Narrow Bridge (3.5e Martial Discipline)

Summary::The Narrow Bridge was first studied by an order of monks who studied the border of life and death. The practitioners of The Narrow Bridge understand that death and life are more closely intertwined than most realize. Those trained in the proper martial arts can cross the narrow bridge that separates life from unlife. While most practitioners of The Narrow Bridge are living, it is not uncommon for undead martial warriors to also dabble in the techniques.

Although the discipline involves much use of negative energy and undeath, it also involves the use of positive energy and the ability to combat the undead. It is thus not wholly evil, but a mix of powers.

The great masters of the discipline realized the ease at which the discipline could be abused and so were very careful to not teach the discipline to many outsiders. Traditionally, a master would take on a single disciple at a time, one whose ethics and outlooks matched those of the master. However, over time the discipline has slowly become more widely practiced.

The Narrow Bridge was never taught at the Temple of Nine Swords. Due to its association with necromancy and the undead, Reshar disliked the discipline and thus never dedicated much time studying it although he did locate a master who was willing to teach him the basics. In addition to his own dislike, the highly specialized nature of much of the discipline and the reticence of masters to teach it has stopped many martial warriors from taking too much effort to master its techniques.

The associated skill of The Narrow Bridge is Knowledge (religion).

The associated weapons are the bastard sword, battleaxe, greataxe, scythe, unarmed strike, and whip.

All Narrow Bridge maneuvers are supernatural unless stated otherwise.

There are two ways to master the discipline. The first is to have been trained in it. If you choose to make a martial adept that has already been trained in the Narrow Bridge discipline at character creation, you simply replace one discipline that adept could normally learn maneuvers from with the Narrow Bridge discipline. Note that The Narrow Bridge should generally be considered a replacement discipline for swordsages and then crusaders. The supernatural nature of the discipline make it potentially inappropriate as a as a starting discipline for warblades.

The other way is to seek out a master of the Narrow Bridge discipline–a martial adept capable of using at least 5th-level maneuvers from the discipline. You must train for a month under the master and spend 1,000 xp at the end of your training. You gain the ability to learn maneuvers from the Narrow Bridge discipline. In addition, you may exchange your maneuvers known for maneuvers of the Narrow Bridge discipline. You may exchange one maneuver of each level, and the new maneuvers you learn must be of the same level as the exchanged maneuvers, unlike normal. The difficulty of finding an appropriate mentor is left to the DM to choose.

Maneuvers of the Narrow Bridge Discipline

 * To see the full, expanded description of every maneuver, click here.