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grailfinders · 1 month ago

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Grailfinders #349: Kyokutei Bakin

today on grailfinders we’re makinig Kyokutei Bakin, whom I swear we did already but clearly not! like, I have their character sheet already to go, and I swear I remember writing this already, but that’s not gonna stop me from doing it again!

bakin’s a Creation Bard to make a big ol’ doggo (or several smaller ones), as well as a bit of a Paladin for the v fance glowy sword attacks in her final ascension.

check out her build breakdown below the cut, or her character sheet over here!

next up: disaster lesbiab frfr final FINAL .exe

ancestry n background

bakin (bacon to her friends) was a human, but now she has that dog in her, so she’s a Kalashtar bc that dog has that god in it. that gives her +2 charisma n +1 constitution, plus a dual mind for advantage on all wisdom saves! if thats not enough u can set up a mind link with another creature, letting you two speak telepathically for an hour, but only to one creature at a time, this isn’t four swords adventure.

you’re severed from dreams too, so you have to sleep but you’re immune to magical stuff that messes with dreams. which is like, one spell. idk why they needed to make this a whole thing.

also ur a guild artisan, which is pretty obvious. that gives you proficiency with insight and persuasion!

ability scores!

charisma is your highest score. it’s how good you write, how strong your dogs are, and your connection to godliness. after that is dexterity! you aren’t super muscley, so I assume you’re using lighter weapons. I mean ur literally using light weapons eventually but u know what I mean. after that is constitution. you gotta be able to make those all-nighters if you want your stuff written on time, duh. after that is strength bc we can’t let it get too low if we wanna multiclass, so your intelligence and wisdom aren’t that great. writing conventions several centuries ago probably weren’t that great, and you did kinda become evil for a bit in your intro event.

class levels

1. bard 1: first level bards get all sorts of skills, like performance, arcana, and nature! you’re a writer, a god, and a dog. makes sense. also you’re good with Dexterity and Charisma saves.

you also get bardic inspiration which you can throw out to people as a bonus action, adding a d6 to one of their attack rolls or skill checks. you can do this Charisma Modifier times per day.

but you also get spells! you can cast ‘em using your charisma, and you get all sorts. message for the chaldea-standard commlink, vicious mockery, charm person, and heroism are all alterations you can make to friends or enemies by using their true names, weakening their saves, making them friendly, or making them braver, respectively.

2. bard 2: at second level you get another true name nonsense spell, command. they’re only one-word commands, but at least now your dogs will know how to sit, stay, shake, etc.

you’re also a Jack of All Trades now, adding half your proficiency bonus to any skill check you’re not proficient in. you also get a song of rest for like an extra d6 of healing during short rests, but don’t expect that to scale well.

3. Bard 3: at level three, you graduate from the College of Creation, adding a Mote of Potential to your inspirations. if your friend uses their die on a check, they can roll two and pick the better. if they use it to attack, they deal that much damage to nearby creatures as well. if they use it on a save, they get temporary HP too!

but even better, you can now perform a Performance of Creation, letting you make a medium or smaller object of your choosing once a day. look, when you have eight of them dog treats get expensive.

speaking of, you can cast Animal Messenger now, turning one animal… into a messenger. I know, it was impossible to tell from the title.

oh right, third level bards also get Expertise in two skills, doubling your proficiency in Performance and Nature.

4. Bard 4: at fourth level use your first Ability Score Improvement to round out your Charisma and bump up your Strength so we can multiclass later. you can also cast Friends now for more true name shenanigans, or cast Locate Object to.. you get the idea. but at least now you can track down your puppies.

5. Bard 5: fifth level’s the best level for bard, giving you a bigger inspiration die, as well as making you a Font of Inspiration so your inspiration recharges on short rests instead of long ones.

finally, you get the spiciest true-name shenanigan of all, Bestow Curse. it can do literally anything as long as it’s bad for the target and your DM says it vibes with the spell slot you spent.

6. Bard 6: at sixth level you can use countercharm, but that’s bad. Animating Performance is good though, letting you turn any object you see into a dancing object. this way you can write up a dog statue, then make it an actual dog. we’ll get a much less jank dog to ride later, but speed beats ease of use today.

you also get a little Lesser Restoration in your life, because Bakin is yet another servant with debuff immunity tacked onto a skill.

7. Paladin 1: at first level, paladins can use Divine Sense to sense good and evil things like, say, mystical beads of purity or whatever the hell you put on those collars. you can also Lay on Hands to restore HP equal to five times your paladin level, or you can use five points of healing to cure a disease or poison.

8. Paladin 2: second level paladins get first level spells! you still use charisma to cast, but now you can prepare new spells every time you rest. your spell slots are also a bit weird now, check your phb for all of that.

with the new spell list, you can use all sorts of spells for those eight benevolences, like Bless for extra HP, Divine Favor for more damage, Shield of Faith for stronger AC, or Protection from Evil and Good to prevent possessions and the like.

or you can use your spell slots on Divine Smites, adding 2d8 radiant damage for first level spells, plus an extra die of damage for every level above that, up to a max of 5d8.

and of course you get a Fighting Style. as a Blessed Warrior, you can use Word of Radiance to write so good it hurts people or Guidance to help yourself (the old guy) around the house.

9. Bard 7: seventh level bards get fourth level spells, like Freedom of Movement. gods go where they want, dogs go where they want, so a doggod’s gotta be free to do whatever, right?

10. Bard 8: max out your Charisma, and get Charm Monster to charm that monstrous dog. we’re almost at the non-jank dogs I promise.

11. Bard 9: ninth level bard, fifth level spells. Skill Empowerment lets you give expertise to someone who’s merely proficient in a skill. writing tips from a famous author can usually be pretty enlightening.

also song of rest is better but I doubt 1d8’s changing any fights by now.

12. Bard 10: tenth level bards get d10s for inspiration, as well as another round of Expertise in Insight and Arcana. you also get to cast True Strike, a sure sign I was running out of cantrips to pick back whenever I made this build.

more importantly, you learn some Magical Secrets this level, letting you pick up spells from any spell list! grab Flock of Familiars for all those small dogs you need, as well as Find Steed for the big’un. it’s a shame the dogs showed up this late in the build, but when have dogs ever come in when you called for them?

13. Bard 11: we called the paladin spells eight benevolences, but we only really got four. well, I think your new spell Heroes’ Feast more than makes up the difference. everyone who sits down to eat get extra HP, advantage on wisdom saves, become immune to poison and fright, and get cured of all diseases and poisons affecting them. officially it’s food, but you could always reflavor it into a book club.

14. Bard 12: now that we finally have a mount, we can get Mounted Combatant. with this, you get advantage on attacking anything smaller than your mount, you can take hits for your good boy when he gets targeted, and he has evasion while you ride him, so aoe attacks won’t him hurt nearly as much. you’re still out of luck though.

15. Bard 13: song of rest’s better again but fuck that, you can cast Mordenkainen’s Sword. it can’t use smites, but it does 3d10 damage every swing and you don’t even have to touch it to kill people with it, it’s so sick.

16. Bard 14: with our last college bonus Creative Crescendo, you can create multiple objects at once, up to five at a time. only one of those items can be bigger than small sized, but that still means you can make collars for more than half your dog swarm at a time now.

you also get another round of magical secrets- Tasha’s Otherworldly Guise lets you go full-goddess, a feat few can ever manage, and Locate Creature lets you track dogs directly, even if their chip’s been stolen.

17. Bard 15: fifteenth level bards have d12s for inspiration, and you can Teleport now to finally move on to the next island. yes, we’ve been stuck on the first part of your even for fifteen levels- I’m sure that would be boring in D&D, but that’s another reason to be happy things don’t translate 1 to 1 when swapping games.

18. Bard 16: use our last ASI to bump up your Dexterity for better AC and more accurate sword swings. when you’re not using a magic sword, anyway.

19. Bard 17: yeah song of rest but also ninth level spell slots! with Foresight, we get the ultimate benevolence- whoever you hit with this spell can’t be surprised and gets advantage on all attacks, checks, and saves, plus attacking creatures always have disadvantage for up to eight hours. always go full godmode, it’s awesome.

20. Bard 18: our last level of bard grants even more Magical Secrets. Geas uses someone’s true name to force them to act according to your will, or at least avoid something you tell them not to do. Blade of Disaster is an even cooler magical sword to do your noble phantasm justice. it deals 4d12 damage a hit, crits three times as often with super damaging crits, and it makes two attacks a turn. it slices, dices, and even juliennes fries.

Pros & Cons

Pros:

Bards and paladins are both great at supporting allies- sticking the two together rarely goes wrong in that regard. add in the fact we have some of the strongest buffs in the game, and any party would be happy to have you.

Like all bards, Bakin’s got sick skills, with ways to improve them even further if needed. you’ll excel at just about anything you want to do outside of combat.

with a 3d printer at your command, plus all sorts of mind-controlled and created minions, you’ll have no shortage of ways to tackle whatever problems you face in your adventures. yeah, the bard encourages you to play creatively, go figure.

Cons:

at lot of your buffs, as well as your puppy horde, require concentration to work. not only does this limit the amount of power you can wield at any one point, but your constitution isn’t great either, so there’s a decent chance you might cast a spell just to waste it the next time you get slapped.

mounts and minions aren’t good in direct fights, so you kind of have to play creatively to get use out of them. thank goodness you have all that magical sword stuff for head-on combat, right?

oh yeah your combat stats suck. your strongest non-magical attack has a +3 to hit, and you don’t really have the HP or AC to get into melee range all that often unless you want to get split into eight pieces too. you can pump out serious damage with mordenkainen’s sword, blade of disaster, and your smites, but it’s a high-risk, high-reward kind of fighting.

#fgo #fate grand order #D&D 5e #DND #kyokutei bakin #bard #paladin

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ryin-silverfish · 2 months ago

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Keisei Suikoden: Genderbent Water Margins

This is probably Part 2 of the "Obscure Vernacular Novels Spotlight" series. Dunno if there's gonna be a Part 3, because most obscure novels stay obscure for a reason. Which is often formulaic boredom. And I'm only picking out the fun ones.

(Also, my main interest is still Ming-Qing vernacular novels, but since I'm doing a final project about Keisei Suikoden for this semester's class, I may as well use the post as Draft 0.)

...

"Is this the Edo Japan equivalent of FGO making historical figures and deities into anime girls?" I thought, when I first came across a Chinese summary of the novel several years ago.

Then I learned that the author, Kyokutei Bakin, has indeed appeared in FGO as an anime girl.

As the title suggests, this fan novel of Water Margins has made all the male 108 heroes into heroines, and the female characters into guys...but the changes go further.

Specifically, Bakin has localized the entire setting, rewriting the storyline so that it took place in Kamakura Japan instead. (Hey, it's even contemporary to Northern Song!) Kinda like how Konami's first Suikoden game put the 108 heroes into a medieval fantasy setting.

Which means:

All the 108 characters got their unique Japanese names, sometimes sharing one or two characters with their original inspirations but not always.

Daoist characters became Shinto priestesses, yamabushi, and onmyoji.

Beef dishes that appeared in the original novel were replaced with poultry and fish because Edo Japan had a ban on livestock meat.

The Genpei War and other rebellions in its aftermath were featured in the backstory of a bunch of female bandits, who belonged to defeated clans, and many of the 108 heroines were associated with the Minamoto Clan.

Almost every character got genderbent. Which means the damsels in distress from the original novel become bishonen in distress, female bandits would kidnap men and force them into marriages, etc.

The rough outline of the story goes like this: an arrogant female official, while trying to find the famous priestess Murokai (fem! Heavenly Master Zhang) in the Kumano mountains to dispel a plague, released the 108 vengeful ghosts of unmarried courtesans mentioned in the Manyoshu anthology, who reincarnated into our 108 heroines.

After a timeskip, in the capital, the Shirabyoshi dancer Kamegiku (fem! Gao Qiu) has gained the favor of Emperor Go-Toba, both of whom were real historical figures.

During his reign, women skilled in various martial arts were selected to train in the Female Warrior Training School, and after offending Kamegiku, one of the head trainers, Ayaosa (fem! Wang Jin) was forced to flee with her aging mother.

During their escape, she encountered the spunky tomboy daughter of a village chief, Fusenryu Komorode ("Komorode the Diving Dragon", fem! Shi Jin), and taught her the eighteen martial arts after defeating her in a duel...

We then got to Otatsu of Hanagara (fem! Lu Zhishen), my favorite of the genderbent characters——A plump, dark-skinned lady with a fierce temper and love for sake, able to effortlessly move a 45 kg mortar around.

She became a fugitive after she killed the mean usurer widow and salted fish vendor, Kaina, with a single punch, to save the male courtesan Yasanosuke and his mom.

Then she was made a Buddhist nun and took on the name Myotatsu, but got expelled from her first temple for acting exactly like the original Lu Zhishen: getting drunk and eating meat, fistfighting a Jizo statue outside the temple gate and bringing the entire small shrine down, and beating up the nuns who tried to stop her.

"I'm adept at explaining the nature of cause and effect: Fuck Around and Find Out." ——Myotatsu, right before rescuing the village head's pretty son from a forced marriage to the local bandit queen

The novel does have a main plot: while Kamegiku was playing the temptress in Kyoto, Hojo Masako ruled as the "Nun Shogun" in Kamakura, and had essentially usurped the Minamoto Clan by placing her son, Yoriie, under house arrest and later assassinating him.

Thus, instead of robbing Cai Jing's birthday present, the 108 heroines were kidnapping Princess Sanze, the youngest daughter of Yoriie, to protect her from the Hojo regents and restore Minamoto control.

Sadly, we don't know how the plot concludes.

Bakin had gone blind in his old age, relying entirely on his daughter-in-law to transcribe his oral accounts, and since he was focused on finishing his most famous epic novel, Chronicle of the Eight Dogs Heroes (Nanso satomi hakken-den), Keisei Suikoden had taken a backstage and is never finished.

Some highlights:

-Sakurado of Torano-o (fem! Lin Chong) got fucked over because Kamegiku wanted to take her husband for herself. Her husband, Nansei, is a pretty twink monk and one of her disciples. He's timid, delicate, and has no interest in women, but loved Sakurado platonically and was in turn supported by her, who never looked down on him.

-Fushishiba (fem! Chai Jin), a.k.a. Oritaki no Sho, is descended from a member of the Taira Clan who owed a debt to Yoritomo, and was granted various honors and titles after the war.

-fem! Chao Gai's name is Kocho, which translates literally to "Little Butterfly". It might be a pun, since Chao and Cho sound kinda similar. And yes, she did lift an entire stone pagoda and carry it to her village to protect the villagers from the local yokai.

-Fittingly enough, "Sasuno Miko Medogi" (fem! Gongsun Sheng) is an onmyoji of the Abe lineage, who can manipulate Shikigami to summon winds and clouds.

-Oohako (fem! Song Jiang) murdering male! Yan Poxi is...surprisingly cathartic, not gonna lie. For context, Yan Po was not genderbent, but she abused Oohako's generosity to try to set her up with her son, a Joruri actor named Gidakichi, in an attempt to leech off her money.

-And while she's unwittingly offering patronage to their performances out of social obligation, Gidakichi was having an affair with her assistant, Adako (fem! Zhang Wenyuan), and being a stain on her reputation.

-After a very awkward and uncomfortable night at their house and Gidakichi being a creep to her, she accidentally left a pouch containing Kocho's letter of gratitude (because she alerted them to an incoming arrest) in their bedroom.

-Gidakichi found the letter and tried to use it to blackmail her into not only approving his marriage to Adako and covering the full expense, but also giving him the 300 gold mentioned in Kocho's letter (a gift she rejected).

-At which point she finally had enough and stabbed the guy to death. As you can see, the plot beats are mostly the same, but I like it better than the original.

-Why? Because 1) Yan Po's intent to leech off their patron is made a lot more obvious, and 2) instead of Yan Poxi (understandably) having no intention of sleeping with Song Jiang due to his cold neglect, and Song Jiang getting pissed at her for that?

-The dynamic is reversed. Gidakichi had no love for Oohako, and the feeling was mutual. Yet when she was pressured into spending the night in the same room by his mom, she was the one who kept a polite distance while he tried to force himself on her.

-Takeyo (fem! Wusong) is said to be 6 ft tall, with a dignified appearance that resembled the famous Tomoe Gozen from the Tale of Heike. Before she met Oohako, though, she was also short-tempered and prone to violence.

-Because Japan doesn't have tigers, the tiger Takeyo killed was a tiger cub gifted to the local lord by emissaries from Joseon Korea, which had escaped captivity upon reaching adulthood.

-Just like Wu Song, she avenged her sister, Butayo's murder at the hands of Kiresuke (male! Pan Jinlian) the abusive freeloader husband and his mistress, Okei of Seimonya (fem! Ximen Qin).

-Not gonna lie, the original Pan Jinlian and her Plum in the Golden Vase incarnation are both fascinatingly terrible people. But, just like Gidakichi, Kiresuke managed to outdone her through sheer creep factor during his failed attempt at seducing Takeyo and pinning the blame on her.

-Bakin generally tried to tune down the gore and cannibalism in Water Margins, as well as the slaughter of innocents and random passersby. Even Rikiju (fem! Li Kui) is slighty less of a indiscriminate murderhobo, and the targets of her killing spree were limited to samurai guards.

-That said, they still killed the corrupt official Ikken (Huang Wenbing)'s entire family by setting fire to his mansion, and preserved his head in a jar of sake after Rikiju killed him.

-Instead of receiving the three divine scrolls from the Mystic Lady of the Nine Heavens, Oohako received a single scroll from Benzaiten.

-Because of the aforementioned lack of tigers in Japan, Rikiju killed 4 giant "mountain dogs", a.k.a. Japanese wolves with unusual stripe patterns on their fur, after they devoured her elderly mom.

Final Thoughts

I'm not a fan of most genderbent AUs because oftentimes, it doesn't add anything meaningful to the original premise, or alter the character personality too much to the point of losing all resemblance to their counterpart.

Keisei Suikoden, however, is a pre-modern example of a genderbent adaptation done well.

The heroines are as badass, colorful, and violent as their male counterparts, the entire premise has been localized in a manner that's both funny and interesting, and the rewrite + deletion of certain story beats have actually removed many elements of Water Margins that do not sit well with a modern audience.

Also, I'll totally play a Keisei Suikoden RPG game, if the heroine designs stay true to the novel and they aren't all made into pretty anime girls.

A two -volume English translation can be found on Amazon, together with the Chronicle of the Eight Dog Heroes. There's also a free digital scan of the original Japanese print by the Harvard-Yenching Library.

#chinese literature #water margin #outlaws of the marsh #shuihu zhuan #FGO #fate grand order #kyokutei bakin #japanese novel #genderbend #japanese literature #suikoden

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