Noble CircleReport

English：Noble Circle　·　Factions

The ruling class of the United Cities — a set of lords and ladies who tie hunting, diplomatic immunity and slave ledgers into a single package.

The Noble Circle (formerly the "Imperial Lords") is the ruling class of the United Cities. The Emperor is drawn from this circle, and the empire's armies and slave industry both hang on the names of its individual members.

The wiki's description of them pulls no punches: equal parts cruel, narcissistic and incompetent. That is not a moral condemnation so much as a mechanical description — every one of them holds real power, and almost none of them can swing a sword themselves.

How It Works: Fiefs, Not Bureaucracy

The Noble Circle is not a cabinet that holds meetings. Military command in the empire is centralised on the nobility, but sliced into separate zones of influence: the Emperor keeps forces of his own, supplied by the slave camps at Slave Farm, Stone Camp and South Stone Camp, while each of the other nobles manages the troops and patrols of one region — Sanda has the Great Desert, Nagata Heng, Inaba Bast, Yoshinaga the Skimsands, Tsugi the Stormgap Coast and Merin the Hook.

The direct consequence of this structure is that the empire has no "centre" that can be knocked over. To strip the Great Desert of its defences you have to deal with Lady Sanda; to cut off the manpower feeding the Bast front you have to deal with Lord Inaba, who runs conscription. Each noble is an independent switch.

The United Cities Line

The Guild Line

The upper ranks of the Traders Guild are likewise counted as part of the Noble Circle. The guild is headed by Longen and forms the backbone of the empire's economy, running the supply chain that feeds the vast majority of its townsfolk; it also maintains private military forces of its own, Samurai included, and is apparently allowed limited conscription — a second chain of power inside the empire:

The Third Piece: Military Command

When lore documentaries list "Tengu's inner circle", they routinely add one name to the lords and ladies above that does not belong to a noble at all: Captain-General Eyegore, who leads the elite units sent to deal with the empire's most dangerous enemies^{[V1 0:02:44][V2 0:02:44]}.

Eyegore's identity is itself a footnote on this political order: he is a hiveless Southern Hive Soldier Drone, and yet he rose to become supreme commander of the armies of the United Cities and the Traders Guild, regarded inside the empire as "the final answer to every problem". A set of nobles who define poverty as a crime and treat non-humans as merchandise handed military command, when they actually needed someone who could fight, to an alien with neither city nor hive.

That same roster of "the empire's official fighting strength" gets pulled out wholesale as the red team in one arena-style feature: Emperor Tengu, the Warden of Tengu's Vault, and the entire Noble Circle^{[V3 0:01:18]}. The list itself makes the point — the Noble Circle has many members, very few who can take the field, and of the handful who can actually fight, almost none are nobles.

How They See Themselves

The Noble Circle is one of the few ruling classes in the game that argues its own case. Lord Inaba wrote a book, The Blessing Of Slavery, sold openly by booksellers across the empire:

Slavery is attacked and branded immoral by outside criticizers, by rebel ninjas. We're accused of cruelty, accused of stealing people's freedom. Yet the accusers continue to buy the products and labours of slavery: Iron, cotton, chainmail... ninja rags. The accusers reek of hypocrisy. — Lord Inaba, The Blessing Of Slavery

The structure of that passage is worth noting: it first concedes the moral dispute, then converts the dispute into a question of hypocrisy via "you buy it too", and finally claims that even if slavery is immoral, it is a burden borne by us alone and no business of outsiders. The second half of the book falls straight back on a utilitarian defence — without slaves, who works the fields? The resources would be wasted on ourselves.

The official version of the Red Rebellion likewise comes from a noble hand, written by the surviving Lady Tanaka. She makes no attempt to soften the decision taken at the time: once the last rations had been snatched up by the most powerful of them, "we shut ourselves off from the outer dregs: This was everyone for themselves now, there was no room for charity or pity."

Way of Life

Noble culture is built on luxuries imported from distant lands: every noble carries Luxury Goods; the United Cities line wears [Masterwork] armour with weapons manufactured by the Edgewalkers, while the guild line wears [Specialist] (10% chance of [Masterwork]). The weapons themselves vary by taste — Inaba, Yoshinaga and Nagata all favour the Wakizashi, Sanda and Tsugi the Long Cleaver, Shiro a Nodachi, Ohta a Ringed Sabre, Merin a Naginata; the guild line, by contrast, is uniformly armed with Longswords. Their combat skill is generally mediocre, with melee figures sitting around 40–60. Each noble is permanently accompanied by four to five Hooded Empire Noble Guards, and out in the wilds those guards are led by a Noble Captain.

More telling still is the contraband: the empire outlaws Hashish, Bloodrum and even the Hemp used to make them, and the samurai are obsessive about purging them — and yet those same substances turn up routinely in the nobles' own inventories.

The orders they give their guards include training a pet Leviathan. They also hunt peasants for amusement.

The Noble Hunter

The Noble Hunter is the institutionalised version of that amusement: an unnamed imperial noble travelling with one noble captain, six hooded guards and a batch of slaves, ranging and hunting between the Great Desert, the Stormgap Coast and Hook.

Time to try out my new bow! This bad boy cost more than you could ever earn in a lifetime, you know. — Noble Hunter

They are particularly interested in Skeletons, which they regard as high-value trophies, and they have dedicated lines for shooting them. They only appear while Emperor Tengu is still alive.

Cracks Inside the Walls

The Noble Circle is not a monolith. The Letter Of Parting, found in-game, is a noble's farewell to a commoner lover outside the city:

A peasant from the outer gates mixing with a Lord of high society... The nobles will be sure to make an example of you and you'll "disappear", along with all the other sorry dreamers. — Letter Of Parting

The writer is not describing external oppression but how their own kind handle their own kind. The same internal tension appears in the anonymous letter Puppet, in which a noble openly questions Tengu's accession (see Emperor Tengu).

After a Noble Is Killed: The Luquin Case

The one occasion on which an outside force genuinely took a bite out of the Noble Circle is recorded in the paired volumes of Legend of Luquin.

Luquin was the son of a farming family in the outer gates of Catun. After the family business went under, the whole household was sold into slavery; his father died in a mine, and his mother was run through by a guard's sword while creating an opportunity for him to escape. Seven years later he came home for revenge with stealth and assassination techniques learned from the ninjas, and his first target was Lord Kurusaga — one of the senior nobles of Tengu's inner circle. The body was impaled on its own sword, with a note pierced on the blade: "One down, five to go." Read literally the note points to six inner-circle members, which does not square with the wiki's Emperor Tengu page, where the Inner Circle is four high nobles handpicked by Tengu himself.

Luquin was eventually captured, paraded through the streets of Heng, then locked into Tengu's Vault. Inside he was tortured, starved and forced to write a book praising the Emperor, Beautiful Tengu: A Tribute^{[V4 0:06:39]}. By the time the game begins he has been in the vault for fifteen years, with a bounty of 30,000 Cats on his head.

The point of the affair is not the assassination but the manner of disposal: faced with an enemy who already had a reputation, the Noble Circle chose not execution but rewriting him into propaganda — keeping him alive and forcing him to write the regime's praises with his own hand was more useful than killing him^{[V4 0:06:39]}. If the player lets him out of the cage, he joins you immediately, and says it plainly: he has been locked up for fifteen years, and you have just released Tengu's greatest nightmare.

For the Player

Every member of the Noble Circle has Diplomatic Status. Mechanically this has several severe consequences:

• Choosing any hostile or insulting dialogue option makes the noble set his guards on you at once and put a bounty on your head.
• Attacking or kidnapping a noble is treated as terrorism, with an extremely high bounty and heavy damage to your relations with the United Cities.
• On the other hand, killing or imprisoning specific nobles is one of the most effective levers for changing world state — patrols, town ownership and hostile faction distribution across an entire region all get rewritten as a result.

Removed Content

The game's construction tools (FCS) still contain data for randomly named "Imperial Nobles" and a large "noble procession" squad — originally designed to travel between towns at the head of a retinue. Also removed were the "Samurai Lords", powerful nobles who once led imperial samurai patrols. Community mods exist to restore both.

Video citations

1. Kenshi: Major Powers | United Cities and Holy NationCivilizationEx
2. History of Kenshi: Major Powers | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
3. Kenshi Colosseum: Holy Nation Uniques VS United Cities UniquesHeroInHisHead
4. Kenshi: All Unique CompanionsCivilizationEx
5. Kenshi: History of the United CitiesCivilizationEx