Monks of the Way of the Iron Pillar are trained to be the strongest they can be. They do not merely aim to perfect their bodies, but to surpass their limits and achieve what others consider impossible for the body to accomplish. They aim to crack stone with a punch, put dents in iron with their kicks, and to pierce skin with but a finger. Monks in this style learn to become immovable objects, to strike with fists as hard as iron, and hone their bodies to withstand any blow.

Iron Pillar Technique

Your training has made you incredibly strong and durable. Starting when you take this tradition at 3rd level, you gain the following benefits.

Resilient Body. When calculating your AC for your Unarmored Defense, in addition to your Wisdom modifier and Dexterity modifier, you may also add your Strength Modifier to your AC.

Stance of the Pillar. Whenever you use your Patient Defense feature, you gain resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons, and have advantage on saving throws to resist being grappled, restrained, forcibly moved, and knocked prone.

Fists of Steel

Starting at 6th level, your unarmed attacks become even deadlier. Your unarmed strikes now deal 1d8 damage. This increases to 1d10 at 11th level, and 1d12 at 17th level. You may also now choose to deal slashing or piercing with your unarmed strikes instead of the normal bludgeoning damage.

Iron Defense

Starting at 11th level, when you are hit by a melee attack from a creature within 5ft of you, you may use your reaction to spend 2 ki points and reduce the damage by 1d10 + your Constitution modifier + your monk level.

If you reduce the damage of the attack to 0, as part of the same reaction, you can make an unarmed melee attack against the attacker.

Iron Endurance

At 17th level, your body is at peak performance. Your Strength and Constitution scores increase by 2, to a maximum of 22.

Additionally, whenever you are hit by a critical hit, you can spend 3 ki points to negate the critical hit and take normal damage instead.