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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2009132" data-attributes="member: 9860">This is not a playtest review.Beyond Monks is a d20 martial arts accessory, the first release from Chainmail Bikini Games. Its not cheap for a .pdf release - $8 for 67 pages, which includes a completely blank page. Its 2.41 MB reflects the limited art in the product and it is limited in both amount and quality. Though the 'front cover' (showing a woman connecting with fist and foot against two enemies) is average, the remainder of the art would have been better left out altogether. I found the quality of writing to be mediocre, particularly when discussing non-rules issues, but the editing seems fairly good.Beyond Monks begins with the new Martial Artist full class, designed to be the physical combat equivalent to the more spiritual Monk class and exemplify the wuxia genre. I thought the class very playable, though the class features did include some spiritual abilities and supernatural powers that the initial description had implied would be missing. However, the class does concentrate on physical abilities and martial arts weapon skills. I particularly liked the fact that there are no alignment or multiclassing restrictions so the martial artist can be multiclassed freely with other classes. Like the fighter, the martial artist is strengthened by bonus feats, though they are restricted to martial arts style feats described later in the accessory.Ten prestige classes are presented:* Armor Pugilist - extreme training hardens the natural armour class and helps resist energy damage.* Blade Artist - dagger specialist combined with martial arts, obsessed with personalised weapon.* Blood Hunter - learns a martial arts style from a vampire, must be evil.* Crooked Monk - spends his life attempting to experience something new as often as possible, very chaotic and probably very annoying in a group. Can also stretch limbs.* Ghost Killer - aims to put undead to rest with the advice of a patron ancestral spirit.* Ki Blaster - uses ki as a remote energy attack.* Psynergist - combines psionics and ki use.* Storm Lord - learns to harness the raw power of nature in terms of lightning, rain, wind and frost.* Sylvan Monk - learn to avoid attacks by bending reality such that the attack was never going to hit them. Practice in natural settings, hence the name.* Tanterist - uses specialised knowledge of the human anatomy to heal or attack.The prestige classes use a mixture of 5 and 10 levels. Some of the prestige classes have a nice touch by giving an example NPC for them.The next section includes over 80 new feats related to martial arts. As noted in previous reviews, and by the author himself, not all these are comparatively balanced, with some weak and some strong. However, there is a useful index at the back of the book that allows a GM to tick which feats will be allowed in her campaign, which can be shown to the players. This is based on the premise that the GM should limit the available feats to those which she feels happy with.Further to the feats is a section entitled Style Mastery Feats. These are specialised martial arts styles with other feats as prerequisites. For example, the 'One Against Many' style mastery feat grants free access to the Whirlwind Attack feat, but requires Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Expertise, Flash Attack, Improved Dodge, Improved Unarmed Strike, and Mobility first. Once these feats have been gained, the character can automatically take the style mastery feat without using a slot for it. There is also advice for designing your own style mastery feats.The next section gives advice on multiclass archetypes, something which I first came across in Star Wars Gamer magazine, and I like the idea. It uses the freedom of being able to multiclass classes from the PHB with the martial artist class, to produce an archetypal character concept. For example, mixing levels of Sorcerer and Martial Artist gives you the Mystic Warrior archetype, who can perform feats of flying (similar to that in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon') as well as benefiting from other spells mixed with the toughness of the martial arts class. Good advice regarding the advantages and disadvantages of the archetype, as well as ways to power-up the archetype are give. To a certain extent for munchkins, but shows a good understanding of the d20 rules and gives some neat ideas for realising a character concept, which could enhance roleplaying. Other archetypes include the Beast Observer (Barbarian/Martial Artist) which uses fighting styles that mimic animals, Ninja (Rogue/Martial Artist), Temple Guardian (Cleric/Martial Artist), and Weapon Master (Fighter/Martial Artist).The next section gives advice on customising the Monk class. Most of the tweaking that is recommended is sacrificing one or more of the Monk's class features for bonus feats from the Martial Artist lists. Advice is also given for designing monk organisations in your campaign and an optional rule is discussed for relaxing the multiclassing rule for Monks.The next section aims to give rules and advice for speeding up game play to approximate the films that the accessory uses as its source material. This is all fairly general stuff and some of it is probably being used by most DMs already, such as pacing, reduced bookkeeping, and getting players to help whilst other such as instant magical item identification, rapid healing and maximum hit points are probably best left for the combat-orientated martial arts game only.There are also rules for using improvised weapons with plenty of advice for ways to encourage the use of these to enhance combats. There is a table with the approximate weapon from the PHB to be used as guidelines for stats with some notes on tweaking to better reflect the individual item.There follows some basic rules for drunken fighting, and some ideas for new uses of old skills and speed special effects, such as running up a vertical surface and across water.Finally, there are a number of magical items and martial arts weapons described, as well as some new weapon special abilities. An appendix gives tables and stats for quickly throwing together an NPC Martial Artist.    Conclusion: This accessory is short on presentation, in terms of art, quality of writing and background/setting information. I know very little about wuxia films and I didn't learn a lot more about the themes and settings, or gain many adventure ideas from this accessory.However, thats not what Beyond Monks is about. Its about rules expansions and allowing martial arts to become playable in any campaign setting. And to this end, it achieved much of what it set out to do. Much of the atmosphere in martial arts films comes from the fighting styles and stunts, and the rules provided here allow those aspects to be recreated using the d20 rules.If you want to introduce a detailed martial arts system into your campaign I highly recommend this accessory. If you want to create a wuxia campaign, Beyond Monks gives you the combat rules but none of the setting or themes to do it (and it would have been better for doing so). In tandem with another setting accessory, Beyond Monks could also be a worthwhile purchase. Hopefully, Chainmail Bikini Games will give a little more thought to their presentation in their next release.</blockquote>

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