I don't like Monks.
This is an old complaint, which is appropriate since Monks, like Barbarians, have been hovering around the edges of core D&D rules since the very earliest editions. Monks 'don't fit' the traditional medieval-Europe fantasy mold; the class is a take on the kung-fu-fighting Shaolin monks seen in dozens of cheap martial-arts films.
It feels a bit forced, perhaps - that you've got all these knights and alchemists and pagans running around the streets and then, next door, there's all these kooky bald dudes from a whole other culture with 'kukris' and 'kamas' and this is apparently entirely normal somehow???
It's the worst kind of Orientalism, I think; hundreds of years of eastern religion and culture (one specific religion from one relatively small area of Asia, to be precise) condensed into a single class so that a handful of players can feel a bit 'exotic'.
Okay, okay, you're probably getting tired of me ragging on D&D and the Forgotten Realms all the time. But it's not just
history-nerd-rage, I swear.
Y'see, when you turn the Monks of Tyr into some kind of hybridised Euro/East-Asian martial-arts order, you immediately eliminate the concept of religious orders of scholars and ascetics who exist outside of traditional temporal/spiritual hierarchies. You no longer have any words to describe, say, the Order of Saint Benedict because "monk" has already been co-opted by the player class, with its fundamentally different fluff.
The traditional European monastery is a terrific dramatic crucible. A small, rich, tightly-knit group of highly-strung men in dresses who spend all their time reading books and thinking about God and not nearly enough time getting laid? Narrative goldmine! So many rich themes available: knowledge and learning, purity and corruption, spirituality, masculinity and homosexuality, secrets, the forbidden and the mandatory, exclusion and inclusion... you ever read
The Name of the Rose? It's just like that.
But we can never have that, because in D&D Monks are these weird Stance-of-the-Tiger types that owe more to films from the 1970s than they do actual Buddhist tradition. It'd be like writing a wonderful campaign setting based on feudal Japan but replacing all the samurai with generic 'knights'. You know, like... dudes in armour who fight each other for their king or something, I dunno, I just thought it'd be nice to have some English dudes in there or whatever!
This is the problem I have with Monks, and Shadow Thieves, and all the other stuff in D&D I whine about : not that it's not 'historically accurate', but that it's throwing away such rich and imaginative possibilities for tedious and mundane cliches. Forgotten Realms is not so much a high fantasy campaign setting based on medieval Europe as it is a high fantasy campaign setting based on high fantasy campaign settings.
Tell me: have you been genuinely impressed with the Shadow Thieves plotline? Has it made you think about order, and control, and how society works its morality into law - and how that morality changes over time, and how society copes with that dissonance? Or is it obviously filler, typical "cops-and-robbers"
that you find in every other fantasy story written, ever? And these monks: have you developed any insight into the traditions of Buddhist asceticism? Or are we still running on empty?
