High kicks and finger tricks

Hopefully you aren't ninja-ed out yet, as we've got a bunch more Way of the Tiger posts to come before the Kickstarter campaign launches in October. These little diagrams will be familiar to all WOTT fans. They featured at the start of each book and were accompanied by a stern disclaimer:

Do not attempt any of the techniques or methods described in this book. They could result in serious injury or death to an untrained user.

(More certainly than they would result in injury to the person you're fighting, anyway.)

There's a story behind those drawings. The publishers asked Jamie to sketch them, so he did a few scribbled stick-figures on the back of an envelope, assuming that an artist would redraw them properly for publication. But the art department at Knight Books had no budget for more illustrations - either that or they had already sent the artwork briefs off the Bob Harvey and didn't want to bother him with an extra assignment. So in the end a staff designer traced Jamie's drawings and those were what appeared in print. I remember at the time Jamie waving a copy of the first book, Avenger, and saying, "I can't believe they just printed those crappy drawings I did!"

As you can see here, Megara Entertainment have given the torado kata a full artistic makeover, imbuing the moves with the power they should have had from the beginning. The Leaping Tiger kick now looks like it might knock a few teeth loose. And we finally have a depiction of the Kwon's Flail kick. (A sort of variant on Forked Lightning?)

I'm still hoping the new books will feature diagrams of the kuji-no-in, without which no ninja's mystical powers are effective. As Tetsubo makes clear, I am more interested in the traditional trickster-image of the ninja represented by characters like Nikki Danjo (below, left) than the post-WW2 mythology of a commando in black pyjamas. As Fabled Lands players will know, there are plenty of the former to be found in Lords of the Rising Sun.