Exotic outsider is played out, though in a more cosmopolitan campaign set in a port or great city such as a pseudo-Constantinople, you can have communities or enclaves that are outsiders who dwell long term in a city, which softens the blow. I’ve been in Chinatown in NYC a lot recently and was very much reminded of how such enclaves certainly exist today. During Spring Festival (aka Lunar New Year) there’s a lot of martial arts demonstrations in the street with dragons and drums. (I was hoping rivals would throw down with each other, but alas….) The community speaks Chinese to each other (or code switches). Signs are in Chinese. I was at a funeral that was conducted mostly in Chinese.

Mystical vs. martial is something I’d want to play out in terms of something very integrated in the campaign. For instance, the martial classes may intentionally renounce more mystical forms of magic, and could be connected to some particular gods or to a race, such as humans vs others. For instance, the wizard may be a way to get around the renunciation of “natural” magic based on Charisma casting. Where the monk fits in that isn’t so great, but you could also have a Wisdom, Charisma, and Intelligence three-way conflict, such as natural magic (Charisma) vs. divine (Wisdom) vs. scholarly or technical magic (Intelligence), and then organize things accordingly.

Fan dancer: https://standsinfire.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/way-of-the-feathered-fan-version-0-2/

I dig what you’re saying on the Hasan-i-Sabah, though the mystical/martial distinction plays weirdly to me – to butcher Clarke’s quote, any sufficiently refined training and athletic ability looks like magic. Hence wuxia, and so on. Having said that, within D&D’s context, what you’re describing is awesome and would be fun in a campaign.

Transplants-from-afar are always an option, but that sets up the monk as a solitaire and outsider. Working the monk into local society is what I’m chasing here, because the story of the exotic transplant is all played out for me. Your mileage most certainly may vary!

Apropos my mystical-vs.-non, a good breakdown might be:

More martial classes: Fighters, rogues, wizards, clerics, paladins

More mystical classes: Barbarians, bards, druids, sorcerers, monks, warlocks

Or something like that, anyway.

I think Scarred Lands back in the 3E days had something like this with different races having been on the side of the gods vs. the titans.

I’ll have to look at the fan dancer.

The reason I thought of the Hasan-i-Sabah type assassin for the monk is the fact that it was thought of as being mystical, which the monk definitely is, compared to the rogue, who’s not really so. The rogue is highly skilled, the monk is doing things that are impossible. Both might exist in the same organization, or you can use the mystical vs. martial as a tension in the campaign, say having two rival groups of assassins, one being the shadowdancers and the other the rogue assassin. Having two rival cultures, one organized in a mystical fashion and having a lot of casters and the other in a martial one with non-caster classes might be very cool more broadly.

A very Western European centered campaign… yeah, I don’t think they fit too well, but if you have a Marco Polo type campaign, Crusades, Byzantine Empire, or Medieval Russia, etc., things are much more cosmopolitan and mystic warriors like that start fitting much better. They’re still exotic but not totally out of place. All that said, even in Matter of France and Matter of Britain, there are still some exotic characters floating around, such as Sir Palamedes the Saracen Knight. One might want to get rid of unarmed combat and replace it with weapons that just happen to scale in damage with level the way unarmed combat does and otherwise do some editing.

I’m pretty sure you’re right about the progression. It’s as I remember it. There weren’t Charisma casters before 3E.

Conflating the monk and assassin into, well, ninjas of whatever derivation is certainly a viable way to go, though the more you bring it into Eurocentric settings, the more it starts to supplant the thief.

Funny enough, around the time I wrote this article, Colin released his revision of his fan dancer monk, and we had exactly this conversation; I think he settled on making them a Wis/Cha blend rather than Dex/Cha, for various reasons.

You make a good point about the bladesinger; I assume the logic is roughly:
1. In 2e, we wanted to support sun elves as mages, so Int bonus.
2. In 3e, we wanted to change ability score adjustments for race as little as possible.
3. Sun elves should be good at bladesinging, so bladesinging should privilege Int.
4. Bladesinging is wizardry rather than sorcery.

(I’m not checking my books right now, so could be wrong about any of this.) A superficial look at elf racial lore in myth and D&D strongly suggests that a Cha bonus is in order, but Cha was so nearly useless for so many editions that Gygax and TSR never saw it that way.

-Hasan-i-Sabah type assassins were very much part of Crusader lore and the shadowdancer monk fits that well. If you have a campaign more built on the Mediterranean world that would fit nicely.

-Making a monk run with Charisma and Dexterity instead of Wisdom might be pretty cool for, say, an elf martial dancer. (I never could figure out why bladesingers were wizards and not sorcerers from 3.X on.)

I would appreciate the information. =)

There’s no question that the 1e monk gets bonus hit points from Con, yeah. =) I’ll cover this in more detail when I write the article, but having a 16 to throw into Con along with all of the monk’s other bullshit stat requirements is… probably a good sign that the player is cheating.

Yeah, I find the anti-psionic monk bizarre. Looking forward in class evolution, 4e goes back to the ki = psionics well, but 4e’s presentation is unpersuasive; the monk’s “psionics” feel nothing at all like what the other psionic classes are doing.

I will try to remember to fold in some discussion of BG2 when I get to 2e. Thanks to UA articles keeping me busy, that’s probably a couple of months off, so if I forget, remind me in the comments and I’ll add it in. =)

I am on vacation now but when I get home I will look for my issue of Dragon and see if it says what issue it is from (I believe mine is a compilation issue taking the “best of the best” from a number of previous issues but I would assume it would cite the original issue somewhere). If I do it in time I will respond here and let you know.

I forgot you were doing a pre-1e version of the monk I am not sure if the con bonus to HP applies here or not though I am fairly certain it does in 1e.

Funny that they say monks have no psionic potential and then in Dragon Mag make a monk that has psionic influences (but as far as I recall no overt psionic powers as we know them).

I wonder if you are going to do the monk from Baldurs Gate 2? It is not a book but it was licensed by TSR (later WotC). It gets weirder because it is a strange combo of the 1e and 3e monks. They clearly designed it to work as the 3e monk but used parts of the 1e monk to fill out the blanks. It is the closest we get to the “traditional” D&D monk in 2e I believe compared to the fighting monk kit in “The Complete Priest’s Handbook” or the later Monk class that was also a modified priest class.

OD&D is endlessly perplexing to me, and I’m never sure which edition within OD&D uses which rules – I don’t have copies of all of them for cross-referencing. I HAD thought that extra hit points from a high Con was a later innovation than 1975, but I might be talking out my ass. (Seriously, please educate me on this point, with citations if feasible.)

I absolutely plan to cover the 1e PHB and 1e OA. I hope to track down that issue of Dragon, either in my own sadly disorganized collection, or online.

I think I mentioned it back when I covered psionics, more than a year ago, but Eldritch Wizardry lays down the law that monks (and druids) can NEVER have psionic potential. There’s no suggestion of why this should be so, but based on a casual comparison of the monk and druid to the other classes mentioned in Eldritch Wizardry, I’m going to say “some vague idea of game balance.” (I’m sure that’s not it.)

Thank you very much for the additional detail on RC – much like other OD&Ds, it is dense and byzantine in its presentation. to my eyes. I do remember that the weapon mastery rules were surprisingly compelling.

As for the mystic in the Rules Cyclopedia it also gets its extra attacks with melee and thrown weapons (not ranged weapons though that was the case for the fighter too so not so bad). Also unlike the fighter they do not need to hit with a 2+ in order to get them (nice). In a game with weapon mastery a monk would probably be better off using a weapon if they can get a high level of mastery with it (also remember the optional rule for bonus damage for getting really high rolls against bad AC) or at the very least it is one of the very few ways of improving their AC from its base (think using the staff at grand mastery that is a nice bonus to AC AND you get to deflect attacks too). I think it is strange that we do not have a weapon mastery for mystic attacks (there is for pummeling but that gets weird fast). They also get resistance which is essentially evasion (I think it is interesting that all versions of the monk except the 2e BG2 monk/cleric monks all get at least access to if not automatic acquisition of a version of evasion).