Sino-Atlantic martial arts

[martinl]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I've settled on the campaigns for my next cycle, and one will be something I've wanted to do for quite a while: A campaign set in Ming-3, the Chinese-dominated alternate history in GURPS Alternate Earths 2. Specifically, I plan to have it be a fairly swashbuckling campaign, taking place during a time of troubles. But that means I need to deal with martial arts. The brief account in the sourcebook mentions the Irish art of si lei li, but there are a lot of other sources for traditions of swordplay and other forms of combat.

IIRC, AE2 implies that the setting has a reversal of OTL's martial arts distribution of the time. The Chinese have little use for such things - they use guns. Their barbarous European subjects have a wide array of them, developed and practiced outside of the bounds of a law that would prefer them to have (edit) no (\edit) martial options at all.

Since the divergence was so far back and thorough, you can probably extrapolate almost anything you want. The QnD way would be to just rename a few existing styles that are already appropriate for the practitioners in question. I lean towards stick based fighting styles, because no weapon law can effectively outlaw the stick.