When I realized my mildly alcoholic Monk could not get drunk anymore

 

Early this year I decided to play in a new campaign of one of my players (also mostly populated by players who were in my campaign). I have only sat down as a player maybe 5% of my gaming life, at most. GM is where my comfort zone is. I ran a Neutral good, meat and potato former soldier fighter I named Chase. 

(edit: remembered I actually came up with him originally about 3 years ago to play in a one shot ran by this girl who was in my regular campaign). 

Not sure he was the best choice for the group. Not that I really knew it at the time, but this would turn out to be a pretty edgelordy gang of characters. They were what he called "a gang of monsters and mendicants."  One of them was literally a monster, a Dhampir. The best of them, a female ranger, was a treasure grubbing murder hobo. Chase was part of the group (actually came in I think a couple games into the campaign...this all started around the holidays when I take most of my vacations) for months and stuck with them because they were sort of escaped prisoners from a cult prison on an island full of cultists and monsters. 

I kind of based Chase on Michael Bains character Hicks from Aliens. A hardened solder but kind and intelligent. He just did not fit with these creep characters haha. It started with him not being the type to jump right on chests. But the other characters did. Everyone took whatever treasure they found for themselves, and Chase swiftly got left behind in terms of power. I was unhappy and decided to try something new. When the characters got back to a civilized city, he ran like hell, got in a coach, and left the party behind without a word. A couple of thousand gold pieces richer, he would not have to find work for a good while. 

So I came up with "Zen" (birthname Sable Rialto).

Zen in her travelling/action gear.

Zen is of the Temple of The Four Master Elements.  The campaign is in the Forgotten Realms, and the temple is in some desert where we have actually ended up and are involved in this and that and bada bing bada boom (really don't need to get into all the typical adventuring and fighting details but fairly basic DnD).

Since the party was getting to higher levels, I figured it was my chance to run a monk already coming into strong power. Besides the elemental stuff, I figured the order to be true neutral. No gods worshipped, but the sun and stars and all things made up of the elements was what they revered. But in philosophy fairly Buddhist in nature. Constant individual search for balance. 

It kind of mirrored to some degree my own path towards balance and a certain enlightenment. I was raised by Catholic European immigrants and growing up that was not a pathway I wanted as I got into adulthood (though you can never really stop having been raised a Catholic). I dabbled in all sorts of spiritual things over the years, and in the last several years I realized that I had been searching for balance, which combined with some other things made me realize I was sort of following a Buddhist path. So nothing hardline, just a philosophy to find greater peace in a mind and heart that was at times in turmoil, especially in these crazy times we live in. 

Anyway, I imagined Zen, a young girl (25 years old but a third-elf so looks 20) whose parents died when she was around 12. Growing up in the monastery, she found herself a bit out of balance and strove for that middle place of peaceful neutrality. Prone to often less than balanced behavior, such as whiskey drinking for fun or to drown sorrows. Now on walkabout in the open world, she challenged herself to be a true ascetic and avoid the indulgences all over the place in the civilized world. This is when she met the party. 

There is a 1993 Hong Kong fantasy film I have long loved called Green Snake (you can find it on Youtube with or without English subs). In this film (and in the original legend) the powerful and self-righteous monk Fa Hai struggles against his "Evil Heart." Not really evil per se, but just trying not to give into earthly desires. So I kind of based Zens struggles for purity on this. 

FYI all the actors in these pics became huge
star in Honk Kong cinema in the 90's after this

So she joined the party all blessing and Namaste to you and all that. But as soon as she got below half her hit points for the first time she started going off the rails. The campaign has really tough battles, and at one point they even fought a small army of lizard men and a T Rex. But eventually we fell afoul of a powerful Lich who did a geas on us. We now had to perform a mission for him. This sent Zen into a shame spiral and she pretty much for a few sessions acted like a petulant child. She always kept whiskey on her and now drank as a full alcoholic. 

But the other game we were in the desert and ended up fighting giant Rocs on a hilltop. At the end of the fight they searched the bodily remains of victims and Zen found one that was a friend monk from the temple. A contemporary Jr. master. She took his awesome bracers (mentioned in previous post) and did rights upon him and burned and collected his ashes. 

By next morning the party had leveled up, and Zens main gain was she was now immune to poison and disease. Oh wait....booze is a poison. Straight up. It would no longer have an effect upon her. 

A new way of running her was in order. What I came up with was that her finding her fellow monks remains and her ritual upon them had a profound effect.  Her new physical immunities were a manifestation of growing consciousness. 

It will now be hard for her to go off the rails. With magic boots, bracers, and staff she is fairly formidable not even counting the elemental powers. So I will run her as righteous, understanding, and steadfast. A sober vegan (no more double meat double cheeseburgers). Even in the face of adversity, she will remain a positive light amongst the monsters and murder hobos. Not a true neutral yet thought. When off the rails she was leaning into chaotic neutral and now it shall be far into the lawful neutral. 

How I approach her journey back to true center will still depend on what happens in sessions to come. Perhaps they will need to get out of the shadow of the Lich before she can do that. But it should be interesting to see how her spiritual journey goes from here. 

Namaste. 

Oriental Adventures & The Legend of Green Snake

I was going through a box of my older DVD’s last night, and came across my copy of the 1993 Hong Kong film Green Snake. I really love this movie, which I think I originally saw at the WLA revival theater The Nuart in the mid-late 90’s. I don’t know if there is a voice-over English version, but I hope not. The movie is so beautiful to look at (when the sadly terrible special effects are not on screen) and combined with the sing song native language it is almost mesmerizing, and part of the films charm (at least for a Yankee).

Wikipedia describes the film thusly:

Two snake spirits have been training for many centuries to take human form and experience the love, freedom and wisdom that is supposedly only available to humans. White Snake (Joey Wong) is the more experienced one and proceeds to get engaged with local scholar Hsui Xien (Wu Hsing-Kuo), with whom she plans to have a child which would complete her passage into the mortal realm. Green Snake (Maggie Cheung) is the younger and more impulsive of the two sisters and she is not yet quite sure about the benefits of the human world. The two snakes move into their magically created house and start a successful medical practice in the town.

Their enemies are a buffoonish Taoist and an overzealous Buddhist monk Fa Hoi (Vincent Zhao) who make various attempts to banish them from the human world. The monk thinks of himself as a keeper of the natural order of the world and is very prejudiced against spiritual beings seeking to improve themselves. He brings things to a head when he abducts White's husband from the human/spirit mixed marriage into his religious reeducation camp–styled temple.

Anyway, whenever I think of this film I think of Oriental Adventures (applying things that I like to gaming terms was a habit I never managed to fully lose after attaining it in childhood). Around 2003 I was into the second or third year of my gaming semi-retirement when I ran into an old player of mine at a suite party at Loscon in Los Angeles (a very rare sci fi con appearance by me) at around 2am. Lisa was from that period in the mid-90’s when almost all of my players were female and we were mostly doing Call of Cthulhu and Champions. Lisa, pretty high on joy juice, talked about how much she loved the old games, and raved to her fairly new husband about my DM’ing prowess (of course a party at a convention is the perfect place to hear that). It was decided right there that I would be doing up some games for these guys and whoever in the near future. At the husband Jeff’s request I would be doing some Oriental Adventures (something I hadn’t run since around 1990). Current player in my group Terry, who had played with Lisa in most of those 90’s games and was Lisa’s roommate back then, was up for it as well so there we were doing OA on a semi-monthly basis on weekends for awhile.

The movie Green Snake had a heavy influence on many of those games for me. For one thing, Lisa ran a Hengeyokai, and I tweaked that race just a little to match the changelings of Green Snake (animal spirits who spend many years of training and meditation to change into the higher human form). Then there was the super-powered, self-righteous monk of the film who both admires and distrusts the White and Green Snakes, Fa Hoi. I totally ripped-him off to create Tai Seng, a monk who I used as and NPC to guide the players towards various adventures and activities (he was not a prick like the movie version…for the most part).

Anyway, take a look at my favorite scene from the film, where the snakes White and Green make their transformation to beautiful human form on the roof of a tavern during a rainstorm, while a wedding/orgy goes on inside (little nudity so be careful at work). Maybe you’ll get the chance to watch in it’s entirely at some point. If you are going to run OA in the future, I demand you watch it! It might give you some great ideas as well.