[3.5] The Adamant Cuisine Discipline

[Xefas]

Currently a work in progress (obviously). I'll continue to add maneuvers as I finish them.

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Nearly a century ago, a man's fantasy became reality in a form never seen before: Kitchen Coliseum, a massive cooking and mixed martial arts arena. The motivation to spend his fortune to create Kitchen Coliseum was to encounter new, original cuisines and fighting styles, which could be called 'true artistic creations'.

To realize his dream, he started choosing the top martial chefs of various styles of cooking and violence, and he named his men "The Adamantine Chefs" - the invincible men of culinary skill.

This man was known as Master Kaga, a warrior of unknown skill both in the kitchen and on the battlefield. Though he delighted in sampling all the foods of the world, and glimpsing all that its champions had to offer, it is said that he died without any accurate accounts of him ever having put food to fire or blade to flesh.

After his passing, his three greatest disciples, the first Adamantine Chefs, poured all that they had learned over the tens of thousands of conquests they had partaken of in the confines of Kitchen Coliseum into a single style - the Adamant Cuisine Style, which they each taught to their own select students, and so on, until it carried their passions to the present day, immortalizing them forever.

The first disciple, Michiba, the Esculent Sage, was a master of the Diamond Mind and Shadow Hand disciplines before entering Kitchen Coliseum. Also a renowned philosopher and artist, he would famously teach his students "Cooking is perfection of one's self. There are no borders to ingredients, other than the obstacles in one's own mind. Surpass your own imperfections, and you will be a master chef." His signature weapon was the Paring Knife.

The second disciple, Sakai, the Rising Flame, was a master of the Iron Heart and Tiger Claw disciplines when he first arrived at Kitchen Coliseum. At that time, he was already famous amongst many circles, and though he was humbled on more than one occasion in the Coliseum, his spirit was never diminished. The philosophy he passed down to his students was "Cooking is passion! To love food is to love life. To love the food that you cook more than you love your own fragile existence, to allow yourself to burn with a passion that transcends any individual person; that is to be a master chef!" His signature weapon was a pair of Chef's Knives.

The third disciple, Kenichi, the Spreading Dawn, was a master of the Devoted Spirit and White Raven disciplines long before he came before the gates of Kitchen Coliseum. His reputation was that of a knight who rode with the sun, filling the hearts of all that he met with joy, and filling their stomachs with contentment; banishing all evil that he met along the way. To his students, he proclaimed "Cooking is serving others. To bring happiness to others, to stand against the tides of misery at one's own personal sacrifice; to be a master chef, one must have a servant's heart." His signature weapon was said to be a Sauce Pan so large that even a man of his considerable strength had to heft it with two hands. A stew that filled it could feed a small village.

Profession (Chef) is the key skill for Adamant Cuisine. Its associated weapons are any improvised weapon that is also a cooking implement. A character that knows even one maneuver of the Adamant Cuisine discipline takes no penalty for wielding such improvised weapons, and statistics such as Shortsword (Chef's Knife), Dagger (Paring Knife), Mace (Saute Pan) may be substituted when appropriate.

A Martial Initiator with 4 or more ranks of Profession (Chef) may choose, upon leveling up (or during character creation) to forsake one martial discipline that they have access to. Henceforth, they may not take maneuvers or stances from the forsaken school, and in its place, they may learn maneuvers and stances from the Adamant Cuisine discipline. Should they already know maneuvers or stances from the forsaken school, they must trade them in for maneuvers or stance of a different discipline with the exact same corresponding levels.

Maneuver List
Level 1
Mise En Place (Counter)
Nightmare Kitchen Stance (Stance)
Tasting Adjustment (Strike)

Level 2
Honing the Dull Blade (Boost)
Simultaneous Component Execution (Strike)

Level 3
Bone Fabricating Precept (Strike)
Sharpening the Blunt Blade (Boost)
Stance of the Rising Flame (Stance)

Level 4
Preparatory Charcuterie Principle (Special)

Level 1

Spoiler

Show

Mise En Place
Adamant Cuisine (Counter)
Action: Immediate
Range: Personal
Target: You

Before one may even begin to cook, one must have everything prepared and in its place. This philosophy is known as "Mise En Place" (Putting In Place), and it is as applicable on the battlefield as it is in the kitchen.

You may activate this maneuver whenever you would roll initiative or be caught in a surprise round. Once activated, you may immediately draw any weapon associated with Adamant Cuisine from a sheathe, your backpack, your bag of holding, any adjacent square (if it is unattended), or similar. If you do, you gain a +2 bonus on your initiative roll. If activated during a surprise round, it has the additional effect of allowing you to act in the surprise round as if you had not been surprised.

As a secondary effect, you may activate this maneuver when preparing to use a Profession (Chef) check to fly into a whirlwind of preparation. You sanitize surfaces, set up chopping blocks, organize racks of ingredients, and similar activities in the span of a few seconds.

Nightmare Kitchen Stance
Adamant Cuisine (Stance)
Action: Swift
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: Stance

A kind word about one's dish is greatly appreciated, but a harsh criticism is far more useful. If you say that it was "good", that's nice, but if you say that "It was dry around the outside, had no color, the presentation was contrived, and by all that is holy, do you even OWN a salt shaker?" then I am given the tools to strive to greater heights.

While in this stance, every time you miss with a melee attack roll against an enemy, you gain a +1 bonus on melee attack rolls for 5 rounds. Whenever you take damage from an enemy, you gain a +1 armor class bonus for 1 round.

As a secondary effect, you may activate this maneuver when you fail a Profession (Chef) check to please a particular person with a dish you have made. The next time you cook for that person within the next month, you gain a +5 bonus on the skill check.

Tasting Adjustment
Adamant Cuisine (Strike)
Action: Standard
Range: Melee
Target: One Creature

A chef must taste his food while he is cooking it. As perfect as his technique may be, his circumstances are variable - flames vary in intensity, herbs vary in strength from leaf to leaf, and every pan carries its heat in its own unique way. By tasting, he may adjust for these variables, and forge perfection from chaos.

This strike may only be used against an enemy that you have missed in the previous round. You may choose to either take 11 on your attack roll, or you may roll twice on your attack roll and take the better of the two results.

As a secondary effect, you may activate this maneuver when making a Profession (Chef) check. You may take 11 on this check, even if you are distracted in some way.

Level 2

Spoiler

Show

Honing the Dull Blade
Adamant Cuisine (Boost)
Action: Swift
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: 5 minutes

As a knife slices again and again, imperceptibly tiny fibers on the cutting edge are rendered askew until one may find that their efforts are having severely diminished results. Just as the reassessment of tiny factors on the battlefield may make a world of difference, so too must the chef break himself away from his fervor to realign the details of his blade.

When you activate this maneuver, any spells, conditions, or ongoing effects that are currently inflicting a numerical penalty to your attack rolls are suspended (either directly, such as Shaken, or indirectly such as the Strength penalty from Ray of Enfeeblement) for 5 minutes. During their suspension, their duration continues to expire as if it were still effecting you, though if its duration still has not run out after 5 minutes, it resumes as normal afterward.

As a secondary effect, you may activate this maneuver to hone any cutting implements within your reach in a matter of seconds, provided you have a proper tool on hand, such as a Honing Steel.

Simultaneous Component Execution
Adamant Cuisine (Strike)
Action: Standard
Range: Melee
Target: Up to Four Creatures

Every exquisite dish is itself a combination of many separately prepared components. To have a perfect dish, one does not simply cook one thing perfectly, but many different things, all of which must be executed perfectly on its own and, more often than not, this must be done simultaneously in order to unite them properly.

When you activate this maneuver, make a damage roll with the weapon you will be using with this strike, and then divide the result in half (round up). Then, make an attack roll against up to four enemies within melee range. If an attack succeeds, you deal the generated damage to them and gain a +1 bonus on your attack rolls until the end of your current turn.

Level 3

Spoiler

Show

Bone Fabricating Precept
Adamant Cuisine (Strike)
Action: Standard
Range: Melee
Target: One Creature

When preparing a raw carcass for cooking, one does not hew straight through bones. One could, potentially, but why dull a perfectly good blade and waste so much time? A trained chef may deftly dismember an animal in the blink of an eye by slicing through its cartilage and ligaments, even those heavily concealed within layers of skin and flesh.

This maneuver turns you next melee attack into a touch attack as you cut directly into the joints and weak-points of an opponent's armor. In addition, any armor they are wearing becomes damaged, reducing its armor bonus by 4 and increasing its Armor Check Penalty by -1 and Arcane Spell Failure by 10% (these penalties are cumulative from multiple applications of Bone Fabricating Precepts). These penalties persist until the armor can be repaired.

As a secondary effect, you may activate this maneuver to instantly fabricate an animal corpse into component pieces (such as a chicken into two breasts, two tenderloins, two legs, two wings, and two thighs, with its bones neatly arranged to the side) as long as you have a slashing weapon in hand.

Sharpening the Blunt Blade
Adamant Cuisine (Boost)
Action: Swift
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: 1 round

A blunted blade is useless. All the fancy techniques in the world will not help the chef who is unable to manipulate his ingredients, and so any chef of note will keep his implements in perfect operating condition at all times.

For one round after activating this maneuver, all of the Chef's attacks completely bypass damage reduction. In addition, each successful attack roll made against an enemy reduces their damage reduction by 1 for 5 rounds (this is cumulative with other attacks augmented with Sharpening the Blunt Blade).

As a secondary effect, you may activate this maneuver to sharpen any cutting implements within your reach in a matter of seconds, provided you have a proper tool on hand, such as a whetstone.

Stance of the Rising Flame
Adamant Cuisine (Stance)
Action: Swift
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: Stance

Cooking is passion! Though weary from 14 hour days in the kitchen, sweating from the heat of the ovens, burned and cut from errant implements, the master chef allows his pure love of food to propel him onwards. Harness this love, and nothing can stop you.

While in this stance, you may substitute a Profession (Chef) check in place of a Balance, Climb, Concentration, Escape Artist, Jump, Swim, or Tumble check. In a round directly following a round in which you made a Profession (Chef) check, you ignore any penalties from Fatigue or Exhaustion.

Level 4

Spoiler

Show

Preparatory Charcuterie Principle
Adamant Cuisine (Special)
Action: Full-Round
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: 24 hours

To lesser chefs, a sausage-based dish begins with buying the best quality sausage they can find. To a master chef, it begins with grinding one's own meat, seasoning it to their purposes, and stuffing it themselves into an intestinal casing of their creation. The more times in the cooking process that a chef may manipulate their ingredients, the more opportunities he has to tune his dish to perfection, ensuring that each and every step of the way is precisely to his standards and specifications.

When you activate this maneuver, you make a series of a Profession (Chef) checks. The number is determined by how many ranks you have in Profession (Chef).

4 ranks = 1 roll
5-8 = 2 rolls
9-12 = 4 rolls
13-16 = 6 rolls
17-20 = 8 rolls
21+ = 10 rolls

Any time within the next 24 hours, when you make an attack roll using a weapon associated with the Adamant Cuisine discipline, you may substitute one of your banked rolls in place of the result of your attack roll (this occurs after you are aware of what you rolled, but before it is confirmed whether your attack hits or not). Each banked roll may only be used once. This maneuver may not be activated again until 24 hours have passed since its prior use.

[Matar]

This is the SINGLE BEST IDEA EVER.

-Ever-

[Admiral Squish]

I must somehow mix this into my Omnomnomicon project now.

[Xefas]

This is the SINGLE BEST IDEA EVER.

-Ever-

Glad someone thinks so.
Still coming up with the missing half of the discipline as inspiration hits me. I keep getting distracted by other stuff, though.

I must somehow mix this into my Omnomnomicon project now.

Still the best name ever. I continue to chuckle when I see the thread title, and its been what, 3 months now? To make a variant of the discipline, I could probably just change the associated skill to your new "Cooking" skill, and then alter the way the secondary effects of several of the maneuvers work, because your "Cooking" skill is much more powerful than a generic D&D setting's Profession (Cooking).

[DracoDei]

I request an Awakened Rat who practices this style as an example character. Maxed ranks in Ride(Humanoid), and Handle Animal Humanoid optional.

For self-sacrificial leadership, Scarlet Bravura > White Raven, but I don't know if you feel like referencing other homebrew that is not directly food related.

((Someone remind me to edit in links to all the stuff that I have that is vaguely relevant to this some time... of cousre, first I would have to POST most of it first.))

[Lix Lorn]

Or frost them over. Mebbe it's just me but FROST OVER A RED DRAGON. WITH A SWORD 8D

Well, yeah, but if you take THIS discipline you can probably pick if it is chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla frosting...

Do I detect a manouevre? XD
Love this.