In the past, the world — Dominium — was inhabited by the Rodians, humans of immense spiritual power and knowledge, favoured by God. But alas, in time they grew proud and succumbed to the temptations of demons, wishing to sway them away from the Creator. The demons succeeded, and Rodians were abandoned to live in diminished human forms, subservient to their demonic rulers.
Many years later, a son of a courtier of one of the demonic lords disobeyed the gravest law of the land, not to enter the old Rodian ruins. In there, he discovered the truth about the world, the past glory of humans, and their past relation with the Creator. Enraged, he proclaimed what he discovered for all to hear, killed the demonic lord, and began the crusade to liberate humankind.
It is many centuries since the Prophet launched his crusade. His sons established and were the first to take up the positions of the Emperor, a secular ruler, and the Pope, the spiritual one. However, the times are changing. Developments in technology, caused by new research and rediscovery of Rodian texts, bring the result that faith is no longer needed to protect oneself. After many wars, the boundary between free humans and demon-ruled pagans has been more-or-less established, and some begin to question the purpose of keeping up the fight. Many stray from the teachings of the Church. Rulers disobey the Pope and Emperor for their own power plays. But even in these times, some still remain faithful.
The players are supposed to play as middle-aged aristocrats who once were young and promising, but then something — injury, dishonor, enemies in high places — brought them down. Now, though, they emerge from their estates, trying one last time to become heroes they were meant to be.
This tabletop RPG provides examples of:
- '90s Anti-Hero: The character generation openly suggests to make an entire party of those. Why? Because obviously edgy anti-heroes are the coolest!
- Adventurer Archaeologist: Oddly enough (or not?), in-universe clergy also doubles as researchers, and plenty of that research involves looking for Rodian scientific texts.
- And Man Grew Proud: The Rodians were just too great for their own good.
- Aristocrat Team: Every party by design. Unless you specifically go out of your way to defy the rules, you can't be anything else than well-off (but not spectacularly rich), retired, landed noble that's also (due to how the game handles its mechanics) quite incompetent in just about anything.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Sort of. The in-universe word "deviria" is synonymous with "demons", but also carries the connotations of "non-human living beings". Yes, whether animals count is a contentious issue, also in-universe.
- The Cavalier Years: This era is the default historical inspiration.
- Creepy Cathedral: The landscape is dotted with foreboding Rodian ruins, most of them described as or compared to cathedrals. There's a minor subversion in that they're actually a boon to humans — they're impervious to the deviria and often contain valuable knowledge.
- Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Karian Church is a clear fantastic take on Roman Catholicism. The primary difference is that the founder figure, the Prophet, is explicitly not divine or even supernaturally inspired (one can guess it would be too close to home otherwise). As for dogma, it's not much described, but there's apparently less talk of forgiveness and more of support for sciences.
- Dark Secret: By default, every single PC is required to pick one, usually related to how exactly they've gained the "retired" part of their Retired Badass and provide GM with plot hooks. Unfortunately, the game forgot to explain that and you can only figure it out from having experience with similar mechanics in other games.
- Darker and Edgier: As part of the ever-increasing Polish competition in "who's gonna deliver darker take on RPG" during the early 00s, Monastyr was deliberately written to be even more edgy than the already overbearingly dark (and dead-serious) take on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay that dominated the Polish TTRPG scene of that era. Since the intended mood was akin to what's nowadays called "nobledark" rather than typical "grimdark", the game reaches at times near-comical levels of pretentiousness without an ounce of self-awareness.
- Evil Sorcerer: Any sorcerer, the game assumes. Those who try to learn magic without evil intent, either to fight fire with fire or as an edgy pastime, are explicitly described as delusional.
- Expy: The Empire is, well, the Empire, with few name-swaps and slight (but not too big) upgrade in the general tech level.
- Failure Is the Only Option:
- The mechanics are not only clunky, they are also intentionally designed for this in mind.
- On meta-level, the assumed playstyle of the game is that the party will fail with their task or at least die trying.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Alternatively, the Empire is a weird mix of Holy Roman Empire (general aesthetics and political fragmentation) and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the way how said politics are handled).
- There are also others, such as Bardania, which is a sort of Scotland with Poland-flavoured history, and Cynazja, which is a dark take on Italian cloak-and-dagger stereotypes. That the game draws inspirations from Alexandre Dumas flavors everything with a pinch of France, too.
- The GM Is a Cheating Bastard: The ruleset openly encourage to ignore roll outcomes, fudge them, make up additional negative modifiers and what not, all in the service of the "better story", which the game understands as "keeping it on the rails at all costs".
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- The game describes Matra as a land of subtle, yet implacable political players, but the rules for Matran characters seem designed to produce a ninja.
- The party is intended to be made out of Retired Badasses with grandiose backstories. The ruleset make it feel as if playing Adaptational Wimps.
- Firearms are a big game-changer lore-wise. Gameplay-wise, they are more likely to explode in your hand than achieve anything else.
- Gentleman Adventurer: Loosely speaking, the player characters are assumed to be independently wealthy aristocrats so that players won't have to put maintenance before the story. Of course, that it allows for epic dramas, political shenanigans, and courtly intrigues is also of essence.
- The Last Dance: The characters are rarely allowed to succeed in the grand plot, and if so, only at the highest cost. The attitude that this is going to be their last big deed before dying is incorporated both in the rules and the fluff of the book. note
- Loads and Loads of Rules: The infamously clunky 3d20 system
, later used in Neuroshima, was explicitly created for Monastyr. - Negated Moment of Awesome: Oh so very much. To wit:
- The rules in general, and GM manual in particular, openly call to pull those on regular basis. Especially when RNG declares critical success or something similar.
- If the current scenario is to end with the success of the party, the GM manual just as openly states that it can only be achieved by Total Par..., err, Heroic Sacrifice.
- The game is set in a fantasy world with multiple nations, powerful magic and entire slew of fantasy races populating it. You are only ever allowed to come from a single political block, always being human (and non-humans are far away from your country of origin) and magic is forbidden to be used, not even as Godzilla Threshold. And no, you can't play for the forces of evil, either.
- Non-Protagonist Resolver: To keep with the general theme of Negated Moment of Awesome, the game openly expect those to solve the plot for the player characters. Or even outright deny players interaction with the scenario, which is then solved by NPCs and players are expected to endure 10-20 minutes of their GM monologuing. No, for real. Perhaps most prominently, one of the example "adventures" for the game consists of local fishermen defeating the Monster of the Week all on their own, while the PCs are told to essentially get lost, but first watching all the events from the nearby beach - and this is the expected "playstyle" for all scenarios.
- Orphaned Series: Much like Neuroshima the franchise carried on strong for a good while, but the chief developer kind of lost interest in RPGs in favour of his far more profitable board game business. At that point, the co-developer had most of the stillborn Second Edition ready, but was left on ice and nothing came out of it in the end. Notably, the lead designer invoked Old Shame when asked about Monastyr in a podcast from 2020.
- Player Character: The game infamously narrowed down the options of who your character can be to a spectrum so small, it's not even really a choice. Then throwing them into a setting where just about anything else would be a more interesting vocation.
- Precursors: The Rodians, as we said above. Their cathedrals still dot the landscape and form the game's loose equivalent to the Randomly Placed Dungeon of more adventurous settings.
- Reincarnation: It's a thing and it's quite a problem for the Church, both dogma and long-term crusading-wise. Once you die, your soul don't go to any sort of stand-in for heaven or even hell, you're just reborn, as a blank slate. And if you were evil or unfaithful, you will be reborn as deviria, rather than human. Which obviously makes it a problem when fighting a war against said deviria and their ranks just continuously swelling.
- Royal Rapier: Since Dominium is no longer in the medieval default, older types of swords have been replaced with rapiers. That said, some traditionalists or no-nonsense soldiers may still cling to other types, finding rapiers either too modern or unsuited to battlefield work.
- Retired Badass Roundup: By design, every party begins like this. The game offers some notes on how to play a youngster character, but this is very much optional.
- Saintly Church: The Church, as depicted in the game, is about never wrong, and the problems are caused by people straying away from it. Whenever religious fanatics are described, the narration makes sure to note the Church authorities have only a loose control over their actions.
- Standard Fantasy Races: They don't matter that much, since player characters are explicitly not allowed to be anything else than humans, and all the non-humans live outside the borders of the Empire.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: They still live underground, but they're also evil, a sort of tunnel warfare specialist troops to the deviria.
- Our Elves Are Different: They're sociopathic killing machines, assassins and commandoes of the forces of evil.
- Our Orcs Are Different: They're the common grunts of demonic armies.
- Status Quo Is God: The world is by conscious design choice perpetually at the verge of collapsenote . Thus, whatever the party is trying to do, it won't achieve anything in the bigger scale of things. Best they can hope for is finishing their personal quests.
- Stylistic Suck: All the lore descriptions are done from the perspective of NPCs living in the setting of the game. Third of them is made by poorly educated peasants, criminals and low-lives, which has predictable effect on the writing.
- Writing Around Trademarks: The game is best described as "late 90s Polish take on Warhammer, if one was only ever allowed to play as Imperial". Not only it's very blatant, but further ties to the past of the lead designer, who previously worked on scene-defining set of articles about WFRP and how to bring it to "higher level". Monastyr is nothing more but said articles, collectively known as Jesienna Gawęda, grafted into a separate tabletop RPG, rather than using WFRP 1e ruleset.
- This further ties into a long-lasting publishing conflict in Poland, where three different publishers tried to cash in on Warhammer immense popularity. Monastyr was chiefly created to still get Warhammer players and fandom, without taking part in that conflict or getting license for the game itself.
- The game has also been long suspected of being, shall we say, "inspired" by a little-known Swedish RPG Gemini. Gemini is a Dark Fantasy game set in a Baroque-era world where humans have to contend with various demonic infestations... yeah.
