Thoughts on th Player's Guide to Fighters and Barbarians?

[White_Drake]

As the title says, I was hoping to find out if the Player's Guide to Fighters and Barbarians published by Swords and Sorcery is any good. Specifically I'm interested in the Nine-Stings Master prestige class.

[eggs]

Skimming the guide, it's pretty typical in quality and balance for a 3.0 splatbook aimed at mundanes. That's not a great thing - a lot of classes and feats are all about a handful of minor +numbers abilities - but it's not a bad thing either. It looked like there were a few nifty gems:

Feats:

Bind is a really cool feat. Stick it on a late iterative attack that would have missed on its own, and get a fairly reliable no-save Entangle effect. This is the kind of thing nonmagical melee characters could use more of.
Most of the Totem feats are pretty bland, but Fur-like-Dusk (Character-level/Wis-based Lay on hands) and Hookwing (Spring Attack minus prereqs) are slick.


Most of the PrCs fall into the bland-fighter-variant zone. On the ones that stood out:

Archer of the Steppes is a passable archery PrC (which is honestly too rare in 3e)
Ragewitch is a Rage Mage that doesn't suck. Hooray!
Warrior of the White Fire looks like a really cool gish, but the Weapon Specialization (Quarterstaff) requirement is going block it from high-op environments.
Chain Legionnaire and Dancer of Steel are pretty typica Fighter PrCs, but they both get some powerful abilities targeting alternate defenses near the end of their tracks (Domination/Paralysis effects and area Stuns, respectively) - they'd at least make above-average fighters at the upper-mid levels (whatever that's worth)
Knight of the Oak sucks out of the can, but it's a mini-Battle Jumper on its own. Plug it into a Hood build and the multipliers are going to stack even faster.


And on the items:

Multiplicity is like Splitting, but better in every way. Splitting is way too powerful already; this can just get silly.
Sorcerer's Steel - Arcane Channeling as a special material is actually pretty cool. Balance-wise, it might be slightly cheaper than Smiting Spell/Graft Weapon/Natural Weapon/unarmed strikes, but it basically looks reasonable and fun.


On Nine-Stings Master, the first two levels are decent (3.0 Monk Flurry with daggers and a bonus feat on a robust framework), but after that, you'd be better burning levels elsewhere. Ideally in a class with at least a couple skill points to throw around.

[Jacque]

Most of the pages in the book is fluff tied to the Scarred Lands setting. Don't expect it to be a book similar to Complete Warrior.

I think a few more nuggets are worth mentioning:

Clothborn Armor: An enchant which makes any armor into a padded armor except it keeps its original armor bonus.

Riposte: Free AoE when using combat expertise and the enemy miss their attack.

Bent Grip: +1 threat range to any piercing light weapon og one-handed sword - at the cost of 5gp.