For the time in a while, I’ve finished a new Spes Magna product, this time for 5E D&D. The Ways Of… presents seven new monastic traditions, each one available to a different core rules race. The elven monks of the way of the Blade and Bow practice a different art than do the halfling monks of the Way of the Hearth. A dwarven Cave monk fighting back-to-back with a gnomish Prank monk use their ki in very different ways. Other monastic traditions include tieflings, dragonborn, and drow. This is the playtest version of The Ways Of…. Get it today by paying what you want, and create a monk for your favorite non-human race.
I’ve also completed about two-thirds of The Ninth Face of Cro, my fourth Dangerous Place and the first one written for 5E D&D. (The other three Dangerous Places are for Swords & Wizardry.) The Ninth Face introduces beginning characters to the Mortuary Moot, a frontier region recovering from a natural disaster. As part of the recovery efforts, the barons have put out the call for adventurers to seek fame and fortune in the Moot (and thus help drive out the hordes of evil humanoids and other monsters who threaten settlers and merchants). I hope to have The Ninth Face available as early as this Friday (although next week is probably more realistic).
And now for more thoughts about investigative 5E D&D.
I’ve written three blogposts about The GUMSHOE System’s applicability to a more traditional fantasy game, wherein I’ve mused about clue hunting, gothic Victorian D&D, and what an Adventuress background might look like. The focus on these musings has been TSR’s wonderful Masque of the Red Death campaign expansion with a dash of Chaosium’s excellent Cthulhu by Gaslight. In recent days, I’ve started down a different rabbit trail. Two of my other favorite TSR products are Oriental Adventures and the Birthright campaign setting. Both of these products encourage and reward things like courtly intrigue, spying, et cetera. They’re ideal for investigative roleplaying.
Nota Bene: All of the links in that last paragraph are affiliate links. If you click and buy, I get a pittance.
5E D&D already includes a few nods to what was the Oriental Adventures milieu: monks, assassins (read: ninjas), and samurai. Working up a few new races (spirit folk) or subraces (korobokuru) shouldn’t be too hard. Classes such as the yakuza could become subclasses. Thrown out the PH weapons and armor tables and pull in OA weapons and armor, change a few names, and a lot of the work would be done. Also, I’ve printed for closer reading the 5E conversion of Birthright by Marsupialmancer. The conversion looks promising.
Little by little, after our current d20 Modern science-fantasy-horror campaign draws to a close, I’m leaning heavily toward a less gonzo game of political intrigue with a decidedly OA feel. Time will tell whether my ADHD drags me in a different direction before we’re ready for a new campaign in the fall.
In TSR’s wonderful Masque of the Red Death campaign expansion, we find several character kits, namely Cavalryman, Charlatan, Dandy, Detective, Explorer/Scout, Journalist, Laborer, Medium, Metaphysician, Parson, Physician, Qabalist, Sailor, Scholar, Shaman, and Spiritualist. From Chaosium’s excellent Cthulhu by Gaslight, we expand the Victorian-era background material by including social class (Upper Class, Middle Class, or Lower Class) and several occupations, specifically Adventuress, Aristocrat, Clergyman, Consulting Detective, Ex-Military, Explorer, Inquiry Agent, Official Police, Rogue (not to be confused with the character class), and Street Arab (period slang for Lower Class children “adept at surviving on the street”) (Gaslight, page 12).
Nota Bene: All of the links above are affiliate links. If you click and buy, I get a pittance.
When adapting 5E D&D to the last few decades of the Victorian era, setting-appropriate backgrounds are a must. Let’s take the Adventuress Gaslight occupation and turn it into a 5E D&D background. Direct quotes below come from Gaslight (pages 10-11).
Adventuress
Adventuress is “a euphemism for the woman who, by her association with Upper Class suitors and admirers, managed to gain power, respect, and sometimes reluctant approval from Victorian society. Often the Adventuress has worked in the theater or in some other form of entertainment. Sometimes ruthless, always competent and intelligent, she can greatly influence the life of her suitor of the moment. In fiction, a famous example of an Adventuress is Irene Adler, ‘the woman’ of the Sherlock Holmes Story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ The adventuress may come from any social class. In so far as the behavior of the Middle Classes and Lower Classes directed at her, her effective class standing is that of her current suitor — but only so long as he remains her protector or until her cash runs out. Then her standing reverts to that of her birth. Naturally her protector’s peers always view her in terms of her original social class.”
Proficiencies: 4 Equipment: A set of fine clothes, letters from suitors, a bottle of perfume, and a pouch containing 20 gp
Feature: Name-Dropping: Due to your association with one or more men of repute, people are inclined to treat you with deference. You can gain access to places normally reserved for the Upper Classes. The Middle and Lower Classes make every effort to accommodate you and avoid your displeasure.
And now some notes regarding proficiencies. As touched on in a previous post, tweaking 5E D&D toward the investigative paradigm of The Gumshoe System requires modifying skills. Certain skills become investigative skills, the use of which guarantees discovering clues, assuming the proper skill is used at the proper time. In short, no die roll is required with an investigative skill.
To ensure that an adventuring group has the investigative skills covered means changing the ways a character gains skills. So, for example, instead of a background having a fixed list of skills, tool proficiencies, et cetera, a background provides X number of points that are spent on such things. This increases the amount of customization each character receives and also ensures that no adventuring group can’t find a clue because no member of the group has the applicable skill. I don’t see how either those “ensurances” are a bad thing.
Back to the Adventuress. If I make up a character with this background, I get 4 points I can spend on skills, tool proficiencies, and/or languages. I might decide to spend 2 points on investigative skills, picking Deception and Insight. For the other two, I might choose Performance and proficiency with a disguise kit.
These skills and this tool proficiency would be in addition to those gained from race and class. If my Adventuress were a half-elf rogue, I’d be looking at 2 more points from race and 4 more points from class. All in all, my Adventuress would have an impressive list of investigative and other skills to help her navigate her way through the strange currents of a mystery.
If I were handing out trophies to character classes, the prize for Most Liked But Least Played would go the monk. As a player, I like monks. They look like a lot of fun. Since I started RPGing in the late 70s, I’ve seldom played a monk. (The most I’ve played a monk was in the Neverwinter Nights computer game.) The same situation applies to other games. For example, in super hero games, I dig the martial artist, but when I (rarely) get to play in a super hero game I’m most drawn to the brick archetype.
In earlier editions of D&D, monks tended to all be pretty much the same. The introduction of prestige classes brought with it some variety, to be sure, but we old-timers had to wait until the 3E DMG for those. Before that? Well, there was September 1981’s articles about the monk published in Dragon, and our AD&D campaign quickly switched over to the rewrite of the monk class presented in that issue. That really didn’t introduce variety. I suppose a gaming group could have used both the AD&D PH monk and the Dragon magazine monk, but the former’s clear inferiority would make that an odd choice.
Nowadays, in 5E D&D, the rules rewrite the prestige class concept into various subclasses, with each character choosing a subclass at 3rd level. For monks, this means a choice between various monastic traditions. In the 5E PH, we have the Ways of the Open Hand, Shadow, and Four Elements. Xanathar’s Guide expands choices with Ways for the Drunken Master, Kensei, and Sun Soul. (I’m sure there are others examples out there, but I don’t own those books.) Based on the idea that options are good, this is a good thing, but my grognard sensibilities still pop up once and a while.
Back in the day, all monks were human. Period. That was it, no other choices were officially available, et cetera. What’s more, every monk of X level had the same abilities as every other monk of X level. This wasn’t a bad thing. It wasn’t a bug; it was a feature derived from a specific vision of what a certain fantasy campaign world looked like. Newer editions of the game have gone different ways. Today, any race can be a monk, and (after 3rd level) monks vary quite a bit in terms of class features.
A while ago, I published The Dwarf. I wrote The Dwarf because part of me still loves the idea that a dwarf character’s class is Dwarf. Such a Dwarf was my very first character (although he soon morphed into an AD&D fighter/thief while our young selves gradually figured out that B/X D&D and AD&D weren’t quite the same game). To quote me: “Old School meets New School in The Dwarf, a new combination character class/race. Now you can relive the glory days of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game, back when a dwarf was a dwarf instead of a dwarf fighter or rogue or whatever. The Dwarf presents a complete race-as-class, including two new subraces, three new archetypes, and three new backgrounds.”
So, with all of this in mind, I thought, “What if some monk subclasses were race specific?”
In 5E D&D, anyone who wants to can play a dwarf monk, for example. When that dwarf monk reaches 3rd level, the player gets to choose whatever monk subclass seems most fun. The player can have a dwarf Drunken Master or a dwarf Shadow monk. Any other race can also follow any of the monastic traditions available. So, if we compare a dwarf Drunken Master and a human Drunken Master, the thing that distinguishes them is race. The class features are identical.
But ought dwarven monks not have a specifically dwarven monastic tradition? And if the dwarves do, wouldn’t the other races as well?
And so I’ve been working on monastic traditions that are race-specific. I’ve left out humans, half-elves, and half-orcs. They can remain content with the plethora of other options. Dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes, and dragonborn, however, have their own unique monastic traditions that reflect a particular way of viewing the world and using ki. As of the typing of these words, I’ve completed rough drafts for every monastic tradition except the one for the gnomes. I’ll almost certainly have the playtest PDF available via DriveThruRPG by the end of this week.
When I’m done, seven (maybe eight) new monastic traditions become possible. So far, I’ve written the Ways of the Blade and Bow (high and wood elves), Brimstone (tieflings), the Cave (dwarves), the Dragon (dragonborn), the Hearth (halflings), and the Spider (drow). The gnomish Way of the Prank remains undone, and may turn into two monastic traditions: the Way of the Prank for forest gnomes and the Way of the Clank for rock gnomes.
To end this post, a sample of a few racial monastic tradition features for tieflings, dwarves, and drow, respectively.
Hellish Castigation: Starting when you choose this tradition at 3rd level, your furious indigation at being injured causes your ki to boil. If you spend 2 ki points, you have advantage when attacking with a monk weapon or unarmed strike any creature that has damaged you since the end of your last turn.
Deep Earth Way: At 6th level, you learn to speak, read, and write Terran. Also, you can expand your senses by spending 3 ki points. For 1 minute, you gain tremorsense with a range equal to your bonus unarmored movement. While your tremorsense is functioning, you also have advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on hearing.
Greater Spider’s Transformations: At 11th level, your ability to channel your ki along eight-fold pathways improves. As an action, you can spend 4 ki points to transform and gain one of the following benefits:
You can climb difficult surfaces, including upside down on ceilings, without needing to make an ability check. You ignore movement restrictions caused by webbing.
Gain blindsight with a range of 20 ft.
You gain a bite attack that is treated as a monk weapon. Your bite inflicts damage as a monk weapon plus 2d6 poison damage.
This ability has a duration of 1 hour. While this ability lasts, you can end one option as an action to gain the benefits of a different one.
