The Quintessential Fighter II

[Messageboard Golem]

Once the dust clears after a battle, the fighter can stand proud, wipe the sweat of his brow and be grateful for the skill and training that allowed him to keep himself alive and vanquish his foes. The field of battle is the home of the fighter, the class that is best suited for combat, showing depths of training that outshines a barbarian’s lasting power and rage, the paladin’s righteousness, the monk’s discipline and the ranger’s instincts. Fighters have a wide range of options, with more paths and choices open to them than any other character class, for it is they who decide how they will approach combat, and what abilities they will learn.

Beyond their beginnings as rookies, veteran fighters have seen enough of the world to learn how to best deal with it, specialising in a fighting style or generalising so they are never caught by surprise and always have an ace up their sleeves. Charging a fighter is a foolish and dangerous tactic, for until he wipes the floor with his opponents can anyone know what kind of techniques he has mastered; some fighters are death incarnate with a sword in their hands, while others are practically untouchable as they duck, weave and parry with grace and speed. Many prefer to become marksmen capable of pinning a fly to the wall with an arrow or down an enemy before he has had the chance to even draw his own weapon, or master the art of incapacitating a foe by taking or breaking his weapon or throwing him around with special manoeuvres. Whether with sword, bow, spear or stranger weapons like scythes, two-bladed swords and whips, a fighter is the lord and master of the battlefield without magic and (overly) dirty tricks; just his unparalleled skill.

The Collector’s Series II takes an advanced look in the whole range of class and racial sourcebooks from Mongoose Publishing, all designed to greatly widen a player’s options for his character within the d20 games system. More than simple continuations, the second series of Quintessential books slot seamlessly into any fantasy-based campaign, giving advanced alternatives for characters of one class or race within the game, allowing both players and Games Masters the chance to give mid- and high-level characters new options without overpowering or unbalancing the game as a whole. The Collector’s Series II will not necessarily allow players to make their characters even better, but they will be able to do a lot more than they ever thought possible before.

With the help of this sourcebook, any character choosing the fighter class will find many alternatives and options expanding his range of abilities. With career paths, fighters can customise their advancement and gain special benefits from their chosen branch of training; legendary classes offer a subset and expansion of their combat prowess that may take them to epic levels and beyond. Multiclassing offers a fighter a complement to his abilities, while superior tools to enhance his performance. Tricks of the trade expands the range of tactics a fighter can use in the field, while weapon mastery and attack moves describe a series of advanced techniques that a fighter can master for even more devastating effects.

The fighter is not without magic of his own, as the magical fighter combines his skill with magic tools, while the mystic warrior opens up his heart into the true way of the warrior to master quasi-magical techniques that use the strength of his soul.

Fighters are characters that are easy to create, but the wealth of options and opportunities, as well as the variables of combat make them one of the more challenging classes, tactics-wise, for they must use their head as well as their sword arm to survive the changing conditions of combat, and The Quintessential Fighter II: Advanced Tactics provides all the necessary tools for the fighter to become a legend.

 

[John Cooper]

The Quintessential Fighter II
By Alejandro Melchor
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 4401
128 pages, $21.95

The Quintessential Fighter II is the first book in the all-new "Advanced Tactics" series, which presumably will hit all (or most) of the subjects in the "Collector Series" line. Fighters are up first, which only makes sense as The Quintessential Fighter started off the "Collector Series" line way back when. I suppose now would be a fine point for me to confess that I haven't seen The Quintessential Fighter, but that shouldn't matter as the two books are supposed to be quite different from each other. The "Collector Series" was geared more toward starting characters, while the "Advanced Tactics" is supposed to be more for mid- and high-level characters. (At least that's what it claims in the Introduction.)

The cover of The Quintessential Fighter II bears more than a slight resemblance to those in the "Collector Series" - it's once again a brown "fake-leather" design, although the leather patterns are more "swirly" than the covers of the "Collector Series," which were more "pebbly." The brown fake leather is incorporated into both inside and outside covers. No cover artist is credited.

Interior artwork, some 33 black-and-white illustrations, is provided by only 4 artists this time, and judging by style Chad Sergesketter (whose last name is misspelled on the Table of Contents page) did the bulk of them. Chad's branched out a bit; at least all of his males don't look like they're wearing the exact same face, although I caught at least two pictures of his with the same face he's used in artwork for countless other products. Unfortunately, he could use a little more work on his females: they all seem to have masculine faces (making them rather homely, in my opinion), tend to wear their breasts rather low, and often have waists no wider than their heads! A distinctive look to be sure, but not really a welcome one. In addition, he does a little bit of shading on his skin and then adds what I'm guessing are "gradiation lines," places where in a color piece there would be a distinct shading difference. However, all this does in a B&W picture is make it look like the characters drawn all have pie on their face.

Carlos Henry, Stephen Shepherd, and Ronald Smith are the other artists listed in the ToC, but I noticed a Marcio Fiorito work on page 65, reprinted from another work. (I'm thinking The Quintessential Ranger, but in all honesty it's really not worth looking up.) In any case, the artwork overall is only about average (although the female barbarian on page 18 and the dragon rider on page 45 are pretty good works, as is the Roman-helmeted knight in platemail on page 119), and most surprisingly it was rather scarce for a 128-page Mongoose book. I've seen more artwork in Mongoose books half this size!

One final artwork note: the "Advanced Tactics" books get new "outer edge page border" artwork. The motif is the same - items useful to different classes (a helmet, a scroll, a horn, several weapons, thieves' tools, etc.) - but with the wooden tabletop background they aren't as distinctive as the ones in the "Collector Series."

The Quintessential Fighter II is broken down into the following chapters:

• Introduction: a description of the new "Advanced Tactics" line and what this book hopes to accomplish for your game
• Career Paths: An interesting concept, where you focus your PC's advancement (skills, feats, etc.) into a narrow category and gain advantages and disadvantages as a result
• Multiclassing: 10 new "character classes" built on multiclassing between fighter and the other 10 character classes from the Player's Handbook (the fighter/barbarian, for example, is the berserk)
• The Legendary Fighter: 7 fighter Prestige Classes, with rules for advancing into Epic-Level play
• Superior Tools: 5 new weapons, 5 new armor types, 13 prosthetic weapons, and 9 exotic materials to make armor and weapons from
• The Magical Fighter: A fighter's view on spells and magic, plus 19 new magic armor qualities, 5 new specific types of magic armor, 4 new specific magic shields, 9 new weapon abilities, 5 new specific magic weapons, and 12 magic feats that fighters can take if they have at least 2 ranks in both Spellcraft and Knowledge (arcana)
• Tricks of the Trade: Unarmed combat, advanced combat feats, fighting dirty, reading an opponent, and fighting massive enemies
• Special Techniques: A do-it-yourself guide to designing specific combat maneuvers (each new maneuver is a new feat the fighter must take)
• Survival Tactics: Very basic suggestions on what skills and feats are good for fighters, and how to fight enemies effectively
• Designer's Notes: Alejandro spends a page telling us how this book came to be
• Index: 2-page index to help you find things in the book
• Character Sheet: a 4-page character sheet for your fighter PC (at least marginally different from the one in The Quintessential Fighter since it includes a space to record your new Techniques

Proofreading and editing were remarkably well done for a Mongoose book of this size; kudos to proofreader Bridette Kirwan and whoever ghost-edited it (as no editor is listed). Not that there weren't any mistakes, mind you, but they were almost universally commas used in place of periods (and vice versa), double periods at the end of a sentence, two instances of incorrect apostrophe usage, and only a few words left out of a sentence here and there. Of misspellings, I only saw two: "off" became "of" in one sentence and "forte" became "fort" in another. Several apparent copy-and-paste errors were evident as well, with a section on fighter/wizards referring to sorcerers and a similar section on "cunning armor" referring to "strong armor."

As far as mistakes made in the update to 3.5 rules, the only thing I noticed was that they're still referring to the Pick Pocket skill (which is now Sleight of Hand). This mistake is made in all 7 of the Prestige Classes. Time to get with it and make the change, guys!

All in all, The Quintessential Fighter II is well written. Alejandro's done some fine books for Mongoose in the past, and his writing style here is very clean and clear. I especially enjoyed the fiction blurbs that run throughout the entire book; these follow a female fighter and her retired bard father through a series of linked encounters, each built upon the others and relevant to the current topic at hand. However, while I think Alejandro did a great job in cranking out a fighter book, I'm not so sure he did so good a job of achieving the stated goals of The Quintessential Fighter II - specifically, a fighter book for mid- to high-level fighter PCs. Much of what he gives us in the book are directed at beginning fighters. The best example of this is the entire first half of the "Survival Tactics" chapter, where he patiently explains that fighter don't get a lot of skill points and thus should spend them wisely, and goes through the differences between moving and attacking once and staying put to take advantage of his multiple attacks. I would hope that players of mid- to high-level fighters (heck, of any PC) have already figured this stuff out for themselves!

Likewise, the 10 half-and-half multiclassing character classes are useless to even a mid-level fighter, as almost all of them require multiclassing at 2nd level! (The exceptions, naturally, being those classes - monk and paladin - where once you take another class you can no longer advance in that one.) I can see where in a book allegedly devoted to mid- to high-level PCs there'd be no room for the "Character Concepts" chapter featured so prominently in the "Collector Series" books (as they're strictly for character creation), but I'm not sure a chapter on multiclassing is a suitable substitute, as it too is built for 1st-level PCs planning out their eventual progression. I also have to question the multiclassing section in subsequent books in the "Advanced Tactics" line - the fighter/cleric in this book is called the temple knight; what's the multiclassing chapter in The Quintessential Cleric II going to include as far as cleric/fighters? A reprint of the temple knight provided here? A completely different fighter/cleric combination? Nothing at all, but perhaps a reference to check out other books in the "Advanced Tactics" line to see other multiclassed cleric PC ideas? In any case, Alejandro did a good job on these multiclassed fighter classes; I especially like the fact that he points out several recommended options for PCs choosing that career progression (which skills/feats/magic items would be a good idea for such a character), and the Variant Rules section (possible class features you can receive - in place of the normal fighter feat taken at that level - at three different points in the progression) was also a bonus, making the multiclass more distinctive and less just a simple merging of two pre-existing character classes.

The Career Paths idea is a good one, but it certainly looks like it could use some major tweaking. The main concept is this: you choose a narrow area of specialization for your fighter, say, mounted combat. Assuming you meet the prerequisites, you can "travel the path" of the mounted warrior for as long as you want; this essentially means that each time you gain a level, you are constrained to choosing from a specific pool of potential feats, skills, and even ability increases. So long as you do so, you gain one career-path-related advantage (in many cases from a pool of three) and the one corresponding disadvantage that goes with it. If you even gain a level and choose from outside the normal restrictions for that career path, your advantage and disadvantage dissipate. Not a bad idea; in a way it's kind of a way to graft a temporary "Character Concept" onto a PC midway though his adventuring career. Here's the catch, though: in all but one or two cases, as I read through the material I said to myself, "There's no way the advantage makes up for that crappy disadvantage!" If I were to implement this in my own campaign, I think I'd have to rewrite almost all of the disadvantages to make them even halfway palatable to the players (or beef up the advantages, either way). Unfortunately, it's even easier still to just chuck that entire section out of consideration, which is probably what I'll do.

The Prestige Classes are okay, and even though I personally dislike the Epic Level rules for D&D, I give Alejandro credit for including advancement rules for the Prestige Classes he came up with. However, there were some problems with a few of them. The Dragon Knight becomes immune to his dragon's frightful presence at 1st level as part of his "Dragonrider" class ability, and then again at 3rd level as part of his "Dragonsenses" class ability. It doesn't look as if the Pureblade gets anywhere near enough ki points to power many of his special abilities each day; the whole Pureblade Prestige Class seems to be a case of "look at all of these cool abilities you get, now choose which one or two you can actually put to use, once, today." Seriously, I can't think of any other Prestige Classes where you get a new ability at every level but are blocked from using all of them. The Wrecker seems like it was built with only Medium PCs in mind; can a Small gnome or halfling Wrecker even exist, and if so, do they get to carry around and wield Large weapons in one hand, too? I somehow doubt it, but no specifics are given.

The Techniques section seems very well though out, and in fact I've noticed that one of Alejandro's strengths is in taking existing examples and wringing the rules behind them out into the open. (Check out his Encyclopaedia Arcane: Constructs, where he examined the four golems and the shield guardian in the Monster Manual and from that derived a set of rules for creating constructs of any size, shape, and construction materials.) The rules for developing fighting Techniques seems like it covers all of the bases, and yet...I can't help it, I was bored stiff reading that section. Likewise, I commend him not taking the obvious path and cranking out "Improved (insert Feat here)" and "Greater (insert Feat here)" ad nauseum, but rather devised rules for doing so...but again, it makes for some painfully dry reading.

He does come up with some good new rules, though. I especially liked his rules for "climbing aboard" a much larger creature and fighting it from there - it's very cinematic (how many times have you seen fighters stabbing a dragon or whatever while standing on its back?), and the fact that he based it all off pre-existing grappling rules is impressive. However, he strays into the area of magic just a little too often for my comfort zone: not only some of the Techniques, but some of the magic-based feats are ways to give a fighter "inherent magic abilities" that I really don't think are appropriate for fighters. If you want to add magic to your fighter, I'd rather you just pick up a level or two of a spellcasting class.

The Quintessential Fighter II is an okay fighter book, but a good chunk of it is directed toward 1st-level fighters despite the stated goals of the "Advanced Tactics" line. Furthermore, much of it is pretty dry reading, or covers the extreme basics that you wouldn't expect to see in a book labeled "Advanced." Despite Alejandro's claims that he had to leave out some sections and condense others to get all of the material to fit into this book (which, by the way, would account for the sparse level of artwork), some of that "basic" stuff comes across as padding and filler. I give it a "3 (Average)," and I hope others in the series will improve upon this one.

 

[GameWyrd]

This isn’t just a review of the second Quintessential Fighter, oh no, this is a review of The Quintessential Fighter II … Book One. There could be another. Or does "book one" refer to the Advanced Tactics sub-heading? Ah yes, that’s it. This isn’t a Collector Series book, it’s the first of the Advanced Tactics series.

The Quintessential Fighter II doesn’t quite pick up where The Quintessential Fighter left off. This supplement assumes your fighters have had some adventuring success and no small dosage of experience points under their belt. The Quintessential Fighter II isn’t quite more of the same either, which is just as well, I’d have been rather annoyed to see another strongholds section in the book.

We have a similar looking book here. Similar but different – and I still can’t decide whether I like the faux leather look of the Quintessential series. This cover is darker and has a different pattern effect. It could almost be wood. It’ll be possible to tell my Quintessentials apart on the shelf.

Fighters here have a bit more experience and so the Character Concepts section is out. I suppose this further shuffles the Character Concepts concept off into the "how your character became a ____" corner. That wasn’t my initial understanding of the section and there are certainly Character Concepts which don’t fit that mould but what ever the focus of the Quintessential Character Concepts is we can be sure that it doesn’t affect this book at all. We have Career Paths instead. Perhaps your character has specialised into the Unarmed Fighter or perhaps gone for the polar opposite and does well fulfilling the role of the Tank? Well, if you can meet the requirements of either of these two career paths then you can enjoy some specialised advantages if you’re willing to accept some associated disadvantages as well. The Tank adds double his strength bonus to damage rolls when he uses both hands to wield a two-handed weapon. On the other hand, he is so used to slamming heavy weapons around that he’s a bit numpty and prone to over-extending his attacks when he uses light weapons. It’s a dagger man: you don’t need to brace both feet and attack with an overhead swing! The mechanics are there. Mongoose and author Alejandro Melchor would like to remind you that Career Paths are a roleplaying feature and something to flesh your character out with. Sure enough there are paragraphs of roleplaying observations for each career path.

Multi-classing; I’m told it’s rather popular. Heh. The second chapter looks at the core class-with-fighter multi-class combinations. This is something that other supplements specialise exclusively in but as a consumer I’m happy to see the competition if it’ll encourage innovation. Unfortunately, the Quintessential Fighter II suffers from the same problem as other fighter multi-class focused supplements suffered from. The fighter is just a boring class to mutli-class with. It’s boring because it’s easy. It’ll take me just a second to come up with a fighter-barbarian idea, a fighter-wizard idea or fighter-druid idea whereas I’d be flicking through the pages to see what Alejandro had come up with for an interesting barbarian-wizard or cleric-druid. What the Quintessential Fighter II does differently here is to keep these multi-classes strictly as multi-classes and not beef them up and call them prestige classes. Essentially we’ve a set of new classes born from two core class parents. The class level tables show the BAB, saves and specials but also show which class the stats up came from. The Berserk, that’s the Fighter-Barbarian, levels up from Ftr 1, to Bbn 1, to Ftr 2, Ftr 3 and then Bbn 2. This continues up to Ftr 10 (for the effective 19th level of the class) and Bbn 10 (for the effective 20th level of the class). I like this effect. It’s clean and it’s honest. There isn’t any attempt to fob the reader of with "all new classes!" but we have that new class feel anyway.

Here’s the list, the Berserk is the Fighter-Barbarian, the War Singer is the Fighter-Bard, the Temple Knight is the Fighter-Cleric, the Totem Warrior is the Fighter-Druid, the Martial Artist is the Fighter-Monk, the Champion as the Fighter-Paladin, the Scout as the Fighter-Ranger, the Scoundrel as the Fighter-Rouge, the Arcane Warrior as the Fighter-Sorcerer and the Mageblade as the Fighter-Wizard.

We also have the Legendary Fighter; but we’re into a new chapter now. Waa! Game balance! I can hear people moaning now. Shush. Sssh. Game balance is entirely subjective. So, once again shush and let me offer my diatribe. If I’m running an epic level romp where my characters are tricking dragons, saving worlds and working with gods (hardly unheard of in D&D games!) then this chapter is just what I wanted. In fact this chapter specifically looks at that epic level and some of these classes are just the thing to router the PC from sub-20 to epic level. There are rule clarifications here to make the epic transition as easy as possible. Whereas the Career Paths assume the fighter as some experience, the Legendary Fighter assumes the character as lots of experience and presents a selection of high powered prestige classes.

On my first pass through the book I started to flick through the Superior Tools chapter but didn’t get very far before I found something interesting and stopped to read more closely. Then I found something else interesting which I stopped to read closely. Then I found another interesting bit of equipment. Okay, okay, I think The Quintessential Fighter II gets a lucky run here. There are some flashy items which might have come from fantasy artwork or Holywood movies like wrist crossbows or whip-swords that I can see in my game and which are statted here. It turns out that I rather enjoyed this chapter despite my initial concerns that it was going to be a case of more of the same with the previous Quintessential Fighter. I’ll judge the other Advanced Tactics books as required but I’m pretty sure this chapter is going to be hard to keep fresh. There’s a fair whack of magical equipment and weapons here which work with the fighter/mage sections elsewhere in the Quintessential Fighter II and which the first book couldn’t touch.

The Magical Fighter is a whole chapter dedicated to mixing the Fighter class with the various spellcasting options in d20. Hmm. This is going to be tricky to justify; if you’re buying The Quintessential Fighter II then I think you’re already good at this sort of thing. There are some new mechanics which start towards this difficult destination and they begin with some magical fighter type feats which require, at least, a limited knowledge of spell casting. But there’s not much else. I don’t think this quite qualifies as a chapter but I do like the feats. Tricky.

Tricks of the Trade is more or less a chapter of feats to although it begins with sub-feat moves which most fighters should be able to pull off. This is another chapter that needs to prove it’s not more of the same. It’s something "more" but not "the same". In the advanced section we have trees of impressive and popular (blind fighting) feats as well as special emphasis on typical fantasy danger situations – against massive foes, for example.

Don’t dismiss the Special Techniques as a similar chapter. It isn’t. Here the player gets to design special moves, trading advantages with disadvantages. This is easy enough and the system works well – design a move that does more damage than usual but must be carried out with a pole arm. I can’t quite visualise the example given in the chapter but I’ve come up with plenty special moves of my own and think you could even use these rules to create fantasy pseudo-martial arts. Pretty neat.

Just before we hit the designer’s notes, which I always like, we have to go through the Survival Tactics chapter and my least favourite offering here. It’s too much like a thinly disguised new uses for old skills section and I fear spends too much time offering up old discoveries and known truths. This probably isn’t the fault of the book as such, we stick with valid observations it’s just that I think the average reader won’t need any of it.

I was quite prepared to be super harsh on the Quintessential Fighter II. I’m all for coming down hard on the d20 milkers market these days. The thing is; the Quintessential Fighter II has a niche all to itself just by being a sequel. The book clearly is for players who really do enjoy their fighter class, who are used to fairly advanced fighters and are looking for something a little different to do with them. In that regard the Quintessential Fighter II does well. It is a book which experienced Fighter players can use. If you’re at all tempted by a "Quintessential Fighter II" then it’s unlikely you’ll be disappointed by The Quintessential Fighter II. The only catch is, I wonder how good an "uber" Quintessential Fighter with the best of both books in and the weakest sections taken out would have been.

* This The Quintessential Fighter II review was first published at GameWyrd.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

I was similarly ready to blast TQFII; talk about a hard sell! They were ready, though.