Blood and Fists: Modern Martial Arts

[PosterBoy]

Blood and Fists brings the action of the Martial Arts genre into your d20 Modern game. With new advanced classes like the Martial Arts Master, the Contemplative Master, and the Badass Barroom Brawler, Martial Arts Styles from around the world, and over 100 new feats, rules for Ki, Pressure Points, Zen Mastery, and other mystical abilities, Martial Arts Modern gives you everything you need to bring exotic fighting styles to your game.

From Aikido to Zen Archery, Blood and Fists has it!

 

[GameWyrd]

A martial arts supplement for d20 modern was always going to be a bit of a gamble. It’s a do or die scenario. RPGObjects’s Blood and Fists is, I think, the first such product out and so it has no one else to learn from. There are other problems too. D20 Modern was written with guns in mind. If you want a martial artist to be on equal footing with the other heroes then you’d need to jazz things up. If you jazz things up then you’re going to have little chance of producing realistic rule mechanics. Fast kicks and swift punches just aren’t as dangerous as fast bullets and deadly rpgs (rocket propelled grenades, of course).

Blood and Fists, aware of all these challenges, sets about taking them on with determination enough to win over the most ardent Golden Harvest fan. Golden Harvest is, of course, the movie company responsible for such classics as The Young Master, Snake in Eagle’s Shadow and it’s famous sequel The Drunken Master. Cinematic kung-fu. There’s one possible solution. The high kicking antics of movie martial artists could well bring the character in line with gun toting characters in a modern setting. Before we even get to the martial arts, Blood and Fists presents three new advanced classes: the Bad-Ass Barroom Brawler (the Americanism easily well known enough here in Europe to avoid any confusion with drunk ninja donkeys), the Contemplative Master and the Martial Arts Master. The latter two are designed to replace the martial arts master in d20 Modern and we’re told, straight up, that they’ve more "bang for the buck" than the original. We’re told why they’ve more bang for the buck, these are the classes you’ll use if you want martial arts to be a bigger part of your game. That works for me. That’s why I’d buy the supplement. It’s not all cinema though. In fact, if you prefer the historical and mystical aspects of the genre then they’re here too. Ki Feats are just the natural union of the d20 system and the mystic power side of the genre. Blood and Fists doesn’t get very much more spiritual than that. You won’t find two Contemplative Masters playing a game of Go while testing the strength of their chi against one another in this supplement. When Blood and Fists talks about different styles it does so by explaining when, who, where and why a style was developed and how it’s used. The supplement details some of the exotic weapons used by martial artists, noting their use too, and finishes by looking at some common themes in martial art based campaigns. There’s a skeleton of a tournament based scenario right at the end and this wraps up the story running through the flavour text.

For any d20 fantasy regular it’ll hard not to think "Barbarian" as a summary for the Bad-Ass Barroom Brawler since the advanced class enjoys the Rage per Day spell feature. The Brawler also enjoys damage enhancing Cheap Shot moves too and so it’s similar to the rogue as well. This class represents super tough but untrained fighters and it does it well. The different between the Contemplative Master and the Martial Arts Master is that the latter is simply interested in mastering the martial moves of their style. The former, the Contemplative, is interested in the teachings, beliefs and conviction of their style. As class specials both Masters receive either a bonus feat or a style Mastery at every level. The range of feats or masteries they can pick from depend on the martial art styles they know.

Just before you get into the plethora of new feats you’ve a quick blast of new skills. Some of these skill incarnations are those "new uses for old skills" that normally send me flicking through the pages but since Blood and Fists is more or less a set of uber-mechanics there’s a real reassurance to see that, for example, the Sense Motive skill is "officially" used by the system to predict attacks.

Once you get into the feats you’ll see that they’re divided easily into categories – the general category rather limply being described as the place for feats that didn’t fit anywhere else. Archaic Weapons – Indian is a sample of a general feat. One of Blood and Fists many successes is the inclusion of Indian (that’s the sub-continent) and Indonesian styles and weapons.

It’s here in the feats that you’ll find the martial arts styles. Martial arts are feats; they have prerequisites and benefits. Blood and Fists offers up a healthy collection of different martial arts and it differentiates between styles at a good level. Styles are different enough in terms of game mechanics to make things interesting but not too complex. External styles tend to concentrate on the physical side and will probably use Strength or Dexterity as the bonus giving stat. Internal styles focus more on the martial artists state of mind and awareness, these styles may use Wisdom or even Charisma as their attack bonus stat. The concept of "unarmed combat" as defined by D20 Modern is broken down further by Blood and Fists and expanded into; punching, kicking and head butts which continue Disarm, Trip, Grapple and Feint. Some styles are adaptable (able to borrow bits here and there) whereas others are fixed and there are those styles considered "aesthetic" and are concerned with spiritualism and the non-aesthetic fighting styles that dedicate themselves to combat. That’s all good, that all works, but the real trick is that the supplement describes how the author (Charles Rice of "Blood and Relics" and "Blood and Space") built each martial art in the supplement by dividing six points of interest on the above topics. It’s useful being an adaptive fighting style but it costs two of the six points, it’s handy having a martial art that uses Dex rather than Str for the damage bonus and that’ll cost another point. This is great. This sharing of information allows the reader to balance any fighting style of their own design. I recently watched a sub-titled martial art flick where the hero used his long and weighed ponytail (his queue) as a weapon and vital part of his combat style – I could use these rules to create a Blood and Fists suitable style. I don’t have any compelling reason to work my own style out like this; Blood and Fists has plenty.

It takes more than just training in certain zones (punch, kicks, tripping, etc) and a primary stat to complete a martial art. The martial artist needs to start learning the range of special manoeuvres the style teaches. Manoeuvres are another set of feats. Whereas high kicks in Martial Art A might be different from high kicks in Martial Art B, Blood and Fists is concerned only with the High Kick feat. These core manoeuvres also work as feats; this time round the prerequisites include suitable stats, skills and martial art style training. For example, if you’re wanting to master the Deceptive Attack then the prerequisites are: Bluff 5 Ranks and either Cobra, Drunken Master or Scorpion. The Effect: "If you use Deceptive Attack with a normal attack, you add your Charisma modifier to your attack roll. If you use it in conjunction with a feint attack, you may add your Charisma modifier to either the attack roll or the damage roll." There are a large number of these maneuvers, everything from jabs and flying kicks to combination moves and iaijutsu.

I don’t think it would be quite right to describe the maneuvers as "basic moves". They’re a level above that. A flying kick isn’t a basic attack. Let’s use the D20 Modern class analogy. If simply punches and kicks without martial art training are equivalent to basic classes then these feat-bound maneuvers are the advanced classes. Signature Maneuvers would therefore be the prestige class equivalent. There are prestige classes in D20 Modern, Urban Arcana introduced them, but you don’t need that WotC book to use Blood and Fists. It’s here, another set of feats (with tougher requirements) that you’ll find the famous Crane Kick, Float Like a Butterfly (since boxing is included in the supplement too), Eagle Claw and Shadow Warrior style feats. It’s here that if a GM wanted to rule in or rule out cinematic moves that he’d make most of his rulings as to what’s available in the game. Some of these signature moves only ever existed in the movies but Blood and Fists doesn’t pretend otherwise.

We’re still not finished with the martial art feats. There are nine Ki feats still to come. Nine doesn’t sound that many and it probably isn’t but where the physical feats elaborate over different ways to hit or dodge the ki feats remain general. There’s Bushido, Great Kai, Hypnotic Gestures, Inner Peace, Inner Power, Inner Strength, Ki, Kai and Wuxia.

There’s more. There’s a whole range of masteries too. These are relatively simple affairs that become available as the martial art master progresses up through the levels. A mastery has three levels; 1, 2 and 3. You need to have the 1st level before you can achieve the 2nd. You need to be of the right character level before you can achieve the 2nd. Adaptable styles have access to less 3rd level mastery than the non-adaptable ones and this is the main equaliser between the two.

Holding this all together is second list of all the martial arts in the supplement. This time round we’re not told about the history of the style nor which zones of attack and defence it teaches. In this list we’re simply told which bonus feats or martial art masteries a style is able to learn.

Here’s the "Python" style as an example. The Python style is a generic offering from Blood and Fists that’s used as the base for any python-based fighting styles from around the world.

"Mastery: Accurate Grapple 1, Accurate Grapple 2, Accurate Grapple 3, Block Mastery 1, Block Mastery 2, Hard Grapple 1, Hard Grapple 2, Hard Grapple 3, Shadow Mastery 1.

Bonus Feats: Alertness, Athletic, Bear Hug, Block, Improved Block, Lock Block, Choke Hold, Combat Expertise, Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Endurance, Eye Gouge, Ground Fighting, Advanced Ground Fighting, Immovable, Improved Damage Threshold, Jab, Nimble, Pentjak Silat, Poise, Shao-Lin Kung Fu, Stealthy, Toughness."

When do you get to pick from this list of masteries or bonus feats? Whenever your advanced class, the Completive or Martial Art Master, says so.

Does it sound complex? I suppose it might. That may well be the fault of the review rather than Blood and Fists though – but I did have to double back a few times when reading the supplement. It’s not complex really. There are simply different lists of feats that you get to pick from at different times.

Blood and Fists could end here and still be a great martial arts supplement. It goes on. We’ve got a long list of martial art style weapons. There are more than just old Asian weapons but Indian and Indonesian too. This means we’ve the Chakra (you know, the flying disc used by Xena: Warrior Princess – it is a real weapon), dangerous punch-daggers as well as Samurai blades.

By the time we find ourselves on chapter five we’re more than two-thirds of the way through the 63 pages. Chapter five talks about the common themes found in martial art movies: the evil boss, the evil twin, the rebellious son and the other classics. It’s an attempt to provide something other than hardcore crunch. It’s just long enough to escape any accusations of being filler material.

Blood and Fists finishes with the Hanmei. The Hanmei is an illegal street-fighting tournament run by a shady businessman. It’s an easy way to do a combat heavy campaign that’s more than just a truck-load of dice rolling. The sample NPCs, people to fight, range from 5th to 12th level and just happen to be the characters from the on-going story throughout the supplement.

I’ve found memories of GMing Ninjas and Superspies at school (many years ago!) and even though the system was awful it was fun being able to compare and contrast the different fighting styles available. It was with that gamer-wise sense of know-it-all that we then set about creating our perfect fighters. Blood and Fists will be able to do something similar, there’s more than enough fighting styles in here to make the chargen of a martial artist a work of artistic science. Blood and Fists doesn’t suffer from an awful game system, the mechanics are good. They’re quick, easy enough and yet manage to have enough scope to ensure that different fighting styles and tactics actually feel different once the dice begin to roll. I said at the start that a martial art supplement would be a do or die product and without a doubt this is a Do. Blood and Fists is pretty much everything you'd want it to be.

* This Blood and Fists review was first published by GameWyrd.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Great review - it has whetted my appetite to find out more, and I found your style of writing easy to get to grips with.

Thanks!

 

[Psion]

Blood and Fists

Blood and Fists is a martial arts sourcebook for the d20 Modern system. The book is written by Charles Rice and published (in both PDF and print format) by RPGObjects.

A First Look

Format: Available as a 64 page perfect bound softcover book for $14.95. Also available in PDF format for $6.95. The contents of the two are essentially identical.

Art: Cover art is by Jeremy Simmons, and is an orange-red with various east Asian themed symbols and characters on it, with the silhouette of a shuriken most prominently displayed on the front cover. The interior is black and white, with a few basic ink drawings of martial artists by Chris Martinez.

Layout: The book uses a basic two-column format. A conservatively sized body font text is used. The header font text used has a calligraphy-style look to it, but is clear and readable. The tables are well organized and easily readable.

A Deeper Look

Detailed treatment of martial arts in the d20 System is a somewhat hazardous subject to broach. Arguably, the feat system is where these sorts of abilities are best represented, but characters only receive a handful of feats as they advance. This being the case, various authors (including those on WotC's payroll) have tried to circumvent this using such dubious techniques as handing out free feat-like benefits with the right "lottery combination" of feats, allowing feat like benefits in exchange for raw XP or money, or even systems assigning individual skill ranks the importance of feats!

Blood & Fists, I am happy to report, avoids all this nonsense. Blood & Fists uses the foundational built in features of the d20 System to handle martial arts: feats and classes.

The basic building block of a martial arts style is one of many "martial art style" feats. Each of these feats corresponds to a fighting system, most of them drawn from authentic real world sources. Martial art style feats include well known east Asian combat system such as karate, kung fu, and jujutsu, as well as less known fighting systems from other parts of the world such as Hawaiian Lua, Russian ROSS, and Brazilian Capoeira. The styles here aren't just limited to the ever-popular unarmed fighting styles; you will also find styles like fencing, kendo, and kyudo herein.

"Animal" style feats, such as those taught by bando and various kung fu variants, are generalized into styles just named after the animal (cat, leopard, etc.), making the abstraction that these styles are fundamentally similar.

Each style feat offers a number of basic benefits that vary by style. These benefits can include new class skills, being considered "armed" when performing certain styles of attacks, negating two-weapon penalties with specific weapons, addition of class skills, and the ability to use abilities other than strength for melee attack rolls.

All of these feats have prerequisites; most of the unarmed styles have combat or defensive martial arts as a prerequisite. It may seem that some of the benefits are redundant with those of the prerequisite feats. However, the benefits from the style feats are somewhat similar to class skills granted by starting occupations in that if you already have the named class skill (or other benefit), you get a +1 bonus instead.

Of course, there are many martial arts in the world, and this one does not capture them all. To allow you to emulate unlisted styles (or make up your own fictional styles), the book has a simple 6-point system with which you can design your own martial art style feats.

A single feat only captures the basics of the style, but there are a variety of martial arts maneuvers. Many are available to a wide variety of martial arts characters, but most have a short list of martial arts styles of which one is required as a prerequisite. In this way the system adds further details as more advanced techniques of all of the martial arts styles. For example, a kick oriented style like Tae Kwon Do or Capoeria brings access to Axe Kick (which allows you to perform a kick attack with increased damage once a round), while arts with grappling and hold techniques bring access to Choke Hold (which allows you to quickly enter a strangulation hold). Many of these maneuver feats have more complex maneuver feats based on them.

More general maneuvers include the various levels of combination feats (which provide bonuses when you perform other "maneuver" style feats in a particular order) and iaijutsu (which allows an initiative bonus with a melee weapon). Also, general feats are available that have no particular maneuver or style as a prerequisite, such as kata feats (which are basically specializations in a style), know thy enemy, and knowledge is power (both of which provided benefits against practitioners of a specific style.)

One maneuver feat left me uncomfortable, the block feat, which let you use attacks to block incoming attacks. While a basic mechanical technique that has been used elsewhere, it seems to lack something; as an opponent's attack rarely occurs on your turn, the only way to practically do this under the rules is to reserve an action, which makes the feat seem weak considering the limitations on holding actions. EDIT: In the latest version, 1.2, of the PDF version, block is significantly refined and improved.

To further define martial arts styles, a number of signature maneuver feats are available. Unlike the general maneuver feats, each of these is unique to a particular style.

Some "aesthetic" styles have access to a selection of feats call ki feats. Ki feats are considered FX abilities, and allow access to benefits such as enhancing ability scores, ignoring environmental damage, or issuing a kiai shout that renders a foe flat-footed.

Though this is a lot of game mechanical details that are being lent to martial arts styles in the game, it is still not all. However, to tell the rest of the story, I must delve into the three new advanced classes provided for the game.

The three new advanced classes are bad-ass barroom brawler, contemplative master, and martial arts master. The bad-ass barroom brawler (whose name strikes me as a bit crass for a game mechanical entity) is the least entangles with the martial arts system of the three. The brawler receives three types of class abilities as it advances: rage, "cheap shot" (which allows sneak attack style bonus damage once per combat), and bonus feats selected from the more "no nonsense" type of feats providing benefits in melee combat.

The contemplative master and martial arts master's special abilities are similar in format. At odd levels, members of both classes get mastery abilities, which like various maneuver feats, are selected from a list of mastery abilities appropriate to a style the character knows; style masteries are more potent additions to the style, and the most potent are only available at the higher levels of these classes. At even levels, they get bonus feats chosen from those appropriate to the character's styles.

The contemplative master has poorer general combat abilities (hit die type, BAB advancement) than the martial arts master, but has more skill points per level (and access to more different skills) as well as access to bonus feats and masteries from an additional "contemplative" list.

To round out the tools with which to describe various martial arts styles, the book introduces three new skills (meditation, pressure points, and zen mastery) as well as new uses for balance (resisting trip attacks) and sense motive (predicting attacks.) The zen mastery skill leaves me a bit uncomfortable in that it circumvents the normal skill system and instead provides a percentage per skill rank subtracted from concealment miss percentages; this sort of modifier seems more appropriate for a feat. EDIT: In the latest version (1.2), Zen and Meditation become aspects of concentration, which is a good move.

In addition to the mechanics section of the book, part of the book is dedicated to the topic of martial arts campaign considerations. One chapter has a rundown citing many conventions common to cinematic martial arts movies and comics, and providing ideas on how you could use them in a d20 Modern campaign styled after these resouces.

The final chapter features the Hanmei, a tournament styled after those that appear frequently in the source material. The chapter describes the tournament, ways to use it in a game, and detailed sample NPCs using rules in this book of a variety of different levels.

Conclusion

I was really impressed with Blood and Fists. It is the first martial arts resource for an RPG that really set my imagination alight since Hero's Ultimate Martial Artist, and is the best treatment of martial arts that I have seen for the d20 System to date. It doesn't resort to dubious techniques that bypass level mechanics and provides statistics for real world styles that people are interested in representing, and represents them is a very detailed yet playable manner.

The book does have a few shortcomings. As mentioned, there were a few mechanical implementations that I was not comfortable with, such as the block feat and the zen mastery skill. EDIT: The treatment of block is much clearer in the 1.2 revision, and the meditation and zen skills are folded into concentration, a much more comfortable arrangement.

The book makes martial arts more powerful than they are as represented in the core d20 Modern rules, and owns up to the fact on the basis that it really doesn't make them more powerful than guns. While this point is well taken, it does make the book more appropriate to campaigns that wish to emphasize martial arts as a central element of the game vice simply adding martial arts techniques to campaigns that only have them as a sideline.

Overall Grade: (Edit) A+

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[cthulu_moose]

Blood and Fists was the first PDF I got hold of to support my D20 Modern game, and overall I'm pretty impressed. The vast majority of the book covers an immense wealth of detail of martial arts styles, providing new feats, skills and manoeuvres to describe each. Fistly, let me say that I'm not a martial arts expert in any sense, not even a non-oparticipatory sense, so if these styles are inaccurate or just plain wrong, I wouldn't know - I look more at what I can use for my game.

Blood and Fists feels on the small side despite it's 60-odd pages. This, I think, is becaus the majority of the book is just great big lists of feats, weapons, styles and manoeuvres. I tend to read a book by flicking through, and Blood and Fists is not good for that approach. Don't get me wrong, this is my problem rather than the book's. Whilst it is a very respectible 64 pages (including licences and character sheet), the lack of variety of chapters which makes it appear smaller only goes to highlight the detail you will find within. The lok and feel fo the book are great, capturing both the 'crisp and clean' feel of D20 Modern and an eastern style to emphasise the martial artselemet. The artwork is at the usual 1 quater-page image per 4 pages, and is definately in keeping with the style, showing largely oriental style matrial artsist fairly typical poses. The art, whilst not great quality, is perfectly acceptable for a PDF. These pictures are not really important, as it is the great page borders and iconograophy that is used that really sells it for me.

The first chapter covers some new Advanced Classes. Two of these are excellent; the Contemplative Master and the Martial Arts Master are nice broad classes with enough versatility to really capture the wide range of concepts you might be interested in trying with your PC. Bot these classes make good use of the martial arts styles system presented later in the book. IMO I like this. I like to see how a single system can be manipulated on lots of different levels. These massively enhances character development options. My one concern with these two is that they look more like basic classes than advanced classes; too many feats. I'm also a little concerned about them having two saving throws that improve in the '+2 onwards' pattern. I think that the amount of multiclasing involved in D20 Modern means that these '+2 at level 1' saves should be rare and only used to describe a special extreme case, such as the infiltrator's high Ref Save. Otherwise the first level of a class just becomes too tempting to take for any power gamer out there. The other class presented here I can't stand. The Bad-Ass Barroom Brawler is an interesting concept, and one of which I have no problem, however, the execution of this class leaves a lot to be desired. The special abilities do not follow the usual pattern for D20 Modern Advanced classes (i.e. a bonus feat every three levels) and the character gets both Rage and Sneak Attack-like ability (that is, however, only usable once per combat). I think the combination of these two abilties, along with the probably maxed out other unarmed damage feats, makes the character far too powerful for level 4 entry. Not only that, but if you want to use some ofthe styles, such as School of Hard Knocks or Boxing, to represent your Barroom Brawler you'd be better off taking the Martial Arts Master class.

Now that I've giot that off my chest, I'll continue with the rest of the book, which on the most part is excellent. Chapter 2 covers skills. I was very wary when I started to read this chapter, as I think that there are already too many skills out there and these will only help to stretch out your character's existing skill point pool. However, on further inspection, only three of the skills are new - others are simply new uses for old skills. Reading what these skills actually do, howver, had me instantly converted. They really cpture some of the special abilities of traditional martial arts cinema and the way they are presented leads me to believe that a skill is by far the best way of executing these abilities than feats or class abilities. On major problem I have with D20 Modern is that teh Advanced classes system means that a lot of character concepts are unworkable until 4th level, these skills means that some concepts become available at level 1 instead.

Chapter three is huge. Atr over 40 pages long it takes up the majority of the book. At first there are some general feats, such as cultural archaic weapons feats so that yyou can get hold of the weapons package you need for your concept in one feat - very good for making your character concept achievable from first level. There are also some other feats that maipulte the styles and a few others on top. Next comes the styles themselves. This is followed by manoeurvres and a mastery system that is manipulated by the two 'Master' advanced classes. Overall this is excellent - it provides a massive range of styles and manoeuvres, and shows how they link together and which styles are better at which attacks. The system itself is versatile, coming with rules to allow you to create and power balance your own styles. The range of styles presented is huge, and I personally can't think of anything that's missing, but if I did it wouldn't be a problem as I could quite easily create it myself. However, this chapter has one big problem It doesn't tell you how to get these manoeuvres. Are they Feats? Can you just do them if you meat the requirements based on style and other feats? It's not clear at all. Personally I'm making them available as feats, but this might not be the right way to go, I just don't know. This book presents yet again another method for defining fighting styles. Different to the traditional 'feat synergy' abilities such as in The Quintessential Fighter and Oriental Adventures, and different to that which I discussed in my review of Malladin's Gate's Unearthed Adventurers. Therefore I'd have to ask the same question about this as I did for Unearthed Adventurers, does it do this better than it has been done before? This is certainly better than the feat synergy system. It just plain blows it out of the water, as did Unearthed Adventurers. The strength of this system is that it can describe the difference between similar but ever-so-slightly-different styles; such as between Thai Kick Boxing and Savate. The Fighting Techniques in Unearthed Adventurers doesn't have that level of depth to it, but it has an advantage of simplicity of this system. Therefore I think they are equally good but in different ways. Blood and Fists is ideal if you want to run a Martial Arts-driven campaign, whereas Fighting Techniques are a good tool for adding styles to a game that does not rely on them. It's also important to note that UNearthed Adventurers is designed for D&D whilst Blood and Fists is for D20 Modern.

The Weapons Chapter is another I have some problems with. This chapter could really do with some pictures to show me, the ignorant reader, whatthese weapons actually look like. I'm also not sure that most of these weapons seem particlarly balanced to me. For example, the Wakizashi is a Large weapon that does only 1d6 damage and appears to have to additional features other than typical sword criticals. These weapons seem to weak.

The final two chapters are, for me the best part of the book. These provide you with ideas for martial arts driven campaigns and the NPCS you'd need to run some. This really caught me up on the idea of running such a campaign and left me buzzing with ideas. At the very leastm theNPCs make great ready made fighters to come into your campaign and provide an interesting for the PCs to fight.

Overall this is a good book. I have some misgivings, and just plain can't stand the Bad-Ass Barroom Brawler, but this is just two pages from 64. Even if you don't like the fighting style system, you can easily interate the feats presented into any other system that takes your fancy. The strongest points of this book are the descriptions of the styles and the campaign stuf at the end. Well worth it on the strength of that alone.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Hi moose, this is Chuck, author of BNF.

First, thanks for the thorough and thoughtful review.

Only point I wanted to make was that martial arts styles and maneuvers are both definitely feats. I will look over the text and see if I can't make that more clear. One reason (besides those you mentioned) for the inclusion of the NPCs was to make everything clear, and hopefully they were some help to you when trying to answer this question

Thanks again.

Chuck

 

[cthulu_moose]

I figured they were probably feats, but for a review I thought I needed to comment that it doesn't explicitly say so. If you're looking to put it right, I'd suggest adding a sentence to the end of the paragraph at the top of page 22 that says something like "Each of these manoeuvres is a feat and the usual requirements must be met before you can take it." Or something similar with better wordiness .

Cheerio, and thanks chuck.

Chris (Cthulu Moose)