Jun27
on June 27, 2017
Crouching Peg, Hidden Hole
D&D and similar RPGs are games are a weird mash-up of cultures and troped. knights from the Middle Ages, allied with Norse demihumans and Arthurian wizards fight monsters from Germanic folklore and Greco-Roman mythology. Then you add monks to that already weird mix.
Monks are inspired by the mythology and culture half a world away from the other sources of inspiration. Inspired/ appropriated. Monks also have a unique form of magic, unlike any other class’ power. Why can’t fighters or rogues tap into ki? Is it similar to arcane magic?
Well, as a follower of a martial way I’d say that in real life you don’t “tap into ki”; if you train and get a grasp on your potential, by relaxing and focusing, the ki permeates everything important you do. This isn’t well represented in “having ki charges to spend daily” as D&D goes. Also, there are so many martial styles that I find the monk to be a ridiculous attempt to mash up a bunch of them. I far more appreciated the “Book of nine Swords” dating back to 3.5….
However, I will always remember fondly the explanation my DM gave me when I was a newbie, back in 1st edition, when I asked how could a (medieval western) monk deliver such powerful blows with his bare hands.
His answer went like: “consider Robin Hood’s Friar Tuck: if you touch his ale, you’re in for some serious open-hand trouble”.
This reminds me of a game I have been playing called Crimson Blades. Its an old-school, Elric of Melniboné-inspired game by Simon Washbourne (of Barbarians of Lemuria fame).
Simon seem to want to stray from the usual European themes by mixing Middle Eastern, Far East and West African themed art and elements into the rulebook to make the setting feel more exotic by using a mix of (largely) unfamiliar cultures. The cultural details in the Crimson Lands chapter were deliberately left ambiguous so GMs could fill in their own details.
Although, you’ll get culture-specific stuff like the Bard class being renamed to “Griot” (gree-O), which is a real-life type of west African Bard. But to distance itself from eastern Shaolin monks, he made the Wayfarer. They are described as simple scruffy Hobos, and highly mysterious mystics, trying to find something or someone. Save for their exceptional acrobatic martial arts skills, meditative healing, and ability to sense the supernatural pathways — none of which are advertise to strangers — they are no different than any other vagrant or runaway child that roam the Crimson Lands.
So… couple of solutions here. First and foremost, most obviously, it’s a fantasy setting. There’s no need to strictly adhere to real-world cultural analogues. Why can’t you have Gandalf-y wizards riding lung dragons or Tripitaca-y mystics punching nuckelavees?
Dialing down a bit from that, I was introduced to D&D with 3e, which had the iconic monk, Ember, and who struck me as being loosely North African. North Africa being near enough to Europe that it wouldn’t be inconceivable for someone from the former to end up in the latter, especially if they’re an adventurer, and far enough away that it’s got enough inherent exoticism to a classic medieval setting that you can totally handwave the existence of martial artist monks.
Then, most importantly to me, your character is not its class. Class fluff is merely suggestions and guidelines. The same mechanics can be used to represent all sorts of things. I once made a half-elf monk (okay, a Pathfinder ninja, but ki is still a central class feature, so that’s the important part). Fluffwise, they were basically just a classic rogue, but with a bit of latent magic ability. Not quite enough to pull off any real, proper spells, but still able to shunt reality around a bit. Think Harry Potter at the beginning of the story, before he meets Hagrid. There is no real reason that a character with the monk class absolutely needs to adopt all the other traditional trappings that word connotes.
Beyond that, what ki is or represents is heavily dependent on your world setting, and the simplest answer is exactly what all the core books tell you: it’s your willpower/life force/chakra that you’re able to manipulate and use to produce various supernatural effects. Learning how to manipulate and control this energy takes intense study, just like a wizard or cleric would need to cast spells, but unlike spells, this power is inherently present in every living and/or conscious thing, and provided they put in the necessary study time, potentially anyone can tap into it, whereas – depending on the setting – magic can require some preexisting talent. But again, this is all fluff, and is only as meaningful as you decide to make it.
I mean, (on the subject of fluff not really mattering), I just started a campaign in a homebrew setting where gods don’t exist and arcane magic exists only as spell-like abilities, and in very powerful creatures with innate spellcasting like dragons. No mere mortal could hope to conjure fireballs and lightning bolts with just a wave of their hands and a silly incantation. However, I’ve allowed every single Pathfinder class (aside from vigilante, just because the social stuff just doesn’t fit the setting). Wizards and sorcerers are actually gadgeteers (prepared spellcasters study a book of schematics and build them ahead of time, spontaneous spellcasters memorize schematics and build them on the fly), building little one-use magitech trinkets that produce the spell effects. Clerics and paladins do have spells, but rather than being gifts from deities, they are manifestations of their own determination and willpower. Druids and witches draw upon the spirits of the Ethereal Realm who are the ones that actually do the spellwork, the “spellcaster” simply invoking them and making a request. Psychic magic is psychic magic, though. No change. Anyway, none of this requires any mechanical changes, outside of a little fluff, and potentially some individual circumstances that wouldn’t likely appear clearly in a rulebook, anyway.
Now, where this becomes pertinent to the main comic, rather than just the last paragraph of my previous post, is that this is (as the gadgeteering implies), a borderline steampunk setting, but in a region that is geographically and culturally inspired by Morocco. Oh, and since this is a gestalt game, one of my players is a witch/gunslinger, handily mixing technology and the most magicky magic this setting has, which traditional fantasy fiction tends to put at odds with each other. None of that is really necessary, however, and you can easily mix together anything you want to mix together. Weirdness only arises when you decide to cling to arbitrary and out-dated traditions of the fantasy genre. Which “traditions of the fantasy genre” really ought to be a nonsensical phrase, given that “fantasy” is supposedly extravagant and unrestrained imagination. You should do a comic pointing out that irony.
Thinking of how monks fit is one of the things I’d recommend when making a fantasy world. Especially for D&D.
Are monks “Eastern” and from another land or did they arise in the default region of the world? When you know that you want monks to exist in the world, it’s not hard to incorporate the class and its tropes.