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Rather than simply presenting new feats and prestige classes, The Book of Nine Swords provides a system of martial powers that any character can develop. These powers fall into two broad categories: maneuvers and stances. Maneuvers are specific, one-shot effects, while stances provide constant benefits for an indefinite amount of time. The book makes heavy use of the rules for swift and immediate actions originally introduced in the Miniatures Handbook. After reading The Book of Nine Swords, you’ll wonder how your D&D game ever did without them.
The book’s martial powers are divided into nine disciplines. A discipline is a family of maneuvers that share a common philosophy or effect. The nine disciplines are Desert Wind, Devoted Spirit, Diamond Mind, Iron Heart, Setting Sun, Shadow Hand, Stone Dragon, Tiger Claw, and White Raven. These names are acceptable, but many Dungeon Masters will likely change them to fit specific contexts in their campaign worlds, or choose to use only some of the disciplines or powers.
Each discipline has its own preferred weapons and associated skill. The latter is no surprise, as Mike Mearls, creator of the martial applications for skills found in Malhavoc Press’s Book of Iron Might supplement and its Iron Heroes game line, was lead developer on The Book of Nine Swords. In The Book of Nine Swords, however, a character’s skills are still important, but not the focus they are made to be in the Malhavoc products. Additionally, The Book of Nine Swords material is easier to incorporate into the D&D game because the martial powers and adept classes work entirely within the already established rules. A character focusing on martial powers still advances, uses skills, and fights with magic weapons and armor just like those with traditional PHB classes, while having a lot of exciting new things to offer your standard group of PCs.
Maneuvers are further divided into three types—boosts, counters, and strikes—and nine levels of ability. Boots usually augment the user’s combat ability; counters are immediate actions that can foil the attacks of opponents; strikes are attacks that invoke a special effect.
For example, Burning Blade, a 1st-level boost of the Desert Wind discipline, allows the initiator to spend a swift action to make his melee attacks deal extra fire damage for the rest of his turn. Wall of Blades, a 2nd-level counter of the Iron Heart discipline, allows you to make an attack roll and use its result instead of your armor class against an attack. A 3rd-level strike of the Diamond Mind discipline, allows its user to take the result of a Concentration check instead of a normal damage roll.
At higher levels, maneuvers allow characters to create damaging area effects, redirect attacks against their foes, literally deal over 100 points of damage with a strike, or simply slay their foes outright.
Stances, once initiated, provide constant, round-to-round effects that can be changed with a swift action. Examples would be Flame’s Blessing, a 1st-level Desert Wind stance that grants the initiator fire resistance based on her Tumble ranks, or Leading the Charge, a 1st-level White Raven stance that increases your allies’ Will saves. Some stances grant the use of abilities outside of combat, like Scent. Most stances directly affect a character’s ability to defeat his foes or protect himself and his party. High-level stances grant damage reduction, immunity to critical hits, and extra counter maneuvers.
Compared to combat-oriented feats like Combat Expertise, the martial powers presented in The Book of Nine Swords have more specific applications but more varied, unique, and interesting effects. Not to mention powerful. While they are referred to on more than one occasion as “blade magic,” martial powers are always and appropriately extraordinary or supernatural abilities. More attention should have been paid to avoiding this ambiguity.
Dungeons & Dragons characters can gain the use of martial powers by taking the new Martial Study feat, or progressing in levels in one of the three new martial adept classes. In fact, several of the NPCs presented in the book use the former approach, illustrating the feasibility of incorporating the book’s material without introducing the new martial adept classes.
Even so, the three martial adept classes provide a significant focus for The Book of Nine Swords. The crusader, swordsage, and warblade are three new standard classes that make overt use of the rules for martial powers. The crusader is a devoted warrior who draws on her faith or inner strength to achieve a peerless presence on the battlefield. Swordsages are martial artists whose great knowledge and use of martial powers make them adaptable and fearsome combatants. The warblade is a single-minded warrior who employs pure martial skill in his search for glory and honor.
The crusader and warblade can easily fill the role of an adventuring party’s main melee combatant. Their good base attack bonuses, high hit points (d10 and d12, respectively), and access to armor and shields make them formidable in a fight. When you add in their special class abilities and access to martial powers, they stand out as excellent contributors to any combat situation. The swordsage is not as hearty or resilient, but offers the greatest access to martial disciplines and powers, and can gain several tactical advantages on the battlefield.
The three martial adept classes lend themselves to more focused character concepts than the generic fighter, and this will appeal to players looking to create interesting back stories and relationships. A player could easily focus on how his character came to be a student of the Sublime Way, his relationship with his teacher, and why he chose the adventuring life over that of an ascetic. Throw in the destruction of his dojo at the hands of a rival school, and you have great hooks with which to begin a campaign.
Each martial adept has access to different disciplines, although there is some overlap. A martial adept character can always take the Martial Study feat to learn maneuvers outside of his accessible disciplines.
The martial adepts can go toe-to-toe with barbarians, fighters, or paladins. They can also play a supporting role similar to a ranger or rogue, or benefit the party with effects similar to those achieved by spellcasters. The martial adepts cannot match the ability with missile weapons of a fighter or ranger, and the flexibility and generality of the former will still appeal to many players. If The Book of Nine Swords is available, however, these fighters may find the strong martial powers to be an excellent way to allocate their bonus feats.
All the marital adepts know a fixed number of martial powers per class level. An experienced martial adept can exchange lower-level maneuvers for higher-level maneuvers for which he meets the prerequisites. Maneuvers are “readied,” by the martial adept spending 5 minutes in prayer, meditation, or exercise. The number of maneuvers an adept knows soon outstrips the number he can ready, but the ease of changing readied maneuvers allows some flexibility in preparing for specific encounters. Sleep is unnecessary for readying maneuvers, and an adept retains the maneuvers he has readied until he decides to change them.
Adepts, or other characters that are granted martial powers, “initiate” maneuvers, just as other characters cast spells or manifest powers. Sometimes an initiated maneuver will add to a character’s actions for that turn. A crusader initiates Defensive Rebuke, a 3rd-level Devoted Spirit boost, as a swift action. Thereafter, for the rest of the round, any opponent he strikes provokes an attack of opportunity from the crusader if it decides to attack another target.
Sometimes the initiation will take the place of a standard or full-round action, but the result will provide a similar effect. For example, War Leader’s Charge, a 6th-level White Raven strike, requires a full-round action to initiate, but includes charging an opponent as part of its effect.
Martial adepts begin each encounter with all their readied maneuvers available, regardless of how many times they may have been used since they were chosen. When a maneuver is initiated, it is expended for the rest of the encounter, although each of the adepts has a unique way of refreshing their maneuvers to make them available during a protracted encounter.
While the system for readying, initiating, expending, and recovering martial powers is balanced by an economy similar to traditional spellcasting, it is quickly apparent that the martial power system is extremely flexible and customizable. The maneuvers have been designed to require a minimum of bookkeeping. It is nice to see the design move away from the miserly tracking of rounds and time, to embrace the looser idea of encounters. All of this makes the rules in the book appealing to implement.
The book contains some new skills and skill uses, along with nearly 40 new feats, including new divine, psionic, and tactical feats. Many of the new feats are tied to the martial powers or a specific discipline, although some do a wonderful job illustrating new ways to use the material presented in the book. For example, the Shadow Trickster feat allows a spellcaster to increase the DC of his illusion spells when in a Shadow Hand stance.
There are also several prestige classes, most of which can be attained by characters without martial adept class levels, but who have gained access to martial powers through feats. Many of these are excellent and full of flavor, and players and DMs will be interested in finding ways to incorporate them into their campaigns. The book offers ideas for adapting its well-developed material to different contexts, whether it is the martial powers, the martial adepts, the prestige classes, or the magic items and monsters. The writers deserve to be lauded for making the material so accessible.
The background material spread throughout the book, detailing the human warrior Reshar and his quest to uncover the secrets of the Sublime Way (the collective name for the nine disciplines), the founding of the Temple of the Nine Swords, and the aftermath of its destruction, is enough on which to base an entire campaign. Even the nine swords themselves, while presented as “legacy weapons,” have enough information about them that an enterprising DM could include them in his own games without too much trouble, or without having to buy the eponymous supplement for a handful of specific rules.
Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords, is a nicely bound, 160 page, full-color hardcover sourcebook. The interior art suffers from the same uneven quality that plagues the other generic D&D supplements, although several excellent pieces by Kalman Andrasofszky are scattered through the text. Eric Pollack also provides a nice piece of cover art. The writing, while evocative, is often repetitive. A thorough read reveals some disappointing proofreading and editing misses, and few specific rules questions immediately arise (although most often with the powers and abilities themselves, not how they interact with existing material). Additionally, there is no index. The comprehensive table of contents does not make up for the book’s lack of an easy way to locate specific maneuvers and stances.
The Book of Nine Swords raises the bar for future D&D supplements and rules additions. The design is often elegant and subtle, and the book really needs to be read cover to cover to be fully appreciated. The best part is that the material works so well within the already established rules. The ease of incorporating the material in this book, whether as new fighter feats and combat options, or a way to create fearsome villains or dynamic and artful battles, offers something for every player and DM. The Book of Nine Swords leaves you wanting more, while at the same time wishing the rest of the rules worked as smoothly and intuitively.
