 into a patch for the newest version, but the Ninja and the other eight new roles were left out. This was due to some changes in the vanilla code, which meant that some content was removed to improve compatibility with NetHack - most significantly, the NetHack 3.1 had seen the addition of the Quest branch. To avoid the challenge of fitting full-length quests for the roles that had been added in NetHack-- 3.0.10 into the patch code, those roles were simply left out of the patch.
The Ninja role, along with the other eight roles from NetHack-- 3.0.10, appeared in Slash'EM Extended and then in SlashTHEM. SlashTHEM adjusted the overall role and their quest, and tailored their starting inventory to be closer to their NetHack-- incarnation by adding a wakizashi, potions of sickness and invisibility, a lock pick, and intrinsic stealth.
Origin
A ninja (Japanese: 忍者, lit. 'one who is invisible') or shinobi (Japanese: 忍び, lit. 'one who sneaks') was an infiltration agent, mercenary, guerrilla warfare expert, or bodyguard that existed in feudal Japan, and was often employed in siege, espionage missions and military deception. They often appear in the historical record during the Sengoku period, when jizamurai clans of peasant-warriors in Iga Province and the adjacent Kōka District formed ikki – "revolts" or "leagues" – as a means of self-defense, although antecedents may have existed as early as the 12th century. The first known English use of the word ninja was in 1964.
The word "shinobi" appears in the written record as far back as the late 8th century in poems in the Man'yōshū, and the word's meaning is the basis for the ninja's association with stealth and invisibility; meanwhile, the word "ninja" was uncommon, and a variety of regional colloquialisms evolved to describe what would later be dubbed ninja. Related is the term kunoichi (くノ一), originally an argot that means "woman" and supposedly coming from the characters くノ一 (respectively hiragana ku, katakana no and kanji ichi), which make up the form of kanji for "woman" (女)—in fiction written in the modern era, kunoichi means "female ninja".
Ninja gained notability as mercenaries during the 15th century, when they were hired to employ many asymmetrical warfare tactics such as scouting operations, raiding operations, arson, and even terrorism. These tactics were considered abhorrent by members of the samurai class. Following the Tokugawa shogunate in the 17th century, the ninja faded into obscurity, though a number of shinobi manuals, often based on Chinese military philosophy, were written in the 17th and 18th centuries, most notably the 1676 Bansenshūkai. By the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, shinobi had become a topic of popular culture in Japan which featured in many legend and folklore, where they were associated with many supernatural abilities.
Many of the now-ubiquitous stereotypes about ninja were developed within Edo theatre: their black clothing was supposed to imitate the outfits worn by kuroko, stagehands meant to be ignored by the audience; and their use of shuriken, which was meant to contrast with the use of swords by onstage samurai. In kabuki theatre, ninja were "dishonorable and often sorcerous counterparts" to samurai, and possessed "almost, if not outright, magical means of camouflage." Many famous people in Japanese history, including several known samurai, have been associated or identified as ninja, but their status as ninja is difficult to prove and may be the product of later imagination; rumors surrounding famous warriors sometimes describe them as ninja, though there is similarly little evidence for these claims.
References
- NetHack-- 3.0.10 attrib.c line 80
- NetHack-- 3.0.10 u_init.c line 257
