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Message: <blockquote data-quote="cthulu_moose" data-source="post: 2011042" data-attributes="member: 17946">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.</blockquote>

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