Sino-Atlantic martial arts

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by martinl

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 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.

That's a very good point.

It is not any more unlikely than the setting in general that Christian monks have become linked to nationalistic underground movements and developed martial arts with mystical connotations. Depending on how you and your players feel about conscious plays on this reverse of history, you could have 'Fist of the Lord' boxing (thoroughly adapted to fight the Chinese conquerors, of course), 'Good Shepherd' quarterstaff fighting (as acrobatic as you wish, really) and 'Sacred Path' grappling and joint manipulation. The wandering friar who is a master of a secretive martial arts style could be a Western trope in this world.