Qik's page

I second the surprise-excitement over Oreads. I've never before been a fan of "my mom hooked up with a elemental" races, but those look great. Never thought I'd want to play a summoner with a race that took a penalty to Cha, but Shaitan Binder looks like fun and then some.

Kitsune and Varana also surprised me by catching my eye.

Alright, here's an idea I had:

hexcrafter staff magus/ monk of many styles 2.

I would level it like thus:
Magus
Magus
Monk (crane style/ crane wing)
Magus
Magus
Magus
Monk (Kirin Style/ Kirin Strike)
Magus

Feats of interest: Hex strike, Monastic legacy

Basically put you'll use Hex strike to put evil eye on your enemies while spell striking. The staff is primarily for the AC since you'll be using up swift action on hex strike you'll avoid arcane strike.

Interesting. Hex Strike is definitely one of those feats that begs to be used. My only concern is that both Kirin Strike and Hex Strike require swift actions, although I assume you're just utilizing Kirin Strike when it's available, and otherwise leaning on Hex Strike.

Don't get any that are cackle-based, you lack the hexes/feats to support that, and most rounds you'll either have no move action cause you're using spell combat, or you'll need it to move into position so you can spell combat next turn. Stick to ones that stand up on their own as very good. Slumber, Flight, and Prehensile Hair would be the top ones for me. Later on, Ice Tomb and maybe Retribution (depends on how harshly your DM interprets Ice Tomb, it's really poorly written).

Slumber is the only offensive regular hex worth taking for you, Misfortune and Evil Eye both rely too much on cackle. Major hexes, you get two good choices for offense, at least. Grand Hexes...by RAW you'll never ever be able to get. ;)

Yeah, my concern had primarily been in terms of the action economy between full attacking and Cackle-ing (and the hexes that lean on it). Slumber would probably be the best bet for my line of thinking: it gives me some nice flexibility to be able to volley slumbers or to go melee, depending on the circumstances.

I really, really like the notion of the MoMS - I love the possibilities afforded by combining style feats, and I love the idea of freeing up the monk from leaning on full attacks. But I've been wondering, is the MoMS worth giving up FoB?

I suppose you can think of this from two perspectives: defensively and offensively. I think for the former there's no question that the MoMS has the leg up: being able to have Crane Style and Crane Wing at level 1, for instance, is in itself uber-wicked. But what about offensively? Do the AoO-provoking feats + the ability of accelerating Dragon Style offer a viable alternative to flurry? I'd certainly like to think they could, but again, I'm not so sure.

Thoughts?

For what it's worth, I'm in a similar position, having only started reading about Pathfinder (my first d20) in earnest about 6 months ago. I'm currently in a pretty transitory living situation, and have been for a while now, so I didn't see myself getting involved in an in-person game in the near future. Long story short, I started playing by post (on mythweaver) about a month ago, and it's really worked out great. The slow pace isn't for everyone, but as a newbie, it helps to have the time to think through my actions, check on rules, etc, and I actually really like the written component of the format. So that might be the way to go once you get comfortable with things.

Good luck!