海浪人
Wide-winged heronSnow upon Mikashima
Casting ripples wide
Snowfall under heron’s wing
The Sazanami takes flight
From the heron’s roost
The filth flows freely forth
Down the narrow strait
Through shallows and rocky whites
The wise shall sail arrow-straight
Archers nest cliff-high
And in the heron’s white nest
Their bows in-land bound
Sazanami’s bow, outbound
While Mikashima spills blood
Mikashiman blood
Needlessly shed by brothers
Ours, kin to the wind
Wind-filled sails, hundreds unfurled
As migrating herons’ flock
A hundred ships sail
Away from heron’s nest to sea:
Ronin’s flotilla
A hundred masterless ships
Lady Murasaki weeps.
— Master Takeshi and students, Idle Ripples
The Sea Ronin are a diverse community of seafarers united by hardship and fierce independence from authority. Traders, raiders, couriers, mercenaries, and even colonists: the Sea Ronin are all of these things, defying attempts to label them or pin them down. The only thing all Sea Ronin have in common is that they serve no master other than themselves — they spit on empires and shape their own fate with their own two hands.
Wanderers from a Fallen Kingdom
In ancient times, as legends tell, the Mikashima Archipelago was united under a prosperous kingdom. In this divine realm, the arts and literature blossomed and the common folk knew peace. But the hearts of men are filled with ambition and avarice. One hundred years before the Confluence, the military overthrew the royalty to rule Mikashima as a Shogunate, which seethed with hateful infighting and greed.
Upon the Confluence of Isles, the already unstable Shogunate disintegrated. The Isles of Mikashima became a patchwork of petty daimyos and warring states, all fighting over the scraps of a fallen kingdom. For most ordinary people, there was nothing left for them in their ancestral homeland — so they took to the sea to search for a better life.
The warlords called those who left their service masterless traitors or “sea ronin,” a derogatory term they adeptly repurposed as a collective identity. If being an “honorable samurai” was to fight and die for the ego of some callous warlord, the Sea Ronin decided that being dishonorable scum was perhaps not so bad after all.
The Huddled Masses Yearning
Over the years, the Sea Ronin grew from a mass of refugees to a permanent fixture on the high seas. The peasants of Mikashima were not the only group of disenfranchised people looking to eke out a new life on the waves. Over the years they were joined by political exiles from the Empire, runaway servants from the Aetherwrights, and a vast variety of thieves, scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells from all over the Endless Ocean. The Sea Ronin did not judge: when becoming a Sea Ronin, one left one’s past behind.
In this way, although the Sea Ronin have always been culturally dominated by the Mikashiman diaspora, they are host to a dizzying variety of ethnicities, languages, and shipbuilding styles. The Sea Ronin take pride in being the ultimate scavengers — taking bits and pieces from all over the world and jury-rigging them into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Fishing with a Side of Piracy
The Sea Ronin live most of their lives at sea. Their ships are their homes, eclectic and filled with the memories of an entire community of wanderers. Sea Ronin travel across the Endless Ocean alone or in flotillas, following trade winds and traditional routes, hopping between friendly ports and safe havens to forage or barter for goods. On the open waters, they dive for crabs, trawl the ocean with fishing nets, and hunt wild seabirds to make hearty stew.
Although the Sea Ronin have no mines, farms, or forests, they do have one resource in abundance: wind. Sea Ronin engineers have developed an impressive mechanical tradition that makes use of sails, ropes, pulleys, windmills, and wooden arms. The most complex Sea Ronin ships are colorful folding puzzle-boxes with contraptions for milling grain, spinning thread, and even hammering iron.
Now the Sea Ronin have a bit of a reputation as an unsavory bunch, and there is truth to this. As a nation of war refugees, they have no interest in unnecessary violence, but desperate times call for desperate measures. When night falls, those Sea Ronin who cannot make a living peacefully turn to smuggling, raiding, privateering, outright piracy, and the occasional kidnapping for ransom. The Isles thus have an uneasy relationship with the Sea Ronin: they bring in exotic goods and news from distant places, but trouble tends to follow.
Umiari, the Provident Sea
The Sea Ronin have a saying that the earth and sea are the father and mother of all human beings. They call the spirit of the earth Chiari, “that which is in the earth,” and the sea Umiari, “that which is in the sea.” Of these two, Umiari is naturally more prominent in the lifestyle of the Sea Ronin, and they honor it as the almighty patron goddess of their community, Umiari-no-Mikoto.
Umiari is a fickle mother: as the tide rises and falls, so does the providence of nature swell and recede. The Sea Ronin have therefore developed a huge variety of rituals to placate Umiari-no-Mikoto into summoning winds, calming storms, luring bountiful catches of fish, striking their enemies with lightning, and so on. It is always a gamble whether Umiari listens to one’s prayers — but, of course, it would be even more dangerous to offend such a mercurial goddess, and so the prayers go on.
Pathfinders of the Sea Ronin
The Sea Ronin go wherever they wish, and increasingly, the bold sons and daughters of flotillas are striking out on their own to brave the New World. The appeal of a vast and untouched land to the Sea Ronin is obvious: it is a blank slate, unsullied by tyrants and moldy old governments, a new beginning where anyone can carve out a new life on their own terms.
What exactly the Sea Ronin plan to do with this new land varies from individual to individual. Some Pathfinders are homesteaders looking to settle down and return to the simple life of their Mikashiman forebears. Some are money-minded prospectors looking to capitalize on unclaimed resources. Some are just there because they can. Such is the beauty of a land without rules: a land of freedom and adventure and glimmering opportunity.
Symbols of the Sea Ronin
- Nashimon: The kings and warlords of Mikashima flew flags with mon, circular seals representing a royal house or warring state. The Sea Ronin use instead the nashimon or “un-mon”: a mon flag with the existing mon defaced, or simply a blank white circle.
- Hachimaki: A headband wrapped around the forehead to absorb sweat. Very common among Sea Ronin and often decorated with calligraphy and outlandish designs.
- Flying Fish: A handmade flag popular with Sea Ronin children. It looks like a colorful fish with a flapping tail, and may be strung up on a flagpole or flown like a kite.