Martial arts moves named for animals, especially in the form of a Three! Word! Attack!, are such a common concept in the source fiction and nonfiction that it’s the weirdest thing in the world to me that it’s unrepresented in 5e monk subclasses. For that matter, if it was a significant part of 3.x monk prestige classes, I don’t recall it, but monks had a weird relationship with prestige classes anyway. The point is, I’m setting out today to address that.

PS. I am 100% not an expert or even an intermediate student on this topic. I am a game designer. If I have f’ed it up, well, that’ll happen. I’m open to revising this in various ways.

Way of the Wild Monastic Tradition

You belong to a monastic tradition that emphasizes your ki as a connection to instinct, ferocity, and the natural order. The ancient sages and martial artists who shaped your tradition described the stances and strikes with various animals and monsters of the world: dragons, tigers, cranes, and others. (Editor’s note: We are aware that some percentage of you read the last word of that sentence as otters, and are now disappointed. We’ll see about putting that in a future expansion of this Tradition.)

Disciple of the Wild

When you choose this tradition at 3rd level, choose two of the following styles: Crane, Dragon, Mantis, Snake, and Tiger. You learn the disciplines associated with them described below, and as you gain monk levels, you learn additional disciplines based on these choices.

Crane Stance. At the beginning of your turn, you can spend 1 ki point to enter this stance. You can end this stance at any time, and it otherwise lasts 1 minute or until you enter another stance. While you are in Crane Stance and a creature adjacent to you misses you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to move that creature to any other unoccupied space adjacent to you, or to move up to half your speed without provoking opportunity attacks.

Dragon Stance. At the beginning of your turn, you can spend 2 ki points to enter this stance. You can end this stance at any time, and it otherwise lasts 1 minute or until you enter another stance. While you are in Dragon Stance, you can use a bonus action to gain resistance to one damage type of your choice until the beginning of your next turn.

Mantis Stance. At the beginning of your turn, you can spend 1 ki point to enter this stance. You can end this stance at any time, and it otherwise lasts 1 minute or until you enter another stance. While you are in Mantis Stance and you use your Patient Defense feature or the Dodge action, the next time a creature misses you with a melee weapon attack, you can make an unarmed attack against it as a reaction.

Snake Stance. At the beginning of your turn, you can spend 2 ki points to enter this stance. You can end this stance at any time, and it otherwise lasts 1 minute or until you enter another stance. While you are in Snake Stance, you gain advantage on Dexterity saving throws, and you can use Patient Defense without expending ki points.

Tiger Stance. At the beginning of your turn, you can spend 1 ki point to enter this stance. You can end this stance at any time, and it otherwise lasts 1 minute or until you enter another stance. While you are in Tiger Stance and you use your Step of the Wind feature or the Dash action, you can make an unarmed attack when you end your movement.

Voice of the Wild

Also at 3rd level, you gain proficiency in the Animal Handling skill, and you can cast speak with animals as a ritual.

Strike of the Wild

Beginning at 6th level, you gain the disciplines associated with the stances that you know.

Crane Strike. When you hit a creature with an unarmed strike, you can spend 1 ki point to distract and confuse it, giving other attackers an opening. Your attack deals additional damage equal to your Martial Arts die, and the next melee attack roll made against that target by a creature other than you gains advantage.

Dragon Strike. When you hit a prone creature with an unarmed strike, you can spend 1 ki point to deal additional damage equal to your Martial Arts die and reduce their speed to 0 until the beginning of your next turn.

Mantis Strike. When you hit a creature with an unarmed strike, you can spend 1 ki point to deal additional damage equal to your Wisdom modifier and attempt a blinding strike. The target must succeed a Constitution saving throw or be blinded for 1 minute. At the end of each of its turns, the creature can make another Constitution saving throw, ending the blindness on a success.

Snake Strike. When a creature adjacent to you casts a spell, you can use your reaction and spend 1 ki point to make an unarmed strike against it. On a hit, you deal additional damage equal to your Wisdom modifier, and the creature must roll a Constitution saving throw as if concentrating on the spell. On a failed saving throw, the spell is lost.

Tiger Strike. When you hit a creature with an unarmed strike and you have already hit that creature with two or more melee weapon attacks this turn, you can spend 1 ki point to deal additional damage equal to your Martial Arts die. You can use this feature up to twice per turn.

Vibrant Soul

Starting at 11th level, your maximum ki points equal your monk level + your Wisdom modifier.

Advanced Disciple

Beginning at 17th level, you learn a third style of your choice, including the stance and strike associated with that style.

Design Notes

Creating five stances and five strikes, and trying to get some kind of thematic connection between the actual* creature and/or the Chinese martial art associated with it, turned out to be super hard. I expect to tweak most of these between now and whenever I call it a final draft.

*for values of “actual” that include dragons

What I haven’t done here is shape a playstyle that is strikingly different from core monks, the way Way of Shadow, Way of Four Elements, and some others do. There’s an argument to be made that you could just start adding thematic names to everything you do with the Way of the Open Hand around animal names and three-word-attacks. I hope everyone understands, though, that “you shouldn’t have bothered to make this because this theme could just get covered with roleplay” is among the least constructive of all criticisms. It’s pure invalidation and it applies even to many of the subclasses in the Player’s Handbook, so miss me with it.

I wanted to create recognizable patterns and useful tricks within each style, but I haven’t hit that mark yet. Specifically, Dragon could use more thought, because its Strike is so constrained. The feature I went with is referencing a description of RL Dragon kung fu as being heavy and stompy, while Dragon Stance comes from a description of the style as involving hard blocks, and me imagining that expanded to the fantasy-adventure spectrum of damage types.

Vibrant Soul is the riskiest single feature, since it’s the biggest fundamental change from the base monk. I think that one of the big problems of some monk subclasses – Four Elements, I’m looking at you – is that they give you new ways to expend a bunch of ki points, but no extra ki points or sources of on-the-fly recovery. The other inspiration here is the discussion of these kung fu styles as internal vs. external; I felt that extra ki points stood in for that internal work fairly well. (Since I didn’t want to copy-paste Wholeness of Body.)

There are a lot of different versions of “the Five Animals,” about on par with “the Three Tenors,” but I went with what I liked from the Wikipedia article I linked above. If the response to this approach to the subclass is generally positive, I’ll come back and do Monkey, Panda, and Otter in some future post.

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