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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Martial Arts For Stars Without Numbers (Free Supplement)

Now that I am diving head first into Stars Without Number, I find myself pleasantly surprised by the number of free, short supplements for the game. Mandate Archive: Martial Arts is the one I just grabbed, and it's 6 pages of gaming goodness are golden. It's not just the different styles of martial arts that are ready to be plugged into your SWN campaign, but even the advice on designing your own MA styles resonates with what I want to do with my GAPs project.

Here's the piece in question:

GMs should feel free to create their own new armed and unarmed
styles to match the particular interests of their players and campaign,
but a few important guidelines should be kept in mind. 
The goal of a style is not to make unarmed or primitive combat
skill better than projectile or energy weapons, but only an equally
reasonable option. For damage comparisons, look at mag rifles and
shear rifles to see what sort of weaponry they’ll be compared against.
If the style does more damage than those weapons in the hands of
equivalent masters, then the style is doing too much damage.
Excellent yet simple advice. Balanced yet different.

Perfect.

1 comment:

  1. I have had at least one martial arts using character in every SWN game I played, and I have not found them unbalancing as a GM.

    Kevin Crawford's free Mandate Archives are always excellent. I recommend all of them!

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