Quintessential Fighter by Matthew Sprange was the very first in Mongoose's long-lived line of "Collector Series" books. Originally released in January 2002, I have the "Revised and Expanded" edition which was released a little over a year later. The only way to tell the revision from the original is a printed announcement in the upper right of the cover saying "Revised and Expanded". It's still 128 pages; all the extra content was squeezed into the original book by, I presume, dropping the font size. The font in this book appears to be one step smaller than the standard size of all the other Quintessential Books that I've seen.
What's been altered and added in the revision? That I do not know exactly. I can glean that stuff has been changed, but without the original printing I can't compare the two directly. I do know that this is still a 3.0 product; the revision precedes 3.5 by a few months, so "revised" doesn't mean "revised to 3.5" and it shouldn't be confused with other Quintessentials books that have "v3.5 compatible" on them. There have been a couple of older Quintessentials books reprinted, but the adding of brand-new material for this book was a special one-off thing. If you have the pre-revised version and want to compare, Mongoose posted a free PDF showing the updates at their website under Free Downloads ---> Quintessential Fighter, which I must say was pretty good of them to offer. At any rate I don't believe the revision is sufficiently different to be considered a whole new product, so I'll go ahead and post it alongside all the earlier reviews of this book.
After a brief introduction, the first chapter of Character Concepts covers a lot of ground with a class as wide open as the fighter. Some of the concepts are good and interesting but the mechanics of balance remain questionable. A couple of concepts, like Professional Soldier and Savage, include the penalty of beginning with little to no starting gold. It's been my experience that this sort of penalty is short-lived as once the party has an adventure or two and gets some treasure, they're pretty even in the wealth department. Yet the Savage's detect magic benefit is something he gets to keep forever. The Prestige Classes follow and they're pretty solid concepts as well, if generic (Officer of War, Swashbuckler and so on).
Tricks of the Trade is the next section which introduces new rules for Armour and Weapon Smithing. I question the need for this since the Craft rules already seem to work perfectly fine, and these don't seem to add anything. It also grants bonuses like treating a self-forged weapon as masterworked for their own hand as they can perfectly balance them. This struck me as a free power-up and I don't think characters should get new bonuses for "stuff they were probably doing anyway".
There are also rules for intentionally breaking opponents weapons and called shots. It takes a critical threat and a BAB requirement before certain called shots can be attempted, but by the time I had BAB +10, I'm probably facing opponents with so many hit points that going for the eye would be a nifty shortcut to really gain an advantage in the fight. In short, there are probably better called shot systems around than this. Rules for duelling, jousting and forming shield walls follow and seem to fare better. Acrobatic fighting is then introduced, which gives a character a chance (on a successful Tumble check) to perform moves like vaulting over an opponent. I thought this was the best part of a very mixed chapter.
Fighter Feats offers 31 feats, with many listed as eligible for fighter bonus feats. They were mostly your typical combat-themed feats and they seemed okay to me.
Tools of the Trade offers up a new arsenal of weapons, mostly real-world with a few fantastic. The Bec-de-Corbin is here offering x4 crit damage to boot, wheeee! The Gladius is here as well but it doesn't read much like a standard-issue Roman short sword when it retails for 300gp and is essentially a masterworked short sword! A section on Armour follows including the much-coveted dragonscale armour. Some equipment is also listed including specialized arrows. The chapter wraps up with four pages on blackpowder weapons for those DMs who want to introduce that level of technology to the game world. They're expensive and have issues with inaccuracy, loading time and misfire chances, so they aren't quite a no-brainer over more traditional weapons.
Next is a long (30 pages) section on Fighting Styles, which are sort of like prestige classes. The character pays an XP cost (it's my understanding that this was a gp cost in the original pre-revised version) and gains something akin to a feat with each linked level of the fighting style. Whether or not you plan to use this in your game it might be worth a look to get some feat ideas out of, at least.
The next section on Tournaments offers guidelines for running a tournament and describes contests of jousting, archery, running and the like. There's a First Blood mechanic in a sidebar which doesn't quite work for me - your threshold before bleeding is half your first Hit Die plus Con modifier. This means that two high-level characters in a first blood duel will have to nickel-and-dime each other for round after round - after round - until nearly dead before one of them will bleed. It seems to me that a critical hit mechanic could have fit in there somewhere.
A short chapter on Mercenaries is next, with hiring prices and a Loyalty mechanic to retain them. Then comes the Open Mass Combat System which appeared in the original but was revised for this edition; the OMCS appeared yet again, later in 2003 in Strongholds & Dynasties. A section on strongholds rounds out the book with a couple of passing references to an upcoming product named Dynasty of Heroes, which was renamed to the aforementioned Strongholds & Dynasties. The usual designer notes, index and character sheet round out the 128 pages.
The Quintessential Fighter rated around average in reviews when it first came out in January 2002, and with rising standards in d20 publishing I would say this revision was enough to tread water and still be about average for the standards of early 2003. So I'll give it a 3 out of 5 for that, seeing as even in 2004 I still use stuff from it. There are some balance problems and design decisions I didn't go for, but the book covers a lot of bases and has its "moments". A lot of other companies have tackled the same ground in the past two or three years, but Quintessential Fighter still has them all in one book and could make a pretty good "grab bag" for gamers who don't need or want every d20 combat book out there. There often seems to be issues around the first splatbook in a series (remember Sword & Fist?) so perhaps it's no big surprise that looking back, later books in the Quintessentials line took the conventions laid out in this book and were able to top it.
