Laughingmanlol
2022-02-19, 04:59 PM
Reach Heaven Through Alcohol
The Drunken Master / Qinggong / Serpent-Fire Adept Monk
The monk awoke with a groan. He was dressed in a peasant's outfit, the coarse sackcloth robe contrasting with the obvious magic of his belt, cloak, and headband. He got up and began the day with a series of strikes to the nearest wall, pulling his blows as he would to knock out a living target. Within a minute, one of the maneuvers met his satisfaction, every movement flowing smoothly together, and he came to a stop.
He withdrew a simple ceramic flask from the folds of his robes, removed the silver stopper and spoke a command word, then tipped it back and poured a stream of rice wine into his mouth. He didn't bother to replace the cap and the contents didn't seem to ever run out, leaving an endless stream of alcohol to pour steadily out onto the floor from the magical bottle and pool around his feet.
"This is the worst part," the man muttered. He frowned with concentration, bracing himself.
A silent bolt of lightning shot up from the base of his spine to the top of his head. Whirling disks spiraled out of nowhere at seven points along its path, each one glowing brilliantly with a different color of the rainbow. The spiritual fire of the kundalini flowed up through them, coiling like a serpent. When it reached the peak the mortal monk was crowned in golden radiance, a being of temporary divinity fully in tune with the powers of the multiverse, and a shining third eye of psychic energy opened from his forehead like a blossoming lotus.
A moment later, an imperfection in his enlightenment produced an eddy in the serpent-fire. The liquid flame of life grew turbulent, twisting in on itself and scorcing the man's internal organs, then ripped out of his gut in a burst of light. The internal explosion would have killed a lesser man.
The monk coughed blood and then burped a puff of serpent-fire. He closed his third eye, holding his hand over his heart to spread the healing energies of that chakra out through his body. Green flame flickered around the edge of his fresh wound, sealing it closed in a matter of seconds and leaving the flesh unblemished, though a ragged scorched hole remained in his cheap sackcloth robe.
To wash away the taste of blood he took another drink from the ever-pouring flask. With a wince he stepped outside to start the day, his head still aglow with divinity.
The Chakra System:
The Pathfinder chakra rules are kind of a mess.
You need to have ki and be psychic to even get started. Each round you can spend 1 ki as a swift action to open your next chakra and select a benefit from one of the previously opened ones. However, keeping the chakras open is dangerous: each round you have to make a Fortitude save to avoid burning yourself on your own spirit and a Will save to avoid being dazed by the visions they inspire. While a failed Fortitude save only does damage, a failed Will save sends you back to the start to reopen them all from the beginning. Like building a Jenga tower, it gets harder the further up you go, from DC 11 for the first chakra all the way up to DC 38 for the seventh.
Why bother? Well, the chakra effects are interesting. The first one gives early access to damage reduction, the second flight, all the way up to the last which lets you select an extra chakra just for having it open and when selected allows you to roll every d20 twice and take the highest for the turn, as if you're playing 5e and have Advantage on everything.
None of the chakras have actions listed for using their benefits when you select them. For some of them, this makes sense: the Root, Sacral, Brow, and Crown chakras are entirelty passive. The Throat chakra seems intended to require no action either, as the user simply selects a nearby foe to be disturbed by their bizarre utterances.
Both the Navel and Heart chakras appear to require active use: the Navel allows the user to make a breath attack, while the Heart allows the user to heal themselves or another with a touch. A strict interpretation would say that having the Navel or Heart selected has the benefit of giving you access to their respective abilities, each of which then require a standard action to use.
However, the Serpent-Fire Adept rules use "gain the benefits of" and "use the abilities of" interchangeably. Similarly, the Chakra Adept feat which says "you can spend a swift action to use any one of the abilities of your remaining open chakras". These imply that the use of the Navel or Heart abilties is bundled in with the swift action taken to maintain the chakras. If you can maintain the chakras without taking a swift action through chakra expertise, you can use the abilities as you're still maintaining them. If you can select multiple chakras when you maintain them, you can use both Navel and Heart without requiring additional actions. This isn't brought up in the chakra rules, so it's hard to say conclusively whether these wordings reveal designer intent or are a case of specific-trumps-general.
I lean towards the lenient interpretation, but it doesn't make that much difference to the build and I'll point out where it does become relevant.
That's enough navel-gazing! Let's see what happens if we go all-in on the chakra system.
The Build:
Drunken Master / Qinggong / Serpent-Fire Adept Monk
Aasimar (Halo, Scion of Humanity and Immortal Spark)
STR 10 DEX 10 CON 17 INT 7 WIS 16 CHA 16 (20pb)
Level
BAB
Flurry of Blows
Fort
Ref
Will
Skills
Feats and ASIs
Class Features
1
+0
-1/-1
+2
+2
+2
Acrobatics, Perception, Sense Motive
Fate's Favored, Resilient, Endurance, Improved Unarmed Strike, Chakra Initiate, Psychic Sensitivity
Flurry of Blows, AC Bonus
2
+1
+0/+0
+3
+3
+3
Acrobatics, Perception, Sense Motive
Evasion, Chakra Expertise
3
+2
+1/+1
+3
+3
+3
Acrobatics, Perception, Sense Motive
Drunken Brawler
Maneuver Training, Fast Movement, Drunken Ki
4
+3
+2/+2
+4
+4
+4
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Constitution +1
Ki Pool, Light Spirit
5
+3
+3/+3
+4
+4
+4
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Fast Drinker
Drunken Strength
6
+4
+4/+4/-1
+5
+5
+5
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Chakra Adept
7
+5
+5/+5/+0
+5
+5
+5
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Surge of Success
Linked Chakras
8
+6/+1
+6/+6/+1/+1
+6
+6
+6
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Constitution +1
Linked Chakras
9
+6/+1
+7/+7/+2/+2
+6
+6
+6
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Defiant Luck
Improved Evasion
10
+7/+2
+8/+8/+3/+3
+7
+7
+7
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Chakra Master
Chakra Mastery
11
+8/+3
+9/+9/+4/+4/-1
+7
+7
+7
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Deep Drinker
Drunken Courage
12
+9/+4
+10/+10/+5/+5/+0
+8
+8
+8
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Constitution +1
Qinggong substitution: Battlemind Link
13
+9/+4
+11/+11/+6/+6/+1
+8
+8
+8
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Critical Focus
Drunken Resilience
14
+10/+5
+12/+12/+7/+7/+2
+9
+9
+9
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
How the build "works":
At level 1 you are a terrible character. Your stats are bad, even for a monk. Even Lesser Age Resistance from the Immortal Spark racial can only do so much to squeeze extra points out, and opening your Root chakra is a lot of bookkeeping for little benefit. At least you can read auras and tell fortunes with Psychic Sensitivity?
At level 3 Drunken Brawler gives you temporary HP every time you drink, and you can use that to both fuel your Root chakra and as a buffer against the damage from failing your Fortitude saves. However, you can't keep your Root chakra open all day long because you don't have any way of healing the damage that spills over from your temp HP and a single failed Will save will close all your chakras back up again. You don't have anything else worth spending ki on yet either.
At level 4 you can open your Sacral chakra to fly, which will help you run away. First you have to spend one round opening your Root chakra and then another round opening the Sacral chakra before you can use it, so running away will have to wait for round 3 of every fight. You do have the Acrobatics ranks to get more out of fighting defensively?
At level 6 you are promoted to living blowtorch: your Navel chakra allows you to blast a 30' cone of no-save no-resistance 2d8 damage in combat. Thanks to Fast Drinker and Chakra Expertise, you can alternate between using your swift actions to spend ki on maintaining your chakras and drinking to get more ki. With the lenient interpretation you also get the rest of your normal actions each turn, while under the strict interpretation you use your standard action for the breath attack. At this point you can also keep your Root chakra open all day: the temp HP from Drunken Brawler is enough to soak all the damage from failing the Fortitude saves, and with Chakra Adept you don't have to make a Will save to maintain your chakras.
At level 8 you become significantly more functional with your Heart chakra unlocked, and you can skip straight to it with Linked Chakras at the start of the day so you only have to risk a single Will save. By now your save bonus for chakra maintenance is +19 without any items so you'll only fail on a natural 1, and at level 9 you pick up Defiant Luck to protect against that.
What kind of lame power is Heart, anyway? It's the cornerstone of this build as it provides healing, exactly what we need to counteract the self-inflicted damage from keeping all those chakras open.
Thanks to this you can keep all your chakras open at once, and use it to heal away the 4d6 damage you'll take from an internal explosion every 20 rounds on average. Not only that, you can also provide your party with unlimited out-of-combat healing to bring them back up to full within minutes after each fight, and use your unlimited uses of the Navel breath attack to melt through dungeon walls that would otherwise take an adamantine weapon to pierce.
When it comes to combat, you want to have your Sacral chakra in your out-of-combat rotation so that your fly speed will still be active for at least a round or two when combat starts, thanks to the duration extension from Light Spirit. In combat you can start to tank attacks with DR 3/- from Root and 8 temp HP every time you drink, blast with Navel now dealing 3d8 damage, and swoop in to remove harmful conditions from allies with Heart, but at the moment you can only do one of these in a round even with the lenient interpretation.
Drunken Brawler gives temporary HP which you'll want to refresh whenever they're lost, so alternating drinking and maintaing with your swift actions is a sensible approach. The tactics of when to drink get more complicated when status effects are in play and you're using the lenient interpretation: if you're at risk of being stunned or nauseated, you'll want to maintain your chakras with a swift action every turn so that if you get hit with one of those status effects you can still maintain with Chakra Expertise and select Heart to remove the effect and get your turn back.
At level 10, you can use two chakras each round for an increased ki cost, and at 11 Deep Drinker helps you meet that cost by doubling the Drunken Ki gain.
Level 14 looks pretty dead, doesn't it? Level 14 is where it all comes online. Level 14 unlocks the Crown chakra.
At this point the chakra save is now DC 38, so you can't rely on your base save and stats alone. It'll take a lucky horseshoe, +5 cloak of resistance, +6 belt of constitution, and +6 headband of charisma to achieve that reliably, but you didn't get this far to give up now.
The primary benefit is that selecting the Crown chakra lets you roll 2d20 and take the highest for every d20 roll you make. This has the greatest effects at the extremes: you need to roll a 1 on both dice to fail your chakra saves, so you'll only suffer a backlash every 40 minutes on average, and you're almost twice as likely to roll a natural 20. This ties in nicely with Surge of Success - every d20 roll you make, you've got an almost 10% chance of both getting a 20 and being able to add a +2 to another roll before the end of your next turn. You should always select the Crown chakra once it's open.
(I previously misread Surge of Success as also activating on a natural 20 for a skill roll as well, and so I'd intended to have the monk perform all sorts of 1' jumps and 180-degree flying spins to convert his fast movement into more 2d20 rolls to generate surges. Sadly he will not gain any mechanical benefits from such a performance, and will have to make do punching walls nonlethally to get a surge before attempting an important knowledge or diplomacy check.)
Now, there may come a time where you need one of the other benefits instead, such as flight or truesight. That's where the second benefit of the Crown chakra comes in: while it's open, even if you don't select it (though you always should) you can select two chakras each turn instead of just one. Should you need three chakras, you can spend more ki to do so using Chakra Master.
How should you use your all-day temporary divinity from having the Crown chakra open? This is the biggest problem with the build: you've only got the options provided by 14 chained monk levels, and your ability scores are bad for combat. Fortunately, there are two ways you can make productive use of the Crown chakra:
First, at level 12 you can pick up the Battlemind Link ki power, and you of course have unlimited ki from your drinking so you can keep it active all day. Pick whichever character in your party has a functional DPS build, attack the same targets as them, and you both get to pick the highest dice out of 3d20 for all your initiative and attack rolls.
Second, by level 14 your Wealth By Level can accommodate a +1 Vorpal temple sword. You'll be rolling 20s to hit about 10% of the time, 14% with Battlemind Link active, and with Flurry of Blows you can make a lot of attacks with it. The main issue here is confirming the criticals.
The unlimited ki rewards continuing as a monk long enough to pick up the Drunken Master's Firewater Breath and some more Qinggong monk spell-like abilities fueled by ki.
Blood Crow Strike allows unarmed strikes to be fired off out to medium range, but the 1 round casting time makes it too much like Dragonball: you've got to charge up for one full pass through the initiative order before it comes into effect before the start of your next turn. It's also incompatible with the Vorpal temple sword.
Cold Ice Strike provides some more blasting in the levels prior to Firewater Breath, but while you've got the mobility to make the most of the Line area the swift action casting time is a detriment.
Ki Shout is probably my preferred option. It's close range and limited to living creatures, but it stuns on a failed save and deals a good amount of sonic damage even on a pass. Combined with the Navel chakra breath attack, you can provide reliable damage all day long while using flight and fast movement to stay out of range yourself.
Or you can go Sonic Thrust and enter the dungeon pushing a wagonload of Butchering Axes in front of you.
Saves:
Strong saves are a necessity for dealing with chakra. Buy the best cloak of resistance you can afford and a lucky horseshoe when you hit +3 on the cloak.
Stats:
You get +CHA to your chakra saves, so you'll benefit from a +CON belt and a +CHA headband.
Alcohol:
There are a few different items in Pathfinder that offer infinite alcohol, but the best is the Flask of Endless Sake. With a single command word the flask can be left pouring out one gallon of sake per round, forever. As an added bonus, you can then drink the sake out of a tankard for maximum RAW compliance, in the unlikely case that "a tankard of ale or strong alcohol" should be parsed as "a tankard of (ale or strong alcohol)".
The Drinking Horn of Bottomless Valor is a more expensive option that appears to require a standard-action command to fill with mead for each drink, and other items usually offer only a 1/day creation of alcohol. For an item that only provides a steady stream of alcohol, I'd suggest basing the price on taking the Tengu Drinking Jug, swapping Purify Food or Drink with Tears to Wine or Enhance Water, and adding the unlimited water effect of the Decanter of Endless Water. I'd ballpark that around 10000gp.
Drunken Brawler gives a +2 alchemical bonus to fortitude and will saves; it also gives a -2 penalty to reflex saves for 1 hour. That penalty stacks every time you take a drink.
One hour after you start drinking and for the rest of the adventuring day, you'll be staggering around with at least a -300 penalty to all reflex saves, and that's assuming you're only drinking every 4th round to provide the drunken ki fuelling your chakras.
Surprisingly, rolling in the negative hundreds for your Reflex saves isn't that bad, as much as it sounds like reverse optimization. At level 9 you gain Improved Evasion, so for most reflex saves against damaging effects you'll be taking half damage.
The Pathfinder drinking rules allow you to drink a number of beverages up to 1 + double constitution modifier, with any excess drinks causing you to become sickened for 1 hour per additional drink. That's not a problem for this build's day-drinking: each time you heal yourself with the power of Heart, you can also remove the sickened condition at the same time.
In combat it's slightly more tricky as you'll be sickened each time you regain drunken ki. With the lenient interpretation, you just need to select Heart on that turn with Chakra Expertise. As events on your turn happen in whichever order you prefer if not otherwise specified, you can remove the condition immediately before it has any effect. With the strict interpretation, you'll probably drink in combat less and save it for turns where you're spending your standard action to heal yourself.
This build probably qualifies as regular abuse of alcohol, which means that addiction is also a risk. The effects of moderate addiction are a -2 penalty to Constitution and Strength along with an inability to heal the ability damage from the drug, which would seem to be a problem. However, addiction is a disease and so can be cured with a single spell or ignored with a Periapt of Health, your fortitude saves are already being optimized for, and all penalties of the addiction are removed for as long as you're enjoying the benefit of the next dose.
Level 3 gives you unlimited Drunken Ki and Chakra Expertise, which are all you need to keep your chakras open all day from a ki management perspective.
When you hit character level 8, you can take Chakra Adept and avoid having to make any more Will saves once you've got all your chakras open, and the Heart ability covers the damage from the occasional Fortitude failures, also providing unlimited out-of-combat healing. The previous level also provides Linked Chakras, so you can open all of your chakras at once. If you intend to have your chakras online all day and don't mind being locked into using all your swift actions on maintaining them and drinking to fuel them, level 8 is probably as far as you need to go.
Against foes that can be meaningfully decapitated, if you could apply Snake Sidewind to a flurry of vorpal attacks, you could load up on attack penalties like fighting defensively as you only need to roll a 20 and then confirm the crit with Sense Motive. The best option for this appears to be a 3-level dip in Varisian Free-Style Fighter to pick up Ascetic Style and the ability to enter both stances with a move action, as this build is already starved for swift actions.
The chakra system provides a lot of saving throws, but it would be nice to find some way to roll even more to get even more surges of success. Arguably, every drink of alcohol qualifies as a dose of a drug and so demands a saving throw against addiction. This might be a rare build that wouldn't be actively harmed by a dip into Brute Vigilante 1, Wild Rager Barbarian 1, Oozemorph Shifter 1, or Alchemist Ragechemist 2, although the former pair have incompatible alignments.
Sources:
Advanced Player's Guide: Drunken Master, Resilient, Fast Drinker, Deep Drinker
Advanced Race Guide: Aasimar and alternate racial traits, Defiant Luck, Surge of Success
GameMastery Guide: Addiction and Drinking rules
Inner Sea Gods: Drunken Brawler
Occult Adventures: Chakras, Occult Skill Unlocks, Lucky Horseshoe
Pathfinder #52: Flask of Endless Sake
Occult Origins: Serpent-Fire Adept
Ultimate Campaign: Fate's Favored
Ultimate Magic: Qinggong Monk
The Drunken Master / Qinggong / Serpent-Fire Adept Monk
The monk awoke with a groan. He was dressed in a peasant's outfit, the coarse sackcloth robe contrasting with the obvious magic of his belt, cloak, and headband. He got up and began the day with a series of strikes to the nearest wall, pulling his blows as he would to knock out a living target. Within a minute, one of the maneuvers met his satisfaction, every movement flowing smoothly together, and he came to a stop.
He withdrew a simple ceramic flask from the folds of his robes, removed the silver stopper and spoke a command word, then tipped it back and poured a stream of rice wine into his mouth. He didn't bother to replace the cap and the contents didn't seem to ever run out, leaving an endless stream of alcohol to pour steadily out onto the floor from the magical bottle and pool around his feet.
"This is the worst part," the man muttered. He frowned with concentration, bracing himself.
A silent bolt of lightning shot up from the base of his spine to the top of his head. Whirling disks spiraled out of nowhere at seven points along its path, each one glowing brilliantly with a different color of the rainbow. The spiritual fire of the kundalini flowed up through them, coiling like a serpent. When it reached the peak the mortal monk was crowned in golden radiance, a being of temporary divinity fully in tune with the powers of the multiverse, and a shining third eye of psychic energy opened from his forehead like a blossoming lotus.
A moment later, an imperfection in his enlightenment produced an eddy in the serpent-fire. The liquid flame of life grew turbulent, twisting in on itself and scorcing the man's internal organs, then ripped out of his gut in a burst of light. The internal explosion would have killed a lesser man.
The monk coughed blood and then burped a puff of serpent-fire. He closed his third eye, holding his hand over his heart to spread the healing energies of that chakra out through his body. Green flame flickered around the edge of his fresh wound, sealing it closed in a matter of seconds and leaving the flesh unblemished, though a ragged scorched hole remained in his cheap sackcloth robe.
To wash away the taste of blood he took another drink from the ever-pouring flask. With a wince he stepped outside to start the day, his head still aglow with divinity.
The Chakra System:
The Pathfinder chakra rules are kind of a mess.
You need to have ki and be psychic to even get started. Each round you can spend 1 ki as a swift action to open your next chakra and select a benefit from one of the previously opened ones. However, keeping the chakras open is dangerous: each round you have to make a Fortitude save to avoid burning yourself on your own spirit and a Will save to avoid being dazed by the visions they inspire. While a failed Fortitude save only does damage, a failed Will save sends you back to the start to reopen them all from the beginning. Like building a Jenga tower, it gets harder the further up you go, from DC 11 for the first chakra all the way up to DC 38 for the seventh.
Why bother? Well, the chakra effects are interesting. The first one gives early access to damage reduction, the second flight, all the way up to the last which lets you select an extra chakra just for having it open and when selected allows you to roll every d20 twice and take the highest for the turn, as if you're playing 5e and have Advantage on everything.
None of the chakras have actions listed for using their benefits when you select them. For some of them, this makes sense: the Root, Sacral, Brow, and Crown chakras are entirelty passive. The Throat chakra seems intended to require no action either, as the user simply selects a nearby foe to be disturbed by their bizarre utterances.
Both the Navel and Heart chakras appear to require active use: the Navel allows the user to make a breath attack, while the Heart allows the user to heal themselves or another with a touch. A strict interpretation would say that having the Navel or Heart selected has the benefit of giving you access to their respective abilities, each of which then require a standard action to use.
However, the Serpent-Fire Adept rules use "gain the benefits of" and "use the abilities of" interchangeably. Similarly, the Chakra Adept feat which says "you can spend a swift action to use any one of the abilities of your remaining open chakras". These imply that the use of the Navel or Heart abilties is bundled in with the swift action taken to maintain the chakras. If you can maintain the chakras without taking a swift action through chakra expertise, you can use the abilities as you're still maintaining them. If you can select multiple chakras when you maintain them, you can use both Navel and Heart without requiring additional actions. This isn't brought up in the chakra rules, so it's hard to say conclusively whether these wordings reveal designer intent or are a case of specific-trumps-general.
I lean towards the lenient interpretation, but it doesn't make that much difference to the build and I'll point out where it does become relevant.
That's enough navel-gazing! Let's see what happens if we go all-in on the chakra system.
The Build:
Drunken Master / Qinggong / Serpent-Fire Adept Monk
Aasimar (Halo, Scion of Humanity and Immortal Spark)
STR 10 DEX 10 CON 17 INT 7 WIS 16 CHA 16 (20pb)
Level
BAB
Flurry of Blows
Fort
Ref
Will
Skills
Feats and ASIs
Class Features
1
+0
-1/-1
+2
+2
+2
Acrobatics, Perception, Sense Motive
Fate's Favored, Resilient, Endurance, Improved Unarmed Strike, Chakra Initiate, Psychic Sensitivity
Flurry of Blows, AC Bonus
2
+1
+0/+0
+3
+3
+3
Acrobatics, Perception, Sense Motive
Evasion, Chakra Expertise
3
+2
+1/+1
+3
+3
+3
Acrobatics, Perception, Sense Motive
Drunken Brawler
Maneuver Training, Fast Movement, Drunken Ki
4
+3
+2/+2
+4
+4
+4
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Constitution +1
Ki Pool, Light Spirit
5
+3
+3/+3
+4
+4
+4
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Fast Drinker
Drunken Strength
6
+4
+4/+4/-1
+5
+5
+5
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Chakra Adept
7
+5
+5/+5/+0
+5
+5
+5
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Surge of Success
Linked Chakras
8
+6/+1
+6/+6/+1/+1
+6
+6
+6
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Constitution +1
Linked Chakras
9
+6/+1
+7/+7/+2/+2
+6
+6
+6
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Defiant Luck
Improved Evasion
10
+7/+2
+8/+8/+3/+3
+7
+7
+7
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Chakra Master
Chakra Mastery
11
+8/+3
+9/+9/+4/+4/-1
+7
+7
+7
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Deep Drinker
Drunken Courage
12
+9/+4
+10/+10/+5/+5/+0
+8
+8
+8
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Constitution +1
Qinggong substitution: Battlemind Link
13
+9/+4
+11/+11/+6/+6/+1
+8
+8
+8
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
Critical Focus
Drunken Resilience
14
+10/+5
+12/+12/+7/+7/+2
+9
+9
+9
Fly, Perception, Sense Motive
How the build "works":
At level 1 you are a terrible character. Your stats are bad, even for a monk. Even Lesser Age Resistance from the Immortal Spark racial can only do so much to squeeze extra points out, and opening your Root chakra is a lot of bookkeeping for little benefit. At least you can read auras and tell fortunes with Psychic Sensitivity?
At level 3 Drunken Brawler gives you temporary HP every time you drink, and you can use that to both fuel your Root chakra and as a buffer against the damage from failing your Fortitude saves. However, you can't keep your Root chakra open all day long because you don't have any way of healing the damage that spills over from your temp HP and a single failed Will save will close all your chakras back up again. You don't have anything else worth spending ki on yet either.
At level 4 you can open your Sacral chakra to fly, which will help you run away. First you have to spend one round opening your Root chakra and then another round opening the Sacral chakra before you can use it, so running away will have to wait for round 3 of every fight. You do have the Acrobatics ranks to get more out of fighting defensively?
At level 6 you are promoted to living blowtorch: your Navel chakra allows you to blast a 30' cone of no-save no-resistance 2d8 damage in combat. Thanks to Fast Drinker and Chakra Expertise, you can alternate between using your swift actions to spend ki on maintaining your chakras and drinking to get more ki. With the lenient interpretation you also get the rest of your normal actions each turn, while under the strict interpretation you use your standard action for the breath attack. At this point you can also keep your Root chakra open all day: the temp HP from Drunken Brawler is enough to soak all the damage from failing the Fortitude saves, and with Chakra Adept you don't have to make a Will save to maintain your chakras.
At level 8 you become significantly more functional with your Heart chakra unlocked, and you can skip straight to it with Linked Chakras at the start of the day so you only have to risk a single Will save. By now your save bonus for chakra maintenance is +19 without any items so you'll only fail on a natural 1, and at level 9 you pick up Defiant Luck to protect against that.
What kind of lame power is Heart, anyway? It's the cornerstone of this build as it provides healing, exactly what we need to counteract the self-inflicted damage from keeping all those chakras open.
Thanks to this you can keep all your chakras open at once, and use it to heal away the 4d6 damage you'll take from an internal explosion every 20 rounds on average. Not only that, you can also provide your party with unlimited out-of-combat healing to bring them back up to full within minutes after each fight, and use your unlimited uses of the Navel breath attack to melt through dungeon walls that would otherwise take an adamantine weapon to pierce.
When it comes to combat, you want to have your Sacral chakra in your out-of-combat rotation so that your fly speed will still be active for at least a round or two when combat starts, thanks to the duration extension from Light Spirit. In combat you can start to tank attacks with DR 3/- from Root and 8 temp HP every time you drink, blast with Navel now dealing 3d8 damage, and swoop in to remove harmful conditions from allies with Heart, but at the moment you can only do one of these in a round even with the lenient interpretation.
Drunken Brawler gives temporary HP which you'll want to refresh whenever they're lost, so alternating drinking and maintaing with your swift actions is a sensible approach. The tactics of when to drink get more complicated when status effects are in play and you're using the lenient interpretation: if you're at risk of being stunned or nauseated, you'll want to maintain your chakras with a swift action every turn so that if you get hit with one of those status effects you can still maintain with Chakra Expertise and select Heart to remove the effect and get your turn back.
At level 10, you can use two chakras each round for an increased ki cost, and at 11 Deep Drinker helps you meet that cost by doubling the Drunken Ki gain.
Level 14 looks pretty dead, doesn't it? Level 14 is where it all comes online. Level 14 unlocks the Crown chakra.
At this point the chakra save is now DC 38, so you can't rely on your base save and stats alone. It'll take a lucky horseshoe, +5 cloak of resistance, +6 belt of constitution, and +6 headband of charisma to achieve that reliably, but you didn't get this far to give up now.
The primary benefit is that selecting the Crown chakra lets you roll 2d20 and take the highest for every d20 roll you make. This has the greatest effects at the extremes: you need to roll a 1 on both dice to fail your chakra saves, so you'll only suffer a backlash every 40 minutes on average, and you're almost twice as likely to roll a natural 20. This ties in nicely with Surge of Success - every d20 roll you make, you've got an almost 10% chance of both getting a 20 and being able to add a +2 to another roll before the end of your next turn. You should always select the Crown chakra once it's open.
(I previously misread Surge of Success as also activating on a natural 20 for a skill roll as well, and so I'd intended to have the monk perform all sorts of 1' jumps and 180-degree flying spins to convert his fast movement into more 2d20 rolls to generate surges. Sadly he will not gain any mechanical benefits from such a performance, and will have to make do punching walls nonlethally to get a surge before attempting an important knowledge or diplomacy check.)
Now, there may come a time where you need one of the other benefits instead, such as flight or truesight. That's where the second benefit of the Crown chakra comes in: while it's open, even if you don't select it (though you always should) you can select two chakras each turn instead of just one. Should you need three chakras, you can spend more ki to do so using Chakra Master.
How should you use your all-day temporary divinity from having the Crown chakra open? This is the biggest problem with the build: you've only got the options provided by 14 chained monk levels, and your ability scores are bad for combat. Fortunately, there are two ways you can make productive use of the Crown chakra:
First, at level 12 you can pick up the Battlemind Link ki power, and you of course have unlimited ki from your drinking so you can keep it active all day. Pick whichever character in your party has a functional DPS build, attack the same targets as them, and you both get to pick the highest dice out of 3d20 for all your initiative and attack rolls.
Second, by level 14 your Wealth By Level can accommodate a +1 Vorpal temple sword. You'll be rolling 20s to hit about 10% of the time, 14% with Battlemind Link active, and with Flurry of Blows you can make a lot of attacks with it. The main issue here is confirming the criticals.
The unlimited ki rewards continuing as a monk long enough to pick up the Drunken Master's Firewater Breath and some more Qinggong monk spell-like abilities fueled by ki.
Blood Crow Strike allows unarmed strikes to be fired off out to medium range, but the 1 round casting time makes it too much like Dragonball: you've got to charge up for one full pass through the initiative order before it comes into effect before the start of your next turn. It's also incompatible with the Vorpal temple sword.
Cold Ice Strike provides some more blasting in the levels prior to Firewater Breath, but while you've got the mobility to make the most of the Line area the swift action casting time is a detriment.
Ki Shout is probably my preferred option. It's close range and limited to living creatures, but it stuns on a failed save and deals a good amount of sonic damage even on a pass. Combined with the Navel chakra breath attack, you can provide reliable damage all day long while using flight and fast movement to stay out of range yourself.
Or you can go Sonic Thrust and enter the dungeon pushing a wagonload of Butchering Axes in front of you.
Saves:
Strong saves are a necessity for dealing with chakra. Buy the best cloak of resistance you can afford and a lucky horseshoe when you hit +3 on the cloak.
Stats:
You get +CHA to your chakra saves, so you'll benefit from a +CON belt and a +CHA headband.
Alcohol:
There are a few different items in Pathfinder that offer infinite alcohol, but the best is the Flask of Endless Sake. With a single command word the flask can be left pouring out one gallon of sake per round, forever. As an added bonus, you can then drink the sake out of a tankard for maximum RAW compliance, in the unlikely case that "a tankard of ale or strong alcohol" should be parsed as "a tankard of (ale or strong alcohol)".
The Drinking Horn of Bottomless Valor is a more expensive option that appears to require a standard-action command to fill with mead for each drink, and other items usually offer only a 1/day creation of alcohol. For an item that only provides a steady stream of alcohol, I'd suggest basing the price on taking the Tengu Drinking Jug, swapping Purify Food or Drink with Tears to Wine or Enhance Water, and adding the unlimited water effect of the Decanter of Endless Water. I'd ballpark that around 10000gp.
Drunken Brawler gives a +2 alchemical bonus to fortitude and will saves; it also gives a -2 penalty to reflex saves for 1 hour. That penalty stacks every time you take a drink.
One hour after you start drinking and for the rest of the adventuring day, you'll be staggering around with at least a -300 penalty to all reflex saves, and that's assuming you're only drinking every 4th round to provide the drunken ki fuelling your chakras.
Surprisingly, rolling in the negative hundreds for your Reflex saves isn't that bad, as much as it sounds like reverse optimization. At level 9 you gain Improved Evasion, so for most reflex saves against damaging effects you'll be taking half damage.
The Pathfinder drinking rules allow you to drink a number of beverages up to 1 + double constitution modifier, with any excess drinks causing you to become sickened for 1 hour per additional drink. That's not a problem for this build's day-drinking: each time you heal yourself with the power of Heart, you can also remove the sickened condition at the same time.
In combat it's slightly more tricky as you'll be sickened each time you regain drunken ki. With the lenient interpretation, you just need to select Heart on that turn with Chakra Expertise. As events on your turn happen in whichever order you prefer if not otherwise specified, you can remove the condition immediately before it has any effect. With the strict interpretation, you'll probably drink in combat less and save it for turns where you're spending your standard action to heal yourself.
This build probably qualifies as regular abuse of alcohol, which means that addiction is also a risk. The effects of moderate addiction are a -2 penalty to Constitution and Strength along with an inability to heal the ability damage from the drug, which would seem to be a problem. However, addiction is a disease and so can be cured with a single spell or ignored with a Periapt of Health, your fortitude saves are already being optimized for, and all penalties of the addiction are removed for as long as you're enjoying the benefit of the next dose.
Level 3 gives you unlimited Drunken Ki and Chakra Expertise, which are all you need to keep your chakras open all day from a ki management perspective.
When you hit character level 8, you can take Chakra Adept and avoid having to make any more Will saves once you've got all your chakras open, and the Heart ability covers the damage from the occasional Fortitude failures, also providing unlimited out-of-combat healing. The previous level also provides Linked Chakras, so you can open all of your chakras at once. If you intend to have your chakras online all day and don't mind being locked into using all your swift actions on maintaining them and drinking to fuel them, level 8 is probably as far as you need to go.
Against foes that can be meaningfully decapitated, if you could apply Snake Sidewind to a flurry of vorpal attacks, you could load up on attack penalties like fighting defensively as you only need to roll a 20 and then confirm the crit with Sense Motive. The best option for this appears to be a 3-level dip in Varisian Free-Style Fighter to pick up Ascetic Style and the ability to enter both stances with a move action, as this build is already starved for swift actions.
The chakra system provides a lot of saving throws, but it would be nice to find some way to roll even more to get even more surges of success. Arguably, every drink of alcohol qualifies as a dose of a drug and so demands a saving throw against addiction. This might be a rare build that wouldn't be actively harmed by a dip into Brute Vigilante 1, Wild Rager Barbarian 1, Oozemorph Shifter 1, or Alchemist Ragechemist 2, although the former pair have incompatible alignments.
Sources:
Advanced Player's Guide: Drunken Master, Resilient, Fast Drinker, Deep Drinker
Advanced Race Guide: Aasimar and alternate racial traits, Defiant Luck, Surge of Success
GameMastery Guide: Addiction and Drinking rules
Inner Sea Gods: Drunken Brawler
Occult Adventures: Chakras, Occult Skill Unlocks, Lucky Horseshoe
Pathfinder #52: Flask of Endless Sake
Occult Origins: Serpent-Fire Adept
Ultimate Campaign: Fate's Favored
Ultimate Magic: Qinggong Monk