Saintly Saturday: St. Cornelius the Abbot of Komel

Today is the Feast of St. Cornelius the Abbot of Komel, Vologda. Born into a boyar family in the 15th century, his brother Lukian served at the court of the Great Prince of Moscow. Both brothers decided to enter into monasticism at the monastery of St. Cyril of White Lake (how cool is that name!?).

Desiring for a more solitary life, St. Cornelius left White Lake to enter other monasteries, but eventually chose to live in the inhospitable environs of the Komel forest. Other monks began to gather around him and in 1501 he built a wooden church dedicated to the Entrance of the Theotokos. By 1512, the brethren had grown so numerous that he built a stone church and compiled a Monastic Rule based on those written by Sts. Joseph of Volokolamsk and Nilus of Sora.

St. Cornelius died at the age of 82 on May 19, 1537.

As I explained in this seven-year-old (!?) post, there are two basic forms of monasticism: cenobitic (communal) and eremitic (hermit-like). The monastic rules found in Russia tend to be of a third type: the skete. It takes elements of both eremitic practices, allowing for the isolation of individual monks, and cenobitic practices, allowing for a community of monks to live in close proximity.

In other words, there really is no single “right way” to be a monastic. Depending upon the individual and the relationships that individual forms, one can be called to be a part of several different styles of monasticism. Indeed, many monastic saints, St. Cornelius included, practice several different types over the course of their lifetime.

In the comment section of my last Saintly Saturday post, there was a joke about edition wars in D&D. Admittedly, when I first started to blog about RPGs, I wrote several serious criticisms of “new-school” D&D and I will openly admit that the idea of playing 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder or 4e sounds about as much fun as doing some major dental work. Today, however, I won’t begrudge (too much) someone else’s fun. Sure, I believe they would have more fun at my table and the way I like to play, but I also know from experience that isn’t a universal rule I can depend upon.

I have argued that we live in a Golden Age for RPGs. One of the reasons for that is that we, as players, have at our finger tips 0e-5e D&D and all the various clones of those editions out there to choose from and hack ourselves for our particular proclivities and our particular needs. In the same way monks have a plethora of opportunities to pursue the ascetic life, we gamers have a plethora of choices as to which rules we want to bring to the table to have fun with.

Recently Eric of Tenkar’s Tavern reported that WotC estimates that there are 12 to 15 million D&D players in North America and that there was a 44% growth for the D&D brand in 2016. Note that this is just the brand, not a specific edition. While I will openly admit that most of the growth can probably be attributed to 5e (and that is not a bad thing), I am guessing that no small percentage of that comes from older editions. Else, why does WotC keep on churning out publications for older editions in both PDF and POD forms? There was a time when I thought such a move by WotC would never happen and I cannot tell you how happy I am that they continue to open up that library.

In other words: play the version of D&D that you want to play and have fun! If that version doesn’t exist, make it! Today, we have so many tools at our disposal to do just that, we barely have an excuse not to.

To that end, one of my episodes of Gamer ADD which I have been subject to of late, was due to the WotC news Eric reported. I like the concept of 5e, but I don’t like its presentation, its editing or the relative complexity of the rules as they exist today. Erik took what were really simple rules (S&W White Box) and stripped them down as much as possible to still have a game we would recognize as D&D and S&W: SWL and SWCL. My Gamer ADD-addled brain thought why can’t I do that for 5e?

Thus, one of my wayward projects is editing the 5e SRD down to a rules-lite version of the game which I would gladly play and even Referee. Hopefully, I’ll have some presentable stuff done sooner rather than later to share.

Saintly Saturday: The Holy Schemamonk Silvanus of the Kiev Caves

Today is the feast of the Holy Schemamonk Silvanus of the Kiev Caves. He was an ascetic in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The monastery of the Kiev Caves (also known as Kiev Pecharsk Lavra) was founded in the eleventh century and today looks like this:

Anyone itching to make a mega-dungeon with the classic
trope of an abandoned monastery with caves beneath?

Photo by Falin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

A Schemamonk is one who takes on the Great Schema, which is a type of extreme ascetic monasticism. They wear a special vestment which looks like this:

Don't you just  want this guy in your campaign world?

Orthodox Christian nuns with the Great Schema

Interestingly, there is an example of a miracle performed through St. Silvans that looks an awful lot like a Hold Person spell. There was a group of robbers that had come to the monastery to do mischief. St. Silvans saw them sneaking through the garden and through his prayers they were held fast and unable to move. Only after they repented did the monk set them free. I see this as further evidence that the original Cleric Spell List was mostly inspired by Christian miracles.

***
For those interested, here is the monk class re-imagined as a Western, Christian analog class for B/X and Labyrinth Lord. I use this as a class available to players in my Lost Colonies campaign.

Red Monk

Prime Requisite: STR, WIS, DEX and CON
Hit Dice: 1d6
Maximum Level: 14
Class Damage Die: d6 (For those who use it)
Requirements: Must be Lawful

In Wilderness areas at the edge of Istenite Civilization is a militant order of monastics that is popularly known as the Red Monks, due to their use of a red wolf hook in their heraldry as well as their reddish-brown robes. Through ascetic practices of prayer and fasting, red monks seek to hone their bodies into living weapons to fight against evil in order to make The Wilderness safe for Civilization.

Red Monks fight and save as Fighters. The are limited to leather armor or lighter as well as shields. [For those who don’t use the class damage die, they may use crossbows, hand axes, polearms, spears, swords and staff.]

In addition, they have the following abilities:

• At 1st level: A Red Monk is at +1 AC while able to freely move and wearing leather armor or lighter and are trained in Unarmed Fighting. They may use a 1d2-1/1d2-1/1d4-1 attack routine when not using a weapon.
• At 2nd level: Red Monks are at +1 AC and +1 Saves vs. Chaotic creatures
• At 3rd level: A Red Monk’s Unarmed attack routine increases to 1d3-1/1d3-1/1d6-1.
• At 4th level: A Red Monk becomes immune to all forms of fear, including magical fear.
• At 5th level: A Red Monk’s Unarmed attack routine increases to 1d3-1/1d3-1/1d8-1.
• At 6th level: A Red Monk becomes immune to all forms of disease, including magical diseases.
• At 7th level: A Red Monk is at +2 AC while able to freely move and wearing leather armor or lighter. A Red Monk’s Unarmed attack routine increases to 1d4-1/1d4-1/1d8-1.
• At 8th level: A Red Monk becomes immune to all poisons, including magical poisons.
• At 9th level: A Red Monk’s Unarmed attack routine increases to 1d4-1/1d4-1/1d10-1.
• At 13th level: A Red Monk is at +3 AC while able to freely move and wearing leather armor or lighter

Red monks must have at least 13 in all prime requisites in order to get the +5% to experience. They must also have a STR and WIS of 16 to get the +10% bonus.

Reaching 9th Level: A Red Monk may build a fortified church.

0 XP ..... Level 1
2,450 ..... Level 2
4,900 ..... Level 3
9,800 ..... Level 4
19,600 .... Level 5
39,200 .... Level 6
80,000 .... Level 7
160,000 .... Level 8
280,000 .... Level 9
400,000 .... Level 10
520,000 .... Level 11
640,000 .... Level 12
760,000 .... Level 13
880,000 .... Level 14

Saintly Saturday: St. Benedict of Nursia

Today is the Feast Day of St. Benedict of Nursia. Born in A.D. 480 in Nursia, a small town northeast of Rome, he took to monasticism at a young age. He lived as a hermit for several years. As happens so often in the history of the church, people started hearing stories and were attracted to his presence, seeking spiritual guidance. Many decided to become monastics themselves.

As a consequence, St. Benedict wrote a monastic rule, based upon the works of St. Basil the Great. This, then became the foundation upon which Western monasticism was based — Benedictine monasticism. He built a monastery on Mount Cassino (Montecassino) and died there in A.D. 547.

For those interested in a detailed examination of the Rule of St. Benedict and how I have used it as a source of gaming inspiration, I would direct you here. Today, I am much more interested in writing about WWII.

The Montecassino Monastery was sacked and destroyed several times throughout history, but one of the most interesting and tragic of these events occurred during the Allied offensive in Italy. Montecassino was part of the Gustav Line, which was a German defense designed to stall the Allied push through Italy.

American forces were convinced that the Nazis had occupied the monastery and were using it as an observation post. On February 15 in 1944 the monastery was almost completely destroyed by American air raids. Tragically, it turned out that the Germans had stayed clear of the monastery for fear of the artifact being damaged by the allies and the only people killed in the bombing were some 230 Italian civilians seeking refuge.

Ironically, after its destruction, the Germans did occupy it and it helped them stave off four Allied assaults prior to withdrawing in May of 1944.

I mention all this because this suggests an interesting twist on the abandoned monastery trope of dungeon design. There are plenty of examples of Chaotic monasteries being sacked by Lawful forces and subsequently re-occupied (Temple of Elemental Evil immediately comes to mind). There are also example of Lawful monasteries that were sacked by Chaotic forces and have yet to be recovered (my own Lost Colonies campaign uses this trope).

The story of the Montecassino Monastery suggests a scenario where a Lawful monastery is destroyed by Lawful forces because of a misunderstanding and then subsequently occupied by Chaos. Such a background story could be the source of all kinds of interesting mischief as those same Lawful forces could very well be actively covering up the story in order to maintain their power. Thus, PCs could run afoul of the authorities back home should they learn too much...

Saintly Saturday: Sts. Marana & Cyra

Today is the feast of a pair of sisters from a well-to-do family in northern Syria: Sts. Marana and Cyra. They lived their lives in strict asceticism during the fourth century outside the city of Berea. The main hagiographical source for the sisters is a book by Theodoret of Cyrus where he records the lives of several monastics in and around his diocese. He visited Sts. Marana and Cyra several times, so his account is a personal one.

The book is actually quite fascinating, because the style of monasticism that existed in Syria, particularly in the north, seems quite alien to the more familiar cenobitic communities that we in the West normally associate with Christian monasticism. The communities in Syria were eremitic in nature; however, they formed on the outskirts of cities and seemingly interacted with people from those cities.

In the case of Sts. Marana and Cyra, the lived in an enclosure with no roof. The door was walled up with clay, save for a small hole through which people could talk to the sisters and deliver them food on the rare occasion they actually ate. There was also another building in which maidservants and other followers stayed. These the sisters encouraged in their spiritual pursuits.

Theodoret notes that normally the sisters only talked to outsiders during the season of Pentecost; however, being a bishop, Sts. Marana and Cyra actually removed their wall so that Theodoret could minister to them in person. He made several visits trying to convince them to remove the heavy chains that they wore as part of their ascetic practice. The sisters would oblige him while he was in their presence and then put them back on when he was away.

They lived this way, according to Theodoret, for forty-two years only stopping when they went on a pair of pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the shrine of St. Tecla in Isauria.

***

Truth is oft times more strange than fiction, and this image painted by Theodoret of Christian monasticism in northern Syria certainly proves the point; however, it's exactly the type of strange that I love to sprinkle into an FRPG setting. Imagine, if you will, structures such as these littered outside of major cities:

Inside are monks chained to the walls. The key to these chains is on their person, so they voluntarily choose to live in this state. People from the city bring simple food offerings to the monks in exchange for prayers. Some even will have advice to give or possibly even religious conversations, but only during certain season of the year. For the rest, they pray in silence.

These monks, of course, could be a really entraining patron for PCs. Not only would the encounters be strange, but the players would have to learn the idiosyncrasies of their patron in order to be able to learn when he/she is willing to talk. They might even unexpectedly find the cell empty when the monk (unannounced) goes on a pilgrimage.

Indeed, once the players get used to the strangeness, there could be an entire adventure built around the disappearance of all of the monks outside their home base. One day the monks are all there, the next they are just gone.

Saintly Saturday: St. Brigid of Kildare

While today is the feast of Sts. Cyrus and John the Unmercenary Healers, I am not really going to blog much about them. I do love them and have a great affinity towards Alexandria, where they were martyred; however, in terms of RPGs the only thing that I can think of to write about is the fact that one of the reasons the original cleric, which was in part modeled after Christianity, has spells like Cure Lights Wounds, Neutralize Poison and Cure Disease is likely because of these saints and those like them.

While potentially interesting, I have found myself drawn to St. Brigid of Kildare this week. Though her feast isn’t until tomorrow, her life has me itching to start drawing maps.

St. Brigid was born around A.D. 450, the daughter of a slave and her master. She was baptized by St. Patrick, Enlightener of Ireland and they were life-long friends. Due to her generosity to the poor, her father found her to be too expensive to keep as a slave and was set free. Afterwards, she was the founder of women’s cenobitic monasticism in Ireland and is considered to be one of the patron saints of Ireland along with St. Patrick.

The monastery that she established was on a piece of land given to her by the King of Leinster and called Cill Dara (now known as Kildare). Translated, the name means “church of the oak.” It was in the midst of an oak forest and was built from oaken timber.

There are a lot of stories from the various hagiographies of St. Brigid, but one of my favorites is of the blind nun Dara. One evening, the two sat and talked. Losing track of time, they found that their conversation had lasted the whole night and it was dawn. St. Brigid was astonished at the beauty of the morning light on the dew of the flowers in the field in front of her and longed for Dara to be able to see it all. Praying to God, she made the sign of the cross and Dara could see. Although she did find the morning scene to be quite beautiful, she asked St. Brigid to pray for her blindness to return, explaining, “for when the world is visible to the eyes, then God is seen less clearly by the soul.” St. Brigid prayed, and Dara was blind once again.

Interestingly, St. Brigid herself had only one eye because she plucked the one out in defiance of a suitor who was enamored with her beauty. She died in A.D. 523.

The RPG part of my brain has been gleefully chewing on the name “Cill Dara” and the story of Dara the blind nun all week. The fruit of that endeavor is an adventure locale akin to the Monastery of the Unsleeping Ones.

The Monastery of the Oak is literally a giant oak tree with a door in it. At one time, it was inhabited and cared for by an entire community of blind nuns. What is not generally known is that the oak actually sits atop a rift in time/space which allows all kinds of nasty things to come crawling into the world. It is also not widely known that the nuns actually lived inside the oak.

When a normal adventuring party opens the door of the giant oak tree, they will see a set of stairs going down. These lead to a section of your favorite megadungeon teeming with all kinds of monster badness. If, however, any member of the party is blind, blindfolded or otherwise cannot use their eyes to see, there are no stairs down, but rather a gate leading into the main grounds of a monastery which can only be “seen” by those who cannot use their eyes.

If the monastery is successfully entered and those who enter it begin to pray, the tear in time/space is closed. Thus, anyone entering the oak sans blindness or a blindfold would simply see the empty shell of an oak trunk. How and why the blind nuns no longer pray 24/7 to keep the tear closed is part of the mystery a party might stumble upon while exploring the dungeon and the monastery.

Saintly Saturday: The Holy Fathers slain at Sinai and Raitho

Today is the feast of the Holy Fathers slain at Sinai and Raitho, which are a pair of monasteries in the Sinai Peninsula. This feast actually remembers two separate events where monks were slaughtered by nomadic tribes. One massacre happened at the end of the fourth century and the other occurred in the middle of the fifth century.

This feast is very personal to me. In the ancient church, one of the primary places that Christians would gather to worship was around the grave sites of saints — particularly the martyrs. During those periods where it was legal for them to build churches, they often did so where they had worshipped — over the relics of the saints. This is where the tradition of naming church buildings after saints comes from. In order to keep a connection to this practice, the Orthodox Church places relics of a saint within the altar table at the consecration of a church. I have only had the privilege of taking part in one consecration. The relics of one of the Fathers of Sinai and Raitho was placed in the altar — an altar at which I worshipped for many years.

What I find interesting about this feast is that the hymnody plays up a thematic trope that lies very close to the heart of D&D and the pulp fantasy that inspired it — Civilization versus the Wilderness:

Greatly did you struggle, O Saints of God: while courageously enduring the barbarians’ attacks, you laid down your very lives with eager zeal before their swords... — From the Stichera of Vespers

The desert you made a city through devotion to God… — From the Kathisma of Matins

Thus, Civilization is personified by the monks and the Wilderness not only by the violence of the barbarians, but also by the desert in which the monks built their monasteries.

In the geography of Genesis, the Tree of Life is at the center of a fenced garden which lies in the middle of a plain (Eden). Across from Eden lies the Wilderness (Nod). In the Wilderness demons reside — one interpretation of the scapegoat (literally for Azazel) in Leviticus 16:8 is that it is sent out into the desert where the demon Azazel lives to be devoured.

The Greek word for wilderness and desert is έρημος which literally means a desolate and lonely place. It is the root for both hermit and eremitic — that type of monasticism practiced by hermits. Thematically, therefore, monastics are Christian adventurers who go out into the Wilderness to fight the monsters that live there. The monasteries that they build are akin to the Keep on the Borderlands — outposts of civilization.

Both monastics and the typical D&D adventurer represent the people who have the requisite temperament and skills to make the Wilderness safe for the rest of us. They are the ragtag front line that take the fight to the dangers that live just across the way in the Land of Nod.

In other words, the classic pattern of D&D where parties of adventures go deep underground or out into the lands dominated by beings of evil and Chaos is a metaphor for the monastic endeavor of living in the desert, because monasticism — seen in terms of the geography of Genesis — is a metaphor for Civilization vs. the Wilderness.

Meditating on Monks

I have to admit that I really like monks — both the class and that arm of the Church that choses to take the monastic tonsure. This has to do both with the awe and wonder that I remember having when I was first introduced to the wonderful cinematic madness that comes out of Hong Kong as well as a deep seeded need for the ascetic disciplines of prayer that monastics are privileged to live out on a daily basis.

There is a strain of gamer that gnashes their teeth at the idea of the Hong-Kong-movie-influenced monk class crashing the medieval European party represented by the three core classes of D&D. I am not one of them. In fact, I have come to relish in an amalgam of the monk class and the monk who endeavors to follow St. Paul's dictum to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:17).

Let me begin with a documentary that changed my mind about how we traditionally see and understand martial arts. It is called Reclaiming the Blade. Ostensibly, it is a documentary that examines role the sword plays in cinema; however, in doing so it reveals that the systematic martial arts that we normally only associate with Asia also existed in Europe. The difference is how these two cultures used gun powder. Whereas the East declined and even outlawed most military applications, the West embraced gun power as a way of making war. These two different approaches resulted in the continued use and lionization of martial hand-to-hand combat in the East and its increasing irrelevance in the West. Consequently, the Western martial arts were almost entirely lost.

Lest we forget, this Western tradition is ancient. The Greeks had the systemized unarmed combat style we know as Pankration. Alexander the Great took this with him as he conquered India. Shaolin Kung Fu is generally credited to an Indian Bhuddist monk often known as Boddhidharma. Thus, there is a link, though tenuous, between Western and Eastern martial arts.

In addition, if one reads the Life of St. Antony, we see the man who many consider to be the exemplar of monastics wrestling demons:

Thus tightening his hold upon himself, Antony departed to the tombs, which happened to be at a distance from the village; and having bid one of his acquaintances to bring him bread at intervals of many days, he entered one of the tombs, and the other having shut the door on him, he remained within alone. And when the enemy could not endure it . . . coming one night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. For he affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could ever have caused him such torment . . . The next day his acquaintance came bringing him the loaves. And having opened the door and seeing him lying on the ground as though dead, he lifted him up and carried him to the church in the village, and laid him upon the ground. And many of his kinsfolk and the villagers sat around Antony as round a corpse. But about midnight he came to himself and arose, and when be saw them all asleep and his comrade alone watching, he motioned with his head for him to approach, and asked him to carry him again to the tombs without waking anybody.

In a fantasy world where sin is personified and monsters roam the wilderness, it is not a big leap to imagine that monastics (who live in and wander through the wilderness) would learn to use what God had given them — their body — as a primary weapon against these foes.

Thus, I happily populate my own Euro-inspired medieval fantasy world with monks and delight as they pray and punch their way through the wilderness making life safe for civilization.

Adventuring with Antony the Great

Thus tightening his hold upon himself, Antony departed to the tombs, which happened to be at a distance from the village; and having bid one of his acquaintances to bring him bread at intervals of many days, he entered one of the tombs, and the other having shut the door on him, he remained within alone. And when the enemy could not endure it . . . coming one night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. For he affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could ever have caused him such torment . . . The next day his acquaintance came bringing him the loaves. And having opened the door and seeing him lying on the ground as though dead, he lifted him up and carried him to the church in the village, and laid him upon the ground. And many of his kinsfolk and the villagers sat around Antony as round a corpse. But about midnight he came to himself and arose, and when be saw them all asleep and his comrade alone watching, he motioned with his head for him to approach, and asked him to carry him again to the tombs without waking anybody.

Whenever I see this passage, I feel like I am reading a quote from some pulp story written at the beginning of the 20th century. Its descent into the tombs that lie outside a village on the edge of the wilderness and its depiction of combat against demons never fails to inspires me. It makes the inner role-player in me want to take out my OD&D books, roll up a character, hire some henchmen and go exploring underground in search of the unknown.

I am not the only one that the story of Antony as inspired. In fact, it inspired an entire generation. However, that generation lived 1700 years ago and included the likes of St. Augustine of Hippo. This account of delving inside a tomb in order to take on demons in mortal combat is the Life of St. Antony by St. Athanasius the Great. It was read all over the Christian world and was translated from its original Greek into several languages, including the Latin that Augustine read. It sparked an explosion of monastic activity in the 4th century that is still with us today. Interestingly, the work is timeless and I've seen it inspire those of the 21st century just as much as it did those in the 4th.

I wanted to share this excerpt with you to demonstrate how easily the idea of the monk going into the wilderness to combat demons translates to D&D. Anthony is engaged in an activity that many dungeon delving D&D parties have done over the years. It is why I choose the monastic in the desert as a metaphor for a D&D campaign. It is a classic struggle between the forces of Chaos and the forces of Law. It also demonstrates that the sandbox campaign can work beautifully in the context of a Christian or monotheistic backdrop.