MONK

Martial traditions that don’t rely on divine patronage or institutional arcane practice are some of the oldest surviving disciplines in Nuxan. Monks predate the Exodus — their traditions were never dependent on the gods to begin with — and a thousand years later they’re still here, adapted to harder conditions and stranger threats.

Available Subclasses

• Warrior of the Open Hand (PHB 2024) — The oldest and most widespread martial tradition. In Bassuras, Open Hand practice has been filtered through street fighting culture, scrapper crew discipline, and the particular problem-solving philosophy of people who can’t afford specialized weapons.
• Warrior of the Elements (PHB 2024) — Elemental attunement without divine mediation, drawing directly on the same forces the hedge god clerics propitiate. In the Hellcatch, that means a specific relationship with desert heat, underground water, the snarl’s electrical bleed, and wind that carries things it shouldn’t.
• Warrior of the Shadow (PHB 2024) — Shadow Step in a city of unmarked Court of Dust spies and Garrotte Line operatives. A Shadow Warrior’s relationship to the Shadowfell’s bleed — which is increasingly visible in Bassuras — is complicated by the fact that what they’re drawing on is getting louder.
• Way of the Cobalt Soul (Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn) — The Cobalt Soul became the Cobalt Veil, and the Veil operates as an underground information network rather than an open academic institution. A Cobalt Soul monk in this campaign has a built-in connection to a faction that’s actively archiving what the Luxon wants erased.
• Way of the Kensei (Xanathar’s Guide to Everything) — Weapon mastery as meditative discipline. In Bassuras, a Kensei’s devotion to a specific weapon is unusual enough that it reads as eccentric, which is most Wrenches’ first theory before they see a Kensei work.
• Way of the Drunken Master (Xanathar’s Guide to Everything) — Unpredictable movement as combat principle. Across the Undercarriage, there are three or four people who look like they stumble through fights and have never lost one. They know each other. They don’t advertise.
• Way of the Sun Soul (Xanathar’s Guide to Everything) — Radiant energy channeled through martial discipline. The light it generates is not divine — the gods are gone. What it actually is remains an open question that Sun Soul monks in Nuxan have learned to stop asking, because the answers available are unsatisfying and the power works regardless.
• Way of the Astral Self (Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything) — Psionic self-projection, the astral body manifesting as a combat tool. In Nuxan, psionic ability predates and survives the divine collapse intact — it’s one of the few power systems that never required the gods to function, which gives Astral Self monks a quiet authority in a world that’s lost everything else.
• Way of Mercy (Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything) — Healing and lethal capability fused in the same discipline. In Bassuras, where the mission house and the back-alley surgery are both real and both necessary, a Mercy monk occupies the specific niche of someone who can walk into a bad situation and determine, with accuracy, which problem needs solving first.
• Way of the Pestilent Haze (The Crooked Moon) — A discipline that weaponizes disease through martial practice, and whose origin nobody in Bassuras can fully account for. Pestilent Haze practitioners aren’t common, aren’t organized, and aren’t welcome in most of the city’s faction structures. They tend to operate alone, which suits them.