For example there is a solar hero charm, which only a solar could learn, that allows you to convert a die to a success at a cost greater than the cost of purchasing a success. While a combo of this with the second excellency could render it somehow worthwhile, it really is just a pure speedbump.

On the other end of the spectrum is a martial arts charm that grants immunity to all natural mental influence for a scene. This seems better than anything Solars have available in integrity.

Still with a few tweaks the book is useful and provides a lot of good options, both for players and storytellers. Just be prepared for a couple of double takes.

Chaper One: Martial Arts World

This is the fluff chapter of the book. It tells you everything you want to know about the society of martial artists in the world of Exalted. It also provides a few story hooks, at least one relevant to any type of exalted, related to tournaments fought around creation. Most importantly it talks about enlightening mortals, and how this enables them to use terrestrial martial arts.

Over all I thought this was a pretty dry chapter. The story hooks were not as dense as I had gotten used to in Exalted books. While I would not say the society information was worthless it did not draw me in. Enlightening mortals on the other hand was very interesting to me as a storyteller, and the book does a good job showing how mortal characters can do it on their own, and how Gods, Spirits, Demons, and the Exalted can help them achieve enlightenment.

Chapter Two: Terrestrial Martial Arts

For me, this was the most interesting chapter of the book. It contains twelve new terrestrial martial arts. While many dragon blooded interested in martial arts will simply move up to the celestial level before the game begins these provide excellent opportunities for a Storyteller to make mortals interesting to the exalted in combat.

This portion of the book looked the most balanced at first glance, and the styles are for the most part evocative and interesting. Some of the highlights include a bodyguard style that allows you to compose a haiku about how you will die gloriously and have it come true, a drunken boxing style that allows you to turn intoxication into an advantage, and a ninjitsu style that provides a wide range of interesting stealth tricks. Unfortunately several other styles feel like the Dragon Styles-lite. Basically toned down versions of the styles in the dragon blooded book.

Chapter Three: Celestial Martial Arts

This chapter is probably the more relevant to players than any of the others. Every type of exalted has access to these styles at character generation, and in my experience most people interested in martial arts that can get Celestial Martial Arts will not even look at the Terrestrial Martial Arts. Again the authors do a good job of presenting flavorful interesting styles. This chapter also presents a number of interesting additions to the Solar Hero Style, including one Essence 6 charm. It was good to see what an Essence 6 Solar charm looked like. Unfortunately this is the chapter where I noticed the most balance flaws.

There are 8 celestial styles. Some highlights of interesting styles include Dreaming Pearl Courtesan a style that uses fans, which appears to no longer require solar charms as prerequisites, a dominatrix style designed for your abyssal exalted needs, and a western gunslinger style. There are also a number more animal styles, a music based style, and a stealth style. I personally did not find these as interesting, but I believe that was mostly due to personal preference.

Chapter Four: Sidereal Martial Arts

The nature of Sidereal Martial Arts has been a subject of great debate since its appearance in first edition. This book will not resolve that argument. This is a chapter that for the most part focuses on villains. I say this because many of the charms are high essence charms that are not accessible to characters in the standard Exalted format. Thus I view this chapter as a Storyteller toolkit, and from that perspective I believe it succeeds. Unfortunately this chapter in particular suffers from poor integration with the second edition rules. At several points this refers to “trumping” other charms. However, the rules are already clear on what to do when two charms contradict each other. They even provide a framework in which to handle cases where you want one charm to have an advantage. Adding bonus dice to the essence vs. essence roll to deal with contradictions in text appears in many of the Solar charms, and it should have appeared here.

There are seven different SMA styles included in this chapter, and they can produce a wide range of interesting effects for your players to deal with. Do you want to have your players fight Agent Smith, with him infecting more and more people and turning them into himself? This gives you the tools to do that. Do you want your enemy to create a dark version of a PC for him to deal with? This chapter gives you the tools to do that. Do you want your PCs to be deluded into believing they are fare more powerful than they are? This chapter gives you the tools to do that. Do you want a character to break the world and let loose the wyld? Appear in a PCs dreams? Poison a PCs charms to make them more expensive? It can do all of that.

Of course if you do ALL of that in the course of a session or two, or if every NPC in your game can do these things there will be a problem. But as fundamental plot elements, intended to be used sparingly I think this chapter does a good job.

The charms SMA in this chapter accessible to standard PCs are difficult to evaluate given the general lack of essence four and five charms elsewhere.

Overview

This book is basically necessary if you want a campaign focused on martial arts in exalted. If you have no interest in martial arts in Exalted there is no point to buying this book. While the fluff chapter at the beginning is a bit dry, I really liked a lot of the fluff contained in the descriptions of the various martial arts. With a few exceptions the art is good. I wish the actual crunch that makes up the majority of the book was better playtested, but a careful eye and willingness to revisit charms after characters purchase them should help with this.

Help support RPGnet by purchasing this item through DriveThruRPG.