Friday, July 9, 2021

Three Monks

Perfect body, perfect mind, perfect soul, kind heart. Choose Three.

CLOUDSTEPPER

Long ago, the Hawk taught the people on the mountain of the Invisible Power. It brought life-giving rain in its wake, could topple the greatest of towers with a swipe of its unseen arms, and carried its chosen on its back. The people entombed the Hawk in the mountain and began their worship in its bones. You were born in the Bones, or brought there, spending your life in the study of the Power’s appeasement. Like a seed on the wind, your soul has told you that you must leave the Bones and germinate afresh elsewhere. Galespeed. Start with prayer beads etched with clouds, a decanter of mineral water that is never empty, and a silver wind vane.

A Soul Lighter than Air. The wind is always in your back, and you carry its spark in your lungs forever. You don’t need to breathe, and you have a ten-foot vertical, twenty-foot horizontal leap.

B Flesh of Wind and Water. You can bend your body in any way you can imagine, squeeze through a square-foot aperture in a ROUND, or painfully contort your way through a square-inch aperture across a TURN.

C Baptized by Breath. When there is a toxin in your body, like a poison or disease, you can blow it out in a noxious cloud that hangs in the air for a TURN, cleansing yourself of it. Anyone who breathes in that cloud contracts the malady.

D Aerodyne Exarch. You can fly, and clouds are your friends. Once a day, you can ask a cloud nicely to come down and do your bidding for a TURN.


PUGILIST

Get up, soldier, get up. Wipe that blood off your chin, put your shoulder back into place. Pour the gin on your cuts and hope they don’t go yellow, damn how much it burns. One day, you’ll be one of the blank faces jeering in the stands. They look malformed, inhuman… it must be a trick of the lights they put on to showcase me, like a prizewinning hog at the fair. Mmm, hog- I think I’ll eat well tonight. I gotta. Start only with knuckle wraps stained with god knows what, a nasty scar, and an unsavory reputation.

A Iron Palm. Your fists deal your Templates in WOUNDS. In addition, you can always sus out secret fight clubs within an hour of arrival in a settled area, and with a glance can tell if someone attends them.

B Iron Stomach. You can ignore the effects of one blow or injury each day, even debilitating ones or those which would cause SCARS. In addition, you can spend an hour in a settled area to start a secret fight club, which if discovered, would be forcibly and indefinitely disbanded.

C Iron Tooth. You cannot go unconscious, only live and die. In addition, you can convince anyone to fight in the ring, and the admission you charge makes you rich with dirty money, unusable at reputable merchantiles.

D Wrought of Blue Salt. You can only take damage from weapons and magic objects. In addition, the tyrants who run your clubs when you’re gone don’t feel the need to hide anymore.


ORDER OF THE RED COBBLE

DR RCGTQ C QMTLDCH GDJY KE ECJCRDLDQI RK ATR RBDQ ECP. OSR XKS'PT JKR DJ RBT OHCLG XTR, LKHXRT. VT BCUT KSP JCIT EKP C PTCQKJ, CJY VT BCUT C HKJA HDQR KE BTPTRDLCH MDAQ VBKQT MKLGTR HDJDJAQ LKSHY OT MSR RK OTRRTP SQT. DE XKS VCJR DJ, LKHXRT, XKS OTRRTP MPKUT DR. Start with a black and red mask, a draft of a collaged ransom note, and a silver charm bracelet with animal eyecons to remind you of the call signs of your Abbots.

A Second-Story Padfoot. You have a Templates-in-4 chance of pulling off heist stunts like acrobatics, lock picking, disguise work, and quickly hiding.

B Bag of Tricks. Every time you spend a point of SUPPLY, you also retrieve an additional object; roll on the table below or force your DM to make something up.

1 A smoke bomb that produces roiling red smog in which swim screaming faces

2 Caltrops of whalebone, spines capped with holy silver

3 Magnetic prayer beads that may be broken into ball bearings

4 A Hand of Glory that burns for a TURN

5 Blow darts dipped in holy water

6 A cigarette case, etched in which is a scriptural image of hell

7 A book of hymns with the key to an elaborate cypher concealed in the marginalia

8 A bronze dirk that looks like an inconspicuous crucifix when in its sheath

9 A book of prophetic poems, edges singed from an an attempted burning

10 A hollow prayer wheel, the rotating cylinder concealing illegal drugs

11 Three large pieces of temporary tattoo paper

12 The journal of a woman that starts three days before she is to be hanged

C Curtain of Coins. You always have arbitrarily high amounts of counterfeit currency of most types on hand. In addition, if someone could buy their average meal with money you throw, all their attention is diverted to it.

D Returning to the Sea. You have founded a popular philanthropic institution. It is secretly a recruitment front for a robin-hood style brigand guild. And remember, the codeword is colyte.

Guess which piece was drawn by a kid at work and which one was mine- the answer may surprise you. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

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