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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Cooper" data-source="post: 2011081" data-attributes="member: 24255">The Quintessential Fighter IIBy Alejandro MelchorMongoose Publishing product number MGP 4401128 pages, $21.95The 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: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Introduction: a description of the new "Advanced Tactics" line and what this book hopes to accomplish for your game</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Legendary Fighter: 7 fighter Prestige Classes, with rules for advancing into Epic-Level play</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Superior Tools: 5 new weapons, 5 new armor types, 13 prosthetic weapons, and 9 exotic materials to make armor and weapons from</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Tricks of the Trade: Unarmed combat, advanced combat feats, fighting dirty, reading an opponent, and fighting massive enemies</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Special Techniques: A do-it-yourself guide to designing specific combat maneuvers (each new maneuver is a new feat the fighter must take)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Survival Tactics: Very basic suggestions on what skills and feats are good for fighters, and how to fight enemies effectively</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Designer's Notes: Alejandro spends a page telling us how this book came to be</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Index: 2-page index to help you find things in the book</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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</li> </ul>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.</blockquote>

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