Bear Clan
Family: Montoko
- The Bear Clan is one of the oldest surviving Clans in Nagakugo, mostly owing to the inhospitable nature of their mountainous home. They have been attacked and defeated more than a few times in their past, but when in peril, the Clan retreats up their mountains and into their iron mines, waiting out their enemy's aggression - sometimes for years at a time - before descending to the foothills to reclaim their lands.
The last time the Bear withdrew to their mines was three generations ago, when Seiwa's army crushed the ruling Owl Clan. The Bear were allies of the Owl and fought bravely against what would become the Carp Clan, but to no avail. They retreated to their mountains and hid for two years, picking off the patrols sent to find them, before finally descending and organizing a peasant revolt against the Carp samurai who had seized control of their lands. The Bear expected the Carp to retaliate, but instead, they merely left the Bear to their lands, and the next year, Carp courtiers arrived in the courts of the Bear to discuss trade routes with the suspicious Clan.
In the years since, the Bear Clan has made little effort to improve its relationship with the Carp... or, indeed, with any of the other Clans. The surly and confrontational natures of their samurai make them difficult people to befriend, though they are firm allies once their friendship has been won. Most samurai would be happy to ignore the Bear completely... were it not for the fact that much of the iron ore in Nagakugo rests beneath their mountains. This makes dealing with abrasive Bear courtiers something of a necessity for anyone wanting access to their iron.
The warriors of the Bear spend much of their time training on the treacherous ground of their homeland. They do not favor heavy armor, as it makes maneuvering up and down narrow mountain paths difficult, instead relying upon a fighting style that incorporates unarmed attacks into their fighting styles. Though the Clan does not place much stock in the strange magics of fangshi, their shenwu are considered invaluable for appeasing the spirits of the mountain and tending to the various ancestral tombs that dot their lands.
Carp Clan
Family: Seiwa
- The Carp Clan is the current ruler of Nagakugo. While its founder, Seiwa, was a skilled general and warrior, it was his determination to forging a lasting peace and his skill with statecraft that are more fondly remembered today. Seiwa's rivals noted that while he was a fearsome opponent on the battlefield, it was only after he had destroyed the Owl Clan and he turned his talents toward politics that he "became a dragon," referencing the common myth that koi fish who are determined enough can transform into dragons. The comparison amused Seiwa, who took the symbol of the Carp as his own.
The Carp hold significant lands on the central continent and boast an impressive standing army, though its numbers - and the quality of its soldiers - have begun to dwindle with no significant threats to sharpen their blades against. Three generations after Seiwa's death, the Carp achieve most of their victories through diplomacy, extortion, and leveraging the threat of their involvement in other conflicts to bully the other Clans into providing obedience (or, at the very least, compliance).
This tactic does not always work, and plenty of small skirmishes have broken out between the Carp and the other Clans over the years, but thus far, none of them have erupted into outright warfare. While the Carp are content to sit on their laurels and use the threat of violence to get others to fall into line, a number of tacticians have begun to suspect that the Carp might be all threat and no steel; while its courtiers are cunning and ruthless, there are few Carp warriors of great renown, and their peasants are more accustomed to harvesting rice than hefting spears.
The fangshi of the Carp are notorious for their spells that influence the mind, especially those that drain the will of their enemies, forcing them to lose their will to fight or to even change sides in the middle of a battle. They put these strange magics to great use during the Clan's war with the Owl Clan, disrupting their enemies by rendering their commanders listless and apathetic to the battle waging around them.
Cat Clan
Family: Kawachi
- The Cat Clan is known for being ambitious, almost to a fault. They hail from the northern continent, which has poor soil and rarely produces enough food to keep their people fed. Faced with starvation, the locals turned to fishing to keep food on their tables. Three generations ago, the ronin Kawachi united the fishermen under his banner and turned their fishing boats into supply and war ships in service to Seiwa's war effort. When Seiwa emerged victorious, he rewarded Kawachi with riches and proclaimed that all the fishermen who had aided in his victory were true samurai.
Returning home and establishing themselves as the Cat Clan, the fishermen-turned-samurai used their newfound wealth to set up trading routes with the surviving Clans, none of whom wanted to upset the newly-founded Carp Clan by turning away their closest allies. Kawachi and his followers took advantage of this and insinuated themselves into ports and trading hubs across Nagakugo.
In the years since, the Cat have somewhat distanced themselves from the Carp, though this has had little impact upon their fortunes. The trading vessels of the Cat fill the northern seas, shipping food, goods, and all manner of esoteric items from one corner of Nagakugo to the other. Though some samurai would accuse their bushi of being little more than glorified warehouse guards and their courtiers of haggling over coins like fishmongers, the samurai of the Cat rarely let themselves get upset at such slander. In their eyes, the other Clans are simply jealous of their wealth... and, some Cat samurai will admit, perhaps not unjustly so.
The Clan is incredibly wealthy, and its samurai tend to just throw money at their problems to make them go away. Should that not work - a situation that most Cat samurai find at least somewhat frustrating - they still have other options. The fighting style of the Cat incorporates numerous uncoordinated and unpredictable sword slashes, favoring speed over accuracy in a way that makes them quite annoying to fight or spar against. When combined with the "luck magic" of their fangshi, it makes even a battle against a seemingly unskilled Cat bushi difficult to predict.
Crow Clan
Family: Tsugaru
- The Crow is a Clan of scholars, academics, and alchemists, more concerned with probing the depths of human knowledge than with the business of other Clans. Though they live on the northeastern-most island of Nagakugo, they draw a fair number of travelers to their island, most in search of some important scroll tucked away inside their libraries. The courtiers of the Crow have kept extensive records of even seemingly inconsequential events tracing all the way back to its founding, and over the years they've gathered a good number of scrolls and letters that go back further still. This information comes at a price, however, and the "gifts" given to the Crow in exchange for copies of valuable scrolls are the main source of the Clan's income. The only other trade item exported by the Crow is paper, which is of a higher quality than that made elsewhere in Nagakugo and is available in a variety of colors.
The meticulous way that the Crow gathers, preserves, and sometimes steals scrolls, books, and other documents is something of a double-edged sword for the Clan. Crow samurai have a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for spying upon others, and it's generally assumed that any secret shared with one of them will end up tucked away in their home, readily available to anyone willing to toss a few coins their way. The fangshi of the Crow, in particular, are quite skilled at gathering information from unlikely sources, and there are more than a few rumors of Crow fangshi and shenwu interrogating spirits in order to learn things that might otherwise not be known.
Crow samurai tend to be inquisitive and a bit on the quieter side. Their courtiers are quite skilled at eavesdropping, reading lips, and memorizing almost absurd amounts of information, while their bushi are trained in ancient and esoteric fighting styles that confuse modern opponents. Reading and origami are both popular hobbies throughout the Clan, even among the peasantry, who are almost entirely literate to some degree or another. In fact, the task of copying scrolls for others is often delegated to peasants with steady hands, many of whom have learned far more about the world than their samurai masters might suspect.
Eel Clan
Family: Ishida
- The Eel Clan was originally formed by the refugee survivors of the Hawk Clan, which was destroyed after a long and arduous war with the Bear Clan. The remnants of the Hawk were driven north, out of their own lands and into the inhospitable swamplands and floodplains to the northeast. The Bear were unwilling to wade through hip-deep, brackish water to chase the refugees down and simply left them to their fate. With few other options left to them, the samurai and peasants intermingled and did their best to survive in a hostile and unpleasant land.
Bit by bit, the survivors slowly adjusted to their new home. They built their homes on tall wooden stilts that would keep their homes dry even during the rainy seasons when the river flooded. Over the years, canals were dug, water was diverted, and hardy strains of deepwater rice were discovered and cultivated. Soon, the harvests of the Eel were large enough that they could trade their surplus with the other Clans. The Clan poured its profits into improving the infrastructure of its canals and the homes of its samurai, and within a few generations, the Eel had gone from desperate refugees to the "rice bowl of the world," exporting a significant amount of deepwater rice to the other Clans. Today, the Clan is quite wealthy, and their conflicts are primarily limited to fending off bandits, pirates, and other minor thieves.
Eel samurai tend to move at their own pace. Their courtiers have a reputation for dragging out any process they're involved in, their fangshi are as languid as the waters they control, and their bushi tend to be somewhat lethargic when compared to those of other Clans. Fatigue (or rather, anemia) is a common problem among the Eel, an unfortunate side effect of the swamp spirits (i.e., intestinal parasites) that plague much of the Clan, and especially the peasantry. The Clan's shenwu can dispel the swamp spirits and alleviate the fatigue they cause with a number of herbal broths, but in the minds of most samurai, an afternoon nap works just as well. The fighting style of the Clan's bushi incorporates this languid approach to life, using various defensive throws and disarming maneuvers to turn an opponent's aggression and momentum against them.
Rat Clan
Family: Hatano
- In the eyes of the rest of Nagakugo, the Rat are a dying Clan whose fortunes have fallen quite a bit over the course of the past few generations. Though they were once prosperous and quite influential in the courts, a series of ineffectual daimyo, poor choices, and bad luck have reduced the Rat Clan to a shadow of its former self. The poor state of their castles, lack of food, and relatively empty coffers have caused many of the Rat's greatest samurai to abandon the Clan, leaving only second-rate courtiers and bushi to struggle in their absence.
The greatest threat to the Rat is the aggressive nature of the Tiger Clan, who share the Rat Clan's only land border. To their credit, the samurai of the Rat realize this fact and frequently go out of their way to appease their neighbors, offering them discounted trade goods and loaning them ashigaru and samurai to fight in the Tiger's various conflicts. Unfortunately, more than a few of these troops - ashigaru and samurai alike - choose to remain in the Tiger after their service is complete, further hampering the Rat Clan's attempts to pull itself out of its slow death spiral.
Rat courtiers are a frequent sight in the courts of other Clans, if only because the rooms and food offered to them by their host is almost certainly better than they can expect back home. They are not liked so much as tolerated, and many samurai hold a quiet pity for the unfortunate souls whose oaths of loyalty bind them to a Clan that clearly will not survive very far into the future. Most Rat samurai have a faint aura of desperation to them, and their Clan's many financial issues often lead to mercenary attitudes and displays of haggling and frugality that are generally considered to be unfitting of "proper" samurai.
This same degradation has also affected the Clan's fighting techniques. Their fighting style, once focused on discerning an opponent's weakness and striking them where they are most vulnerable, has suffered in the absence of competent sensei and skilled swordsmen. It has become a fighting style of unclean cuts and dirty tricks, incorporating a number of less-than-savory elements that other samurai would consider dishonorable in order to remain on equal footing with other, better-trained bushi.
Shark Clan
Family: Zutsugi
- The Shark Clan hails from the Ogunto Islands, the archipelago along Nagakugo's southern edge. Unlike the other Clans, they are not a single, unified family, but rather dozens of smaller families that have unified together under a single banner in order to improve their political situation in the courts. The Zutsugi family serves as a "catch-all" family name that these smaller families use when dealing with the "mainlanders," but it is almost never used among their own people, where they use their "local" family names.
As befits a Clan composed primarily of sailors, the Shark have an impressive number of ships under their command. They effectively have control of the southern seas, and it's not unheard of for Shark ships to engage in active piracy against rival Clans. While this piracy often involves attacking other ships on the open seas, the Shark have also been known to raid other Clans by sailing up to an undefended beach and disembarking hundreds of samurai, ashigaru, and mounted warriors, allowing them to strike, take what they want, and sail away before an effective defense can be mustered by their surprised victims. These hit-and-run tactics have not made the Shark popular with the other Clans, and small-scale naval battles are frequent and somewhat common in the southern seas.
The samurai and peasantry of the Shark Clan have largely forsaken the worship of their ancestors - many of whom were lost at sea and thus did not receive proper funerals - in favor of worshiping the moon. The shenwu of the Shark believe that Tsukuyomi, the moon god, watches over and protects them. The moon god's story of being cast out from grace and being forced to live in the shadows strikes a chord with most Shark samurai, who often see themselves as being similarly cast out from the business of the mainland, ignored in politics and never recognized for the glory and renown that they've justly earned. Their shenwu can draw upon Tsukuyomi's blessings to aid their bushi in combat, hiding them from sight and dampening their footfalls. When combined with the illusory magic practiced by their fangshi, it's not difficult to see why so many of the Shark's victims do not see them coming.
Tiger Clan
Family: Suda
- Once, the Tiger Clan was a relatively small Clan that was used as an enforcer by the ruling Owl Clan. When a situation arose that displeased the Owl but was too politically entangled to risk their own involvement, they would quietly ask the Tiger Clan to intercede on their behalf. Thus, the samurai of the Tiger gained a reputation for interfering in the conflicts of others, often in grandiose and frustrating ways. A few cunning courtiers and tacticians suspected the relationship between Owl and Tiger, but outwardly, the two Clans professed to dislike each other.
After Seiwa's coup, the deception crumbled as the surviving samurai of the Owl fled westward across the ocean to seek protection among the Tiger. Seiwa launched a naval attack against the Tiger to recover the refugees, and the Tiger, realizing that they were too weak to fend off Seiwa's army on their own, executed peasants dressed as Owl samurai in view of Seiwa's distant Carp ships. Thinking the battle won, Seiwa retreated, leaving the Tiger to absorb the remnants of the Owl... and their hatred of what would become the Carp Clan.
The samurai of the Tiger Clan are fierce, ambitious, and extremely militaristic, even by the standards of most samurai Clans. In actual number of samurai, the Tiger Clan lags behind the other Clans, a problem that it compensates for by leaning upon their peasantry for assistance. Throughout the Clan, positions that one would expect to be filled by minor samurai are instead held by peasant retainers, and it's not uncommon for a Tiger samurai to have friends and even lovers among the peasantry. The Clan's recent wars against the Cicada and Monkey Clans - both of whom were destroyed and absorbed by the Tiger - saw hundreds of battle-hardened ashigaru promoted to the rank of samurai as a reward for their exceptional performance in battle.
The fighting style of the Tiger reflects their personalities: it is brutal and aggressive, so much so that most other samurai consider it to be reckless to the point of suicidal. Nevertheless, the bushi of the Tiger have claimed multiple victories on behalf of their Clan, and the blood magic practiced by their fangshi - which is capable of dulling the pain of wounds and even regenerating lost limbs - has gone far in ensuring that even the most reckless of Tiger bushi will most likely survive a winning battle.
Toad Clan
Family: Okatsu
- Three generations ago, the Toad Clan betrayed their allies in the Owl Clan and turned their blades against their neighbors, the Stag Clan. The intent was to distract the Stag Clan, and thus, allow Seiwa's army to destroy the Owl without their interference. The betrayal caught the Stag Clan off guard, and within hours most of the Clan's bushi had been killed. The Toad did not stop the slaughter there, however: anyone wearing the mon of the Stag was brutally murdered, whether they were women, children, or even the elderly. After two ruthless weeks of bloodshed, the Stag Clan had been fully annihilated.
The price of victory, however, was far higher than the Toad had expected. On the last night of the campaign, the moon turned blood red, and the bushi of the Toad felt a powerful hunger growing within them. Their teeth elongated into fangs, and with bloodthirsty roars, the bushi turned on each other, hacking their fellow samurai apart with reckless abandon. The bloodlust faded with the coming of morning, but the hunger remained. In the weeks and months that followed, the fangshi and shenwu of the Toad determined that their bloodline had been cursed... but whether by a spirit, a god, or the last of the Stag, they could not determine.
In their attempts to end the blood curse, the fangshi of the Toad turned to darker and darker magics, making pacts with all sorts of dark spirits and learning spells never intended to be uttered by mortal lips. None of it helped; no matter what dark rituals they attempted, the curse continued to cling to their bloodline, afflicting their children and grandchildren as well. The cursed became renowned for their strength, endurance, and longer lifespans, but also reviled for their need to feast on the blood of their fellow humans. While many older samurai felt shame and remorse over their shameful natures, most of the younger samurai who bear the curse have accepted what they are and revel in the strength of their curse.
Wolf Clan
Family: Adachi
- The Wolf Clan is the newest of the Clans to stake their claim upon Nagakuro, and also one of the least liked. Their ancestors were not noble paragons of Bushido, but rather the bandits, thieves, murderers, and ronin that plagued the eastern lands of the Carp and the western foothills of the Bear. These outlaws banded together into small bandit groups that would raid farms and ambush caravans, striking fast and scattering in the face of any sort of resistance. They were a nuisance, but no matter how many were caught and executed by the Clans, the problem never seemed to go away.
A generation ago, the ronin Adachi - a former Carp who had been cast out from his Clan - fell in with one of the bandit groups and quickly rose to a leadership position. He taught his fellow bandits how to fight, and as they began to take down larger caravans, his fame grew and attracted other bandit groups to his banner. Feeding everyone soon became a problem, so Adachi did the sensible thing: he visited the farms in the area and agreed to stop raiding and killing them if they would willingly become his vassals. The beleaguered peasants readily agreed, and Adachi sent word to the Carp and Bear that the newly-formed Wolf Clan had seized control of the "bandit-ridden" area and restored order. The Carp and Bear Clans were both outraged at the audacity of the bandits... at least until they realized that the "taxes" the so-called Wolf Clan charged them to pass through their lands were less than the bandits had been stealing from them before their proclamation. The Carp and Bear decided to begrudgingly play along with the charade, giving the Wolf a tenuous claim to legitimacy.
The single greatest challenge set before a Wolf samurai is simply proving to others that he or she is actually a samurai. While the Bear and the Carp have more or less agreed that allowing bandits to pretend to be samurai is less chaotic than the alternative, most of the other Clans look down on Wolf samurai as pretenders. The samurai of the Wolf always see themselves as being measured against other samurai, and while a few scoff at the "elites" looking down on them because of their ignoble origins, most go out of their way to prove themselves as the brave and heroic paragons that they believe all samurai should aspire to be.