Third Party Martials

[ekarney]

Are there any interesting to player martial character from third party publishers? One of my players just retired his binder and wants to play a martial character, but he wants to have options with what he can do, we've looked at ToB but I'd just like to see what else is out there to present as an option for him. Possibly classes with cool sub-systems or something.

[Thurbane]

The Runeblade from the Book of Experimental Might (https://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/54689-sample.pdf) is a fairly decent rune-based gish in a can class.

Although, that is a lot more caster-y than martial, now that I think about it.

[Vizzerdrix]

Dungeon mag #136 has the obah blessed template. Extra arms, free multi weapon fighting, and some okay stat boosts. Comes in a +2 (2 extra arms) or +3 (4 extra arms) flavor.

[pabelfly]

Psychic Warrior is a fun Gish. You get bonus feats almost like Fighter (you also get psionic feats but you get them less often) and you get psionic powers including teleport options. Slayer is as good PrC to get to 16 or 17 BAB in exchange for a feat or two.

You could also do the Gish swordsage variant.

[Asmotherion]

i don't follow 3rd party classes.

My suggestion would be a Hexblade/Stelwart Battle Sorcerer/Abjurant Champion.

A Naberious Binder (or do the incarnum thing) Hellfire Warlock with Eldritch Glaive can also be a competant Gish. UMD a wand of Divine power for better fun.

The Book of 9 Swords has some great options for Martial (Gish) Classes.

[ngilop]

The book Arcana Evolved has the Warmain, Oathsworn, and Ritual Warrior. (there might be another class i am forgetting) That get Combat Rites, which are a sort of proto-martial maneuver.


You can also try the Iron Hero and their token enhanced combat.

[Efrate]

If you are not opposed to pathfinder dreamscarred press has their path of war stuff which is phenomenal, though you will outpace a similar 3.5 martial adept with a lot more and beater class features and maneuvers. You can easily play with casters and keep up very well, and potentially make them even better.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Oddly enough, monk with several ACFs, using one's entire body as an unarmed strike, and liberal use of magic weapon enhancements (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?285801-Tippy-s-Terrifically-Terrible-Trial/page25&p=15474863#post15474863) can be pretty interesting, especially if you go monk 1 or 2 / psychic warrior + Tashalatora.

The ability to treat your body as both corporeal and incorporeal at the same time via ghost touch alone is pretty spectacular. Invulnerability to non-magic weapons, 50% miss chance against non-force/non-abjuration effects, ignoring armor that isn't also ghost touch (or riverine), and a fly speed at 50% base land speed is none too shabby.

Metalline turns your body into living adamantine, with hardness and the ability to ignore (most) hardness.

Throwing/distance/exit wounds to hurl yourself at your enemies and burst through them like a particularly gruesome Kool-Aid Man.

http://threewordphrase.com/koolaid.gif

[Ruethgar]

If you are ok with adapting PF 3P, I would say Spheres of Might (http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com/using-spheres-of-might). It has some pretty neat abilities and some of them make martials more apt at things other than I hit it with my sword. I would suggest severely limiting the skill gain, probably down to +1 per talent instead of the default +5, also the easiest way to get them(giving up feats for a low/med progression) would need to be adjusted for the PF/D&D difference. I like it because a lot of the things feel more like improvements to the vanilla game as opposed to ToB/PoW which feels more like just giving martials spells/invocations.

[ViperMagnum357]

If you are OK with 3.0 that was not updated, you can look at the D20 Rokugan setting from AEG. A solid majority of the classes are martial, and there are long feat chains available for PCs with Monk and/or Rokugan Samurai levels that add a lot of depth to a character that is not in a rocket tag campaign.

The setting also uses several additional systems, the most salient being Void Points; similar in concept to Action Points, but they recover after 8 hours of rest rather than scrounging them as a limited resource. Void Points initially can only be used for a small AC bonus, but most classes have features that interact or improve them, and there are long feat chains scattered through the setting books that form entire builds by themselves because the effects are strong enough to build around if you know what you are doing.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Totemist from Magic of Incarnum is a super fun class with a lot of flexibility and options. Melee combat is pretty easy to build for with natural attacks (Sphinx Claws and Girallon Arms are your two best friends there), likewise mobility options (Blink Shirt for teleportation, Phase Cloak for etherealness IIRC, and Pegasus Cloak for flight, among many others), and with a little effort you can make a solid ranged character, too (mainly Manticore Belt).

The Incarnate Class from the same book can make a pretty good martial combat character (as in someone who uses weapons and similar attacks rather than spells), too, though it's more suited to a skillmonkey/utility character.

EDIT: Neither of these are technically martials, because their subsystem is explicitly magical, but they're pretty comparable to ToB as far as what they actually do. Also have the advantage of being 1st party.

[Oberron]

Pathfinder has a lot of things that you can easily used in 3.5 with little to no adjustment. Check out their feats as well. But a lot of other feats that help out martials are other classes look into the AEG book of feats. This book was made for 3.0 I think and has feats that go from "why does this exist?" to "who thought this was balanced?" So if you allow anything from it check it out first, some of them are bad because of prerec bloat but balanced if some of them are removed (mostly because they are either redundant to something in 3.5 or just put on as a tax for the sake of being a tax)

[Gnaeus]

If you are not opposed to pathfinder dreamscarred press has their path of war stuff which is phenomenal, though you will outpace a similar 3.5 martial adept with a lot more and beater class features and maneuvers. You can easily play with casters and keep up very well, and potentially make them even better.

I second this, but also their Akashic martial (Daevic) is fun, their monster classes (love my green dragon) are fun, their psionics (like the improved soulknife) are fun. Lots of good options there.

[AnimeTheCat]

Totemist from Magic of Incarnum is a super fun class with a lot of flexibility and options. Melee combat is pretty easy to build for with natural attacks (Sphinx Claws and Girallon Arms are your two best friends there), likewise mobility options (Blink Shirt for teleportation, Phase Cloak for etherealness IIRC, and Pegasus Cloak for flight, among many others), and with a little effort you can make a solid ranged character, too (mainly Manticore Belt).

The Incarnate Class from the same book can make a pretty good martial combat character (as in someone who uses weapons and similar attacks rather than spells), too, though it's more suited to a skillmonkey/utility character.

EDIT: Neither of these are technically martials, because their subsystem is explicitly magical, but they're pretty comparable to ToB as far as what they actually do. Also have the advantage of being 1st party.

Yay, someone mentioned my favorite (and most under used) subsystem in 3.5! I second this, or mix it with a martial adept class from ToB and make a "gish" that way. The Tiger Claw school would mix well with the sphinx claws and girallon arms melds from Totemist.

[Psyren]

I'd recommend either Totemist, or porting in the PF Soulknife.

[Bphill561]

Legends & Lairs is third party and their "Path" books (Path of the sword in this case) have Legendary classes in them that are interesting. Usually they are 5 levels long with an ability you can select at each level. The bonus the ability gets is multiplied by which level of the class you pick it up at. For instance one lets you ignore the effects of 3 spell levels a day after you fail a saving throw (Hmm, disjunction protection maybe for your gear). If taken in your 5th level it lets you ignore 15 spell levels. It is 3.0 and the classes seemed good at the time, but maybe they have not aged well.

Not sure what kind of options he is looking for. I get the impression from you comments that ToB's system was too much and maybe some other heavy spell casting gishes are as well. If really limited spell casting is okay, the Divine Crusader in Complete divine could work. In 10 levels it gives you 9th level spell casting from just one domain. You could probably add more with contemplative or another PrC.

[SangoProduction]

It's Pathfinder, but it's still relatively balanced in 3.5. And by that, I mean it's not totally amazing, and isn't a steam pile of dung. It's also about as 1-note as a martial normally is, but has some nice flexibility as you could actually go a bow build, and make the bow out of mithril, gaining Dex to hit and damage. And that extends to all mithril weapons. I mean, it's mithril for a weapon, but unless you're dealing with specific hardness/DR, you don't *need* adamantine. Also it's a pretty metal.
Or just focus on throwing fat sacks of cash at people. That works too.

http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com/the-craven