Gemathustra and the Gourd situation
Dang it, I knew I shouldn't have picked a fight with somebody who had Skill Focus (horticulture) and the Persuasive feat!
About balancing the slow-casting magic users:
One idea that sort of got investigated in the 2nd edition was to give all Chinese or Japanese or Asian (what have you) characters the "martial arts unarmed combat" table instead of the "punching and wrestling" unarmed combat table to use. This assumes that in Asia, martial arts-inspired exercises would be common.
Something like that could be done for an arcane spellcasting class. In fact, you could probably get away with doing that for cleric and arcane, if you agree that both should have longer-casting, ritualized magic. We'd have to work out how to tie that in with monk classes, though, because you could multiclass and then that would become tricky. (Perhaps the unarmed attack bonuses and damage dice simply stack?)
I didn't like how the cleric and mage in the Western style campaigns have so few skill points. That could be remedied for Eastern style campaigns to give them more of an edge as multi-talented characters, to counterbalance a slow-casting campaign.
It's possible that an Asianloft setting, clerics and wizards would have greater abilities to lay potent curses, similar to the Ravenloft Vistani.
Most would probably take a level or two in psionicist, to keep a handful of immediate-use powers available.
And now, here's the very tongue-in-cheek profile for
the mystical Shi Tie Shou, the "Iron Eating Beast" of the Bamboo Forests:
a.k.a. Shuangqi Xiong (Two-spirited bear), Daxiongmao (Large bearcat), Mengshi shou (Beast of Prey)
Considerable controversy surrounds this beast. Scholars and academicians around the Hua empire have tried to categorize it, and have filed it under a leopard, a bear, a cat, a dog, and even a raccoon. The various names through the ages reflect this. The animal is most often found in bamboo forests and has a fearsome reputation for ferocity. The herdsmen of the Darta highlands have their own (non-Hua) word for the creature:
panda, which means "heel-handed", referring perhaps to the creature's six-fingered hand. The other Hua academicians laugh at that name and say it will never catch on, except perhaps with foolish foreigners who don't know any better.
Practitioners of the Shuangqi Jiao philosophy revere this creature, as it resembles their own yin-yang symbol when it's curled up asleep (or sometimes when just sulking).
It is uncertain whether this creature is unique or whether there are more of them. It has only been documented on a few occasions.
Possible powers: Adept at climbing and swimming. Can sunder with its bite attack, which is exceptionally strong. Alignment of true neutral or chaotic neutral suggested.
Attitude depends on time of day. During daytime, it is suffused with positive energy and becomes very active, leaping gallantly from tree to tree in its neverending search for hapless prey to rend and otherwise terrorize (or so the legends say). Locals tell of the beast dropping down onto its enemies and crushing them with its attacks.
During the daytime, its attacks deal more damage and it fights ferociously, using what appears to be a form of martial arts (or at least human monks have devised a style after this creature's example). One legend tells of a devastating quasi-magical attack that drags its foes into an alternate plane briefly before dealing massive damage (see below).
However, its positive planar energy also allows it to heal living creatures if it sees the need to do so. The use of this power usually means the creature has to lean in and nuzzle the target, which then feels healed and reinvigorated. The creature has been seen nuzzling near-dead forest creatures, giving them the strength they need to rise up and scurry away.
During this stage, it is said that wherever its six-fingered paws touch, flowers and forest greens will shoot up briefly, and then when it moves on, they wither and die.
At night, when the sky is dark, the creature is a malevolent carrier of negative planar energy. It acquires darkvision and is said to be able to shadowwalk, although this remains unconfirmed. It loses the ability to climb trees because it would wither them - everything it touches gains negative energy levels. In this incarnation, it is able to walk on the surface of water, and it can even become ethereal and blink from place to place.
During the night, the creature gains the "
Raging Bearcat" special attack, which is an unusual ranged grapple. The creature must be able to see an enemy and spend some time observing its ethereal shadow. Then it simultaneously blinks towards the enemy and shifts into ethereal, grabbing the enemy's ethereal shadow and dragging it into and out of the ethereal plane quickly. This spiritual disruption is intensely damaging to the target, and coupled with the creature's level-draining ability, more often than not kills a target outright.
In the one supposed eyewitness reporting of this event, the creature appeared to stand upright for a split second, while ethereal motes collected in its eyes, and then appeared to "slide" rapidly towards its opponent (leaving realtime shadows behind it) and grab it. The pair "strobe-flickered" in and out of visibility, with the creature rending and tearing, and ending with the final blink into existence, where the target lay crumpled on the floor and the creature stood above it with arms raised to the sky. This eyewitness even saw the word "Tian" (Hua Zhengti for "heaven") scrawled on the beast's back.
The Nürfan sharpshooter gunman and martial artist, Beiying, once tried to kill this creature, in a complicated plot that involved a monk serving the Emperor, a minor tribal prince, and sentient oversized forest animals that had adopted a female human child. At the end of a morally ambiguous adventure that questioned the moral justifications for ethically aberrant behavior, Beiying found and shot the creature. The first shot went through the creature's braincase, causing it to start sinking into the water that it was walking on. The second shot hit the creature's neck. Undeterred, the creature recollected itself and continued walking across the water and reached the other shore, where it drained the life from a giant wolf and boar to replenish itself and turned towards Beiying.
Beiying decided at that point to make himself scarce.
Another eyewitness report states that If the creature should ever come into contact with hot water, it will be unwillingly transformed into a grumpy middle-aged male human being. This has not been verified, but if true it's easy to imagine that the creature does not enjoy this and will do everything in its power to change back, which requires cold water.
The creature also carries around a smaller, reddish creature on its back which also resembles a cross between a bear and a raccoon. This creature appears to be able to speak in broken human tongues, and the pair of them have occasionally appeared along mountain passes to shake down travellers for gifts of fruit and other foods.
(Apologies are necessary for the satirical references to, amongst other things,
Ranma 1/2,
Street Fighter, and
Princess Mononoke. I figure if the Japanese are going to sneak over to China and steal their kanji one by one over the course of centuries of coastal raiding, then the theft of a few Japanese cultural icons for a Chinese animal should be mere equilibrium
)