Since I haven’t done a run down on the characters my players are playing, I thought I should do one before writing about the game, so here it is.
I already had played with the players that are currently in my game; all of them had previously played in one of my campaign. I knew for the most part how they liked to play D&D and what are their general approach to the game. After I answered their question about the setting we were playing in, I asked them what kind of character they would like to play and give me some kind of background to flesh out the characters. I didn’t want to stress this out too much; they could always come back to me and ask if it was possible to change this or that aspect of their backgrounds.
One of the players wanted to play a monk. This didn’t surprise me since it’s exactly the kind of class he likes to play, plus he loves martial arts. What did surprise me was that he wanted to play a Centered breath monk, a type of monk that uses wisdom and discipline over brute force. He even said that his character preferred to approach conflict calmly and avoid combat whenever possible. That’s very unlike the assassin from the last game we played together! Cool! He named his character Dogen, a real name from someone that has existed and that I don’t know much about (Google says he was a Buddhist monk. I’m fine with my players using real names as long as they don’t go overboard with it. No Cloud or Boba Fett in my game, sorry). He also said that he wanted his character to carry a big book along with him. The book would hold the teaching of his monk school. Interesting…
So we talked about those features and how we could make them fit in the setting and Dogen’s background. This is what he came up with (with some help from me, of course):
Dogen, not bearing that name at the time, grew up in a nomad tribe wandering the Endless Sand Dunes region. Whenever the tribe was not struggling to survive the desert, his father would teach him how to read and write two languages; one of the language was somewhat useful, he recognized it as the one he was also speaking and could sometimes read the rare books that the tribe would find. His father told him that in the big cities, there were many people able to read and write the Common. Only he and his father could read in the whole tribe; something to be proud of!
But the other script was nearly useless; the only things he could read with it was the pages his father wrote for him to practice. And the characters didn’t even remotely resembled the common’s ones; they were complicated to distinguishes from one another and even harder to write – or more correctly, draw. But his father insisted and wanted him to practice and focus on learning this language whenever they had the time to do so. So he did.
The father also told the young boy that if he was ever to go missing, or worst, to die, Dogen would have to leave the tribe and go to their secret hideout, a place only they knew about. Also, Dogen was to never tell or teach anyone the “useless” language he learnt. Not fully understanding why his father would ask this of him, the boy still promised that his lips were sealed.
One night, years later, Dogen’s father disappeared without leaving a trace. The now teenager Dogen would return to the hideout. There, he found an old book and all that his father taught him began to make sense. The book, “The Five Winds”, was written in the strange language he learned during all those years. On the first page of the book lied a note written by his father saying that when he would find the book, he would be dead or would die very soon; his father’s death was inevitable and part of a greater plan, a plan to eradicate the knowledge of the “Shon’ten”, the ancient language, from all but one mind. And Dogen had been chosen to be that last mind. The knowledge of the book would now only be available to him and he would be the instrument of a plan laid long ago.
Reading the book, Dogen learned the way of the winds and began to train his body and mind to undertake his destiny. It is at this point that he abandoned his old name to take his new one; a master of the wind seeks to protect others from themselves. By “imprisoning” destructives emotion within oneself, a master is a bastion of discipline and balance and preaches by example; it is indeed very hard for someone to hate someone who doesn’t hate. Choosing the furry, or “dogen” in the ancient dialect, as the emotion he would shackle within himself, Dogen set out for his journey in the desert.
Again, years passed, and a week before King Kalak of Tyr fell, Dogen entered the city of Tyr. The book had told him that he had his role to play in the upcoming events.
