Flotsam NinjasReport
English：Flotsam Ninjas · Factions
A resistance movement of women and slaves who escaped the Holy Nation. They hide inside Cannibal country to train, they pray to their enemy's god, and their forces amount to under two per cent of the Holy Nation's.
"There is nowhere in this world that is safe. People either want to tie us to a stake or eat us alive... Although the Cannibals are good for one thing: target practice." — Moll
The Flotsam Ninjas are the most easily romanticised and the most easily overestimated faction in Kenshi. Their story sounds excellent — oppressed women escape a theocracy, pick up swords, and set out to bring down the whole Holy Nation. The numbers do not sound excellent at all.
The Name
Flotsam originally means wreckage floating on the sea after a shipwreck, and by extension refers to people society regards as worthless and already discarded. That is precisely how the Holy Nation defines them, and they took the word and made it their banner.
Who Makes Them Up
The core is women and escaped slaves out of the Holy Nation. Holy Nation doctrine demands that women submit entirely to men, and Rebirth is a labour camp that works dissidents to death — the output of those two places constitutes the Flotsam Ninjas' manpower. The whole organisation's operation revolves around that fact: led by Moll, hidden in the concealed forests of the north, training itself by fighting the neighbouring Cannibal tribes, with the goal of one day challenging the Holy Nation head-on[V1 0:07:21].
But they are not merely an assembly of fugitives. A substantial share of the membership consists of outsiders who joined voluntarily:
- About a third of the Flotsam Ninjas are Scorchlanders, and the Holy Nation is a purely Greenlander state — those people cannot possibly have come out of it
- A small number of Shek members, mostly escaped slaves from Rebirth (Shek make up the overwhelming majority of Rebirth's slaves)
- The faction holds a relations value of +100 toward Deadcat in the north, and Deadcat is likewise a mixed Scorchlander and Shek population
From this the wiki infers that large numbers of volunteers come from Deadcat — two peoples both cornered by the Cannibals, naturally forming an alliance. Mani is the textbook case: a former Cannibal Hunter, now holding the Flotsam Ninjas' watchpost on the Cannibal side.
Faith: A Splintered Okran
This is the most intriguing thing about the Flotsam Ninjas. Their enemies are worshippers of Okran — and they worship Okran too.
What they believe in is an Okran with the part about discriminating against women deleted[V2 0:06:19]. The difference does not stop there: the Flotsam version simultaneously honours Narko, who in Holy Nation doctrine is a dark goddess who must be expunged. The Flotsam Ninjas hold that the two deities are two faces of one cosmic balance, and that good and evil are not opposites. Their blessing runs:
"May the light and dark both bless you."
In Holy Nation eyes this is more unforgivable than atheism. They are not foreigners; they are heretics and traitors.
Interestingly, Moll herself is not devout. When the player asks whether she is part of a "Narko cult", she laughs off the Holy Nation's framing:
"There are a hundred possible interpretations of any religion, and the Holy Nation's is just one of them. They only see black and white..."
Moll's attitude to her followers' faith amounts to "believe whatever you like" — in the end, she thinks, it is all nonsense. That is a rather rare combination in a religious resistance movement: believers fighting for someone who does not believe.
Hiding Inside Cannibal Country
Flotsam Village sits in the Hidden Forest, right up against the Cannibal Plains. The siting is entirely deliberate.
"Because there's no Holy Nation here, no Empire, and no slavers. And the Cannibals themselves make a decent deterrent anyway." — Moll
Holy Lord Phoenix has admitted himself that the reason he has never sent a punitive expedition to level the Flotsam Ninjas is that Moll is hiding in "the land of monsters".
The cost is that this moat bites back. Cannibal tribes have begun expanding toward the Hidden Forest in recent years, running straight into the Flotsam Ninjas hiding there[V3 0:05:09]; the Cannibals also cut their supply lines — merchants in the village complain that "the suppliers who used to come got eaten by Cannibals" — so they have to go weeding on a schedule.
"Cannibal watch. My job is to keep the painted tribes outside the line and stop them swamping the main camp. Leave them alone and they breed like swamp raptors and treat the whole plain as a buffet table..." — Mani
The Number: 2%
The wiki has produced a fairly cold estimate of Flotsam Ninja strength.
They send patrols into only two regions (the Hidden Forest and the northern coast), at about a third of the Holy Nation's numbers, and have zero patrols in the Holy Nation core region of Okran's Pride. Weighting military presence by region, the Flotsam Ninjas account for roughly 2% of the whole theatre — and that is before counting garrisons in Holy Nation towns and military holdings.
Moll knows it herself:
"Let's hope those enemies clear out most of the army for us. Okran knows, numbers have never been on our side."
The actual world states bear the judgement out: as long as either High Inquisitor Seta or High Inquisitor Valtena is alive, the Flotsam Ninjas cannot push into a single region or take a single town.
Internal Disagreements
The Flotsam Ninjas are not an organisation of one mind. At least three voices can be heard in game:
| Position | Representative line |
|---|---|
| Fight to the end | "The Holy Nation will fall! And it will fall at the hands of women!" |
| Wanting out | "I've had enough of gloomy ninjas and miserable refugees. Okran can go to hell too." |
| Guilt | "Okran has forsaken us... I betrayed my holy brothers... what have I done..." |
The four recruitable Holy Nation fugitive women in the village are four products of the same oppression[V4 0:08:35]:
- Digna — from Stack, wanted to escape the Okranite suppression of women, was caught by her father, killed him and fled north to the Flotsam Ninjas[V5 0:01:32]
- Knife — likewise escaped the Holy Nation; her asking price of 6,000 Cats exists to send money back to her mother, who is still in Stack
- Pia — her sister died fighting Paladins
- Reva — since escaping the Holy Nation she distrusts all men and refuses to work for any of them[V5 0:02:10]
Reva trained with the Flotsam Ninjas but never actually joined, and her reason lands squarely on the organisation's soft spot: she cannot understand why this group, having escaped the Holy Nation, is still worshipping another version of the Holy Nation's god[V4 0:09:52]. "Praying to the enemy's god" is not something everyone in the village can digest.
The Condition of Their Existence
For all that internal noise, the external order of priorities is beyond dispute. One commentator sums up their position in a slogan — "the Shek are bad, but the Phoenix is worse": even with nothing good to say about the Shek, the number one enemy has always been the Holy Nation[V6 0:03:47].
For exactly that reason, one inference proposes that this organisation's existence is entirely bound to the single fact of resisting Holy Nation oppression: if the Holy Nation ever turned moderate, the Flotsam Ninjas would disintegrate from within first, and some members might even end up fighting the Cannibals and Fogmen alongside the Holy Nation[V7 0:16:37]. No such branch exists in the game; it is purely a thought experiment extrapolated from faction motives — but it pinpoints precisely what separates the Flotsam Ninjas from other factions: they are not fighting for a piece of land or a kind of order, but to make one thing stop.
Moll and That Wanted Poster
Moll is a Scorchlander woman who fights with dual Ninja Blades and is escorted by three Jonin and twelve ninjas. The Holy Nation has put a bounty of 50,000 Cats on her (the 30,000 Cats printed on the poster is wrong).
The poster itself is a specimen of Holy Nation propaganda, listing charges of blasphemy, treason, disobedience, witchcraft, terrorism, murder, cannibalism, female independence, arson, kidnapping, mind control, extortion, theft and slander. It also warns soldiers to "attack immediately without warning, and do not give her the chance to speak".
World States
The Flotsam Ninjas' ending is bound entirely to Moll and the three Holy Nation leaders:
- Moll dead or imprisoned — Flotsam Village is taken over by the Cannibals and the organisation disintegrates
- Moll alive, Seta and Valtena down — the Flotsam Ninjas begin patrolling Okran's Gulf and Okran's Valley
- Moll alive, Holy Lord Phoenix, Seta and Valtena all down — Rebirth and Blister Hill fall into Flotsam hands, and Moll relocates to Blister Hill
- All four down (Moll included) — the two cities go to the Holy Nation Outlaws instead
Even in the best ending, all the Flotsam Ninjas take is a wrecked capital and an abandoned labour camp. Stack, Bad Teeth, Okran's Fist, the Holy Mines, the Holy Farms — none of those ever come back.
See Also
Books found here
Video citations
- Kenshi: History of the Holy NationCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: Major Powers | United Cities and Holy NationCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: Major Powers | Tech Hunters and CannibalsCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: All Unique CompanionsCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: Unique Companions | GreenlandersCivilizationEx
- Kenshi Colosseum: Dust Bandits VS Black Dragon NinjaHeroInHisHead
- What If The Shek And Holy Nation Were Allies? (ft. Muffintop)HeroInHisHead