Monasteries and Nunneries in Terafa

I mentioned late last year that I was working on a post about this topic. It hasn't really come together, so I'll quickly just post the highlights.

When reading "The Pillars of the Earth", one of the things that it made a big deal of was that travellers could present themselves at a monastery and request lodgings - strictly for a single night, and they'd be expected to offer some sort of a gift on parting, but it was there.

Adapting that for D&D gives a neat tie for the Monk class - if we assume that the setting is dotted with monasteries, but posit that these are much more like armed camps than the historical equivalent, we get a nice bit of D&D flavour without too much changed. In a "Points of Light" setting that makes a lot of sense - the isolated tavern on the road actually would be horribly vulnerable, but an armed outpost of martial artists?

In Terafa, then, I will be placing such outposts fairly frequently. Some of these will be men-only, some women-only (hence monasteries and nunneries), and some mixed sex. Additionally, I'm inclined to divorce these orders from the religious aspect that was the case historically. Instead, monasteries and nunneries will be engaged in a quest to protect and retrieve lost lore following the Upheaval - a great event about three hundred years ago that shattered a lot of things.

Or something like that. It still needs some work, but as I said, it hasn't fully come together yet.