Paizo Iconics - Sajan

Many people, even of my generation, always thought that the addition of the Monk class seemed really weird in D&D. But I came into D&D in the early to mid-80s. The Monk was added in Dave Arneson's 1975 Blackmoor supplement. Arneson was always more of a genre bender than Gygax, who was a bit more of a Medieval military history buff, along with pretty traditional fantasy. In 1975, Enter the Dragon had been out for about two years, and Bruce Lee was kind of a faddish icon at the time. The wildly popular David Carradine Kung Fu TV show had just had or was still in its third and final season. I still saw reruns of that ten or so years later, so in a way I kind of get why there's a monk in D&D, but at the same time, it really feels like an artifact of the early to mid 70s that has aged poorly since. 

That said, Gygax included the monk, as well the assassin from Blackmoor when he released the AD&D Player's Handbook in 1977, and monks became, for better or for worse, an integral part of D&D because of that. Although I've never had much interest in playing one, I've seen them in play in campaigns that I've also been in, by other players. 

Paizo, for whatever reason, decided that Orientalist martial artist monks wouldn't necessarily be Chinese or Japanese, like you'd have expected in the 70s and 80s respectively given the faddish popularity of Hong Kong movies, Bruce Lee and Kung Fu in the 70s and the whole fascination with ninjas, samurai and Japanese pop culture through an 80s American pop culture lens that was a hallmark of the 80s. Rather, they seem to have mostly made them Vudran, which is kinda sorta their fake India... yet Vudra is off-screen from the main campaign setting, and I'm not sure that there's any product that actually details it; the closest we get is Jalmeray, the "Vudran island colony" that is geographically kinda sorta where Madagascar is, to the extent that you can align Golarion and real world geographies. 

Sajan, the iconic Bollywood martial artist (lol, people mostly make fun of Bollywood in America. It isn't like it has the same cultural cachet that Hong Kong movies did in America in the 70s) is kinda sorta like Kwai Chang Caine; an exile looking for his missing sibling who can't return home, so he's destined to wander the land interminably. Probably with a melancholic corny 70s TV show music playing in the background while he's a silhouette against he sunset crossing the desert. And maybe the flashbacks to his training in whatever an Indian equivalent to a Shaolin temple is.

I dunno. While I can at least imagine the cultural touchstones in the 70s that made an iconic monk character seem desirable in D&D, because I'm old enough to have memories of the aftershocks of the cultural touchstone; I saw Kung Fu reruns in the 80s, and Hong Kong movies were usually on TV on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid too, I still think it's kind of silly. And Indians aren't even as cool as Chinese monks. I've known way too many Indians to be impressed with them anymore. Whatever. Sajan is included as one of the pregens for the Second Darkness adventure path, and is next in the roll-out of the Paizo iconics.