Freefighting (Spacer Kung-Fu) Draft
A GURPS 4e Martial Arts style, TL11. Practised by Six.
In one line: a zero-G boarding art that anchors on the grapple, powers off the bulkhead, and kills the suit instead of the man.
What it is
Every ground art assumes three things you take for granted and never name: a floor to stand on, a down to fall toward, and a body that breaks when you hit it hard enough. Freefighting is what a fighting style looks like when you delete all three.
Six never learned it in a room with mats. Castellan Biodynamics wrote the combat package straight into him, the same way they wrote everything else, and the package was built for one job: cross the dark between two ships, cut in, and clear whatever is waiting on the other side. Boarding work happens in vacuum, in free fall, in cramped steel with no up and no down and every surface a weapon if you know how to use it. So the art that came loaded in him is not really a striking style or a grappling style. It is a style about momentum, about the one thing that still behaves predictably when gravity stops answering the phone.
The kids from P.E.T.A. who cracked his cryo-vault watched him move once and called it kung-fu, because that was the only word they had for a big man folding someone into a wall without ever seeming to push. Six calls it Freefighting. Flat and literal, the way he calls everything. It is not poetry to him. It is just the name of the thing his body already knew how to do when the calculators went dark and the job was all that was left.
The four pillars
Freefighting rests on four ideas. Each one is a place where zero-G breaks the assumptions a groundfighter never questions, and each one has a mechanical spine.
1. There is no down
On a floor you have a posture and a footing, and the rules punish you the moment you lose them. In free fall you have no footing, ever, so a groundfighter spends the whole engagement at the penalty for fighting off-balance while Six does not. Free Fall (B195) is the spine of the entire style. At Free Fall 15 almost nothing of his is penalized, and most people he meets are flailing at their Free Fall default of around 9. Zero-G is not a hazard he tolerates. It is his floor, and everyone else is the one who slipped.
The lever that closes the gap the rest of the way is Ground Fighting (Hard, Karate or Judo -4, MA / B231), the technique that buys off the penalty for attacking and defending without a stable base. It is the closest thing RAW gives to a “no footing” rule, and it turns the one situation that wrecks a normal fighter into a non-event for him. (How cleanly Ground Fighting maps onto true zero-G rather than merely lying prone is a GM call, and worth Tim’s ruling.)
2. The grapple is the anchor, the bulkhead is the engine
You cannot throw a man without something to brace against. Newton is very firm on this. So in Freefighting the grapple itself becomes the anchor, and the enemy’s own mass is the thing you redirect. You do not knock him down, because there is no down. You spin him off into open space, or fold him into a joint lock, or ride his momentum into the nearest wall and let the wall do the talking.
The mechanical family here is Judo (B203) for the throws and entries, Arm Lock (Average, defaults to Judo, MA) for the leverage crank, and Sweeping Kick (Hard, the unarmed Sweep, Karate/Judo -3, MA) for turning his own rotation into a takedown. Power, when he wants real power, comes from bracing off a fixed surface, which at the cinematic tier is Power Blow (MA) and Push (MA), both unlocked by his Trained by a Master (B93). A Push in a gravity well staggers a man. A Push in vacuum sends him tumbling away with nothing to grab, out of the fight and out of the room.
3. Hole the suit, let the void finish it
This is the sharpest pillar and the most Six. In vacuum you do not have to defeat a hundred points of torso armor to end someone. You have to defeat a seal. A joint, a faceplate, a hose, the soft collar where helmet meets suit, breached past whatever the suit can self-mend, and the vacuum does the killing for you. Nobody holds their breath out there for long. Try it and your lungs tear for the trouble (B351), and suffocation is close behind (B436).
The doctrine follows straight from his Code of Honor. A suit-kill is not gentler than a killing blow, it just costs less effort, so it is often the efficient answer and he takes it without preference or hesitation. The tool is Targeted Attack (Vibro-axe Swing / Neck) (Hard, -5 to the neck where the seal lives, MA), and the vibro-axe’s 3d+2 cut with armor divisor (3) means a seal does not survive contact. The word “non-lethal” does not really apply to a suit-breach. Out there, disabling the suit is the kill, and everyone in the compartment knows it the second the alarm starts screaming.
4. The unbalanced axe is a momentum engine
The vibro-axe is an Unbalanced weapon (B270). His sheet says so in the Parry
line, 12 (0U). On a floor that is a straight tax: swing it and you are
committed, you cannot parry with it that turn, the follow-through drags you off
your line and leaves you open. Groundfighters treat unbalanced weapons as a
trade, more damage for more risk.
Take the floor away and the tax becomes a gift. That same committed follow-through is free angular momentum, and Free Fall 15 lets him ride it instead of eating it. The swing that would overbalance a man on the deck becomes a spin he chose, carrying him into a reorientation, a brace against the next surface, or straight into the arc of the next strike. What is a stumble in gravity is the next step of the dance in free fall. The weapon stays Unbalanced by the rules. The art is spending the recovery as a controlled Free Fall maneuver rather than paying for it.
The style block
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Required skills | Judo (B203), Karate (B203), Free Fall (B195) |
| Secondary skills | Vacc Suit, Acrobatics, Forced Entry |
| Techniques | Arm Lock, Choke Hold, Kicking, Sweeping Kick, Ground Fighting, Disarming, Targeted Attack (Axe/Neck) |
| Cinematic skills (needs Trained by a Master) | Power Blow, Flying Leap, Push, Immovable Stance |
| Style perks | Armor Familiarity (Karate), Armor Familiarity (Judo), Suit Familiarity (Vacc Suit), Grip Mastery |
| Optional traits | Combat Reflexes, Trained by a Master, Perfect Balance, 3D Spatial Sense, Enhanced Move |
Six already owns the load-bearing half of this: Trained by a Master, Combat Reflexes, Judo/Karate/Free Fall/Vacc Suit/Acrobatics, both Armor Familiarity perks, and the Choke Hold and Kicking techniques bought to full skill. The rest is the menu he grows into, not a debt he owes.
No-lookup technique card
Every technique below is usable right now at its “Rolls at” number without spending a single point, because a technique defaults to its skill (minus a penalty for the hard ones). Read the number, make the roll, do not do arithmetic at the table. Buying a technique up later just raises the “Rolls at” value toward its cap.
| Technique | Diff | Rolls at (now) | Bought cap | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Choke Hold | — | 14 (bought) | — | FP choke to unconsciousness; no defense from behind (B370) |
| Kicking | — | 15 (bought) | — | full-Karate kick, 1d+2 cr, reach C-1 |
| Arm Lock (Judo) | Avg | 14 | 18 | joint lock, +4 to keep him held; cranks crushing damage (MA) |
| Sweeping Kick | Hard | 12 | 15 | momentum takedown, dumps him prone / spinning (MA) |
| Ground Fighting (Karate) | Hard | 11 | 15 | buys off the no-footing -4 attack / -3 defense (B231) |
| Disarming (Judo) | Hard | 14 | 19 | strip a weapon barehanded (B401); -2 if the target holds a weapon |
| Targeted Attack (Axe Swing/Neck) | Hard | 12 | 15 | the suit-breach cut; neck seal at -5, vibro-axe AD (3) (MA) |
Numbers use Six’s current skills (Karate 15, Judo 14, Axe/Mace 17 with Weapon Bond) and Light encumbrance with both Armor Familiarity perks live. If DX rises to 15, every “Rolls at” number here rises with it.
Advancement
Current call: bank earned XP toward DX 14 to 15 [20]. It is the single highest-value buy on the sheet, +1 to every DX skill and its parry at once, which lifts every number on the card above in one purchase (Judo 15, Karate 16, Axe 18, Free Fall 16, and free bumps to Kicking and Choke Hold). Roughly four sessions of XP at +5 a session. Do not dribble it into single techniques before then.
After DX 15, the technique priorities, in order of how much they change a fight:
- Targeted Attack (Axe/Neck) to cap [4] — makes the suit-breach a reliable called shot instead of a gamble. The purest expression of pillar 3.
- Arm Lock (Judo) +2 to +4 [2 to 4] — turns a grapple into a fight-ender and a limb-cripple. Pillar 2.
- Ground Fighting to +3 or cap [4 to 5] — erases the last of the no-footing tax so he is never off-balance in his own element. Pillar 1.
- Suit Familiarity (Vacc Suit) [1 perk] — offsets the DX penalty of fighting in a hardsuit (MA). He is always armored, so this is quietly always-on value.
- Sweeping Kick / Disarming as taste dictates.
All of the above is post-approval advancement. The base build is GM-approved canon.
See also
- Six — the character sheet (Skills, Techniques, Combat Action Chains)
- Vibro-Axe (MACE-06) — the bonded weapon at the heart of pillar 4
- Castellan Biodynamics — who wrote the package
- P.E.T.A. — who named the fighter