Character Creation
As with other D&D games, you must create your character.
The Monk is a special class available free to VIP accounts.
Non-VIP players must purchase the class using Turbine Points (TP) through the DDO Store. Unlike some races or classes, the Monk cannot be unlocked through Favor points.
Teacher Unbongwah passed on Teacher EllisDee37's sage advice to those more ascetic acolytes among our candidates (what others call Free-to-Play): You can run characters on all live servers and build up 125 Turbine Points from each server. This should give you almost, if not all the TP required to obtain the class with some hard work.
The Book of Syncletica is scribed for all player account types, but specifically Premium and VIP, since its far more efficient to buy the Monk class with regular cash than to grind for it as a Free-to-Play account.
As such, Free-to-Play players should note that the Book concentrates on the use of the class and does not differentiate chapter information based on specific adventures, classes or items that may be restricted to players by their account type.
If you are not familiar with a particular adventure, location or item, see the DDO Wiki for details about your account.
About "Character Builds"
Until recently, this Book did not provide any specific character builds.
The reason for this should be clear: It's a kind of cheat. Not so much in cheating the game, but yourself. It's one thing to import a build and use it. It is an entirely different thing to understand the selections inside each build. Else, you may never utilize the selections and thus feel discouraged when the build does not perform as you expect.
With Update 19, the notion of a build became far more complicated than ever before. The changes to the enhancements (which begin to define your Prestige path immediately) as well as racial benefits that allow a type of multiclassing (such as adding an Arcane Archer tree to a half-elf Monk in addition to their other selected class trees) mean that your Monk (and other classes) can do so much more. With this many variations, it's impractical to attempt to list them all.
A Monk is about balance. You'll likely make great variances in your skills than your abilities over time--even a few not mentioned here. This guide hopes to explain the importance of key abilities, skills and enhancements of the class so that you can determine what's best for you--and for you to later improve on what you learn.
Starting with Update 26, the Book will provide three starter builds for each of the three enhancement trees. These will be generic builds that utilize the common fighting styles and default core abilities of the Shintao Monk, Ninja Spy and Henshin Mystic as the enhancements define them.
These starter builds can be your starting point to understand how to play that enhancement tree and, later, to improve on it for yourself. Starter builds will NOT be an heavy damage, perfect optimized build, but a balanced set of racial and class enhancement to help a beginning player learn and play with as little undue hardship, using easily available gear.
Also with Update 26 are specialty builds, all designed to leverage special talents of the Ninja Spy tree. One is a third-party build by Teacher Firewall, and two others were developed by students, here, in Syncletica's dojo.
You can also use a build guide to test out what resources you will need for a build of your own, based on information from this guide and other sources. Planning out your own build for any class, before you begin creating a new character in DDO, is a good idea.
A popular build tool is RJ Cyberware's DDO Character Planner. A second builder, more suitable for players that know more about DDO (although not necessarily about Monks), is Character Builder Lite, by Teacher EllisDee37.