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. 

The Best Gauntlets a Monk Can Have?

 

In my last post I talked about Boots of Speed my Monk, Zen, had recently gotten in a campaign I'm in, mostly consisting of my awesome Saturday Night players. They let you cast Haste on yourself.

So in the last session we were attacked by a pair of Giant Rocs in the desert. We ended up in their hilltop next. In this encounter Zen, now 9th level Element monk, she really came into her own. she used an ability of called Fangs of the Fire Snake. You can do unarmed attacks ( she got with the boots activated she got four of these attacks. It is fire damage, and you may add 1d10 to each for a Ki point. I really busted on that big bird. 

It was a tough fight. But in the end we had some bodies of bird victims, including a fellow monk from Zens monastery. A friend in her same master circle. His remains were partial, so she got a fire going to make some ashes to carry with her (after her prayers of course). 

His own possessions of worth were these gauntlets.

These are created by the DM, and he calls them Bracers of Deep Striking (I think they may actually be from Warhammer). When equipped you get an extra 2d4 on each unarmed attack. they give you plus 2 to your AC. 

She loves her quarterstaff, but these make doing several unarmed attacks pretty worthwhile. The staff is actually a staff of stunning and comes in handy often. But with all these being her only objects, they are a great addition to her growing elemental abilities and spells.

You can imagine her wearing these items. Kind of comic booky, But I am a comic booky guy. 

Cheers

The Best Boots a Monk can have

 

So one of my players started his first DnD campaign not long after I put the group together in the late summer of last year (actually I am in two of my players campaigns and might post about them later). Though I rarely sit down as player, I decided to be supportive and be a part of it. 

I ran a fighter for a long time, a basic meat and potatoes sword and shield ex-soldier type. Not long ago I decided he was not working with the group (a long story, and I may post about that experience at some point, but enough to say for now they were all psychotic, and it is no fun being the sane one ). Characters were levelling up fast and we are 9th level at this point. So I thought that this would be a chance to get to run a high-level monk So I did a half elf master of elements monk I named Zen. 

Zen is inspired in part by Last Airbender characters, and also the monk Fa Hai from the White Snake Chinese legend (specifically my favorite Honk Kong Film "Green Snake" from 1993), who is conflicted and always trying to suppress his "evil heart." She tries to be true neutral, but usually wavers in law and chaos therein. 

The DM early on in the campaign lavished the party with magic items. Good ones. Belts of giant strength and throwing hammers that returned and all kinds of goodies. Lots of stat increasing items. Zen came in with almost nothing. But they were kind enough to give her a staff of stunning which often comes in handy. 

I knew from my experience with the previous character that if you do not jump on chests (and there were lots of chests...DM is a good guy but is new to running and is a video game guy, so, ya know. Lots of loot crates). So, when I brought Zen in I knew what I had to do. Have her jump on any chest we found, and her 45 base movement made it easy. She got this pair of boots. 

Big pimpin'...

Turns out they are Boots of Speed. Lets you cast haste on yourself. At least one other character wanted them, but it was obvious to most. A monk is the best character to have this. 

So if I am calculating right, she can use her movement and action to dash for 90 feet. Haste doubles this. So 180. But Haste also gives you and extra action, which you can use to dash again. So that is a potential 360 feet. That has to be close to 50 miles an hour in real world terms. 

Whatever it is, it's fast. But there are downsides. When your 10 rounds are up, you are helpless for a turn. In a difficult combat, like we are always in, it can be fatal to be helpless for a round. If combat is still hot when it wears off, you will will spend turn 8 or 9 trying to rush to a safe place. But in a dungeon or battlefield there are few safe spaces. She used them twice in a row in the same awful encounter. And when the time came to lose a round in both cases she was in serious dangers. 

The used come back after 24 hours each. If you use the boots three times in 12 hours you will get 4 levels of exhaustion, which is pretty bad. Long recovery times too. 

But shit, they are cool (in a cartoonish kind of way) and hopefully they can be used smartly. But sparingly. 

Cheers

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.

My Weakness is Strong - Monks

It seems to be the opinion of many that the Monk as a D&D character class being based on old kung-fu movies is a no-brainer. I don’t think these folks have put much thought into it. For one thing, how many of these old chop socky guys can speak to animals at an early level? Sure, there is the HTH damage (pitifully low at 1-3 points damage for a 1st level monk). Not being able to use swords or some other higher damage weapons, they have to settle for 1D6 staves and spears. Sure, they slowly do more damage in both HTH and weapons as they go up in level, but this is shamefully slow progression. The monk isn’t even doing broadsword damage until the mid-levels. No Dex or strength bonuses seem like a screwjob to be sure. Yeah, it’s hard to imagine a monk who isn’t high level being a kung fu badass per a thousand horrible Asian karate movies. Perhaps if they wander into a tavern full of unarmed, zero level NPC’s. But how often does that happen in D&D?

I played a Monk character for the first time in 25 years recently. Big Ben from the regular group is doing his own side thing with some of the other regulars, and it’s a low level evils campaign. I know from my own experience that evil campaigns are weird (worthy of a post themselves, maybe this week). They usually don’t have long legs, and eventually fall apart under their own hubris. My Monk came in on the second session, and it seems a miracle that the other sarcastic, murderous characters didn’t kill my guy just for showing up (why do people running evil characters always choose to portray them as confrontational, hand-rubbing stereotypes?).

Really, there isn’t much fun to be had running a 1st level monk. They seem like a watered-downed thief class that can run fast. The majority of the other characters could do, and take, more damage than my guy could. So the Monk was sort of relegated to being a humble, helpful coolie, toting fallen characters to safety. This is likely his role for at least a couple more levels, should the campaign go on that long.

By mid-levels and up, Monks can dole out some decent damage, and start to get some decent skills (if you call talking to animals and being resistant to ESP great skills. I don’t). But it’s a long road to have to run a humble character as more or less an MU who can’t cast spells. “I’m a seeker of ancient knowledge…and, uh…a day laborer.” Sheesh.


Edit: I just read at Wikipedia that the D&D monk is based directly from the martial arts in The Destroyer series of novels (of Remo Williams fame). "Sinanju" in The Destroyer was a martial art of ancient assassins, and gives superhuman abilites, such as the ability to rip steel doors down, or destroy automobiles in a single blow, and superhuman falling and jumping abilities. That for sure seems to jibe with higher level monks.

The elusive all-Tavern game

All DM’s rely heavily on the inns and taverns of their world. These are iconic places where, whether it is in-game time or in-between game time, characters ultimately spend more of their life in these places than anywhere else.

If I had to guess, I’d say that 3 out of 4 of my campaigns from around 1978-1990 began with a bunch of characters who didn’t know each other (actually, I had a habit of having at least a couple of PC’s meet on the road to the tavern, just so there is some role-play back n’ forth right off the bat) hanging out in the boozer when some wizard/cleric/nobleman tripped in with a hammer, nail, and poster advertising for a group of stalwarts to go crawling into the local dungeon jobber for one reason or another.

While these public houses are great places to get adventuring gigs, info, and entertainment, they rarely take up large amounts of actual play time. They are usually just places that keep characters from having to hang out in the street or market squares in between dungeon delves. If things are going slow in the game and the characters are listlessly mooning around the beer hall, you can always have a gang of rakish rogues or barbarians march in as fist-fodder to pass some time. Doesn’t matter if it is some fancy uptown establishment, or some half-orc shit hole, a nice dust-up always gets the juices flowing. I almost can never resist creating a bar fight (it doesn’t help that in my younger, more aggro days I got involved in more than a couple of fights at dive bars here in Venice Beach and other places).

I always wanted to run an entire game set in a tavern. Characters drinking, brawling, wenching, gambling, etc. Recently I played a video game called Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and in your first levels you are hanging out at an Inn that is haunted by an elvish girl’s ghost, who sings a melancholy tune as you drink your ale and chat to the locals. Eventually you get a job clearing out the rats from the basements, and then deeper below where undead stalk around in the catacombs beneath the establishment. It’s great fun and easy to pull off in a low level game, but it doesn’t really count as a “Tavern Game.”

What I always wanted to see was characters mostly taking it easy, having fun on their time off. Play some cards or dice, chat to the lassies, have a brawl or two. An entire game of just hanging out. But in the past it doesn’t seem to take long for players to get antsy about moving on to big fights and big treasure. I mean, you cannot just force them to play out their roles in a tavern for several hours. A lot of it just seems to depend on their mood. If they have been involved in a lot of violent, life or death combat, it seems to make it easier to get them to take it easy and do some character-developing role-play.

So finally in the last game it just sort of happened. The party is still in a large town on the souther frontier. Having just fought wererats and a gnomish automaton below the town, and an alleyway encounter with the drow party from the previous games, the players decided they wanted to hit the big dive bar for a bit of a rest from the mayhem. So we started the game with them traipsing off to Silvio’s.

I’ve used Silvio’s in games of years past. Formerly a violent den of scum and villainy where a party once attacked it to rescues a child held hostage by gangsters, the place was now run by Silvio’s son, who has made attempts to clean the place up a tad. No longer involved in rackets and gangs, Silvio Jr. just wants to make legit money. So the Tavern now had better booze and food, fair card and dice games (and rat roulette), a small stage for bards, and a cage fighting hall downstairs in the basement.

It was the time of the spring festival, and lots of things were happening in town, but the players seemed content to have their characters relax for a bit. I didn’t mind, I just want the players to have fun and sandbox their own evening. So they decided to spend it at Silvio’s (probably prompted and enticed by a flyer I printed out and had a street kid distributing in the game).

Helena the fighter-girl settled down with some rat roulette, while Ormac the gnome and Dell the elvish monk rattled some dice. After jamming with the house musicians a bit, Vaidno the bard picked up on a dark-haired, doe-eyed serving wench who was sending him smiles. But it wasn’t just quiet gambling: Krysantha the female drow fighter/druid with the double scimitars went down to watch the cage fights, and after seeing the mountain of a man “Creature” whipping ass on all takers, she decided to volunteer to take to the cage. All the other characters came down to watch, and hefty bets where laid on Krysantha. With wooden swords Krysantha and Creature wailed on one another, until finally the big man went down like a sack of bricks. Krysantha took on a couple of more fights before striding out of the cage to collect her winnings.

Other characters were waiting in the wings to assist, like the corner handlers in a boxing match . So even though only one character battled, the other PC’s got to be involved, and some went around making bets. Everyone made money. Betting on herself, Krysantha made a few hundred gold pieces.

Helena was the funniest: the young fighter sat herself down at the rat roulette table, and spent a good chunk of the evening making small, one gold piece bets on the rolls. She was so excited to finally get the right rat, and get 3 gold in winnings (after losing around 6). This is a character who had adventured a bit, and had previously earned hundreds. Ah well, maybe she was just happy to make a little cash without having to steal or kill for it.

OK, my Wednesday night games are only around three hours long. I never could have stretched this encounter out to one of my old 6 hour weekend games. Or could I have?

Anyway, that was fun, and the players all want to go back there for an evening before leaving town. I hope this really fun game where not much happened wasn’t a lucky fluke.