Windstep Master (Monk Archetype)
Fantasy martial arts movies, anime, and all manner of other media paints us a picture of martial artists that can use their control over their own bodies in order to fly.
While there are a few ways to achieve this or at least simulate it, few embrace it as early as the mountain-dwelling monks called windstep masters, who devote themselves to understanding and emulating the fluidity of the wind, becoming graceful and elusive, yet shockingly forceful when focused.
Thankfully, this archetype is compatible with both the standard and unchained versions of the monk class, so you don’t have to do any homebrewing or adjustment to make it work.
As part of their baseline training, the windstep school teaches it’s students how to focus force from multiple angles to drive a foe back. While other monk schools can learn the hurricane fist, this school teaches how to use it against even comparatively massive foes, and how to push them further, a deadly technique for sure in the mountains that this archetype originates from.
When they first develop the technique, these monks can only run on air briefly, running over gaps or up to higher platforms before the effect fades, and their distance traveled is much slower than their full running speed.
However, with an expenditure of ki, they can stay aloft for longer, and even spend more ki to move faster.
This archetype gets a limited version of air walk that requires a constant expenditure to remain in the air, but if you’re comfortable with the limitations of both the spell and the windstep’s limitations, this archetype can be a fun way to have extra maneuverability around the battlefield, bringing your normal melee focus to bear on foes that are normally out of reach, and adding that utility to the party’s arsenal. However, no talk about this archetype could go without mentioning the cloud step feat, which one must normally be much higher level to acquire, and on average, is actually slower than the speed you use with this archetype.
While I’m sure some min-maxxer would find a way to combine this archetype with others to make a monk that renders the cloud step completely obsolete, my opinion on the matter is that cloud step could be considered a lesser technique developed by other ascetic schools that devote their time to other techniques.
Despite the reclusive nature of their monastaries, I imagine that plenty of windstep masters eventually go out to see the world, wandering like the wind to better understand the world. Given the chaotic nature of the wind, I can imagine that this can be the ultimate test of these monk’s resolve.
Deep in the Magestar Mountains, the Sky Dancer monastery teached the art of wind step, as well as care for herds of disenchanters, the wooly camel-like beasts casually grazing on the fonts of wild magic that often leak from the mountain’s interior. When one of these leaks brings forth strange monsters conjured or mutated by the magic, they also slay the dangerous ones, dancing around them from the air.
Sheer and slick, and filled with horrors unknown, people avoid Black Rift whenever possible, using bridges of the magic of flight. When a young man’s fiancé is kidnapped and the bridge destroyed, he desperately wishes to learn any sort of technique for flight, even the monastic ways, to try and follow.
While the laws of the Walled City are absolute, only the powerful would call them just. Recently, a half-orc woman bearing the skill to walk on air has been robbing tax caravans to buy food for those living in the poorest neighborhoods, but the nobility are already planning vindictive reprisals. If they can’t catch this thief, they will make every half-orc and orc in the city, as well as the monks of her order, suffer.