Ch.29

Members of the Soulblade class also gained something called Blade Skills which were essentially a blending of Feats and Mind Blade specific powers. I took Mind Armor, which let me create a field of psychokinetic energy around myself in the shape of a masterwork suit of armor. It could be light, medium or heavy armor, whichever I chose.

Now of course, wearing armor is a very good idea, but being forced to not wear armor is one of the drawbacks of the Monk class... and that’s where my second Blade Skill, Improved Mind Armor comes in. Improved Mind Armor counts as if you aren’t wearing armor at all! At least, as long as it’s the Light Armor version of Mind Armor.

The light armor version counted as a chain shirt, which gave a +4 armor bonus... but this was formed off of my Mind Blade, which meant it was automatically the equivalent of an enchanted +1 chain shirt, so it really gave me a +5 armor bonus! Even better, wearing it didn’t conflict with my Monk class restrictions!

On top of that, as I got more levels as a Soulblade, the enhancement bonus to both my Mind Blade and Mind Armor would also increase! I could also use the enhancement bonuses to them for things other than just straight pluses, letting me take both weapon and armor special abilities every time I activated them, and changing them to tailor the abilities I took to my opponents!

Fighting ice elementals today? Take Elemental Bane and Flaming Burst for your weapon enhancements! Fighting undead? Take Holy and Undead Bane for your weapon, and Undead Defiant for your Armor!

Bane is a +1 weapon enchantment adds +2 to hit and +2d6 damage versus a specific type of opponent. Holy? Its a +2 weapon enhancement that adds +2d6 damage versus evil enemies and bypasses certain kinds of damage reduction. Defiant? It’s the armor version of Bane. A +1 armor enhance that counts as a +2 armor versus a specific kind of enemy and grants DR 2/- against them, too!

Even as powerful as Bane and Defiant are, they’re largely considered useless when found on an item, unless you’re in an L&L campaign where most of your foes are all the same type – all undead, all evil outsiders, and so on. The ability to reform your Mind Blade and change your bonuses to take advantage of a particular enemy’s weaknesses was one of the Soulblade’s biggest strengths!

The extra ten skill points for the two levels were used to raise Bluff, Diplomacy, Disguise, and Meditation to 3 Rank each, from the one they had been at.

The Feats I purchased at 2nd and 3rd levels were Psicrystal Affinity and Psionic Dodge. For my 3rd level granted Feat, I took Up the Walls.

Psicrystal Affinity let me gain a psicrystal, basically the same as a Wizard’s Familiar, but a psionic construct imbued with a shard of my own personality. I’d need to take some time to Craft it after I got my hands on the materials to do so... which might take a while. It required a decent sized chunk of crystal to make one and it needed to have certain, specific qualities that made it tough to find.

Psionic Dodge was the next level of Dodge, it gave a +1 to my dodge AC as long as I was psionically focused.

Up the Walls was as much a coolness factor thing as it was useful; it let me run on walls, DC Comics Flash style! The only problem was I had to start and end on a surface that could support me, though I could do things like grab hold of something at the end of my movement. It wasn’t a pure combat boost, but it was both useful AND cool!

Of course, the new secondary class also gave me a (d10+6)/2 h.p.’s per level, or +8 h.p.’s per level.

Ok. Some notes about how magic works versus how psionics do. While they were very obviously not the same, they were treated as the same things for the most part, at least from a rules perspective in L&L.

In Legends & Labyrinths, this was called magic-psionic transparency, which meant that in many ways magic and psionic were treated similarly. Basically, there were two reasons for this. The first was a ‘story’ reason – though magic and psionics were very different in how they manifested themselves and worked, in general, there is really very little difference in the fundamental supernatural energies that are the basis for them. So, wizards could use Detect Magic to see psionic powers, and a psion could use Detect Psionics to see magic at work!

The other reason was that otherwise, it would just be a nightmare for GMs and players. For instance, what if the GM pulls out an Eye Tyrant, one of the mighty Evil Eyes, whose strongest ability was that their main eye created an anti-magic field in a huge area in front of them. If a psion could just ignore that, it ruins the whole point of such a challenge! Basically, it was just a huge pain in the ass to the GM, and ended up just being not fair all around.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

By having things like spell resistance and anti-magic fields affect psionics, and their psionic equivalents affect magic, it made many things easier on everyone involved.

Finally, the time had come for me to decide on my Primary class – which really wasn’t a decision at all.

Monk was the right answer, at least for me. Advanced classes would let me advance my Combat Arts and Initiator levels (that's a Combat Art user’s equivalent to a spell caster level) to keep up with the rest of what I’m trying to do... it would just get delayed until I hit 5th level as a Monk.

Whereas if I go the other way, I’ll lose out on a lot of damage, most of my Qi abilities, and the very, VERY tasty Style Strikes!

Needless to say, I made myself a 4th level monk. Attack bonus went up by one, my saves all went up by 1, +16 more h.p.’s, and I gained the Still Mind ability – a bonus to saves versus Enchantments and mind affecting abilities, and choose 1 Ki Power, from which I took Bark Skin.

Bark Skin grants +2 Natural Armor, which meant +2 DR/- which stacked with my other defenses! It cost 1 point of Qi to activate and lasts 1 minute per Monk level... and it gets stronger as I level. Even better, it stacks with other types of Natural Armor!

Yes, between Bark Skin and my Mind Armor, I had 7 more DR! I now had a total of DR 14/-, and that was no joke! Unless there was some other modifiers involved, now, normal zombies and ghouls couldn’t even hurt me, outside of a Critical hit which should be almost impossible!

At 4th level, you’re able to add +1 to a single stat, and I chose Wisdom; it was what powered both my monk and Psi powers, as well as all of my Pneuma abilities. Choosing anything else would have been foolish at this stage!

For my purchased Feat, I took Shield Bash. It was a very simple Feat that let you attack with your shield and still keep your shield’s AC bonus. It was important that I take it now, because there was another Soulblade special ability I was going to take soon that would make it important.

I also bought the first of my Stat Mastery/2’s - Strength Mastery... only 6 more of those to go!

At this point, I stopped to consider things. Sure, it was more efficient if I stayed at 4th level to buy all of the stuff I wanted.

You know what? Screw it! I’ll stay here for long enough to buy my Stat Mastery/2’s, so 6 more days, then I’m gonna take 5th level!

Over the next six days, as I was taking my Stat Masteries, I took six more Feats... because I’d be silly not to. They were Autonomous, Battle Step, Combat Expertise, Elemental Focus, Martial Charge, and Shield Check.

Autonomous - +2 on Meditation and Knowledge: Psionics. +4 @ 10. Both become Class skills.

Battle Step – gain your Cha bonus to attack rolls, Acrobatic checks, and Reflex saves.

Combat Expertise – take a –1 penalty on your attack rolls and CMB in exchange for a +1 Dodge bonus to hit. Every +4 base attack bonus, you may raise the penalty and thus Dodge bonus by 1.

Elemental Focus (Lightning) – choose 1 of the elemental attunements you have as a Disciple. Ignore up to your Initiator level in elemental resistance to damage you inflict with that element. At Initiator level 10, entities with immunity to that element now take half damage instead.

Martial Charge - make a charge attack. Move up to twice your speed in a straight line towards a creature, then initiate a Maneuver on the creature you moved towards with an initiation action of 1 standard action. You gain a +2 bonus on attack rolls during the strike and take a –2 penalty to your AC until the start of your next turn.

Shield Check – gain your Wis mod in additional attacks of opportunity, can only be made with your shield as a shield bash. REQ Improved Shield Bash

All of them were useful or I wouldn’t have taken them, but Battle Step and Elemental Focus (Lightning) were total game changers. Battle Step was essentially Monk only, as you had to have Flurry as a requirement to buy it, and to be honest, most monks used Charisma as a dump stat, making this useless to 99% of the Monks in L&L. It was meant to only be useful to Bards, Warlocks, and Sorcerers who took a splash into the Monk class using the Scaled Fist alternate Path that replaced Wisdom with Charisma as its primary stat... but for me, it was going to be game changing!

Elemental Focus was also amazing, of course. Being able to bypass elemental resistance and even immunity was incredibly strong! One of the largest weaknesses of elemental damage when fighting higher level opponents is that practically everything has SOME elemental resistances, and many things are simply immune to at least one if not multiple elements. Demons were a perfect example; basically every demon is immune to lightning for some crazy reason, and resistant or immune to nearly every other type of elemental damage.

Want to play someone that focuses on shooting lightning? Better hope you don’t run into any demons! It’s always felt pretty lame, but this Feat goes a long way towards fixing that.

It isn’t just demons, either. All Outsiders, creatures from other planes of reality, are either immune to or at least highly resistant to most elemental damage types!

Even fire, despite its traditional role as a purifier of evil, was nearly useless against a large percentage of monsters Challenge Rating 10 and higher.

And all of that didn’t even consider things like low level spells and easily accessible magic items that also gave a great deal of elemental resistance. Sure, damage resistance was ALSO very common, but it was in fact SO common that anyone that fought with a weapon usually put being able to bypass such damage resistance as a top priority! Plus, simply having a high enough enhancement bonus on your weapons, something everyone wanted ANYWAY, took care of it!

DR/magic? Simple. Just need a +1 magic weapon. DR/silver or cold iron? That needed a +3. DR/adamantine was +4, and DR/Holy, Unholy, Lawful, or Chaotic was nullified by a +5 weapon. Or you could just have a weapon that was made of silver or blessed to be Holy.

What was even better, and that a lot fewer people knew, was those things were actually an enemy’s weakness... and if you satisfied that weakness TWICE, it turned the attack into an enemy’s Susceptibility!

For instance, if an enemy has DR/silver, and you hit them with an weapon that is both made of silver and enchanted to +3? Yup, that becomes what’s called a Susceptibility attack! Basically, you’re attacking them with their weakness! Attacks like that do +50% damage! Crits could get really silly!

Now that I’d finished with the Stat Masteries and Feats, tomorrow it would finally be time to take 5th level!