Shinobi ThievesReport
English：Shinobi Thieves · Factions
A continent-wide professional criminal guild dealing in fencing, smuggling and assassination. Membership costs 10,000 Cats, and they trade openly, on the record, inside the cities of every major power.
"So, you want in? The guards make a show of their crackdowns, but they're fooling nobody, they're nothing. There's nothing a few cats can't smooth over." — Thief Boss
The Shinobi Thieves are the most widely distributed criminal organisation on the Kenshi continent. They are not bandits hiding out in the wilds but a guild trading openly inside the cities — their Thieves Towers stand within the walls of the United Cities, the Holy Nation and the Shek Kingdom, and the guards of all three can do nothing about them. That position of "illegal in plain sight" is itself a footnote on the law-enforcement capacity of the three great powers.
A ten-thousand-cat ticket
The barrier to joining the Shinobi Thieves is abnormally low: find the Thief Boss outside a Thieves Tower, pay 10,000 Cats, done. It is a one-off fee with no test, no quest and no sponsor; the only thing to do is scrape the money together[V1 0:03:52][V2 0:03:23].
What the payment unlocks is substantial — beds, training equipment, a plastic surgeon, and a fencing channel for buying and selling stolen goods at a discount[V1 0:03:52][V2 0:03:23]:
| Facility / person | Use |
|---|---|
| Shinobi Trader | Buys and sells at half price across the board; a reliable source of thieves backpacks |
| Thief Fence | Buys stolen goods, no questions asked |
| Guild Plastic Surgeon | Changes a character's appearance for free |
| Assassination dummies, locksmith training boxes | Train Assassination and Lockpicking |
| Beds | Free to rest in the tower |
| Ninja Guard | Steps in to help when you are attacked |
| Wandering Assassin | Heals you when nearby |
Half-price economics
Every trader in the guild buys and sells at 50% of market value, unaffected by relations. This produces two well-known arbitrage routes:
- Laundering stolen goods — sell hard-to-move stolen items to the Shinobi Trader, then buy them back. Between the sale and the repurchase the items lose their "stolen" flag, after which they can be sold to ordinary merchants at normal prices.
- Buy low, sell high — take goods the Shinobi Trader sells at half price and sell them at full price in the shop next door.
Thief Fences work differently: they do not require membership to trade with, they are scattered across bars in various towns, and they likewise buy and sell at half price. This effectively makes the guild the clearing house for stolen goods across the whole continent. In the southern swamp, hemp grown by the Swampers is processed into hashish, and one of its main sales routes runs through the guild into the United Cities.
Three forms of organisation
The Shinobi Thieves have no unified continent-wide chain of command; they are distributed in three forms:
- Thieves Towers: permanently staffed by a Thief Boss, 3–5 thieves, 2–3 Ninja Guards, a Shinobi Trader and a plastic surgeon. Towns confirmed to have a tower include The Hub, Heft, Heng, Sho-Battai, Catun, Admag, Clownsteady, and Mongrel in the Fog Islands. FCS data shows that by design every United Cities town should have a Thieves Tower.
- Bar teams: a thief and a Thief Fence appearing as a pair in bars everywhere. Such teams may appear in towns controlled by the United Cities, the Holy Nation, the Shek Kingdom, the Tech Hunters, the Empire Peasants and Deadcat.
- Wandering Assassins: operating solo, found in the Border Zone, Heng, the Skimsands, the Spider Plains, the Great Desert, the Hook and the Swamp. Their job tag is actually "wandering trader", but the player cannot trade with them; during the day they stop to do business with local merchants.
Who is inside
The guild's racial weighting is: Scorchlander 200, Greenlander 90, Hive Prince 30, Hive Worker Drone 30, Hive Soldier Drone 5.
Two things about this are worth noting.
First, Scorchlanders are overwhelmingly dominant. This makes the guild one of the very few non-Greenlander presences inside Holy Nation territory — the Holy Nation is almost uniformly Greenlander, and the only Scorchlanders who can appear in its cities are mercenaries and guild members. A theocracy with racial purity as state policy has room for smugglers but not for its neighbours; the game never states the contrast, but there it sits.
Second, Hivers make up around 18%, far above their share of the United Cities population. The Wiki lists this as part of the argument that "Hivers are inclined towards theft" — Hivers have naturally higher Thievery, and the two places where Hivers cluster most heavily are the Empire Peasant class and the guild: one destitute, one criminal. The first issue of the United Cities' official news flyer United Weekly is headlined "Twig men bring yet MORE crime into the United Cities". Whether that charge is a statistical fact or a self-fulfilling prophecy, the game leaves for the player to judge.
Who likes them
The guild's external relations are far better than those of most criminal organisations. The blanket category of Drifters holds them in high regard at +100, and the Anti-Slavers sit at +50. They manage to maintain workable relations with powers large and small, operating openly in the cities without being wiped out.
The price is that they cannot genuinely stand up to a great power. The guild's influence spans the continent and it is one of the strongest secondary factions, but it still cannot beat the Holy Nation or the United Cities[V1 0:04:28]. One reason is a near-self-destructive trait: members protect each other to an extreme degree, and if a single comrade gets into a fight with city guards or soldiers, all the others join in regardless of the odds[V1 0:04:28][V2 0:03:23]. This loyalty makes the guild nearly immovable in small-scale conflict, and also keeps it forever at "powerful underworld organisation", never a regime.
The same protective logic is also where the player benefits in practice: members watch each other's backs, and when you are hurt the people in the tower will come and treat you[V1 0:03:52] — which makes them, alongside the Anti-Slavers, one of the few organisations that actively look after their allies.
Do not confuse them with the Trade Ninjas
The Trade Ninjas are a separate faction, running the bars and black markets of The Hub, Mourn and the rebel base, hostile to bandits, and merchants rather than criminals in essence. Both wear ninja gear and both do business in the grey zone, but there is no relationship of subordination between them.
Known issues
See also
- Black Dragon Ninjas — identical tower structure, entirely opposite line
- Empire Peasants
- Factions