Polearm Feats and Polearm Ranger Style

Hello, dear readers.  Long time, no see.  I'm pretty well settled back on my home continent now, sadly very far away from any castles but very close to all my RPG books.  I'm sorry for the lack of updates recently, but that changes now.  I'm getting back on schedule and bringing you more content every Monday.

Today, as I promised long ago, I've written up a selection of feats centered on making polearms a more appealing weapon choice for adventurers.  While all of these feats are great for people that use polearms, a number of them will also be of interest to adventurers who don't keep their weapons on the end of a ten-foot pole.

And, now that polearms have more feat support, I've also made a polearm fighting style for rangers.  I know at least two of my players have expressed a desire to play a polearm ranger and been frustrated by the lack of options available to them.  Rangers seem like they would be well-suited to polearms; they tend to seek out and fight a lot of scary stuff, and in my experience it's often best to have ten feet of weapon between you and scary things.

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 4: More Polearms (part 2)

Continuing from last time (before I was interrupted by an amor of rampaging cupids)...

I am on a quest to make polearms more appealing weapon options for adventurers, and just more realistic* in general.  Part of that involves updating and expanding the list of polearms.  Last time I covered the bardiche, bec de corbin, lucerne hammer, bill, fauchard, fauchard-fork, halberd, glaive, glaive-guisarme, guisarme, glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaive...  This time around we've got some more polearms like the partisan, the pike, the pollaxe, and maybe some that don't start with p.  Read on, dear reader.

*By realistic, I don't mean 100% historically accurate, because that is simply not possible within the d20 combat system.  I am attempting to reconcile what we know about polearms with the assumptions about them that are core to D&D.  This may sometimes mean adhering to polearm categories that are relevant to D&D but not to modern historical scholarship (I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a glaive-guisarme).

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 3: Polearms (part 1)

Polearms are just about the most ubiquitous and varied category of weapon to have ever existed.  Heck, spears alone have been in use around the world for hundreds of thousands of years, and are so fundamental that chimpanzees have been observed crafting and using spears for hunting.  But in the Middle Ages and continuing on into the Early-Modern period, there was a proliferation of new varieties of pole-weapons designed for all sorts of uses.  Many of them were very simple to make and to wield, allowing peasant armies to have some recourse against mounted knights.  Many of them were much more complicated and specialized, designed to bust open armour, cut harnesses, or just really mess up a dude's face.

You would be hard pressed to find an army that went to war without polearms, if only just spears; getting into the Late Medieval period most armies would have units of some other specialist polearms - usually halberds.  And yet they hardly turn up in fantasy RPGs these days, whether tabletop of video game.  Many such weapons were included in 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D, and a few of those made the jump to 3.5 and Pathfinder.  My goal here is to round out the list of available polearms and fix those already existing ones which don't seem to have been statted up quite right.