Tiger Claw is about fighting like an animal, sometimes literally. It's key skill is also Balance for some reason. From a more metagamey standpoint it's the lowest common denominator of the Disciplines, every Martial Adept class has access to Stone Dragon maneuvers, they're functional but usually not the best or flashiest thing in your arsenal. Stone Dragon evokes the Strength and Endurance of the mountains. One of the stances gives you sneak attack damage. Shadow Hand the other overtly supernatural discipline, it focuses on cold, darkness, ninja shit. Using your opponent's force against them through throws or imitative strikes. You're likely the best straight up warrior on any battlefield you are on. You're so good with weapons you can hurl them like boomerangs and do whirlwind attacks that would make a Diablo 3 Barbarian blush. Iron Heart You're good with weapons, no you're really good with weapons. Unsurprisingly it's key skill is Concentration. Through feats of concentration you can move faster than other people, ignore pain, and seemingly stop time. Diamond Mind is about mind over matter, sometimes literally. Not necessarily to good, but definitely to an alignment, there are good/evil and law/chaos options in this discipline, but also some rather potent healing abilities. This is perhaps the most overtly supernatural of the nine disciplines. Desert Wind is about speed and mobility, also about fire. Adepts also have access to Stances which grant special benefits and options, though only one can be maintained at a time they have access to all stances they know throughout the day.Īll maneuvers are divided up into one of nine Disciplines, each of which has one associated "Key Skill" and some Favored Weapons which are important for some class features but not necessarily for this review. Counters are reactions to an opponents attacks. Boosts augment a user's abilities, usually an attack, in some manner. Each encounter the adept has all the maneuvers that they prepared that day ready for use(though they can change which ones they have prepared any time they have 5 minutes to focus), once expended it's used up for that encounter until they take an action to recover their maneuvers.
Unlike spells they aren't used up over the course of a day. Instead they are called Maneuvers, like spells they're one-shot effects that require an action to initiate. A master of the Ways can perform martial feats that are superhuman, or supernatural, but they aren't spells. The Way isn't magical, at least not really. The book opens up with some fluff that sets up how Martial Adepts are different from Fighters or Paladins, including a rather hilarious bit of tripping over their own feet trying to explain that having a bunch of Bonus Feats is an "Array of special maneuvers and attacks". But grognards completely lost their minds and derided the book as the " Book of Weeaboo Fightin Magic".īut fuck those guys, this book is awesome and I'm here to tell you why. If that sounds similar to Vancian magic, well, it is. Most importantly Bo9S is good, rather than introduce a bunch of feats or prestige classes to plaster a functioning but restrictive build over the fighter or barbarian, it introduced three brand new classes that have special abilities that fit into 9 tiers of increasing power. The Book of Nine Swords is from late in 3.5's life cycle, around the same time as Tome of Magic ( which I reviewed previously) and Magic of Incarnum (which is a pile of fiddly min-maxing bad ideas and I might get around to it at some point). The Book of Weeaboo Fightin Magic posted by Kurieg Original SA post Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords
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