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[Saint]

Make the monks subsist on a diet of raw plump helmets and ice-cold mountain water. No cooked food, no alcohol, and no meat.

You'd have to mod the raws to keep them from being angry over no booze.

[Eddren]

Are you kidding me? Rage is the best..
..Now they get to murder ANYTHING that opposes them!

[NRDL]

Posting to watch, this is awesome.  I wish more people would do stuff like this.  Also, as a suggestion, embark on a mountain, it gives the place a very Bruce Lee  martial arts monastery feel.  Bonus points if you can make two very high towers, where any sieging enemy has to pass through one tower.  These two towers would be connected by a narrow, stationary bridge.  This way, any goblin or elven or human invaders would have to go on the bridge and fight your warrior monks in a confined space.  Your guys will probably die of dodging over the edge, but you might be able to get a nice epic martial arts bridge battle. 

[Wayward Device]

I've often thought about building a training dojo for my non-military dwarfs and is makes me happy to see someone dedicating a whole fort to it. Here are some ideas I've thought of before. Firstly, once the place is up and running you should make various training enviroments and appropriate custom professions for those who have mastered them. For example, novice monks (or whatever you call them) train in a variety of barracks including one with pressure plates hooked up to wooden training spears, one on a 1-wide walkway 2 z levels high, one in a pool that's 4/7 full etc. Nothing particularly dangerous, but enough to give them a good grounding in the basic fighting skills and a few cuts and scrapes to train your Master of Healing  . Obviously, the recruits should be trained by a few learned masters while still at this novice level. Once they have reached an appropriate level of skill, they go through some sort of initiation test before moving up to neophyte or whatever gradation of skill you want to use. I can imagine this being, say, a one-on-one fight above a 3-5 z pit filled with copper spikes. Repeat as necessary. 

The other things that come to mind are that if you ever by luck get a blind dwarf then you have to ensure that he becomes a legendary blind fighting master, but this is self evident. Also, I assume that the guy who will be teaching the starting seven is in line to become the first Grand Master of your order (whats it called by the way?). Well, I'm thinking that if you ever get another dwarf who could fit that role, then you have to make them duel for it in a suitably epic setting, like over a bottomless-for-all-intents-and-purposes pit. Finally, masterwork silk robes are surprisingly good protection and I heartily recommend them. 

[thegoatgod_pan]

I love everyone's advice, I intentionally set out with rope reed, dimple cuts and plump helmets for simple food and a clothing industry.  I don't like the surface to be too diverse z-level wise (that's what caverns are for) so at this point it is on a flat glacier. Kudos to Wayward device for suggesting a vast and dangerous training program, I will implement these as soon as the fort is out of the danger-of-death-by-thirst territory (should be soon enough)
The fort is called 'Witherabbey", the civ "The artifact of showering" and the clan "The Spear of Thorns"

Also thanks to some flesh balls which provided unwitting and effective training dummies, I have my first legendary fighter/wrestler by the mid autumn of the first year.  Flesh balls: the other other danger room

[NRDL]

Updates?  I wanna see a Dwarven Jackie Chan. 

[elf-fondling human]

Alpacas fit the theme better than Llamas, because they tend to live in mountains anyway. This includes the Himalayas, irc, and there are a lot of monasteries in the Himalayas.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Update*:

All seven original founders became legendary fighters and wrestlers early in the fall of the first year after beating on flesh balls for about half a season. The top layers of the monastery are a circle of ice walls, below it a second circle carved into the glacier.  Ideally I'm working for a perfect sphere. 

The peasantry are coming in droves and settling into the cavern area, where I set up a well, some traps and raising bridges, a little farm and pasture. So far I caught (and with judicious raw editing) tamed a cave dragon who promptly laid an egg.  A cave dragon seems like an appropriate mascot for a dwarven dojo--Enter the (Cave) Dragon!  It still hasn't hatched, though about 3 seasons have passed.

A clothier withdrew from society, but with insufficient wool (since the monks weren't farming and immigrant kept coming we were forced to eat the yaks, the horses and finally even the cats and dogs) failed to complete the artifact and went berserk.  A monk punched his brain in.

A glassmaker made a lovely earring, and is now cranking out all sorts of masterpiece goods--the monastery has a definite ice and green glass theme going.

Work will soon begin on the tower and training center--I want the monks to have individual cells, a training and mediation hall, a swimming pool and an obstacle course with something like a danger room, but no automated lever pulling--instead I want to somehow use pressure plates.  Cloth industry is starting up--a pity the clothier went mad or I could have some really nice robes out.

In case monks prove ineffective against goblins I started drafting peasants into a marksdwarf and swordsdwarf squads.  Neither have any weapons yet, since I never bothered to set up a forge and the minerals at my disposal include nickel, silver and copper. 


The abbey has 10 monks, 7 of them legendary and 39 peasants, mostly useless (though migrantion brought something like 4 skilled armorers--oh the irony...)

[Eddren]

Also, you should literally make it a perfect sphere. And it should hover 6 z-levels in the sky, with only supports keeping it up.

[PwndJa]

Mod children and have them train until adulthood. But don't let them fight until they are adults. It will just end badfun.

[Girlinhat]

The cave dragon egg won't hatch.  There needs to be a male cave dragon to get a hatchling.  And it will take 1,000 years to mature into an adult.  The egg itself will take years to hatch, I believe, but only IF there's a male to fertilize it.

Cave Dragon Egg Roast, anyone?

[dmurray]

I know you've got the basics up but might I suggest this for next time: Have a master monk to train three of them. Have one "outside" monk, to pick berries and chop wood and move refuse.
Then have two monks inside, one a woodworker/mason/miner and another, farmer/clothier.

The idea is that the expert monk will train three other dwarves, those three dwarves can each "open" their own school or in other words, each of those dwarves gets a seperate dojo to teach immigrants. With every immigrant wave, you can take one or two as vistors to the dojos and workers for it. You can teach them hand-to-hand, albiet more slowly.

[Ubiq]

Dig out a pit and place fortifications along the sides. Go up a level and designate a Pond above it. Now your monks can do strength training by carrying buckets of water all day.

It won't actually do anything, but hey, what's martial arts training without somebody lugging around buckets of water?

[elf-fondling human]

See if you can mod in a custom workshop, call it a wall or something, and have it train your monk dwarves in the art of punching holes in walls. It can take hand to hand to "operate", and would also improve armor skills.

[Garky]

Any possibility of having the monks focus on striking and kicking skills, rather than wrestling? I didn't dig into it much, but I once embarked with 5 points in teacher on one dwarf that somehow picked up skill in biting. Most any training session he lead thereafter was for biting.