The Player’s Guide to Monks and Paladins is the last entry from Sword and Sorcery for their class sourcebooks. Like previous ones, this book’s main focus is not on these classes as generic resource like Sword and Fist from Wizards of the Coast, but rather, a sourcebook for the Scarred Lands setting.
I love the classic if corny martial art movies that I watched as a child in the 70s. In that I love the crazy maneuvers of the martial artists from those movies, I love monks. Having read a lot of history, I hate how the monk fits in standard D&D. It fits like a sore thumb even in the custom made Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk Campaigns.
The Scarred Lands setting is different though. The reason these two classes were paired up is that both are religious orders that follow different martial paths. The monks often line up along the lines of Hedrada, the Lawgiver. It makes sense as the monk has always had a lawful alignment restriction. This isn’t to say that all monks follow Hedrada however. Take for example the monks who are members of the Adamantine Church. While Paladins are its main strength, the members known as the brothers of steel wield longswords in their efforts to battle chaos and evil.
By giving the monk serious historical impact, ranging from the emergence of the Perfect One, a monk whose skills were supreme, and noting where monks have followed the “Warring Path”, the Scarred Lands gives the monk a distinct flavor. While originally from another land, the monk fits in more with this campaign model than others I’ve seen or played in.
Some of the nice ways it does this is by providing numerous organizations and methodologies. The organizations are found under chapter two, The Seekers of Ki. These start off with name, location, alignment, philosophy, allies and enemies, notable personages, signs of the order, and what those monks do. These aren’t highly detail orders with pages of maps and NPCs, but quick glances at different groups like the Blades of Belsameth, monks who practice the arts of murder, or the Exemplars of Onn, a former monster from the original Creature Collection, now a organization and a PrC.
In terms of methods, chapter three, The Way of the Warring Hand, gives the reader an idea about other martial art styles like the Bladed Hand, where these masters are found, what their favored feats are and what organization they belong to. For example, most masters of the Bladed Hand are members of the Brothers of Steel. It provides a quick solid foundation on which to base a monk character. Combined with the orders, a player can quickly fill out his background information. One thing I’ve been playing with is taking different organizations than the standard ones so that I’ve got monks who are members of Belsameth’s order, but have mastered a different style. It gives the players a little surprise every now and again.
The second part of the book covers paladins. Paladins fit the D&D system and have been a huge part of the Scarred Lands setting since one of it’s first books, Mithril, City of the Golem, hit the book shelves. The book provides some quick discussion on proto-paladins and how the dwarves had champions that followed this method as well as how the Great General, Chardun, brought free will to man even as Corean forged them from ‘a hard core of silver’.
Holy orders help detail the different organizations and virtues that the paladins follow. For virtues, we have; Gold (Chasity and Mercy), Iron (Industriousness and Tenacity), Mitrhil (Compassion and Courage), and Silver (Purity and Wisdom). Churches are broken up into the same four different chapters; gold, iron, mithril, and silver. Each one with a different specialty and in most cases, a PrC, detailed in various books.
The book does a good job insuring that if your player doesn’t want to be a priest of Corean however, that he has options. For example, Madriel has the Swan Knights, and Sisters of the Sun, even as Hedrada has Holy Templars. The most interesting note is that of the knights of the demigods with Knights of the Blossom, servants of Syhana who merged with Aspharal, to the Knights of the Sirocco, those who pay homage to Tamul, the Old Man of the Desert and D’Shan, the Desert Wind. Good role-playing opportunities.
As in previous appendices, the crunch of the book awaits the patient reader. These start off with feats like Divine Focus, providing a character with weapon focus and the ability to cast divine spells with a +1 sacred (or profane) bonus to attack rolls made with the deity’s favored weapon in addition to a few mount specific feats meant for a paladin. The new types of feats introduced are martial arts, paragon and virtue. Martial art feats are meant to capture the unique fighting styles of martial artists and include the over powered Ten Animal Praya, a feat that increases a martial artists critical threat range by 2 with unarmed attacks and attacks made with special monk weapons to merciful palm technique, that allows you to add your Wisdom modifier to unarmed damage when it’s nonlethal.
The paragon feats are monk feats that can be selected as their bonus feats. My favorite is Ironbone and its follow up, Ironskin. Ironbone provides a +1 unarmed damage bonus and a +2 AC bonus against nonlethal attacks. Ironskin provides a +1 Fortitude saving throw bonus and +2 AC against nonlethal attacks but the part I like is the +4 AC against rolls to confirm a critical hit. There are some other classics like Ki Projection, allowing you to make an unarmed attack at 5 feet per level in the monk class as a standard action. Others like Mantis and Peregrine should’ve been combined as they do the same thing. The former allows you to inflict slashing damage, the latter piercing. Heck, one option might be to allow the player to select a style at 1st level and determine what he does since it’s a visual in 90% of the cases (skeletons notwithstanding.)
The virtue feats are for paladins, but I’d let any holy warrior take them. These cover the eight virtues I mentioned earlier; Chastity, Compassion, Courage, Industriousness, Mercy, Purity, as well as some others like Tenacity, Gold, Iron, Mithril, Silver, Wisdom. Each has a restriction based on its tenants. For example, Purity requires the paladin to maintain faith in his cause, granting them to add his Charisma modifier to an attack roll against an evil opponent at first level, but gaining more bonuses as the paladin gains in levels. The Virtue of Iron gains more bonuses to the abilities gained from the Industriousness and Tenacity feats. This is a good way to chain the new feats together without making them too powerful.
The section on unique paladin mounts is a nice little table with creatures ranging from griffons and nightmares to war ponies and wyverns. Each includes character level, requirement, patron, and level adjustment. Also included is riding tricks, a little table with name of the trick and DC. This includes calming a runaway mount as well as standing upright in the saddle.
The parts most will want to look over are the PrCs. My personal favorite is the brother of steel, a monk that wields a longsword and gains gifts of devotion to reflect their mastery of ki. An old favorite, the exemplar, the ‘root’ or core Scarred Lands monk, also gets updated, and the original Mithril Knight PrC gets revised as well.
Other goodies help round out the book. For instance, the priests of Hedrada often wield the old Greathammer, a huge two-handed melee weapon that does 1d10 with a x3 critial modifier. The magic item section is a little weak, especially for monks who could really benefit from a wider range of monk specific items and in term of blades and armor where paladins could reinforce their character archetype. The new spells are a lot level lot for the most part as these are paladin spells, but provide the paladin a bit more unique flavor. Celestial Mount grants the paladin’s mount the celestial template while armor of light creates a +2 breastplate to protect the paladin. The history of the spell is separated from the spell effect making easy reading.
The things I don’t like are still here but don’t seem as bad in all cases. Advertising is down to two pages. The white space issue with the PrCs is still here, but not as severe. The massive amount of white space in the appendices is still presence and the repeat of the cover for the two sections, monk and paladin, also wastes space. The layout is nice simple two columns for the most part with some variants thrown in to showcase individual letters or other ancient documents. Tim Truman handles the Prestige Classes and does a great job on it while David Day, Jim Nelson and Nate Pride fill out the rest of the book.
While the book doesn’t break ground in the manner that Mongoose’s Quintessential Monk did, it does solidly ground the monk into the Scarred Lands setting. The paladin, long an archetype of fantasy, gets a solid measure of new goods in terms of feats, PrCs and spells to round it out. While the book is a Scarred Lands resource first and foremost, I’ll be borrowing heavily from it for my Forgotten Realms campaign. Others not running a SL campaign may want to look through the organizations first and see what they can glean for their own campaigns because almost the entire crunch is easily transferable.
In short, a Player’s Guide to Monks and Paladins rounds out both character classes with Scarred Lands background, organizations and styles, but all purpose feats and prestige classes making it a worthy purchase for fans of the two classes.
