Martial Arts in the Project Jade Serenity Supers/Technothriller Campaign - Page 6

Icelander · 03-30-2017, 02:32 PM

Kachin Bando has 16 animal forms. ABA Bando has 12 and various forms of Bando in Myanmar appear to have 9-12.

I can find short descriptions of the 12 forms that ABA Bando teaches online.

I was wondering if anyone had an idea how to characterise the other four, what kind of personality, tactics and preferred techniques they implied about the stylist.

According to Phil Dunlap, the only US lineage-holder of Kachin Bando that I know about, these are the ABA Bando Animal Forms, also applicable to the NBA in Burma:

Name of Form: Characteristics

1. Boar: courage, rushing, elbowing, kneeing, butting
2. Bull: charging, tackling, power striking
3. Cobra: attacking upper vital points
4. Deer: alertness
5. Eagle: double hand blocking and striking
6. Monkey: agility, confidence
7. Paddy Bird: rapid flight
8. Panther: circling, leaping, tearing
9. Python: crushing, strangling, gripping
10. Scorpion: pinching and seizing nerve centers
11. Tiger: clawing, ripping
12. Viper: attacking lower vital points

The four or five animal forms unique to Kachin Bando are:

Barking Deer: Is it the same as Deer in ABA Bando, i.e. a focus on awareness, evasion and control of distance?
Crocodile: Is it grappling, but different grappling from Python?
Sun Bear: No idea, but really curious!
White Elephant: Ditto.
White Rhino: How does it differ from Bull?

I'm also really interested in the armed forms of Kachin Bando.

As far as I can find out, the association of the kukri with Bando is a something that emerged out of the post-WWII attempts to codify the style in Burma. It's part of ABA Bando, but I don't know if it made it into Kachin Bando.

In game terms, of course, the shorter dha blades that Kachin tribesmen wear are chopping Knives and Shortswords, just like kukris, and I suspect that even in real-world terms, most of the forms, tactics and techniques would transfer over pretty well.

I'm looking for information on Kachin Bando stickfighting. I can find some interesting information on hardwood sticks of 4'-5' length, which are used with Staff skill and obviously, even into the 20th century, tribesmen in inaccessible areas of Burma fought with spears when they didn't have firearms.

What I'm wondering about are shorter sticks. As far as I know, everything from the equivalents of yawaras and short batons has been a part of bando somewhere, but I don't know what kind of sticks Kachin Bando would emphasise.

Also, is it common to train using two blades or two sticks or is it more likely that the stylist will use just one weapon and incorporate it (especially sticks) into grappling?

Are armed techniques taught seperately from the personality-based animal forms or do various tactics or techniques for weapons fall under animal forms?

According to the Internet, ABA Bando teaches a lot of stick-grappling as part of the Python animal form, but I don't know if an analogy could usefully be drawn from that.

Icelander · 03-30-2017, 05:24 PM

Well into the 19th century, some Americans, particularly in the South and out West, carried a large fighting knife daily. In some regions, settling disputes with the knife was an accepted part of macho subcultures. And obviously, knife fighting was part of the warrior culture of many, if not most, Native American tribes.

Hunters, plainsmen, cowboys and especially vaqueros were especially likely to carry and use knives. Allegedly, professional knife fights took place in Mexico into the 20th century, ending in the 30s. I've heard Mexican knife-fighting referred to as 'El Cuchillo' or 'cuchillo', but as that just means 'knife' in Spanish, it's hardly very specific.

I know that there are Spanish knife-fighting styles, which are believed to have been among the influences on escrima, kali and other types of FMA. In game terms, I suspect most would fall under Dagger Fighting, but I don't know enough to differentiate any type of Spanish knife-fighting from another style of fighting with knives.

For the next adventure in Project Jade Serenity, any PCs who survive Jewell Island, as well as new characters, NPCs and PCs (should any need replacing and/or new players join) will be going to Mexico. They'll be going to an area which is apparently completely under the control of a violent cartel boss and they will probably meet a lot of criminals of Hispanic ethnicity, both nortenos and native-born Mexicans from Chihuahua and Michoacan.

Even if news media mostly focuses on deaths related to firearms violence in Mexico and the border regions of the Southwest US, beatings and stabbings are generally more common than firefights, even in the worst violent urban areas. Historically, violent gang warfare for generations has usually led to the development of rough-and-ready fighting skill among those who survive and become enforcers among the gangs. In GURPS terms, such fighting skill can be represented by a Style Familiarity with the Street lens.

This is especially important because the cartel in question is a splinter faction of the Knights Templar, ruled by a former test subject of Project Jade Serenity, and they are likely to be quite spectacularly crazy. In particular, underbosses, enforcers and favoured soldiers may own ceremonial armour, wear long daggers or fancy fighting knives as a badge of rank and even collect swords.

Given that the boss, Raul Vargas, was a martial art enthusiast even before he developed superpowers (and super-insanity), I'm leaning toward him training his disciples in an an eclectic style that will be composed of his Style Familiarities. After all, just because he's insane doesn't mean that he loses all his Green Beret skills and he had spent some 15-20 years training South and Central American militaries, militias and revolutionary forces in various skills. Even with Callous, his Teaching is quite high.

I'm thinking that Vargas doesn't really know how to fight with a sword in the style of a medieval knight, but that it would fit his personality well to have been fond of knife-fighting all his life. Which leads to me wondering what Style Familiarity that would be and if it is just Dagger Fighting, how to tweak it to make it distinct and intersting.

I therefore have several questions about knife fighting, Mexican and otherwise.

1) Movies, books and even supposedly non-fiction biographies (of detectives, policemen, rebel leaders, etc.) set in 20th century Southwest US and northern Mexico often portray members of Hispanic criminal subcultures as expert knife-fighters. Is there any truth to this?

2) Do any elements from traditional Spanish or Indigenous knife-fighting styles survive in this area?

3) What about later developments? What are the fashions in knife fighting martial arts in Mexico or Southwest US? Do law enforcement, military or mall ninjas exclusively learn FMA if they want to know how to fight with knives or are there other influences at work? What does the Mexican army teach special operations personnel?

4) Does anyone have any tweaks or notes on tactics and roleplaying to portray a credible 'Cuchillo' or Mexican Knife Fighting style, based on Dagger Fighting?

5) Raul Vargas was born 1954-1957 in Los Angeles, CA, but spent most of his life on military bases, after joining the US Army in 1975-1977. He was stationed in Korea early in his career, became a Green Beret as soon as he was accepted, was one of the early Delta Force recruits and belonged to the 7th SFG (A) until the year 2000, when he escaped and deserted just before his court martial for drug related offences. Since then, he has apparently been living in various places in Latin America, surfacing at various times in Mexico and other places. The military hand-to-hand he learned included some minimal knife work, but assuming that Vargas studied knife-fighting in more depth, what are likely styles and influences?

Icelander · 01-10-2018, 03:56 AM

When a new player joined the group in preparation for Jade Serenity S2: Once Upon a Time in Mexico, our heroes were joined by a new PC, a senior field agent for Onyx Rain who was a Special Agent of the HSI-ICE, former DEA Special Agent and a former special operations capable military intelligence specialist who took part in Project Jade Serenity in 1999-2000.

Special Agent Ilana Marie Rubio is from Southern California and has spent much of her career in federal law enforcement on the California-Mexico border, with extensive experience as a DEA agent in Mexico and a recent assignment in El Paso as a HSI agent.

While growing up, she was into a lot of sports, including surfing and some form of martial art, including and possibly not limited to escrima/kali/FMA. At Camp Mackall during Project Jade Serenity, she met sayagi Than Yamaguchi and became an enthusiastic student of his Kachin Bando and Lethwei. She has maintained contact with him since then, lives about a half hour from him and visits him and his family weekly if her duties allow.

First of all, as an ultra competative teenager who likes extreme sports, full contact and adrenaline, what could she have been competing in during the 1990s in SoCal?

Were there any big sparring competitions in escrima or other FMA?

What about Muay Thai or Lethwei, how plausible would a competative background in the 90s be?

Or would American Kickboxing be better, much more popular in the 90s?

~~evileeyore~~ · 01-10-2018, 10:19 AM

All my perspective comes from living in Florida, which also being big on sun, surf, and sand may be somewhat parallel... however big social change comes slowly here, so I'm trying to factor that in.

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Originally Posted by Icelander

First of all, as an ultra competative teenager who likes extreme sports, full contact and adrenaline, what could she have been competing in during the 1990s in SoCal?

BMX, Skateboarding, Surfing, Windsurfing, Triathlons...

While parkour wasn't an 'official' thing in the US until the late '90's, I had friends that did it (we called it 'freerunning') when I was in HS in 1990-92. If she was proto-internet savy (a lot of skatepunks and surfers were) she might have encountered the idea of 'urban acrobatics', 'tricking', and 'freerunning' like we did and get into it.

I can imagine a group of youths in places like Cali getting heavy into the idea of acrobatic urban movement as manner of expression and thumbing their noses at the authority.

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Were there any big sparring competitions in escrima or other FMA?

I don't know how big escrima was in Cali, but I know it's been there since the 1920's.

The only thing that comes up for FMA on a google for me is Full Metal Alchemist... which I doubt is what you mean...

[EDIT]
Do you mean MMA? While the term 'mixed-martial arts' didn't exist until '93 (tv critic Howard Rosenberg coined the term while reviewing the first UFC match, UFC 1 held at the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado, on November 12, 1993) the practice of learning multiple styles is older than recorded history. Competitive events however tend to be 'one style only' meaning points are awarded for legal hits from that style. So a Lethwei boxer in an American Kickboxing match would be called out for using headbutts, but wouldn't be disallowed competing (unless he'd been banned for illegal moves in the past).

However actively mixing martial arts styles has always been a contentious thing. Some schools actively frown on it, and in America MMA was rather frowned on in professional fighting sports until the UFC got going.

But Bruce Lee very much popularized and romanticized learning as many styles as possible during his lifetime, and most 'serious' martial artists I know try to learn as much as possible, never passing up an opportunity to train in different style, or even with a different teacher of a style they already know.

But competitively? No, competitive MMA didn't exist until '93, but streetfights and 'underground' illegal matches were a thing.
[/EDIT]

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What about Muay Thai or Lethwei, how plausible would a competative background in the 90s be?

There were two Mauy Thai dojos that I knew of in Orlando in the early '90s, I can't imagine Cali being less cosmopolitan.

I'd never heard of Lethwei until I just googled it... i suspect it's not embraced heavily in the US (but then again I can't speak for anything but the Orlando/Florida area).

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Or would American Kickboxing be better, much more popular in the 90s?

Like I mentioned above, I had Muay Thai schools locally and had a friend training in it, so I imagine it had to be in Cali in the early '90s.

Icelander · 01-10-2018, 01:12 PM

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