Tag Archives: monk

Geek Related – The Site

I got a question in a post comment recently asking if the stuff on this Geek Related site was also me – it is, it’s my old Mindspring site from before I started the blog.  There’s some stuff you may find of interest there:

The Official Death To Jar Jar Binks Website – ah, youth.  Not really RPG related but the day after Phantom Menace came out I slapped the site together. It got featured on Salon and ZDTV among other media outlets. For the last like ten years I still get emails from people demanding “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?!?” like I’ve even touched the site in a decade.

The Way, The Truth, and the Dice – I was publisher for the e-zine of the Christian Gamers Guild for a couple years. There’s some good stuff in these mags (especially the realistic combat and friction rules); sadly it all fell apart due to infighting (they eventually put out a fourth issue some 5 years later with content we’d gathered, but nothing since then).

Scooby Doo Cthulhu – Almost as popular as the Jar Jar page, this is the Scooby crew statted for traditional (BRP) Call of Cthulhu.  Used in about a billion con games. “Julianus” did them, I just hosted them. I especially liked using them with the various “Blood Brothers” CoC adventures.

The Monk – I redid the monk class for AD&D 2e based on a more supernatural, free-wheeling style as I was watching a lot of HK movies and playing Feng Shui.  They totally stole my approach for Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords and then D&D 4e. I made up custom monastic orders for Greyhawk too, partially based on on some of Erik Mona’s Oerth Journal work (“Baklunish Delights”).

Horror in Roleplaying – probably one of the most lasting of my game essays, I did a lot of horror gaming back in the day and wrote extensively on how to do it. Nothing from the entire storygame movement has caused me to think any of it should be changed.

Classless Skills and Powers – I really enjoyed AD&D Second Edition and when the Skills & Powers supplements came out I wanted to like them – they let you do more of a custom character generation – but they were deeply, profoundly flawed.  I figured I’d fully GURPS them up and turn D&D classless.  This worked great, we ran several campaigns with these rules (sometimes mixing in non-S&P characters for those who didn’t want to go to the trouble). 3e ended up solving a lot of this in a simpler way so I left this behind when I upgraded, but for 2e OSR fans it could be useful!

Children of the Seed – Feng Shui is one of the best RPGs ever.  And it was powered high enough I thought it would make an even better anime game than a HK action game.  I was a fan of the anime series Blue Seed and so I wrote characters and a con-ready adventure to that end!

The Yeomanry page is down forever, sadly, and Bruce’s session summary page died with Onramp and he’s being a slack about getting it going again.

The great thing about all of these is that I had a lot of spare time back in the day and took all this real seriously – so this has all been playtested in campaigns and/or many con games, there’s bunches of sample characters and whatnot… About as complete as you could hope house rules and whatnot to be.

So poke around and let me know what you find interesting!

My Second Edition Monk

Back “in the day,” I built a more dynamic, chi-power fueled monk class using AD&D 2e (the current edition at the time, this was a little more than 10 years ago).  I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that it largely predicted what the much-later Book of Nine Swords and other attempts at making martial classes more interesting would look like.  The powers were granted pretty much just like spells, using the standard spell progression chart and being used up for the day when you use them (which made balancing the class easy).  Many of the powers use “swift” or “immediate” actions, at least my early conception of them.  I’m pretty proud of it – my gaming group playtested it and it was fun but balanced.  Being a long time Greyhawk wonk I also put together “Monastic Orders of the Flanaess” to incorporate monkiness into Greyhawk better, which drew from Erik Mona’s Baklunish Delights articles from the Oerth Journal.

Cool but retro, why are you mentioning this, you ask?  Well, suddenly (starting in about April), I’m seeing an incredible surge in traffic to that Monk class.  It’s hosted on my old Mindspring Geek Related site that has Web stats for shit and I can’t see referrers so I don’t know where the traffic’s coming from.  But it’s leapt way, way past the perennial favorites I host there, the Death to Jar Jar Binks Homepage and the Scooby Doo Cthulhu site (all the Scooby gang in CoC BRP stats).  Like thousands of hits a month.  So I thought I’d ask – anyone know where I got linked from?  I’m interested to know if anyone’s using/interested in my old Monk class…

(And yes, I know how to do Google link: searches, and those never work…)