This tome focuses on the martial heroes: characters who rely on their combat talents and keen wits for survival. "Martial Power" is the first of a line of player-friendly supplements offering hundreds of new options for D&D characters.

New options for fighters, rangers, rogues, and warlords... Sharpen your sword and tighten your bow! This must-have book is the latest in a line of player-friendly game supplements offering hundreds of new options for D&D® characters, specifically focusing on martial heroes. It provides new archetypal builds for fighters, rangers, rogues, and warlords, as well as new character powers, feats, paragon paths, and epic destinies.

From Bruce Lee and Benny Urquidez to the latest Jackie Chan blockbuster film, this updated edition of The Martial Arts Almanac is the first-ever comprehensive look into the exotic world of martial arts. Young martial arts fans can read all about aikido, tae kwon do, kung fu, karate, and a host of other styles, as well as the great masters who made them famous. -- Dozens of photographs, illustrations, and sidebars -- Index and glossary for help with foreign terms -- Interview with a real martial arts master

In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai’s efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body – being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities – is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.

A collection of parables and teaching stories from the martial arts traditions of Japan and China that emphasizes their spiritual foundation. • The teaching stories in this book are based on the lives of martial arts masters and are meant to inspire questions and insights for the student. • Written for martial artists and anyone interested in Eastern religions such as Buddhism, Zen, and Taoism. True martial arts should never be confused with simple combat techniques. Rather, martial arts are a way that an individual, after a long and difficult apprenticeship, can gain a profound understanding of the true nature of reality and one's place in it. Over time the apprentice discovers the laws governing the subtle forces of life and realizes that their mastery is only possible after one has mastered oneself. "He who has mastered the Art doesn't use his sword: he compels his adversary to kill himself." This quote from renowned sword master Tajima no Kami perfectly expresses the paradoxical nature of martial arts teachings in China and Japan. These teaching stories are not moral fables; in fact they have nothing to prove. Their purpose is actually to inspire questions and insights that will aid the student to achieve self-realization. Most of the stories in this book are based on actual events in the lives of martial arts teachers who have achieved legendary status. The almost superhuman abilities of some of the masters described here are evidence of the secret powers that can be wielded by those whose martial arts training is not simply the learning of physical techniques but involves the mastering of the subtle energies of the mind and body. Master of the Art of Archery Kenzo Awa could hit the center of a target even when shooting in total darkness. Assailants of Tai Chi master Yang Lu Chan found their blows did more damage to themselves than to their would-be victim. By reading--and comprehending--the tales in this book, we can acquire the same essential knowledge that these masters had--that extraordinary forces are within the grasp of those who have achieved inner peace and self-mastery.

Examines the careers and political thinking of Elizabethan martial men, whose military ambitions were thwarted by a quietist foreign policy.

-- A "sleeper" worldbook that has just continued to sell and sell. -- Martial arts are applicable to every sort of campaign...fantasy, SF, or modern! -- Detailed discussions of over 50 different fighting styles.