Like a lovingly forged and carefully honed weapon, the Martial Arts Guidebook offers you the chance to employ 59 new martial arts-themed Techniques: methods for your characters to do something more on the battlefield. It also explores the use of arcane, ki, and grit points to perform awesome martial arts techniques. In addition, it brings you six detailed martial schools, complete with descriptions, adventure seeds, boons and associated NPCs—almost twenty personalities to fill out the ranks, along with new feats and new magical items, all with a combat bent.
Why should rogues and wizards get all the fun? This is about giving your game not only a lot of options for the battlefield, but creating martial organizations for your game world. You don't have to just be former member of the guard or a retired military man, or a mercenary without a company. You can be part of a subcultures of warriors who band together in schools for exotic reasons and pursue evocative goals.
Crafted by the dedicated collective of Timothy Wallace, Matthew Stinson, William Senn, Mike Wice, Aaron Phelps and ENnie-award winner Ben McFarland, the Martial Arts Guidebook gives you something to strive towards, something to fight for, and a stylish sense of cinematic panache while you're at it.
Authors: Timothy Wallace, Matthew Stinson, William Senn, Ben McFarland, Mike Wice, Aaron Phelps
Cover Artist: Juan Diego Dianderes
Pages: 59
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Our friendly neighborhood reviewer Mr. E.Z. Geist has already reviewed this book two years ago. I just received it for Christmas as a lucky gift and am taking the advice of the gift-giver to review this. So here's my commentary:
The Martial Arts Guidebook is a true pleasure to read. Too often, books come out that are strongly focused on the crunch of their ideas. More feats, more archetypes, more numbers. these are good things, to be sure, but not the totality of the game. Some books go the other way: tons of evocative ideas and description, and the only numbers to be had are things like "the city's population is 53,000 people, rising to nearly double that during trading season" or sucklike. It's too rare to find a book that gives the reader both well-detailed locations/people as well as solidly-designed new gaming material.
This book delivers on both, in spades.
Each school is a unique creation, with its own background and story. The martial arts styles feel and look very different in the mind's eye as you read about each one. It's been a few years since this book premiered and it still fills an important, relevant niche in gameplay. With new classes coming along from time to time, integrating older material into the game can be difficult sometimes. But the Martial Arts Guidebook gives multiple different paths to bringing the material to the game and to life.
I've never had the opportunity to play in a game centered around martial artists (something I'd love to try!), but if I did, this book would be one of two that I would absolutely want to integrate into my campaign of all third-party products. I cannot recommend it strongly enough as a tool for making combat more interesting while still adding to the campaign world you set your games within.
