5 Duelist Styles

nicolas nemiri

Loch's Duelist is required reading for this post.

Ψ - Feral
The style of Inner Earth paladins, as practiced in the Prison-City.
You might have learned it from one of their fold, or the spiraling ravings carved in bedrock.

1. Technique: Dagger-Blood - Bite your tongue and take 1 damage to spit a dagger at them.
   
2. Stance: Orehound - You track expensive metal (>200gp) by smell.
   
3. Technique: Manacle - With your free hand, grab their wrist. Your grip cannot be broken, except by death of one or both of you. They'll need to overpower you to use the grabbed arm meaningfully.
   
4. Stance: Magnesis - You may strike at polearms-length with an iron or steel weapon, swinging it with your mind alone. While you do this, your hands are free.
   

Ψ - Reaper B)
An impractical style for foolish, lethal people. You must wield a scythe or, more rarely, a katana.
You might have learned it from a black-clad farmer-assasssin, or from The Memoirs of James Blackgun.

1. Technique: Vorpal - Go for the throat. If your next attack brings them to 0 HP, you instantly decapitate them in a terrifying display, forcing morale checks and saves vs fear.
   
2. Technique: Nothing Personnel - If no one is looking at you (even for a moment), you can disappear and reappear directly behind them.
   
3. Technique: Early Harvest - You may forgo both of your attacks to make a single attack against everything in the room, including the furniture.
   
4. Stance: Accessories to Murder - You have +1 to hit for every 2 slots of belts you are wearing. 

Ψ - Qusan
The style of the Eastern frontier, in the trenches, under the storm-that-blinds-God.
You might have learned it from a veteran with sunken eyes and pointed teeth, or a roan-bound journal.

1. Technique: Ankle-Breaker - When you deal max damage with a heavy weapon, you may break one of their legs.
   
2. Technique: Jaws of the Steppe - When you could riposte, you can instead catch their weapon in your teeth and wrench it out of their hands. Heavy weapons get a save.
   
3. Technique: Bear-Biter - This round, treat your teeth like a fistful of +[level] daggers.
4. Stance: Yaga Cauldron - Nothing in your stomach can harm you.

Lesson of Qusan: The Man In The Trench - You can assume an alternate persona, recognizable to all who know you as different from you. He (and it is a He) is immune to fear, charms, sleep, cold, and compassion. He has six cravings—numbness, forgetting, a mother's touch, horse meat, sudden violence, and the unspeakable one—whenever you banish Him, adopt another of His cravings. He remembers things.

Ψ - Kenesse
The style of invaders from a vanished land of high cliffs and golden geese.
Maybe you learned it from a runty giant, or a 12ft stele in the hinterland.

1. Technique: Sunder - Forgo an attack to turn a shield to splinters. Magic shields get a save.
   
2. Technique: Knock - Forgo both of your attacks to knock a door off its hinges. Metal doors get a save, unless you forgo three attacks.
3. Technique: Shape Earth - Forgo both of your attacks to split the battlefield in two. This might be a wall of earth displaced by a mighty stomp, or a collapsed roof section, or a massive crack in a sheet of ice. It's difficult to cross, but not impossible.
   
4. Stance: Cloud Step - You can double-jump. If your hair is ankle-length, you can triple-jump.
   

Ψ - Ja Ki
The style of drunken masters, born in revolutionary circles of the Hungry City.
Maybe you learned it from one of them, or the back of the label on a 500 year old jug of moonshine.

1. Technique: Muddle - You may forgo both of your attacks to trade weapons with them, somehow.
   
2. Technique: Liquid Sacrifice - You may parry with a d10 by sacrificing a waterskin, bottle, or jug of drink on your hip.
   
3. Technique: Footstool - When you could riposte, you can instead end up standing on their head, somehow. From there, you can make a further running jump. Either way, this knocks them prone.
   
4. Stance: Monkey Gathers Oranges - You can pick up and throw things with your feet.

Lesson of Ja Ki: Stumble - Whenever you go anywhere, you have a 2-in-6 chance of ending up in a bar instead, and a 1-in-6 chance of ending up somewhere you are not allowed to be. This is true whether you are walking alone or being escorted in a cage to your own execution; everyone who accompanies you is utterly bewildered by this phenomenon.

special thanks to random_interrupt for getting me on boell oyino