GurgleGutbuster's page

I made a monk once that played like a bard. Sensei, Ki Mystic, Monk of the Lotus, with Vows of Poverty, Peace, Fasting, and Truth. His dump stat was str and I made him super old so he had a fatty wisdom and a good charisma. The party loved him because he let them re-roll saves and had a variety of great buffs

So I definitely posted my in-game interpretation of the major religions encountered along the silk road. People who keep telling me about favored weapons can read that if they want.....

Dweomerism: Lawful Neutral, Domains: Community, Earth, Law, Liberation, Protection, Strength, Sun. Holy Symbol: the shinning sun of Thorin, favored weapon Warhammer.

Yoshanity: Neutral Good, Domains: Community, Glory, Good, Healing, Nobility, Repose. Holy Symbol: the gallows Yoshul hung from, favored weapon Bastard Sword

Bobert's Malsi: Lawful Good, Domains: Fire, Glory, Good, Knowledge, Law, Travel. Holy Symbol: a dragon chasing the moon. Favored weapon: Falchion.

If players want to play a subsect of any of these, they can pick one domain from those listed above, and one domain that is not listed. For example, the Armies of Abstergo are a mercantile/warrior sect of Yoshanity that incorporates the Glory, Nobility, and War Domains.

Vedayism: Includes scores and scores of deities, (I like to let the players make these up themselves) But important ones would be

Unhasav: Lawful Good. Domains: Glory, Protection,War

Rudra: Chaotic Neutral. Domains: Destruction, Knowledge, Repose

Also, Vedayism has numerous deities directly associated with sub-domains, such as Mar the god of Heroism, or Kil, the goddess of Catastrophes, or Goosh the rhino-headed god of Toil.

The last major religion is Bhoddism, which is followed mostly by monks, but I suppose clerics of Bhoddi can have access to the Knowledge and Liberation domains.

FYI, I made up all of this while I was writing it down, but I reckon it'll work, no?

I'm trying to be as non-restrictive as possible. This game is a conscious shift on my household's part to bring my young nephew's attention away from violent video games, while stimulating his imagination and cognitive skills. The huge selling point is that you can do ANYTHING! so I'm going to try avoiding banning classes or races till he has a clearer vision of the campaign he wants to play in.

I have disallowed clerics in the past (no pallys that game either), replacing them with oracles, inquisitors, and druids to great effect, but I'm frankly taken aback by A) Commando's fervent insistence that clerics must worship gods and B) the impression people seem to have that I'm not including anything in my campaign for clerics to worship.

For the sake of Argument, lets call the original Monotheistic religion in my world "Dweomerism". Tens of thousands of years ago, the Dwarven people were slaves to the giants. The giants forced the dwarves to toil their lives away building massive ziggurats and carving out huge mountain halls. Eventually, one dwarf (Lets call him Torses) was contacted by a omnipresent divine entity who granted him the power to liberate his people from slavery, promising a land of milk and honey where they would be free from the oppression of the real-big-folk. Torses cast many a high-level spell, and the Giant Pharaoh was defeated. During the great Dwarven exodus, Torses received additional messages from this divine entity, and established a system of laws to govern his people.

Fast forward a few centuries, the dwarven people find themselves once again second-class citizens, this time under the heel of an expansionist hobgoblin empire with a decadent capital, many gods, and a philosophy of "Panem i Cirucs de solei". A dwarf is born seemingly from the earth itself, travels the world acquiring mad knowledges (and leveling up) and returns to save all the people of the world (Not just dwarves) from their suffering. He dies, gets resurrected, and ascends to the astral plane (So goes the legend).

A lot of people like this and start worshiping this Dwarven Messiah, lets call him Yoshul.

A few centuries after that, this divine entity contacts another mortal. This time a human. This human prophet, whose name can be Bobert, writes down all the new laws and teachings in a book and starts sharing them with the world. This human religion spreads very quickly and soon a whole lot of the world has heard of, or even worships, this single divine entity in one form or another.

Meanwhile, east of all this, We have a culture with more than 3 Million gods and goddesses (Who are all really different forms of a single divinity) and a prince from this culture who attains enlightenment and shares wisdom with the world. Plus lots of people who worship the spirits of their ancestors, honor the spirits of nature, or just try to live by the teachings of great masters from throughout history.

You want a mechanical break down? That'll be my next post

So clerics who dont worship specific deities get their spells........?

I'll rephrase. In MY game divine casting is powered by faith. If you really, really believe in a higher power, be that Obad-Hai, Jesus, or the power of love, it can grant you powers.

I'm running a campaign for a bunch of new and young players (like ten years old) and the question came up "Whats a deity?"

Well, I've honestly been over and done with the whole made-up gods and goddesses trope for a while. In my regular gaming group with older, mature players, it rarely came up. It was assumed that D&D religions, like real world religions were mostly just collections of rituals and beliefs. Clerics were powered by their own faith more than actual divine other-worldly beings. Also, I don't have any Golarion books, so I don't have a good idea of what the pathfinder pantheon looks like.

For this game, I plan on creating a setting inspired by the real-world silk road, and the varying cultures and countries that it touched. The game would begin after the crumbling of the "mongol" empire, a vast human khannate with numerous vassal states. It'd be a lil past 1400, early firearms are common place, and polytheistic paganism is no longer really the mainstream.

I was thinking about creating a dwarven originated monotheistic culture, with different sects. There could be the dwarven sect that believes dwarves are the chosen people and seek to return to the glory promised them in ancient prophecies, another sect that worships a mortal incarnation of this dwarven god, and a third that follows the teachings of a human prophet who forged an empire out of the disparate desert tribes in the central part of the super-continent.

In addition, there will be numerous animistic and shaman cultures, and a Hinduism parallel that takes polytheism to the extreme.

I'm thinking this will allow the players to pick any belief system they already know about and incorporate it into the game, making my job easier.

I've heard "Keep the real world out of it" before, but are there any other thoughts about this kind of an approach?

For the DR and Touch attacks. Just say that if you are using a gun, any DR applies to the target. Problem solved.

I dont understand this.

Now that I've gotten the proverbial first few chapters of the PHB taken care of, its time to expand on my vision of this campaign world, and share with you, the forum lurkers.

What follows is the history as it is understood by the most learned of the world.

At the dawn of time.....the Age of Dragons! The world then was occupied by a single great continent, a primordial paradise of volcanic deserts, roiling seas, and forests with trees hundreds of feet tall. A land whose western shore was also its eastern most border. Massively powerful, scaled, entities of nature, the dragon ruled a civilization that was scattered and insular by the standards of the mortal races. But the dragons lived for thousands of years, and needed much hunting ground. For ten million years the dragons ruled the earth, but the gradual spread of the mortal races sent the dragons into to the bowels of the planet, not defeated, simply waiting and allowing the other races an opportunity to carve out their legacies.

Following the Age of Dragons was the Mage Age, when ancient peoples deciphered draconic writings and learned to use the words of power written therein to manipulate the world around them. The first mages built thousands of obsidian towers around the world, the ruins of many can still be found today.

The Golden Age of Dwarves and Elves
Eventually the mages refined their magical abilities, and after several generations became the elves as we now understand them. The elven ruins found today suggest that for the most part, these people stayed in the forests or along rivers. Their skill with magic was unprecedented, and has not been matched since. Giant floating pyramids, and entire cities hidden behind glamor or mists have been found or reported among elven ruins.

Rising contemporaneously with the Elven civilization was the dwarven empire. The dwarves are believed to be descendents of certain mages who delved deep into the bowels of the planet looking for magical secrets. What they discovered were the spirits, and very possibly the corporeal forms, of dragons, millions of years old and in a deep hibernation. They taught the dwarves a very different type of magic, and the dwarves eventually became the most masterful craftsmen and architects the world has ever seen.

For five thousand years, these two great nations warred, made peace, and expanded across the globe. It is not clear what it was that brought these two seemingly unshakable empires to a sudden end, but it is known from what little of their histories that we have deciphered that the asteroid belt that now surrounds the planet was once a moon, or several moons, and that when they were destroyed, the planet changed drastically. The magic that the elves had implemented in every aspect of their empire was no longer effective, and the dragon spirits that the dwarves took as their patrons became silent.

The Last age before our current time, was the Age of the Mind, also known as the age of the Violet Night. Less than a thousand years after the dust settled on the ruined empires of the Elves and Dwarves, a new power manifested itself in the world, replacing the arcane and divine powers of old, with the power of the mind. There is little evidence of these "psionic" powers existing before the asteroid belt became present in the sky. The first known Psion, a being of unknown race who is referred to alternatively as Gith Yanki, Gith Zerai, or sometimes simply as Gith, carved out an empire for himself about 3,000 years before the present. He brought under his law the dromites, the Maenads, and the demi-giants. His empire lasted only 2,000 years, as his descendents soon fell to war amongst themselves. A 750 year dark age followed.

250 years ago, the dragons returned. Great behemoths destroyed huge swaths of land. Literally obliterating entire regions of the continent, through floods, fire, storm and plague. And then, just as quickly, they vanished again. In the aftermath of this second great Apocalypse, the habitable land mass had been reduced from a globe spanning Pangaea, to a single continent roughly 6,000 by 3,000 miles surrounded by islands of varying size. Using any mean possible the surviving people of the world flocked to this new world, which was already populated by giant reptiles, and a reptilian humanoid people.

The first to arrive on these shores were the cossack hosts. Soft of skin, with no fur, no fangs, no claws, and no innate psionic talent, the cossacks were the underdog. But they brought with them alchemical knowledge that allowed them to craft and use guns, allowing them to swiftly sweep across much of the new world.

Thus began the Age of the Axebeak (so named for the Axebeaked, flightless birds that the cossacks became famous for riding into battle)

In the Age of the Axebeak, the following major events happened.

The Goblin Wars 30 years long
The Cossack Hetmantate and their allies warred with the slave taking Goblin Empire in the north east for three decadeds, eventually driving them back beyond the black forests north of the Eline River.

The First Finding, the uncovering of the first dwarven ruin. Soon Elven ruins were found, ruins from the Age of the Mind, and even the base of obsidian towers from the Mage Age.
For 80 years there was a mad rush to discover new ruins, and put to use the wonderous and magical items found within them.

The Union Wars. 7 years long. The Zaparozian and the Dhon Cossacks fought dozens of small skirmishes, against each other, and against the Catfolk, Saurian, Gnoll and Demi-Giant tribes. Vaanara warred amongst themselves, and the other tribes of the broken moon chose sides as best fit them. Though they lasted less then a decade, the Union Wars bore witness to the bloodiest battles that history has ever recorded. Eventually, mutual decimation brought the wars to a slow trickling end.

2 1/2 years after the last major battle between the assembled cossack hosts sees a long shadowed sunset in the Town of Sich, where a small group of heroes meet in a saloon......

The secret history that no player begins the game knowing is that the mind-flayers destroyed the moon and wrapped the entire planet in an unstable anti-magic field, and then proceeded to enslave or annihilate every dwarf and elf they could. Dwarves and elves still exist in the underdark as duegar and drow respectively. Gith is of course an escaped thrall who sought to to raise an army to destroy the illithid threat, but he failed due to mind-flayer infiltration.

The Return of the Dragons was a last ditch effort by the most ancient of peoples to destroy the mind-flayers. While it certainly set their plans back aways, the mind-flayers were not utterly defeated and still lurk deep, deep below the earth.....

(Note: I love the idea of the Thoon Mind-Flayers as they were present in MMIV for 3.5, so all the mind-flayers in my game will be pathfinder conversions of those guys.)

so what do you think? Are there any holes I need to fill? Also, how can I run this campaign the way I want (with the most powerful being in the world being between levels 12-15, and no "new" magic items) without nerfing the players and spoiling their fun?

Updates!!!
a player in my game can be one of the following races:

Beast Races
Catfolk
Gnoll
Grippli
Saurian
Tengu
Vaanara

Goblin Races
Du-Goblin (Standard Goblin)
Hobgoblin
Brur-Goblin (Bugbear)
Psi-Goblin (Psionic Goblin/Blue)

Races of the Broken Moon
Dromite
Elan
Maenad
Half-Giant

Cossack Hosts
Zaparozia
Dhon
The River Hosts

and combine this choice with one of the following classes
Alchemist
Barbarian
Bard
Cavalier
Druid
Gunslinger
Monk
Ninja
Oracle
Ranger
Sorcerer

Compiled House Rules
Armor as DR
Wound/Vigor
Skill Points
Instead of receiving x+int Bonus per level, characters receive x+int score

MORE TO COME

The title says it. I'm throwing the classic base classes out the window. The only "casters" are gonna be sorcerer, druid, oracle, alchemist, and bard. I'm allowing psionics. The characters ride around in a dinosaur filled, wild-west meets Mount & Blade world exploring the ruins of long dead dwarven and elven civilizations. Oh yeah, none of the core races either. Except humans. No Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings, or orcs.

The races I'm putting in are

Humans
Vaanara
Tengu
Half-Giants
All Goblins
Ophidian (though I want to modify them so their stats arent the same as the Vaanara's)
and a few others, I havent decided

Early firearms are commonplace, using Wounds/Vigor and Armor as DR

biggest question is: How would that armor as DR system work with touch attacks?

Those all sound like ridiculously cool ideas. Why would you stop running such a sweet game?

Non-Action is not evil, it is the tao

This is awesome. How does the council of nine fit into your campaign world?

Yeah 3.5 had alternate paladins with different with alignments, although they didn't have any neutral paladins. I think this looks great!

I always glance right over that blood line and got straight to Aberrant...thanks!

I see a few posts on these boards that make use of familiars with sorcerer builds. I thought only wizards and witches had familiars, where are the sorcerer familiar rules?

Goku from DBZ was based on this character. Also known as the Monkey God or Monkey King. Anyway, he was also a bo staff master. So a monk/ staff magus with the staff feats from Ultimate Magic is an option.

Well, that's Sun Wu Kong, who is the Chinese adaptation of him.

Yeah I didnt put that down, but that build is with him as a vaanara. Battle Oracle just doesn't give him access to the kind of spells he needs unfortunately. Oracle in general has always been a very confusing class to me, as I've never been sure what to do with it.

Who knows anything about Hanuman? The Monkey God of Hindu mythology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanuman
there's a link if you don't know much.
He's pretty much the most badbutt hero in an of the old epics, and I'd love to play a character that is (at least loosely) based on him.

The basic requirements for this character are
1) The ability to change his size, becoming very large or becoming very small. Shape shifting.
2) The ability to fly
3) Incredible strength
4) His tail has to do some cool stuff
5) Heavy, Heavy Immunity to fire

Hanuman, if I were to stat him out as he appears in the legends would probably be close to a CR 21 entity of sheer awesomeness, but as a playable character I'm willing to go with what I can get.

I'm thinking he should be a mystic theurge, with sorcerer and cleric levels, but also maybe some monk stuff in there. Here's where he'd have to start:
(I rolled for these stats)
Monk 1/Sorcerer 4/Cleric 3/Mystic Theurge 2
Str-16
Dex-20
Con-14
Int-12
Wis-18
Cha-10
Sorcerer Bloodline
Celestial (Empyreal)
Sorcerer Spells
0-Arcane Mark, Dancing Lights, Daze, Ghost Sounds, Prestidigitation, Spark
1-Ant Haul, Disguise Self, Enlarge Person, Reduce Person,
2-Bless, Bull's Strength, Resist Energy
3-Fly
Cleric Domains
Glory, Protection

And now its late, so I'll update more later. But yeah, how does that look so far?

Right on. Thanks

The title says it all. Is this a legal Race for PFS? What build/Archetypes would be good? I was thinking a Master of Many Styles/Quingong Monk

So I had this idea for an opening module.

The Stadium in a huge city is packed with people for a huge event. Some of the PCs could be on the arena floor, some could be in the stands, some in the VIP box, I usually figure that out once I actually know who the characters are.
Anyway, this event. It could be as simple as gladiatorial matches, but it'd be cool to do something different.
At some point, after the event goes on for a while, there's a massive attack. The PCs would be starting at around level 7, but a CR 15 monster comes and starts blowing everything to hell. The city is basically taken over by Rakshasas or mind flayers of evil dragons or something, and then a huge part of the campaign would be fighting the invaders, or running for the hills, or going back in time and preventing the attack or something.

I'm thinking a ball game. Here are the rules I've devised so far. There are three teams,four players to each team. Each player has a different position. The Defender is like the goalie, they stand around the goal post beating on each other and making it hard for the other defenders to stop the ball. The Striker is the only player that can score. The Controller is the only player allowed to use magic, and the Captain is the player...well I'm not sure.

The goal is to get the ball through a hoop in the center of the arena. There are only 20 points in the game. Each team starts with six points, and two points sit in reserve. The first two points scored by any team are taken from this reserve, but subsequent points are subtracted from other team's totals.

The game ends when one teams gets all the points, or all the strikers have been killed.

It's a bit like quidditch in that it can go on forever.
What do all y'all think? Would this be a fun first session?

This reminds me of a sci-fi book called Hyperion, where the Church people all had this parasite in their chests called the cruciform that basically made them immortal by regenerating their bodies after death. Which made space travel easy because the ships didnt have to be safe at all.

It also reminds me of Dark Sun, so good job there.

Are you sure you want ten? Seven is also a good number.

So besides the jewel dumping, maybe we could have

2-Everything the dragon-gods see belongs to them. As the gods fly over and survey the lands at all times, everything in this world belongs to them. To covet the property of the dragon gods is heinous blasphemy.

thats really wordy.....

I kind of wish weapon proficiency was a skill, kind of like linguistics. players would still get a list of proficiencies at level one but past that they would have to apply a certain amount of skill points to learn new weapons. maybe its one skill point per weapon, maybe different weapons require different amounts of skills, or maybe the number of skills applied to a weapon open up additional abilities with that weapon.

I think it would be pretty cool.

hm... maybe i should homebrew that

back in the days of AD&D every character had a certain number of proficiencies, and they just selected which ones they wanted.

Good work you!

Veldan Rath wrote:

The point of the lamentations here are that the monk does not even live up to it's class description.

That's the biggest problem I've got with the current monk too. Suck when a Mobile Fighter is better at the Monk's job than the Monk.

I just disagree. I feel like the monk's job is to provide a fun play experience. I realize that a lot of posters here find it difficult to have fun when they aren't "winning" but that really sounds like a personal problem.

Who remembers AD&D when a str of 18 was actually a big deal instead of a requirement for a melee character? Or when Magic Items were important and mysterious instead of life support?

The Monk is IMO, perfect. In the real world, monks have a hard time because they reject the way the world works. The say "No, profits don't come before people." and "Happiness is easy" and in Pathfinder they say "No, I won't kick down the door just because it's there. I'm going to interact with my world and freaking role-play."

The point here is really not about the monk, its about how the gaming culture presents itself on websites like these. Too often I find myself kicking the back of my own head in frustration over the rude and blatant meta-gaming, min-maxing, "I don't smoke nearly enough grass to enjoy this game" posters on here. Not to point any fingers, but screw all of you.

GurgleGutbuster wrote:

StreamOfTheSky wrote:

"This game is about having fun, telling a kick-butt story, and exploring other worlds and other kinds of people. I think the Monk Class lets players do that just fine."

So does the Commoner class.

That's an awfully shallow measure of class balance.

I would counter that being able to kill anything you meet is an awfully shallow way to experience the game.

Exactly. I commend the OP for championing a class that he simply has fun with. I find the constant need for "balance" on some of these boards to be self-destructive. Every class is someone's favorite, and damage per round figures into that not one bit.

Roll and role, my friends!

Yeah this one gets it. Thanks!!

"This game is about having fun, telling a kick-butt story, and exploring other worlds and other kinds of people. I think the Monk Class lets players do that just fine."

So does the Commoner class.

That's an awfully shallow measure of class balance.

I would counter that being able to kill anything you meet is an awfully shallow way to experience the game.

Is there a question in there somewhere?

Nope.

I love monks. I love the flavor, I love the way they play, I love what pathfinder has done to them, but I loved them in 3.5 when a lot of their special abilities were pretty useless in the big scheme of things. I even loved monks in 4th edition, particularly my Elidran Monk in a Dark Sun campaign.

I've heard a lot of the arguments against monks, that they are dependent on multiple abilities, that they don't have the damage output of a fighter, that its hard for them to scale with other classes because of magic item limitations, that they are too soft, that they don't fit in the flavor, the list goes on I'm sure.

It seems to me that the biggest issue is that Monks do not have as easy a time fitting into the classic four. They are not immediately defenders or strikers, not controllers or leaders. They don't fight as well as a fighter, take hits as well as a barbarian, sneak as well as a rogue, and they have no explicit magic to speak of.

That sounds about right. In the real world (Its a game, I know, have fun) Monks don't fit in. They sequester themselves away from society, never becoming president, CEO, or MVP, but a chill monk is always cool to be around.

A Pathfinder monk should never be considered a drain on the party, and can always help here or there, in subtle ways. Because inner peace and spirituality are subtle.

I don't think every class should fit into one of four roles. Fourth Edition did that, and while it is a fine game, most of us are clearly playing pathfinder most of the time for a reason.

If you don't like monks, don't play them. If your DM can't accommodate a play style that is not Diablo-esq, that really sounds more like a personal problem than a problem with the Rules As Written.

This game is about having fun, telling a kick-butt story, and exploring other worlds and other kinds of people. I think the Monk Class lets players do that just fine.