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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2011337" data-attributes="member: 1129">Blood and Fists is a martial arts companion for the d20 modern game. It’s a relatively simple book broken into six chapters: classes, skills, feats, weapons, campaigns, and the manmei. The book does an excellent job of informing the reader what its goal is and what changes happen to the d20 system. In short, the author notes that d20 Modern puts guns as the top dogs and as a design decision, that’s fine. However, not every campaign revolves around the use of guns and some campaigns may want a break from a Hard Boiled or Better Tomorrow style game in favor of Enter the Dragon. To that end, martial arts as presented in the core rules are really not sufficient.Enter Blood and Fists.The first chapter introduces three advanced classes, the bad-ass barroom brawler, the contemplative master and the martial arts master.  The first one is in essence a barbarian like martial artists who gains not only the ability to rage, but also can get in a cheap shot once per combat that acts as a sneak attack. The latter two are meant to replace or act of options for someone who doesn’t like the d20 Modern Martial Artists. The contemplative master gains mastery. This can come from the Style list or the Contemplative list, things described a little latter.  The martial arts master also gains mastery. The difference between the two is that the former is more on the will side gaining a higher will save, more skill points and fewer hit points.Chapter two is a brief one page for skills. Some of these are new uses like predict attack using sense motive or resist trip attack with balance. Others like meditation, pressure points and zen mastery, are new. All of the new skills can only be used trained and each one focuses on some aspect commonly attributed to a martial art environment. Meditation for example, allows the user to slip into a trance and ignore fatigue or exhaustion for an hour before having to try again and ignore another hour. The real meat of the book is chapter three, feats. The book starts off with general feats. Many of these break up weapons into different groups like archaic weapons-Chinese or Japanese. The bulk of the chapter though, is martial art styles that in turn have a martial art style feat, and maneuver feats. The style feat is the basics while the maneuvers are the tricky moves within the style. Let’s say you spend a feat on Cobra style. You are now considered proficient in punch attacks and considered armed when punching. You can also feint as a Move action. You get Bluff, Intimidate and Pressure Points on your Class Skill list. Last, you use your Dexterity modifier for combat instead of Strength.  Then you can take something like Heart Punch, a feat that increases your die damage by one size and treats the target as flat footed the first time you use it in each combat. If you hit the target when he’s flat footed, he has to make a Fortitude Save or be stunned.It’s an interesting system. The ability to augment your feats is one not really utilized enough as bonus feats, no matter how many, tend to putter out in power level as the character gains power. What feat for example, can compare to a 9th level spell? Not as big a problem in a d20 Modern Game unless you’re using FX, but the concept is still the same.Now remember those mastery abilities I mentioned at the start of the review that two of the PrCs could take? Using the example of Cobra, there are a few things that such a master could take. For example, they can gain up to Accurate Punch 3 ability or a Stunning Punch 2.  What does that mean? Well, an Accurate Punch 3, by stacking, you have a +2 to your base attack bonus from 1 and 2, and from 3, you gain the True Strike attack that’s unaffected by any Dodge bonus or Blocking Feat. For Stunning Punch, which I assume is Stunning Strike, you can strike an opponent and stun them for 1-4 rounds. Chapter four brings us back to the earlier part of the chapter that concerned feats for various weapon groups. Here those weapons are detailed and broken up into different families. Name, damage, critical, type, range, size, weight and cost are included. Chapter five provides the reader with advice on a martial arts campaign. I’m an old reader of numerous comics and the martial art subgenre in Champions, especially the Ultimate Martial Artists and Ninja Hero, do a much more throughout job than this chapter, but for newcomers, this is a good starting point. The last chapter, The Hanmei, provides the GM with a system of street fighting with different levels to take characters through. Very much in the style of Enter the Dragon. The good news is that the author has provided numerous pregenerated characters for GMs in a hurry or those pressed for time.The book, at $14.95 for 64 pages, is average price. The interior layout is standard two-columns and has a fair use of white space. Art isn’t quite up to Malhavok or Green Ronin’s best but suitable for the material. The writing flows well, especially with the author’s enjoyment of the genre coming through his fiction that carries us through the book.Charles Rice has done a good job with Blood and Fists and players interested in trying various styles of martial arts should look into it. Game Masters who are intrigued by this may want to hunt down the first edition of the Ultimate Martial Artists as it’s a little deeper and more detailed in some areas and actually includes some game material to be used in a d20 game (2nd edition D&D) unlike the newer edition which is larger, but doesn’t have those game mechanics.</blockquote>

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