Publisher: Awful Good GamesThis is a largely unarmed martial artist that can shift between various fighting styles. I say "largely" because some styles don't affect your unarmed attack, meaning that you can fully benefit from them even with a weapon (and there's a pair of optional extra moves in the back that lets you treat weapons as an unarmed strike).
How the core of the class works, is you choose several fighting styles at 1st-level. You can only have one active at a time, and each gives you a different type of bonus. For example leopard is all about speed, snake lets you use your Dexterity to attack and has 1 piercing, and tiger just gets a flat damage bonus. As you level up you can expand on the bonuses that each style gives (though again, you can still only benefit from one style at a time).
To make things easier to track, there's a sheet of "style cards" for you to cut out, one for each fighting style, and a space on the character sheet to place the card. The cards list the starting benefit, plus any bonuses for advanced moves. When you have a style active, you place the card on your sheet, and when you change it, you replace the card.
There's also a small ki pool that you can use to deal a bit of extra damage, or gain a bonus when attempting various physical feats.
Of course all of this is in addition to a slew of other moves (there are twenty-eight advanced moves in total): you can hold more ki, gain additional bonuses when you defend, become tougher when you have ki, deal more damage with it, use it to reinforce your mind, and so on. In this way you can better control what kind of monk you wanna make.
If you check out the previews, you can see the entire core class plus some of the advanced moves. More than enough to to try before you buy, for at least a few levels.
This product contains five files.
Two are letter-sized character sheets that use our new character sheet layout. One has a completely blank gear section, while the other fills in the initial choices if you want to just check some boxes and start playing.
The third is a sheet of the aforementioned "style cards".
The other two are digest-sized books, one in color, the other in black and white (to make it easier to print off at home if you want). They both contain:
- The monk class, complete with (again) 28 advanced moves.
- New weapons, dungeon gear, and magic items, including the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven and the Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod (which fans of Dragonball will recognize).
- The bakemono race, with an advanced move if you want to gain additional benefits while in your animal form.
- The dragon master compendium class, which lets you utilize multiple styles at once.
- A few extra moves that we literally couldn't fit on the sheet.
- A director's cut with questions to ask yourself when rolling up a monk, alternative backgrounds, and explanations and suggestions for some of the moves.