Progression Monk… A fantasy scrap worth visiting…
I have a lot of story ideas. A lot, a lot. I won’t ever write most of them, so I might as well tell you about the small sparks of imagination I had with these strange fantasy ideas that will probably never come to be. This is the “Fantasy Scraps” blog series.
In July 2021, I visited the magical alien landscape of Hotokegaura. A fantastic little spot anyone should visit if they come to Japan, especially if you can go by ferry like I did!
But, along the way back from Hotokegaura, I was struck by a sort of sense of beautiful isolation… And a new story idea:
Strange fantasy and maybe LitRPG idea called “The Progression Monk”:
A monk or some other character travels across the entire world, inspired by Hotokegaura, and must visit all these shrines, big and small, and appease every single deity so they can gain the power to save the world in progression fantasy style. They also have a curse that prevents them from dealing any violence to a human (or glossal or whatever the term is in this world); they cannot fight back in any way that will directly or indirectly harm their foes, who are many.
At the time, I was hard at work on Her Golemancer Girlfriend, and feeling the Web Fiction Woes as well. So, I was definitely never going to work on this random Progression Monk idea. And there wasn’t anything else I could incorporate the idea into, either. Maybe Systemless, but that’s too silly for it.
LitRPG stories intrigue me, but seemingly exclusively when they subvert the genre standards. Progression Monk would have a complex system, a really cool world, and, importantly, no combat. There’d be action scenes, but with a protagonist who cannot fight, it’d be so much more interesting to me. The exploration of religious devotion in a super-polytheistic fantasy world with hundreds of gods and countless hidden shrines… It’s just so cool!
I love little twists like that, whether in games or stories, and I would love to read this kind of story. Sadly, I’ll probably never write it myself.
But you can, if you want, dear reader. Just as long as you tell me about it so I can read it, you can definitely take this scrap!
