DND experiment! OA: Rock the Keraton!

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Hi guys, this is my attempt at using the wonders of DnD to do homework.

i have a writing assignment due later today on Southeast Asian arts, and i decided to do a short story. After some re-engineering of thought processes and plot devices, i wrote up a couple of DnD character sheets using the PHB, Oriental Adventures and the Psionics Handbook, and ran a solo game versus a few BoVD-enhanced monsters, just to generate a story and choreograph the action with dice rolls to see what kind of stunts i can get out of it. At the same time I tried to input Javanese concepts of cosmic order, mysticism, theatre traditions, and martial arts into the mix.

Yes, i know, i'm weird.

But i thought i should at least post the fruit of my labour here haha..

(it even comes complete with a glossary and bibliography! whee! Harvard-style!)

so here we go...

yours sincerely,
shao

 

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The evening drizzle ended as abruptly as it had arrived, leaving a humid odour that clung uncomfortably closely to Radin’s skin in the jungle heat. He wrinkled his nose in mild embarrassment as he realised just how uncouth he must appear to his father’s court at the keraton, and shifted his large frame awkwardly to take the strain off sitting with his knees. Out of the corner of his eye, he could sense the disapproving glances of the senior members of the court -his elder brother Humam’s being the sternest among them- at his lack of propriety, and he flinched inwardly, feeling very much like a baby monkey who had stumbled into a conclave of hungry tigers.

The two siblings’ affinities and appearances were as different as the northern valleys and southern mountains; Humam was lithe and genteel, noble of aspect with his hair artfully arranged into a neat bun, distinguished in both heraldry and dance, while Radin was a tall jago, simple of speech and deed, whose carelessly strewn locks revealed his lack of concern with etiquette. Despite these differences, however, both brothers were foremost practitioners of the martial arts of pencak silat and mystical arts of ilmu batin, and deeply devoted to their father, King Srisukra.

The steady drone of idle chatter at the King’s Audience – some minor noble, Lord Wijaya, was praising the King’s wisdom and commenting on the high price of fish these days, ostensibly in an attempt to procure loans from the royal treasury- nearly sent Radin tumbling into sleep, but a sudden moment of rasa overcame him, and his senses kicked into painful focus – there was something preternatural about to intrude into the present. Radin focused his eyes, willing himself not to blink, and peered furtively about the keraton for the imbalances that had alerted the inner voice of his intuition. His gaze met that of his brother’s momentarily, and he -knew- that his brother, the sensitive aesthete, had sensed them too.

“Radin.” The aged King Srisukra smiled benignly at his younger son, a question trailing on his wrinkled brow.

The young prince flinched, this time, visibly so, as his concentration was broken. “Wha.. Most August Liege and Honoured Father, how may your poor supplicant of a son serve you?”

“I was asking, Blessed Child, about the exorbitant prices of fish in the markets these days. What are your comments on this exceedingly interesting discussion that Lord Wijaya has shed so much light on?”

Radin smiled uneasily at Lord Wijaya. The courtier smiled back, conveying both hope and something else inscrutable – disguised disdain? feigned respect? – in his bland grin.

Thoughts ran through the jago’s mind with the alacrity of a jilted lover’s memories racing for the bliss of yesteryear, as he composed a suitable reply. I am sorry, Honoured Father, if my words are those of a unlettered child, but I will not beg behind the shield of ignorance for what I will say. It is not my intention to offend, but I would like to know why Lord Wijaya wants to borrow the money. He looked to his elder brother for some guidance, but Humam did not meet his gaze– he was still contemplating the flash of rasa. Nothing to it – he was on his own.

Radin cleared his throat, uncurled his tense toes, and began to speak…

And pandemonium erupted in the court, as his world became fire.

 

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The rakshasas strode into the conflagration that was once the keraton, as boldly and brazenly as though they owned the land, their obscenely misshapen forms spewing forth flame and poison. The three of them were chaos and death personified each of them as different as they were deadly. A particularly massive and loathsome ogre stood leering with all seven of his mouths; where normal men had eyes, ears, and a nose, he possessed gaping maws with an abundance of crazily lolling tongues and red-stained cruel tusks. His consort, an incongruously petite ogress with scars from countless bites all over her naked frame, laughed gaily next to him as the multitude of scars opened into a thousand little eyes, taking in the horror and shock all around her. The last of the demons bayed, hound-like, on his haunches, belching forth clouds of acidic, noxious flame into the keraton, slaying most of the old and infirm and injuring many others among the assembly.

The largest fiend’s visage crumbled with cruel mirth as he saw a burning youth falling in front of him, crying and rolling in an attempt to halt the biting misery of the hungry flames, and all seven of his mouths cracked in sadistic joy as he stomped down, hard, upon the adolescent’s back. The chorus of laughter from his multiple throats wafted among the pleas for mercy and crackling of flames, providing a surreal symphony to the carnage.

“We are the representatives of the Kingdom of Ogres to your north, oh King Srisukra. I am He who frightened the Nagas into their sleep beneath the waves, He who terrified the Garuda such that it flies into the sky and fears to return to the earth, I am Buta Tujuh Cakil, undefeated in battle, unvanquished in martial pursuit, eternally strong,– that am I, and more! Hear my name and know despair! My liege, King Bauhbhuta has demanded the rib-cages of five hundred of your subjects and the skulls of another five hundred to be carved into a beautiful statue for his pleasure.”

The grievously wounded King Srisukra shouted for the guards, tended to and assisted by Humam’s ministrations, the shrieking Lord Wijaya forgot all about his beloved fish, and the assembled nobility ran forth, some foolhardy scions assuming silat stances to do battle, but the majority of the panicking crowd sought egress, not conflict. The brave souls charged Buta Tujuh Cakil stalwartly, war cries blazing from their lips more brightly than the flames engulfing the keraton.

“I’ll take that as a “no”, then.”

Buta Tujuh Cakil laughed again as he beheld their assault and with a single massive sweep of his gong-sized fist he knocked them away. The sickening thud and crunch of bones only added new layers of gruesome resonance to the horrific mood.

Radin stood up through the crimson haze of his own addled agony, and shrugged off the pain as he rose to do battle with the ogres. He intoned a brief chant to focus his ilmu batin and girded himself with an impressive panoply of pure will. As if in answer, Buta Tujuh Cakil roared, and a slippery, oily mass of seething primordial chaos manifested in his hands, congealing into a wickedly jagged blade that would have been a long parang in any normal man’s hands, but looked only like a short kris dagger in his prodigious grasp.

“Little man knows some tricks, hmm? He knows how to do a little bit of magic, and he knows how to breathe deeply and do all kinds of pretty tricks, hmm? Fffffeh!! What will you do, little man? Use your ilmu sirep to make me fall asleep? Use your ilmu gaib to make me smell of flowers and honey?”

Buta Tujuh Cakil laughed raucously, his thunderous guffaws drowning out all other noise in the palace.

“Meet your doom, demon.”

The defiant reply served only to increase the ogre’s laughter tenfold, and he tore the earth up in huge gulping bites to show his arrogant joy.

“Little man not only has some brains for magic, little man also has some guts and balls on him, hmmm? No matter, my seven mouths are all hungry, I’ll tear you apart and eat all of ... aarrgh!!”

The fiend gaped in pained surprise as he felt one of his knees weaken and give way. One moment Radin had been more than 10 paces away, and the next he was beside Buta Tujuh Cakil, leaping and stabbing his kris downward with impeccable precision, his thrust lent extra force by the gravity of his short hop sliding into the rakshasa’s right knee joint. Radin had learnt some tricks of the blade from the Batak knife-fighters to the western islands, and relaxed his grip on his kris, before applying a palm strike to the pommel of his blade, driving the wavy blade deeper past the giant’s loathsome flesh and viscous sinew.

Radin spoke, in even and calm tones. “Your follies, demon, were assuming that we “little men” are all weak and the same, and in taking too much joy in your empty, posturing actions. Your energies are unfocused; you are too lost in sensation, the world of lair, and your strength is futile. You are like the dying centipede, a thousand legs thrashing nowhere, directed towards nothing. While you were too busy gloating, my brother Humam goaded and tricked you by telling you to meet your doom – and you were so eager to see only your own perception of my weakness, that you were blinded to the reality of my approach.”

A tendril of invisible thought fired forth from the rasa of Humam to Radin’s own, linking their minds in a mystic unity of communication without the need for speech. Pretty words, young brother. There was a hint of curious amusement in Humam’s mental voice.

Radin’s reply was also amused, but his mirth was coloured by tinges of sheepish, abashed emotion. I picked most of them up from your many lectures, older brother.

Ah. That would explain it.

The brothers’ banter was interrupted as Buta Tujuh Cakil staggered backwards, hissing seven different insults in seven different tongues expressing a single cadence of wrath at Radin and Humam in particular and the Javanese in general. Radin went into a low, defensive sempok stance as he recovered his breath, and tried to gauge the situation again. Despite his confident words and the successful ruse against the ogre, victory was not assured – that powerful strike was usually enough to dispatch any foe, but the rakshasa was proving to be stronger than any ordinary foe. The blow he had dealt was further bolstered by surprise, a resource he had already squandered, and most distressing of all was the fact that he was now without a blade, for his kris was lodged deep into the vile chitin of Buta Tujuh Cakil’s flesh...

 

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And there were two other ogres to battle as well; one spewing forth killing clouds of flame and the other crooning forth mind-bending, sanity-rending songs that increased the panic of the people in the keraton… things were not looking good. Ah, but wait. Good fortune is the same as ill fortune, it is only the man who is different in these situations, and a potential enemy is also a potential ally as his spiritual teacher had always instructed him... where the unversed sees chaos and chance, the enlightened man sees the hidden hand of fate at work. There are reasons for the current situation, there exists a manifest destiny that cries out to be realised, and in that moment, Radin saw it.

The blade of Buta Tujuh Cakil.

The demon has seven powerful maws with jutting teeth and superhuman strength to work his dark pilgrimage of destruction, why would he need to create a weapon? Through the ogre’s own egotistical and whimsical desire to show off his magical prowess, he had given Radin a possible advantage, an advantage that Radin intended to exploit.

Buta Tujuh Cakil roared and slashed down on the young prince with an utter fury the likes of which has not been seen since the days when the Ashuras warred with the Devas in the heavens – with some difficulty, Radin leapt to the side, barely avoiding the arc of the blade. The puissance of Buta Tujuh Cakil was such that his blow slashed right through the wooden platform into the very earth itself, and it speaks of the ogre’s great strength and reflexes when he hefted the blade backwards into a reverse, scything slash, transforming a near miss into an opportunity for more violent brutality.

Two steps to the left, and jump high! In his head, Radin heard the stately, dispassionate instructions of Humam.

The young worthy quickly complied. The explosion of sawdust and earth created by the gargantuan force of Buta Tujuh Cakil’s blow would have been his undoing – the dust cloud made it nigh impossible for the stalwart warrior to see his surroundings, and he would have been cleanly separated into five parts like a starfruit by the angular, jagged blade, if not for Humam’s telepathic warning. As it is, Radin’s wild locks were shorn by the frenetic slash of Buta Tujuh Cakil – a vivid reminder of just how close he had come to death and defeat.

Keep your hair tied up in a bun. More sensible, far more aesthetically pleasing, and infinitely more dignified. Though one must concede that the botak (bald) look suits you well. Humam’s vaguely acid tongue burned in Radin’s mind.

Radin braced his knees firmly to support his rising stance, and hopped up swiftly like a flitting cicada onto the back of the ogre’s over-extended brawny arms and used them as a springboard to bound onto Buta Tujuh Cakil’s grotesque head. The force of his ricocheting ascent was expended into a quick one-two of wrist strikes powerful enough to shatter coconuts; the impact was met with a sickening teeth-sundering crunch, as Radin smashed the maws on each side of Buta Tujuh Cakil’s head where ears would normally be and held his head thus in an obdurate grip.

The rakshasa ululated and stabbed his blade blindly and frenziedly at the annoying human perched on his head. This was the opening, the chance, for which Radin had been waiting to convert to his advantage; with quicksilver reflexes, he feinted a strike towards the ogre’s shoulder, seemingly to divert the thrusts. With lightning speed, he switched stances into a sickle kick, and released his handhold – for a brief fragment of eternity, it was all that anyone, mortal or demon, could do, to simply gape in wonder as he dodged the ogre’s blows, fell and hooked his right leg upon the massive trunk while simultaneously launching another kick upwards with his left foot at the dark giant’s elbow. Buta Tujuh Cakil’s blade was driven into his skull by his own strength, slaying the dread fiend outright.

 

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The keraton was silent.

To King Srisukra, who had seen his subjects perish in the first few seconds of the chaotic fray, the silence was a dirge evocative of the grave. To the two demons that had seen their strongest champion bested by a mere human gnat, the silence was the speechless entangling tongues choked by outrage. To the triumphant Radin, awash in his own controlled power, the silence was simply natural, a conservation of inner energy and emotion.

To the artiste Humam the silence was none of that. To him, it was the moment of quiescence in a crowd privy to a performance that had touched them profoundly, that moment without noise where the audience looks with expectation and wonder at the scene around them.

The calm of the moment passed, and the two ogres surged forth, screeching dark promises and vile threats.

-Silence- touched Radin again, and the demonic onslaught was deflected, redirected and he counterattacked, slaying the rakshasas with little pomp or ceremony.

Rain began to fall again.


The End

 

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glossary and bibliography (i've been brain-damaged by academia!)

Glossary of terms:

1, keraton: palace, especially of a Javanese ruler

2, jago: martial artist who uses occult knowledge to bolster his own confidence and fighting ability to secure victory in battle

3, pencak silat: martial arts form developed within the Malay and Indonesian archipelago

4, ilmu batin: literally “spiritual science”, a corpus of mystical meditation and moral knowledge that grants supernatural power

5, rasa: literally “taste” or “feeling”, used here to convey sense of deeper intuition and inner sensitivity

6, rakshasas: powerful, demonic ogres of crass aspect and foul disposition

7, nagas: serpentine dragon spirits thought to reside in watery places

8, garuda: sacred eagle, servant and mount of Lord Vishnu the God of Cosmic Order

9, Buta Tujuh Cakil: Buta Cakil is the fanged, tusked demon whose defeat by the hero with the demon’s own dagger is instrumental to the Flower Battle sequence of Wayang Kulit. “Tujuh” just means “seven”, and this refers to the “demon with 7 tusks” – not exactly on the mark, and thus the author apologises twice, once for his lack of accuracy and again for his bastardisation of the Indonesian languages

10, parang: machete-like sword with a heavy cutting forward edge

11, kris: wavy-bladed dagger associated with supernatural power and nobility; the wielder or wearer is accorded social prestige and honour by the quality of his blade

12, ilmu sirep: spiritual science that allows one to hypnotise others into a state of daydreaming sleep

13, ilmu gaib: spiritual science referring to magical arts of enchantment in general

14, lair: world of external physical phenomenon that can be perceived by the five senses, as opposed to rasa, the realm of inner awareness

15, sempok: literally, “sitting”. A low defensive stance used by Javanese silat practitioners to support themselves on uneven, wet terrain and to lull opponents into thinking they are relaxing and thus defenceless

16, War of the Ashuras and Devas: in Hindu-Buddhist mythology, both Ashuras and Devas are powerful divine and celestial beings who have strong and sometimes hostile rivalries with each other


Bibliography/ List of Useful Readings:

(weird, i know, to see this in a story hour. but indulge me. )

Draeger, D F. (1972) Weapons and Fighting Arts of the Indonesian Archipelago. Rutland, Vermont. Charles E Tuttle Company.

Maryono, O. (2002) Pencak Silat in the Indonesian Archipelago. Yogyakarta, Indonesia.Yayasan Galang.

R. Brandon, J and Guritno, P ed. (1993) On Thrones of Gold: three Javanese Shadow Plays. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press.

Mulder, N (1996) Inside Southeast Asia: religion, everyday life, cultural change. 2nd edition. Amsterdam, Pepin Press.

 

[neveryours]

Interesting... hmmm... Not what I expected

Well, I should've known that's be coming from someone in South East Asian Studies. Adds a different flavour to the game. A new add-on perhaps? The Mystic of the East Indies. That'd be cool.

Sorry to bog you down with such mundane thingies, but I'd like to know a few things.

The class make-ups of Radin and Humam.

The monsters that you've used for the "Ogres"...

You know, it's the boring aspect of Ogre Me...

 

[neveryours]

Interesting... hmmm... Not what I expected

Well, I should've known that's be coming from someone in South East Asian Studies. Adds a different flavour to the game. A new add-on perhaps? The Mystic of the East Indies. That'd be cool.

Sorry to bog you down with such mundane thingies, but I'd like to know a few things.

The class make-ups of Radin and Humam.

The monsters that you've used for the "Ogres"... Would appreciate some breakdown of special abilities and CR.

You know, it's the boring aspect of Ogre Me...

 

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cast of characters

Thanks for your feedback..

Radin is modelled after a Rogue 3/ Ranger 5/ Sorceror 2/ Shadow Scout 2. He pumped all his favoured enemy bonuses (+6 in all) into the category of "aberrations"; the first blow he pulled off was a sneak attack/ iaijitsu focus-ed critical hit with a kris (i used the stats for a kukri, except it does piercing, not slashing) with favoured enemy bonuses. The spells he used were Mage Armour at the beginning to protect himself, Jump for his acrobatic skills, and True Strike for the final finishing blow (power attack full steam ahead! MAT ROCK NEVER DIE! Aku punya semangat!) from the Sorc list, and Ram's Might (from the Magic of Faerun, turns your unarmed strikes into magic, armed 1d6 bludgeoning weapons) from the Ranger list.

Humam is modelled after a Marshal 5/ Telepath 7. First off, he laid down a couple of Suggestions on the ogres, to let Buta and Radin fight mano-a-mano.. then he used Conceal Thoughts and Control Sound in tandem to fool Buta then threw up a Mindlink with Radin to co-ordinate tactics. While the ogre was tricked, he used the Marshal ability to give Radin an extra move action so that Radin would be able to go in for a full-attack with his sneak attack. His Marshal tactical auras were the directions that helped Radin fight off and dodge the poor ogre's blows.

Buta Tujuh Tjakil was Akuma no Oni (instead of 7 tongues with fire, they became 7 maws of acid) slapped on with the Corrupt template from Book of Vile Darkness... the total CR came up to around 15 or 16 i think. If you're thinking why he didn't get any hits in despite being so hardcore in the CR department, it's cos i was using the VP system instead of HP; it's awfully unheroic in the Javanese Wayang Kulit to be hit so many times! Near-misses that sap the spirit and strength of the hero, though, are ok

The female ogre was a Hag with the Corrupt template. The panic attacks are the fear effects and strength-draining gaze of the Hag.. and the last ogre is the most honest-joe ogre around. He's an Ogre Mage with a few levels of sorceror, and i slapped a Corrupt template on him as well.. i subbed out the Cone of Cold for an Acid Fog effect.

hope that answered your queries, bout how my homework was assisted by Dnd

 

[neveryours]

Hmmm. Okay, thanks. I think it could be quite heroic for him to be hit and than deliver finishing blows with blow all over his face. A la Ong Bak.