knasser2

Ha ha! Well AIs are banned. Or perhaps more accurately can no longer be created. And for good reason. There's a historical period that details the "Iron Men" which was essentially when robots tried to enslave / wipe out humanity. So AIs were largely destroyed. That's one of the reasons the Imperium of Man is in such a mess technologically. There are tech priests and a lot of them actually do understand science (somewhat), but most of the technology was built with advanced AI / computers which they no longer have. It's like how you might understand all the principles of fusion and how you could create a magnetic containment field to hold the plasma in a torus, but without systems that can perform the thousands of computations per second to make it work, it doesn't matter. You can't build one. They've got all this incredible technology lying around and they can use it, but not build it. There are automated factories that churn out vital components necessary for war machines and nobody dares touch them or stop them to take them apart and examine them because they might not be able to start it up again. Imagine you have a computer that you don't know how to turn on. And it has all your vital work on it. And there is no backup.
 
There are actually some AIs still in existence. Of a limited kind. They call them "Machine Spirits" and try to please them. So if you accidentally activate your tank's auto-pilot and it starts careering across the landscape to some long-gone city with you stuck inside it, you've angered its machine spirit and you'd better hope there's a tech-priest around who can recite the Psalm of Manual Operation that will placate it. ?

Or you’re Just trying to buy the latest miniature!

You say you're not familiar with the setting but whilst this is probably too much for Imperial weaponry, it's oddly reminiscent of the 2nd edition rules for orks. Ork mekboys would sometimes have to roll for random results such as their Shokk Attack Gun which teleported snotlings (think tiny goblins) right up to the enemy to prevent them getting shot whilst trying to get close. Random rolls would have them appearing inside enemy vehicles, inside enemy armour (!) or on the very odd occasion, inside the enemy. There was also, iirc, a bouncing bomb. (Literally, it would bounce around the battlefield before detonating) and an anti-gravity weapon called the Lifta-Droppa. Which lifted enemies high into the air before cutting out and letting Mistress Gravity do her thing.
 
I'll save this for orks but I'll use the CV modifiers for xenotech (alien weaponry) and maybe some of the more esoteric Imperial weaponry. It might be useful for Space Marine weaponry to stop regular people using it as well, although Strength Minimums will also help there. Thank you for this.

It's popular because a lot of immature players think "ninjas are cool" and have no regard whatsoever for general atmosphere or whether their personal power trip makes my setting all loopy. Also, in most versions of D&D the monk class is easily exploited to create game-breaking combos like stun-locking a dragon round after round.
 
Why yes, I am harsh and judgemental and wildly opionated. Why do you ask?

RPG authors picking out words or names for special significance from foreign cultures is a goldmine of hillarity. I don't think anything quite tops White Wolf naming a Vampire clan the "Giovanni", though. I suppose they thought it sounded sinister and urbane. But for those of you not from Italy, imagine if you will a vampire clan titled the "The Smiths".
 
Actually no, that one works! That band might actually be vampires. Okay, how about "The Joneses". Sound scary now?
 
Mind you, this is White Wolf - the company that also had gypsies with magic stealing powers, so what do we expect? :D

RPG authors picking out words or names for special significance from foreign cultures is a goldmine of hillarity. I don't think anything quite tops White Wolf naming a Vampire clan the "Giovanni", though. I suppose they thought it sounded sinister and urbane. But for those of you not from Italy, imagine if you will a vampire clan titled the "The Smiths".
 
Actually no, that one works! That band might actually be vampires. Okay, how about "The Joneses". Sound scary now?
 
Mind you, this is White Wolf - the company that also had gypsies with magic stealing powers, so what do we expect? :D

Oh, it isn't really that much of a stretch if you think back to when these actually started.   Not AD&D but D&D, specifically the supplement Blackmoor in 1975.  Cable wasn't really available "everywhere" and even if you had cable you had at best 20-25 channels.   This is relevant because until the 80's I had never seen a "martial arts" movie and had only heard of Bruce Lee in magazines.  When the little black and white book Blackmoor introduced the Monk as a subclass of the Cleric we didn't have much more than that to go on. Where I lived the TV stations didn't even show Kung Fu on TV.  I missed Battlestar Galactica till years later too
 
But it was only the fact that I ran across D&D at an old wargaming shop before my Dad retired from the Army and we all moved back, that I even knew what a RPG was and had a copy. It wasn't until I joined the Navy in 81 that I actually got exposed to Asian Cinema and the often confused 70-80's martial arts action shows.  Since I was a apprentice at the time (being a seaman or airman in the Navy was synonymous to dead broke in the 80's) I took advantage of the MWR at the time.  The rec center on base had hobby rooms you could reserve, a cheap restaurant and a two screen theater. We used to go there and reserve a room where we played wargames, D&D and Champions all weekend long only taking breaks to eat and watch movies.  On Sat and Sun from 9am to 6pm they had free action theater where they showed end to end Martial Arts flicks and so on.   In the evenings they showed movies like Philadelphia Experiment, Top Gun, Flash Gordon and so on for $1 fo the night.
 
By the time I saw Enter the Dragon or Master of the Flying Guillotine, the Monk was firmly a Friar like the Robin Hood Tuck with cooler abilities.

It was actually quite simple: because I didn't know anything about mystic kung fu.  "Master of Winter/Spring/Summer/Autumn" "Master of the North/South/East/West Wind" didn't suggest anything Chinese to me.  The seasons and the winds exist in Europe, too.  There was not a single Chinese word or any hint of a connection to any Asian culture anywhere in the description of the class.  On a separate page was a table of weapons available to various classes, which mentioned "bo sticks" and "jo sticks", but no one - No.  One. - had any inkling what those were, and there was not even a shadow of a hint of a half-hearted thought about maybe making an attempt to define them in the book.  And in the weapons table, they didn't seem to be particularly good weapons anyway, so no one ever used them.
 
Kids today have no idea how poorly-written the 1st edition of D&D was.  And they need to get off my lawn, too.

Not at all weird!  I thought the same thing when I first saw the monk class in the 1st edition Player's Handbook.  The OP is correct that oriental mystic martial artists don't really fit in western-style fantasy.  There are monks in western culture, but they're not martial artists - they're guys in robes who live in a monastery with the top of their head shaved and spend their lives making copies of holy books by hand.  And there are martial artists in western culture, but they're not monks - they're masters of various forms of combat, armed and unarmed - but mostly armed.
 
But so what?  Monks were "popular' in D&D because they were there.  There were SCADS of things in D&D that didn't fit in western-style fantasy.  D&D has *never* made much sense at all, which is why I don't play it anymore.  Let's see, off the top of my head:
 
Psionics
Dinosaurs and other pre-historic creatures
Science-fiction-y "fungus" monsters with weird names like "ascomoid" and "phytomid"
Feeble attempts at "hard physics" rules - like the zero-gravity on the Astral Plane
Dozens of spells based in modern technology and science - Duo-dimension, Time Stop, Clone, etc.  Spell-equivalents of flashlights, telephones, anti-gravity carts,etc.
Infravision & Ultravision - as if historical fantasy ever concerned itself with the physics of light frequencies
Monsters that were essentially just math tricks you could do with the dice, like the Tween
"Magic" items that are more at home in the steampunk genre.
The redefinition of words like "paladin", "necromancy", etc.
Formalized spelling that make real distinctions - e.g. demon vs daemon.
EDIT: I remembered the other sci-fi monster I was trying to think of before: the "Cifal", which was an acronym for "Colonial Insect-Formed Artificial Life".  Yeah, sure, a perfect monster for a FANTASY game.  Conan and Bilbo and Fafhrd and Merlin and Perseus fought cifals all the time!

It's popular because a lot of immature players think "ninjas are cool" and have no regard whatsoever for general atmosphere or whether their personal power trip makes my setting all loopy. Also, in most versions of D&D the monk class is easily exploited to create game-breaking combos like stun-locking a dragon round after round.
 
Why yes, I am harsh and judgemental and wildly opionated. Why do you ask?

All your throwing stars to the back accomplish is help me achieve my dreams of being a stegosaurus!
 

 
I guess I'm okay with oriental settings having them. It's just a bugbear of mine when they show up in Medieval European settings. It's so typical of D&D's "Kitchen Sink" approach. Generally I'm very careful about what I allow in my setting. For example, I've reigned in D&D's profusion of little people. Halflings and dwarves and gnomes and whatever else. I just have dwarves. (Well there are gnomes but they're only in the Fey realm) A good meal requires a caerful balance of well chosen ingredients. It is not made better by just adding everything. I also think "Chi" can be easily re-flavoured to have less Wushu flavour if desired. A warrior who has a pact with some deity or is possessed by a demon. The D&D monk just feels like one of those hodge-podge damn-all-sense things D&D is famous for.

That was the problem. With Bruce Lee movies and theKung Fu series being so popular, players who created monk characters were expecting to get this:
 

 
But instead, they got this:
 

Monk's effectiveness was inversely proportional to the number of magic items available.
 
HM

Maybe that's what a D&D dragon has become, but in the days of OD&D and 1st ed. AD&D, the prototype for the Ancient Red Dragon was Smaug, and he sat upon his treasure horde all alone, and didn't need a powerful array of minions and leveled agents to be an unholy terror to an entire region of the (campaign) world. Don't let the fact that he had an Achilles Heel type weakness detract from the challenge he alone represented. 
It wasn't until players routinely bragged about their 30th level characters and dragons became Just Another Monster in the MM that there was a need to turn them into the equivalent of supervillain organizations just to make them a challenge again.

My D&D favourite character of recent times was a half-orc monk. I think the addition of other races provides for an injection of mysticism etc.
 
As it happens the order he belonged to was an obscure sect of Gruumsh, a lawful good one, that promulgated an alternate history of the races. In olden times, according to this sect, there were no humans and the elves and orcs were equally civilised. Corellion and Gruumsh decided to end the constant warfare between their children by merging them into one race (humans). Corellion cheated though and only merged half of his elves and then persuaded the humans that orcs were evil. Gruumsh was devastated and plucked out an eye, the one that did not see the trick.
 
Over centuries the orcs and their god were brutalised and came to reflect the propaganda. This sect keeps the story alive, seeking ways to redeem their race and bring them back to civilised ways. There is a schism as to whether the elves should be forgiven or punished for millennia of hurt.
 
Their biggest piece of evidence is the existence of both half elves and half orcs. How could that be unless humans were not already half and half....
 
:-)
 
This sect were mystics, forswore metal weapons and communed with an ancient version of their god, the current version being too far removed from their iconography....
 
Doc

Knasser2 I resemble that remark? Ninja ARE cool anyone who disagrees gets a throwing star to the back!

Big announcement about the Jolrhos Field Guide.  I've gotten it about 90% rough writing done, and should have the first pass complete by the end of April.  There will be a lot of work to do after that, but I'm hoping for a Fall release.
 
However, the big news is that I'm working with someone to do a kickstarter for the book.  If this goes through I'll be able to reach a broader audience and maybe even get a nice painted cover from a major artist.  Hopefully with enough funding I can put out a version for Savage Worlds and even D&D.  I don't want to get ahead of myself, but keep an eye out for more news.

Something a little different this time.
 
In studying tailoring, cloth, and historical techniques for the Jolrhos Field Guide, I came across silk armor. I knew that the silk that the mongols wore would help protect from arrows, and further would not tear off into wounds and increase chances of infection: you could twist the arrow back out with the silk.
 
But I didn't know that the first functioning bulletproof vest was made of silk. And it works. Silk's resilient stretchy material is actually very effective against projectiles, which is making me add a few concepts to my fantasy hero armor options.
 
Because you can wear one of these things under a suit of armor.
 

 
This article goes into the first bulletproof vest, invented in the late 1800s by a Polish scientist and how it might have changed history.  WWI was inevitable: too many forces in motion, too much animosity, etc.  But it might have been a little later in starting.