I was thinking about the Fluff.

If the Age of Warriors comes after the Temple of Nine Swords, then there has to be a reason for such a flourishing of hundreds of styles. Perhaps we could move a lot forwards in the timeline, making the ToNS be centuries in the past? Some of the styles we are including are obviously very old, especially the planar styles. But others could just be developments of new schools that came up after the fall of the temple? If the temple was the world's main place of fighting education, perhaps it just became too rigid and codified over time, and its fall meant that there was no central place were "correct" style was thought and experimentation discouraged, so there are now hundreds of competing masters and their students, all teaching their own styles?

It would be a very Wuxia setting, then.


And now I'm tempted to make a class based on experimentation and combining styles. Hmm...

Okay, how's this for a base class idea. You get a lot more maneuvers, but your initiator level is considerably lower, so you get lower level maneuvers. Something like a bard progression. But you get access to more disciplines and you get a bonus for mixing disciplines. (I.e. you get an attack bonus if using a boost from one discipline on a strike of another discipline.) Plus maybe a kind of inspiration mechanic, for unusual maneuvers invented on the fly.

Because you're not going to let some crusty old master tell you how to fight.