There are classic stunts ascribed to masters who can control their inner energy, whether through kung fu, yoga, or meditation. Some vary from the merely flashy, like blowing out a candle or lying naked on a bed of nails, while others are downright useful, like the Tibetan stunt of using your internal energy to dry sheets soaked in ice-cold water with your body heat. Nothing that qualifies as a Chi Trick should be as useful as a Fu schtick. (More impressive stunts, like walking soundlessly on top of dry leaves, should be left to actual Fu schticks. Breaking the third board down in a stack of five where the boards are mounted correctly and are made of the right sort of wood is a Chi Trick; breaking through a solid oak door that hasn’t been carefully set up for you is a different matter.) These are meant to add flavor to the game, and allow kung fu masters, PC and NPC, to ooh and aah people with their prowess without necessarily getting violent.
Chi tricks are rolled with your Fu + Martial Arts as skill, and don’t work at all if you have a 0 Fu stat. Chi tricks usually require instruction from another or time spent practicing to develop them; they only cost 1xp each, like vehicles for the Drive skill. They can be used after instruction during a session as long as you spend the xp afterward or your character can’t quite figure it out without instruction. (Thus, a Tibetan master can rescue the characters in a blizzard by teaching them to use their internal energy, and those who remember the trick after the rescue spend the XP.)
| Trick | Difficulty |
|---|---|
| Break a board with your hand | 5 |
| Break a brick with your hand; break a board with your head | 6 |
| Swim in icy water without getting pneumonia; break a brick with your head | 7 |
| Break the third board down in a stack of five; chop the top off a beer bottle | 8 |
| Put out a candle across a room; lie on a bed of nails | 10 |
| Dry ice-cold sopping wet sheets; run skewers through your arms without drawing blood; wallow on broken glass without getting hurt | 12 |
| Shatter a ceramic tile by clapping hands against its edges | 14 |
| Strike a blow that comes just short of connecting, but cuts a hole in the target’s garment in the outline of the fist/foot/etc. (The scrap of cloth falls out dramatically.) | 16 |